The New York Times announced last week it would start charging for web usage over an undisclosed level. You won't hear this from many quarters but this is a smart move. Monetizing content via standard web advertising models just doesn't work for publications. 

Full story here.

Excerpt:

Media Decoder: Dialing in a Plan: The Times Installs a Meter on Its Future

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.

From today's New York Times comes this story of how newspaper web sites are having trouble attracting larger brand advertisers consistently.The reason boils down to two problems we have spoken about on this blog many times - newspaper sites are too expensive and the ability to target is poor.

Full story here.

Part of the story:

It was a good day for newspaper Web sites when Mercedes-Benz USA introduced its updated E-Class cars this summer. Mercedes bought out the ad space on the home pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and had those sites create special 3-D ads for them, at an estimated cost of $100,000 a site.

The days after were not as good. While Mercedes was happy with the newspaper sites’ performance, it shifted money to cheaper, more tightly aimed ads bought through networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.

When Mercedes advertises its more basic models next year, it will largely avoid newspaper Web sites and rely on networks. That lets Mercedes “be very targeted and efficient with our dollars,” said Beth Lange, digital media specialist for Mercedes-Benz USA.

But that also explains why newspaper sites are not holding on to ad dollars, even while overall Internet advertising is creeping back. Newspaper sites are the patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear. The beneficiaries of this behavior are networks and exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space.

The New York Times plans to eliminate another 100 newsroom jobs. Just a few years ago, according to this article in the New York Times, the newsroom had 1,330 employees, a number which is hard to imagine. 

Full story here

Here is the first few paragraphs of the story:

The New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs — about 8 percent of the total — by year’s end, offering buyouts to union and non-union employees, and resorting to layoffs if it cannot get enough people to leave voluntarily, the paper announced on Monday.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The program mirrors one carried out in the spring of 2008, when the paper erased 100 positions in its newsroom, though other jobs were created, so the net reduction was smaller. That round of cuts included some layoffs of journalists — about 15 to 20, though The Times would not disclose the actual figure — which was the first time in memory that had happened.

The paper has made much deeper reductions in other, non-newsroom departments, where layoffs have occurred several times. But the advertising drop that has pummeled the industry has forced cuts in the news operation as well. The newsroom already has lowered its budgets for freelancers and trimmed other expenses, and employees took a 5 percent pay cut for most of this year.

Nearly all papers in the metropolitan region have been cutting their news operations for years, and some have fewer than half as many people in their newsrooms as they did in 2000.

Especially if your publication is in Asia.

The New York Times reports that 2010 projections are better than 2009 for global advertising. Full story here.

"Nielsen said spending in 27 countries, accounting for the vast majority of advertising worldwide, declined by 5.8 percent in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, after a 7.9 percent drop in the first quarter. The figures mesh with recent assessments by advertising executives, who say the worst is probably over, while cautioning that any marked upturn is probably unlikely before next year.

Spending in the first half was strongest in Asia, where it rose by 2.2 percent, the survey showed, and weakest in North America, where it fell by 15.9 percent. Outlays in Europe fell by 9.1 percent."

From Sunday's New York Times- this story on cost cutting at Conde Nast: 

"A three-month McKinsey & Company project advising the publisher how to reduce costs is drawing to a close, and several magazines have been told to cut about 25 percent from their budgets. The company’s editors and publishers have already been under pressure to reduce costs this year, as advertising has plunged, and Condé Nast has closed two magazines in 2009, Domino and Condé Nast Portfolio.

But cost-cutting at Condé Nast is not quite like cost-cutting at other publishers. For example, on Oct. 13, the men’s magazine GQ will host a party in Washington to promote its list of powerful capital players, to appear in its November issue. The party is upscale: it will be held at the 701 Restaurant, known for its caviar and live piano music.

That is not the only expense involved. Several editorial employees will travel from New York for the evening. And they received an e-mail message recently reminding them to limit their expenses for the night — to $1,000 a person."

Here is a way for Conde Nast to make more money - sell tickets to watch the cost cuts being implemented at Vogue. 

The New York Times appears to be flirting with the idea of applying for foundation grants to help underwrite the costs of journalism for sections of the newspaper. Full story from PaidContent.org here.

"We’ve begun to ask ourselves whether it would be possible to get the kind of support that NPR does from foundations for its journalism…[but they] haven’t reached any conclusions and we haven’t gone to any foundations," according to Craig Whitney, AME at the New York Times.

Perhaps we will be seeing fund-drive messages mid-story in the future: We will get you back to the article you have been reading in just a moment, but first if you have not yet contributed it only takes a second, call now.

It is too bad that the Times, which appears to be thinking so creatively about alternative revenue sources now with a billion dollar debt hanging over its head, never put that type of brain-power to work in an effort to get the print ads they sell to generate better results.