After the financial abyss and near-death spiral of 2009, most major US news brands showed in 2010 that they could rebound from one of the worst economic downturns newspapers have faced in recent memory.
But that was 2010. Here we are in the first half of 2011 facing yet another tough financial year and nowhere close to answering the existential question that has dogged us all for a while now: whither the news business?
This year's big hope is apparently the paywall. TheFinancial Timesand the Wall Street Journal, with relatively proprietary content, can afford hard paywalls on the web. And so can many of Rupert Murdoch's other newspapers, with News Corp's deep pockets to cushion the financial impact of millions of readers who aren't paying and might be going elsewhere.
The New York Times has launched its much-anticipated digital payment subscription, a metered system that essentially targets heavy users of its content - an ambitious and gutsy move by the largest newspaper website in the US.
Scores of other experiments with pay systems are underway in the US and around the world; most too nascent to reach any conclusions.
Publishers have long been forced to give up on their original fantasy: that print revenues will decline gradually and web revenues will soar; the two lines will intersect in the not-too-distant future; and all will be well without painful cost-cutting and the rethinking of business models.
Now, with all the focus on monetising websites, the same publishers are betting that newspaper websites will be trusted safe havens for millions of readers; protecting, informing and entertaining them amid a deluge of often untrustworthy digital content.
When you, dear reader, come to us - the big media brands - because you trust us to guide, inform and educate you, we now want to make a bit more money off you through all sorts of consumer pay models.
But just as they have missed the many digital opportunities since starting news websites and giving away their most precious asset - content - it may be that publishers are building moats around their websites without realising that social media is already fundamentally altering their business prospects.
That's because, while newsrooms have embraced social media, the business side is ignoring a more profound question: what happens to web pay models if readers, especially the legion of younger readers, start to think of their friends, rather than editors at WSJ, NYT and WP, as their trusted news sources? What happens in the not-so-distant future when there are a billion people on Facebook or 500 million people using Twitter and they all realise that good content comes to them in their 'trusted' environment from 'trusted' friends - a great new form of curated aggregation that doesn't require them to visit myriad news sites as often, or linger there? Or when readers discover that the trusted big brands of the past have become relatively obsolete gatekeepers determined to monetise inherently poor news experiences?
Sure, for now, referral traffic from Facebook or Twitter seems good for the big brand sites, but sooner or later there are likely to be fewer and fewer reasons to actually visit originating sites. Will 2011 be the year that big publishers end up with expensive drawbridges around their websites just when social media begins draining audiences and engagement?
'Free' is indeed very expensive. But what the prolonged debate about free versus paid inside big news organisations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: an imagination deficit. It is true that, despite their soaring valuations, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube don't create much, if anything, by way of original content. But they are winning by simply making the 'news' experience easy, useful and engaging to their audiences.
These are already incredibly disruptive times but it feels like, while newsrooms realise the value of social media, publishers haven't woken up to the monetisation challenge posed by social media. And that, yet again, the balance of power is quietly shifting away from big brand publishers - much as it did in the past decade to Google, Craigslist and Groupon.
Raju Narisetti (narisettir@washpost.com) is Managing Editor of the Washington Post, where he spends his time worrying about digital content and strategy, and getting into trouble with his tweets @rajunarisetti.
