For newspaper publishers and newspaper readers, iPad apps tend to be nice to have but not especially important. Given the choice of rich newspaper apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I actually opt for the browser versions over the apps: I can see a lot more at once, they’re updated more often, and they load faster.

But I’ve found that newspaper apps for “lite” newspapers are much better. USA Today’s headline and short story format is perfect for the iPad. The Washington Post (not such a lite paper) has a great iPad app, too.

In early December, The San Diego Union-Tribune — a truly lite newspaper but with good local news and features — also launched an iPad app. The result is vastly superior to the print and browser version of the newspaper. More than 11,000 downloads have already taken place.

The U-T’s iPad launch coincides with the elevation of digital chief Mike Hodges to president and COO, and today, a rebranding of the newspaper company, which recently changed hands, to U-T San Diego. The new name also does away with the dated “Sign On San Diego” city guide moniker.

An announcement on the company’s website notes that “We will now use one company name and logo on all of our media products and communications: U-T San Diego. This change marks a new era in our company’s history. It will help us unify our print and digital products under a single brand with a clear and consistent expectation of quality. SignOnSanDiego.com is now UTSanDiego.com, to match the nameplate of the newspaper and our newly released iPad app.”

Hodges, a digital real estate marketing vet prior to joining Freedom Communications and then The U-T, has been responsible for several new revenue initiatives. These include a heavy emphasis on the local daily deal, bolstered by the acquisition of Discover SD, an events guide and deals platform for a younger demographic.

Hodges notes that the iPad app was specifically designed to have an entertainment orientation. “The primary time that people are looking at it is after 6 p.m., when people want to lean back after dinner and watch TV. They’re often reading the app as well,” he says.

The app, designed by MindGruve Interactive, is geo-enabled for traffic and Surfline surf reports. It features a FlipBoard-like news page, along with dropdown “sections” for easy access. The sections include a full graphic on the Daily Deal — it shows up very well. It also prominently highlights features that were obscured in print and on the website, including arts, photos and videos.

Notably, in an effort to keep it simple, The U-T App doesn’t offer newspaper content such as comics, a television programming guide, letters to the editor, user-generated content or local news — although Hodges says a major local initiative will launch in early January. Other Phase 2 items will include more in-depth, iPad-only content. It might also include more localized weather (the temperature in the San Diego region varies by as much as 15 degrees from one area to the next).

Much has been made of the iPad’s appeal for advertisers. The charter advertiser for The U-T’s free phase is Cadillac. When the app goes to a premium model next quarter after an introductory period, sponsorship will be available for multiple sponsors on a premium basis.

Pricing for the app, however, is still being finalized. When it is introduced during Q1, there is likely to be an a la carte three month subscription for users who just want the app, especially those outside the San Diego area. My guess is it might be priced in the neighborhood of $5 a month. But there will also be bundles for people who want seven-day delivery or three-day weekend delivery.

We’ll see whether The U-T pulls the trigger on a firewall for the app. Several other publishers have announced plans to charge but haven’t done so.

Two compelling speakers made the case this afternoon at ILM West that newspaper companies can successfully transform into digital media businesses. One problem is that most newspaper companies are not willing to make the tough decisions necessary for this transition.

Making the case were two respected newspaper change agents, John Paton, CEO of Digital First, and Clark Gilbert, a Harvard Business School scholar who is now president and CEO of Deseret News, part of Deseret Media Companies.

“The newspaper model is irretrievably broken,” Paton said. “It cannot be fixed in its current state.”

Paton talked about some of the radical changes his company is making to transform newspapers into a digital, social and non-paternalistic medium that is adapted to the media it is distributing content through, channeling Marshall McLuhan’s famous “medium is the message” dictum. 

Paton cited how the company newspaper in Torrington, Connecticut, has changed its newsroom “ecology” into a center of community journalism, with an open newsroom where consumers can walk in and use blogging terminals and sit in on editorial meetings (which are webcast for those who can’t make it). All online stories include a fact checking box where users can question or correct veracity of reporting.

“News organizations are no longer gatekeepers,” Paton said.

Paton also announced that his company will launch Digital First Ventures early next year to invest in content and sales related start-ups.

Gilbert, whose scholarship is in disruptive technology, shared a number of directives for traditional media companies looking to make the transition.

His big point was that transformation requires two stages: The first is to repurpose the core business, which is largely about reducing the cost base to maximize its sustainability. And the second is to build a new, separate and disruptive business.

He acknowledges that this causes massive distruptions, with many people asked to leave and others with different skills brought in. The key is never to pursue transformation from the perspective of preserving the core business. It should always involve pursuing the massive new opportunity.

The new business must focus on differentiation and specialization.

“Average loses every time on the Internet,” he said. “Average can survive in print.”

People are key to successful transformation (it’s much more important than strategy), and being bold, authentic and committed to a digital strategy is key to attracting the best people.

“You can’t attract top talent if your pitch is, ‘Oh yeah, we do some digital stuff too.”

Finally, Gibert said channels are critical. At Deseret, they have four channels touching customers, and it’s critical that the channels built for new media are overtaking the traditional channel.

“The alternative channel becomes the core channel.”

A big chunk of the newspaper industry has banded together to adopt Find n Save, a shopping platform featuring a single place to review deals, product inventory, weekly specials, “cents off” grocery deals and local ads.

Participating newspaper companies include many of the companies participating in the Yahoo search and national advertising consortium and the Zillow real estate consortium. They include Gannett, MediaNews Group, McClatchy, Advance, Hearst, Cox, A.H. Belo and The Washington Post. More than 200 newspaper titles are involved.

Find n Save was launched last year by Travidia, a newspaper services vendor that has specialized in digital conversion of circular ads as well as directory solutions. The consortium is purchasing Travidia as part of the deal.

The conversion of the multibillion-dollar newspaper circular business to the digital age has been a tough one, although potentially lucrative. Chains such as Radio Shack, Target and Frys Electronics have increasingly looked to spend outside traditional newspaper channels as print circulation has declined.

Moreover, the way shoppers look for information has dramatically changed due to the ability to search for specific products and deals on the Internet. Most online circular solutions have not been fully searchable.

Early versions of Find n Save have tried to address these changes by offering a one-stop, fully searchable solution. The concept has been especially championed by McClatchy. As of today, the initial launch of Find n Save is live in 19 markets and will be in 21 markets by the end of the year.

For the newspaper industry, the question has been whether to get behind Find n Save, or Gannett-owned ShopLocal, which has many national accounts and has been similarly evolving. Gannett’s participation in Find n Save suggests they will seek to form a complementary solution. Another shopping solution that may prove complementary is AP’s iCircular product, which is oriented toward mobile users and may be seen as experimental.

To lead the new company, Find n Save has recruited former Yahoo Consortium leader Chris Tippie, who told BIA/Kelsey the advantage of the broad consortium is that it provides a truly national footprint, which is vital for circular advertisers. “Our goal is to have a Find n Save presence in every market in the U.S. For us, it is imperative to provide consistent delivery, uniform measurement and ease of engagement across all of our affiliate markets,” he said. “National retailers have been asking for this for some time.”

Tippie also said it is much better that a one-stop shopping approach be offered, even though deals, grocery coupons, inventory and national product ads might seem like unrelated items that newspapers just happen to sell.

“It is absolutely critical,” said Tippie. “Local newspapers provide terrific service to local retailers, and they provide a variety of different products. These are revealed to local shoppers in a variety of mechanisms. This provides a single interface that is searchable and optimized.”

Tippie also emphasized that local affiliates have a lot of leeway around such issues as sourcing local deals. “We don’t provide a daily deals product,” he noted. “We just make it better” by aggregating and optimizing them. Sacramento’s Find n Save, for instance, had been providing both Groupon deals and local newspaper deals.

One part of the shopping solution that will require more work to be fully integrated is a local retailer directory. Some newspapers are earning revenues from enhanced directory listings, including one developed by Travidia that will continue to be sold by Find n Save. These will likely to continue to be developed locally by each company.

Whether Find n Save is ultimately successful depends on a number of factors. The biggest is whether the national retailers will adopt the platform and switch their circular budgets to it. Many have been developing their own capabilities.

For McClatchy Digital head Chris Hendricks, Find n Save represents a new beginning for newspapers. “It is pushing what we want to do as an industry,” he told us. “We are working together to develop solutions that work for advertisers and consumers.” Hendricks envisions future iterations, for instance, in the tablet space.

For newspapers, the 1/3 circulation/1/3 display/1/3 classifieds revenue model of the print days hasn’t made the transition to online, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time to right the ocean liner. But as a local media channel, newspapers have been written off before their time. Newspapers, of course, remain the single largest source of local content. As analysts, we like them as a giant laboratory for online services, with hundreds of different tests in different markets.

David Carr’s must-read Sunday profile on MediaNews Group and Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton in The New York Times showcases an industry executive as “change agent.” The profile of the ILM West Dual Keynoter (along with Deseret Media CEO Clark Gilbert) shows Paton on a mission to capture the best of the newspaper model that still works, and to abandon what does not. In his first year at Journal Register, notes Carr, Paton’s efforts boosted digital revenues by more than 200 percent.

It helps that Paton hasn’t always been an ink-stained wretch (that’s what we used to call industry people). While he started in newspapers, he also worked as the leader of Canoe.com, a large news site, during the first dot-com bubble, and then invested in Hispanic media, buying El Diario La Prensa in New York and other Spanish-language properties, eventually forming (and running) impreMedia in 2003.

“Mr. Paton has become something of a darling among media thinkers for putting his business where his rhetoric is,” notes Carr. “He issued Flip cameras to all the reporters at Journal Register papers, helped create a newsroom cafe that’s open to the community in Torrington, Conn., and has been pushing to dump ancient proprietary newsroom software in favor of free, Web-based publishing tools. He has financed a lab to foster employee innovation, and the company has formed partnerships with a number of Web companies to provide news and information.”

As Carr notes, what began as a tidy little experiment has become perhaps the single biggest bet in the whole newspaper business: “The Journal Register and MediaNews are now in 18 states, with over 800 print and digital products, with revenue of over $1.4 billion and 10,000 employees. The second-largest newspaper chain in America is now being run by someone who thinks that print is, if not exactly dead, dying a lot faster than anyone thought. “

Carr also note that Paton isn’t talking to himself, having added sharp-tongued new media advocates (and newspaper critics) such as Emily Bell, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen to an advisory board.

“Mr. Paton hears all sorts of clocks ticking. His newspapers are mostly owned by hedge funds and investment banks, which are not known for patience, and part of the reason that the percentage of digital revenue is rising so fast is that the print revenue that it is compared with is dropping so precipitously,” notes Carr. ”Although he is something of an evangelist, he says he is also a pragmatist.”

We’re honored that John Paton and Clark Gilbert are doing back to back keynotes at ILM West, which takes places Dec. 12-14 in San Francisco. You can register here.

CEO John Paton (photo, Nieman Lab)

Sometimes, you reach a point where you think all the newspapers should just combine their audiences and online advertising efforts and be smart, big, technologically savvy and competitive with everyone else. Like the combined effort on Cars.com, for instance.

That’s the game plan behind Digital First, a new management effort that allows the forward thinking execs at Journal Register, an 18-title chain in the Northeast, to manage MediaNews Group, the second-largest newspaper company with 57 titles spread out in multiple regions. Together, the companies will have 11,000 employees and 75 newspapers (and 880 print and online products).

While Journal Register and MNG have been motivated by the interests of their joint investor, Alden Global Corp., it seems possible that other newspaper companies might eventually join. Alden bought Journal Register in 2010 and is the largest holder of MediaNews Group.

Journal Register CEO John Paton, for one, has been a vocal proponent of the ongoing value of newspapers in print and online, and has assembled a strong team to execute, including hyperlocal proponent Jim Brady. The reach of the MNG properties should provide more scale to Paton’s efforts.

MNG, itself, for all practical purposes, ends a long history as an industry maverick that sharply cut newsgathering costs (i.e., salaries) and experimented with new formats and services. The company has had a tradition of being an online vendor’s best friend, always willing to take meetings with new companies. But at the same time, its cost-cutting ways resulted in new areas being underfunded.

Recently, MNG has pushed paywalls to block free, non-subscriber access to its content. It has also collapsed its 12 Bay Area titles to two titles, increasing the individual circulation for those titles, but possibly at the cost of less local coverage in print (but perhaps easily segmented online). These strategies may be re-evaluated under the new regime.

At this point, the newspaper industry have several “we’re all in this together” products. Things like the Yahoo Consortium, which has placed national advertising in papers and sold search; the AP; Cars.com; and various national and regional ad nets.

Some work well, but what we’ve seen is that there is no magic bullet. In fact, the impact of newspapers has been a little underwhelming for its partners. Still, newspapers deliver strong retail relationships and a strong and frequent readership (if aging and inevitably dwindling).

Whenever one writes about the future of newspapers and other news organizations, a voice in the back of his or her head says: “They’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.” Fifteen years into the digital revolution, that’s the dilemma confronting the news industry as it once again revisits possible solutions. Thankfully, no one is giving up.

Paywalls. Video. Search. Hyperlocal. Mobile. All these things are extensively discussed in “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a new Columbia Journalism School report from Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave and Lucas Graves. The news-centric report doesn’t deal very much with our favorite subject — the transformation of the local marketplace, and the newspapers’ potential role in it. But there is plenty on the plate here.

While there are no ready answers — if we knew the answers, we would have provided them a long time ago — there are strong overviews on each subject. The real focus here is reconnecting to the real “fans” and “regulars” who may engage with a news product 50 times more than the “occasionals” and “fly-bys” who make up the bulk of unique visitors. “When people talk about the size of an audience, that’s a sham,” the report quotes Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan.

One goal stressed in the report is building a direct relationship with fans to help push contextual advertising. “By producing relevant journalism, deploying data intelligently and relying on social media — not just search engines — to drive traffic, (publishers) can gather a more devoted and involved readership, one that advertisers will also prefer,” note the authors.

Examiner.com, for instance, does very well when it encourages writes to match their output to social media, search…and advertising. Pet writers did very well last year matching coverage of dog adoption and pet shelters, pushing CPMs from $3-$5 to $11 for P&G’s Iams pet food, a key Examiner sponsor.

In theory, other passion subjects do well too. High school sports especially stands out. The Dallas Morning News’ High School Game Time registers 14 pages a month compared with entertainment (2.5 pages), news (2.78 pages), weather (4.83 pages) and sports (7.71 pages). It also grosses $700,000 a year of new ad dollars, in partnership with local cable coverage. This year, it is launching a $1.99 iPhone app, which represents new circulation revenues, along with heavy user paywalls, such as the one recently enacted by The New York Times.

That’s important. Like others, I’ve actually come to conclusion that the news organizations that have the market power to erect such paywalls are the ones that ultimately survive. For The Times, which has boosted per copy costs to $2 a day, circulation dollars have inched up to $683.4 million a year, just behind display advertising, which has fallen from $1.27 billion to $780.4 million. Next year, it doesn’t seem out of the question that circulation will surpass display.

When hyperlocal zeroes in on local marketplaces, it makes a lot more sense to me. Witness ShopBuffalo, an attractive new marketplace from The Buffalo News launched as a companion to Buffalo.com. The site has partnered with ShopCity and Hero, a local design firm.

Launched March 31 as part of a broader redesign, ShopBuffalo provides free business profiles, adding premium tiers priced at $47 and $97 a month. Businesses can claim them and flesh them out with Facebook and Twitter links, online inventory feeds, coupons, deals, gift certificates, video, event calendars and maps — a very well-conceived set of services. As with other ShopCity partnerships, “shop locally” is a major theme. Merchants are encouraged to promote their own presence via in-store signage. The site also features overall community pages for merchant news and events.

Buffalo News’ Emily Lowrey tells us that ShopBuffalo was developed as a piece of the broader site, which targets 13- to 30-year-olds who are not traditional newspaper readers. She’s not kidding about that. The animated characters that hover in the logo on Buffalo.com’s home page — designed by Hero — could be from a “Star Wars” comic. Another component of the beta is PaperG’s Flyerboard, which lets organizations and merchants post announcements and send additional information on request.

Lowrey notes that the site also has a strong community component. The five-person team that launched Buffalo.com — Manager Ben Kirst, a part-time manager, plus sales and content coordinators/creators — is working with community organizations now to get Neighborhood Goods and a few other really positive projects running.” She adds that site has not had any formal marketing while it is in beta, but will begin a major promotional campaign within two weeks.

The San Diego Union-Tribune is buying DiscoverSD. com, a lifestyle website founded in 2006. The acquisition, in the works for six months, was made with an eye toward expanding the UT’s fast growing Daily Deal business arm, which is expected to generate $10 million this year in new revenues.

The merger of the two databases will give the company’s separate deals programs a reach of 230,000 people. The UT has migrated to its own deals platform after originally working with Shoutback. DiscoverSD will also be using the UT platform.

Besides deals, The UT and DiscoverSD will seek synergies on marketing and website development, while maintaining separate brands and operations. There won’t be news sharing. “We are a multi-platform company, and we need to be aggressive about growing in all of these areas, said Publisher Ed Moss, in a UT article. “[But] they’re positioned differently than our company, and we need to keep it that way.”

DiscoverSD.com reaches 200,000 unique visitors per month, compared with 3.3 million uniques for SignOnSanDiego.com, the Union-Tribune’s website arm. The UT’s audience tends to be older, while a third of DiscoverSD.com’s visitors are between 18 and 34.

Groupon gets much of the credit for “making coupons cool again.” But it’s the smartphone, with its inherent social, geo and touch capabilities, that may make them cooler than ever. By “cooler,” we mean discoverable and relevant.

The St. Petersburg Times believes there is no better way to unlock the city than through the mobile device. As a result, it has jumped into the space with “Things-To-Do,” an iPhone coupon application built around a deep database of local shops, venues and events.

Digital Sales Manager Maryann Balbo presented the app at NAA mediaXchange and underscored that ad-as-content is a difference-maker in enabling effective, pure-play advertising platforms to layer on top. For St. Pete, the database “populated with local content” provides the foundation on which the app operates.

From there, users can search by neighborhood, ZIP code or through a “near me” button that leverages the phone’s GPS. They can subsequently earmark favorites to create personalized lists and can click-to-call for reservations.

The most compelling value is found in user opt-ins that trigger push coupon notifications for timely, geotargeted deals. Once a user chooses a local outlet as a favorite, permission is granted for the business to send marketing offers. These can be leveraged by the merchant to promote a special, deplete an item or motivate other desired consumer actions.

For these businesses, the double hook is a low price point coupled with a simple interface. The Times uses a fixed-price model without bidding or keywords. The platform is self serve, allowing merchants to “send out their own messages in real time from any device.”

Balbo has already seen rapid acceptance of the app, with 18,000 downloads in the first 60 days. She points to marketing. The news organization is utilizing all of its products and outlets to promote “Things-To-Do,” including point-of-purchase materials, window decals, bill stuffers and event marketing. Businesses reap the benefits of this holistic approach, which not only prompts downloads, but motivates users to use the “favorite” functionality to truly make the app their own.

Even as preprint circulars continue to account for a hefty chunk of newspaper revenues, the race to migrate these FSIs onto digital platforms that provide compelling shopping experiences and command premium CPMs is revving up. Associated Press will soon release iCircular for mobile devices, Gannett’s PointRoll operates ShopLocal, Local.com has a local option and several deal/offer aggregators are popping up. Travidia’s Find n Save, however, has gained early traction with publishers thanks in large part to a social + local + deals approach.

McClatchy is the earliest adopter, with co-branded Find n Save sites now live in 21 markets, including Charlotte, Miami and Sacramento. Find n Save leverages partnerships with Groupon (daily deals) and Milo (real-time retail inventory) and Twitter (Twitter streams) to create quick shopping routes for deal hunters.

Here are how the different tenets work together within the holistic platform:

- Group Buying: Groupon provides an exclusive daily deal in each of McClatchy’s markets through Find n Save. At NAA mediaXchange, VP of Strategic Development James Calloway said that this co-branded arrangement plays nicely with the separate deal-a-day program that the publisher is now independently marketing through a private label from Second Street.

Unsurprisingly, Calloway has seen the greatest successes in restaurant, recreation and personal grooming verticals. Retail (except for high-margin goods) are more suspect.

In addition to obvious brand and exclusivity perks, the Groupon Find n Save relationship integrates consistently across all McClatchy properties with “zero sales or fulfillment costs.” Effective CPMs have reached $125. The drawbacks: McClatchy controls the user relationship (and thus the data), but McClatchy handles the local merchant. Then there’s margin compression, with the publishers taking only 15 percent.

- Local Coupons: In addition to digital store circulars (listed as clickable tiles on a single page), Find n Save also features searchable local coupons by category and advertiser. Many are online-only, but print-to-online and online-to print also exist. All coupons are socially enabled for sharing, and local advertisers have unlimited coupon-refresh capability.

- Real-Time Inventory: A deal with Milo (now part of eBay) enables product searches primarily for national chains, though Calloway, much like Milo founder Jack Abraham, is hopeful that eventually more locals can participate. McClatchy takes a revenue share on clicks to retailer sites.

- Social Media Integration: Find n Save embeds a Twitter widget that streams active local deals, linking to the source. Shopping blogs from local newspaper columnists such as Sacramento’s “Shop Cheap” infuse useful content into the site. Calloway sees Find n Save’s shopping portal — an advertising vehicle — as primarily a “content play.” Social functionality enriches this ad-as-content value.