I’ve been enjoying a weekly podcast with blogging pioneer Dave Winer and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen discussing the future of news. This week, Dave and Jay talked about the difficulty that journalists face in creating a new foundation for news as their old foundation is struggling. (”Journalism’s responsibility is to keep its own downfall in perspective,” says Winer.)

Thought for the week: How to jump into the new news system without being weighed down by “how is going to make the transition?”.

The Austin American-Statesman has come up with a clever way of tying online and print readers together by offering a pair of discounted subscriptions to Twitter users who follow the @statesman account.

Readers can choose from a four-day subscription to the paper (Friday through Monday) for $5 a month or a seven-day subscription for $6 a month, a savings of 70 percent from the regular price.

Internet editor Rob Quigley and publisher Michael Vivio teamed up on the idea and shared their brainstorming through their individual Twitter accounts. Nearly 7,000 people follow updates from @statesman, and it will be interesting to see the impact of this special offer.

To illustrate what a poor situation that is, let’s go back to September, where media analyst John Morton told the Statesman’s Dan Zehr that “a rule of thumb for valuing a newspaper is $2,000 multiplied by the average daily circulation over a week. For the Statesman, that comes out to roughly $350 million.”

In that same September story, Zehr writes that “Five years ago, a newspaper typically sold at 12 or 13 times its earnings before taking out taxes, interest and other accounting-related items. That’s down in the 5- to 7-times range now. The Statesman likely would go at the upper end of that range.”

The Statesman is owned by a private company, Cox Enterprises, so we don’t know what its earnings before taxes are, but I would bet it’s a lot more than $8-10 million. And Morton’s rule of thumb would now be $300 per average daily circulation, down from $2000.

If that much has changed in the past six months, then the market for a profitable newspaper, with no other daily competition and a growing web presence, has bottomed out. The land that the Statesman sits on is worth $32 million on its own, according to Travis Central Appraisal District records.

So what does Cox do now? The company said it wouldn’t rule out selling the paper and the land separately. They can either sell one of their well-performing papers for one of these low-ball offers, or hold on to it and see what’s around the corner. It’s a depressing situation to be in for the newspaper’s owners, and for those who work there.

Among the unfortunate missteps (Newsday wants to charge for content; Hearst wants to build its own e-reader) and genuine misfortunes (Rocky Mountain News closes) in the publishing industry this week, there was this late-breaking glimmer of promise: the New York Times is expected to launch a local blog network on Monday.

As Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at The New York Times, confirmed in the comments of the TechCrunch story, the two pilot sites will be staffed initially with full-time Times reporters and the paper will sell ads to local businesses. The neighborhood blogs will cover “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’”

The good news is that this could be the beginning of a local collaboration network that online news organizations can provide the platform for. It’s one of the rules that Jeff Jarvis lays out for newspapers in his excellent book, What Would Google Do? Newspapers can provide the tools and raw material for neighbors to gather and share news, and then sell ads to local merchants to support those efforts.

The bad news is that it’s still primarily an advertising-supported model, and in these harsh economic times, that’s a hard way to make a living. At BusinessWeek, Sarah Lacy reports that local interactive advertising is headed for a big slowdown this year, according to Borrell Associates, an online advertising researcher.

UPDATE: Schachter provides some more details in the comments below: “Our Brooklyn site will be collaborating with Jeff Jarvis and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. CUNY students will do outreach to residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, extending them the tools and skills of journalism so they can cover their own community.”

Very promising stuff — I look forward to watching this grow — jb

FOR

• Alan Mutter: Mission possible? Charging for web content and How to charge for content. Theoretically.
• David Carr: Let’s Invent an iTunes for News
• Walter Isaacson: How to Save Your Newspaper
• Nicholas Carr: The writing is on the paywall

AGAINST

• Clay Shirky: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers
• Michael Kinsley: You Can’t Sell News by the Slice

Photo by Infrogmation

There are much better choices for the Times than to cozy up even closer to the Mexican billionaire. Slim bought a stake in the New York Times Company back in September, and he’s already the company’s largest shareholder not related to the owning Sulzberger family.

The Journal points out that an additional investment by Slim would also cost them an additional dividend for a preferred sales plan, but the Times might find it tough to get a loan of that size in the current environment.

In such dire straits, the Times would be better off following the advice of venture capitalist John Thornton, who suggests they become a nonprofit organization running as a public trust. It’s probably not what Mr. Slim has in mind.

Thanks to Michael Barnes for the pointer to John’s blog. Michael also got John to share his reading list for media blogs.

But the story also contains this paragraph:

Just as striking was the spirit of camaraderie among artists: in set after set there were acknowledgments and dedications. On Saturday evening the indie songwriter Conor Oberst, with his countrified Mystic Valley Band, sang “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” — a nod to John Fogerty, who wrote the song, and who was at that moment holding court on another stage.

Sounds pretty cool, right? But it never happened. Oberst and band played Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” during their Saturday set, but did not play “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”.

That’s a curious error — probably resulting from a misunderstanding in one person telling the story to another as it made its way to the writer.

UPDATE: Commenter ttrentham reminded me that I could double-check the setlists on the ACL site. That list backs me up — yes to Kodachrome, no to Have You Ever Seen the Rain.

Interesting tidbit near the end of today’s Statesman story about the paper’s search for a buyer. A significant portion of the value of a sale is the land that the Statesman sits on. The 18.8-acre tract at South Congress and Lady Bird Lake is appraised at $32.3 million. Today’s story says that “dozens of developers have approached Cox about the land … but none has been able to stomach the cost of moving the four presses.”

Cox won’t rule out selling the newspaper and land separately, he said, but it doesn’t intend to do so. “The highest and best use of the site is significantly more than what’s located there,” said Charles Heimsath, president of Capitol Market Research, an Austin real estate consulting firm.

It’s been odd enough to think about the Statesman under new ownership, but even odder to think about them not being in their familiar location.