We’ll be around Ad Week in New York this week, helping our partners Scribe Media with a new channel similar to this one on YouTube by Google and the London School of Economics, helping a client involved in outdoor advertising, working on Naked Media, looking for information useful for Dorian’s digital marketing course for MBA students at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business, and generally poking around, scaring up contacts — the usual.

Come say “hi.”

Was watching the FOCAS seminar on media at the Aspen Institute when consultant and colleague Steve Outing presented some models for how to pay for news, and he quoted Dorian as saying: “There’s not a silver bullet — the industry is in severe disruption and folks need to change their models, almost building a new business from scratch, throwing out old assumptions.” Further bullet points we gave him, that he presented, of what content people will pay for:

* People will pay if it’s valuable and they can’t get it another way:
* Really intensive stats about their beloved sports team(s)
* A directory or information organized in a way that’s much better than free
* Really top-notch business analysis
* Training or information that will make them money, long- or short-term

Follow the coverage of Internet Week here. Dorian is serving as editor in chief of this site, with nine “Social Communicators” giving their take on events.

And see a roundup of their Tweets, video, Flickr feeds and more here, at a special page on the Pepsico site that includes some nifty mashups, including one from (it seems) Slash 7 that gives a pictorial representation of the Tweet-o-sphere surrounding the topics.

Tad Smith, the CEO of Reed Business, home to dozens of publications including Variety, Broadcast and Cable, and Multichannel News last week on CNBC questioned the idea that “free” is the best price for media. “Price communicates a lot of value, and when it’s free, it really says it’s not worth anything,” he said, also noting that we’re conditioned to believe, “you get what you pay for.”

In another part of the show, not in this linked video, he said that Reed is considering charging for its publications that are currently free online.

What do you think? Can ads, alone, support a news operation? What are the other means to doing so — subscription, e-commerce, events, and so on. Should you charge — especially if your site is for a limited audience defined either by geography or subject? How can you figure it out before taking the first steps?

We’re helping the Reynolds Journalism Institute come up with pointers. Share your thoughts here. The RJI’s ‘Collaboratory’ Business Assessment group is coming up with pointers.

And the show, with Jon Gibs of Nielsen, and Todd Juenger of TiVo, talking about the ins and outs of media measurement.

On Naked Media today, we opened with a joking jingle about media measurement. A few of you have asked for the lyrics. Here they are. Thanks for watching. Next show, June 23, we’ll have Rich Antoniello, publisher of and CEO of Complex Media, which publishes Complex magazine.

{Spoken Open) Want to figure out your audience, measure it, figure out what’s going, who’s watching, reading, listening, interacting?
Not so simple, is it?
I’ve written what might be the first ever jingle about media measurement. To the tune of the old “Have it Your Way” Burger King commercials:

Niielsen Hitwise Comscore Quantcast
Media Metrix, TiVo, Atlas
All we ask is that you let us.
Measure your way

Surveys, cookies, panel data
Then you do your brandlift later
Who cares if it’s still in Beta
Measure your way!

AND DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON MAGAZINES

Analytics straight from Google
Yahoo lets you have a boodle
A2M2, use you noodle.
And we engage!

TRP and GRP
And then they had to add a Plus 3
But why can’t they ever tell me
What’s in my brain?

YEAH, THAT’S WHAT WE REALLY WANT TO MEASURE.

= = = =
These stanzas, below, were not in the video, but I had written them then cut them later:

Media Buyers, Media Sellers
Measure ladies, measure fellers
Rich and poor and Rockefellers
Measure your way

BPA and circulation
ABC across our nation
Pass-throughs, based on observation
Measure your way

(Click the image for a larger and crisper version.)

This is a simple matrix we use to describe the value of a user in digital media. The higher up and farther to the right the user is, the higher the value over time, in nearly all cases. This is one reason a “unique user” is not just a unique user and a pageview is not just a pageview. If someone, in coming to your property (whether on your site, their mobile device, a social network, their widget reader…) does something with you that moves them beyond the lower left, they’re worth more, in a business sense, than the casual viewer who just pops in from search, leaves quickly, maybe didn’t even realize where they were.

The chart was part of a presentation we gave for the Suburban Newspaper Association’s Interactive Media Alliance last week. The slides from the presentation (with a little bit of distortion and font mistakes that occurred in the uploading to Scribd) are below:

The Virtuous Cycle: Making Money From Media

Check out the live stream of Digital Hollywood’s Media Summit from McGraw Hill building in NY. We will be grabbing on-camera interviews as can, as well, for Naked Media, most with host Dorian Benkoil.

Check out stream and catch the interviews here.

And follow Dorian’s Tweets and others’ from the hashtag #ms09. And his writings at MediaFlect and the Naked Media blog.

The headline says it. Dorian’s at the We Media conference. He wrote up the Game Changer award winners, and is there talking to a bunch of fascinating media, technology, money and social good types, from everything from health insurance corporations to The Associated Press and sole bloggers and consultants.

We Media is also partnering with Naked Media.

Check out the award-winner case study essays here.
And the main essay, here. NOTE: These are PDFs.

No Need to Make Newspapers Not-for-Profits . On potential business models for news, rebuffing a New York Times op-ed suggesting newspapers be funded by foundations. From Rebuilding Media.

Cell Phone Networks Take Another Hit . On how carriers can’t keep their businesses going in the present age that fights against media control. From MediaFlect.

What the Economy Means for Media Investment . Coverage of the Always On conference from the Naked Media blog.

More coverage of the AlwaysOn On Media conference (and other things) on Twitter.

Quotes about media, work and business on Tumbr.