Straightforward stuff, but still enough to cause a minor stir among the Bloomberg ranks. That’s because Winkler, who enforces the news service’s spartan style, seems like the kind of newsman least likely to take to Twitter’s anything-goes ethos.

The opposite, in fact: Just a year ago, Winkler was sending out staff memos chiding Bloomberg reporters who used the service to write about stories they were covering.

But now even Bloomberg has a social media director, and a social media policy: reporters are encouraged to use Twitter, but not to break news on it. And Winkler seems to be trying it out as a show of good faith.

Top dogs at other very serious news organizations have found a way to use Twitter to both inform and entertain, even if there’s still some evident disdain. Last week the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller used Twitter to debate whether using Twitter made you stupid.

Don’t expect any of that from Winkler, though. He’s tweeted three times to date, and each one has been a sober note about accolades earned by Bloomberg reporters. Expect more of the same, he says, via email:

Peter Kafka: Why did you get on Twitter? What do you hope to accomplish?

Matthew Winkler: I want to share the most immediate and direct appreciation of Bloomberg’s reporting, and Twitter is ideal for that purpose.

What was your opinion of Twitter before you started using the service? Has it changed now that you’re tweeting?

I have always admired technology that makes the delivery of news more efficient and Twitter is a good example.

Your tweets to date have been links to stories about Bloomberg and a Bloomberg story. Should we expect more of the same, or do you expect you’ll venture outside Bloomberg?

Bloomberg News will always be the focus. It won’t be about me, it will be about us and helping people appreciate the quality and impact of our work at Bloomberg. That’s why my handle is @BloombergWay.

Would it surprise you to know that BoomTown doesn’t really care anymore if TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sidelines as a blogger while he makes investments in tech companies his tech news site covers?

In a post yesterday, titled “An Update to My Investment Policy,” Arrington made his seemingly cogent arguments that plenty of disclosure made it all “fine,” took one of his typical look-at-me swipes at anyone who dared to question this logic (apparently, we’re crappy “direct” competitors, so we haters have no standing to comment!) and presumably went on his merry investing way.

While I was first irked–because it was an appalling show to many of us cranky standards-insisting whiners–I soon realized Arrington had made a good argument about who he is and, frankly, who he has always been.

In other words, it’s a kind of there-he-goes-again thing, vaguely icky but hardly surprising and completely genuine.

Meanwhile, his new boss, AOL content head Arianna Huffington, pointed me to his post in an email.

When I asked her for an on-the-record comment, as usual, she politely and quickly complied, writing in support of Arrington:

“TechCrunch is committed to transparency. Michael has written about the guidelines he follows–that he rarely writes about companies in which he is an investor, and that, when he does, he clearly discloses this information. The same rules apply when TechCrunch’s writers cover these companies.”

Hold the phone.

Because while I kind of understand where Arrington is coming from, what I don’t understand is how this kind of convenient and on-the-fly rule-making can govern a much larger company whose strongly and repeatedly stated goal by Huffington herself is to create quality journalism.

Since I believed Huffington–whom I like very much as an Internet figure and as a friend–I was confused at what the rules for the whole of AOL content were now.

That’s why I sent her a long new list of questions to answer, which are:

1) What are, if any, the ethical guidelines about making investments for the editorial staff at HuffPo media group properties?

2) Since Arrington now seems to have permission to do so from you, can other editors at AOL properties do the same–that is, make very adjacent investments to what their site covers, as long as they disclose it? For example, can an editor who runs the entertainment site make investments in entertainment companies she/he has coverage responsibility over? (By the way, did you give him permission to make these investments? Did he ask?)

3) Is there anyone who polices what is fair coverage of competitors–i.e. companies competing with companies your editors invest in?

4) If an editor makes investments in a company and someone who works for them writes about that company, does that editor have to recuse himself from the story? Is that even possible?

5) Since you just fired someone for what you called an ethical breach–asking freelancers to work for free and also seemingly defending an attempt to curry favor with an advertiser/client–why is this not an ethical breach?

I had a lot more questions, still unanswered by Huffington, but you can see where this is going.

Simply put, does AOL, which is touting itself as a 21st-century media company, need to have 21st-century rules of the road? Or perhaps not so much?

UPDATE: Now, it is a real clown circus at AOL, with the company declaring that editorial personnel cannot make investments, except Arrington!

“As a rule, in order to avoid conflicts of interests, AOL Huffington Post Media Group editors, writers, and reporters may not have a financial interest in a company or industry that they regularly cover,” AOL said in a statement to Business Insider today, even though I nicely asked for a comment on the issue yesterday. “Arrington operates from a unique position.”

And how! Where do I get such a faboo ethical hall pass from Content Principal Huffington?

I suppose I should go all slouching-towards-Bethlehem here, and wring my hands over this unusual ruling, but what’s the use?

As you might have read: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

How did this all start, especially since I feel like this ridiculous tempest in a Silicon Valley teapot over Arrington’s investment-making might actually be my fault a little bit?

Here’s why:

On Tuesday night around 10 pm (just when I start getting revved up), I wrote a testy email to Arrington’s bosses at AOL–Huffington and CEO Tim Armstrong–as well as the Internet portal’s sharp PR head, asking for a response about what seemed to me to be a glaring conflict of interest at TechCrunch related to new investment activity by Arrington and the site’s coverage of those particular companies he had invested in.

It was all disclosed, of course, but it still felt, as I said, icky.

And, given the recent and loudly stated goal of promoting quality journalism by Huffington–including the recent dismissal of AOL’s Moviefone site editor over what the company considered ethical lapses–it seemed pertinent to ask.

Mostly because I don’t think they actually knew much–if at all–about Arrington’s increasing investing action. Armstrong said as much in an email to me, and Huffington assured me they were going to check it out tout de suite.

But rather than the answer I was waiting on, up popped Arrington’s missive yesterday, which I assume came after his bosses asked for some info on this.

In it, he explained his controversial decision to go back into investing again, in what is clearly a more significant manner.

It was a practice he had abandoned years earlier, apparently after being pecked by detractors for it.

But, dear readers, no more! Let Arrington be Arrington!

And that seems to be a talented blogger with a flare for the dramatic, with a clearly sharply-honed news nose and sassy writing skills, but a scribe who much prefers to be a playah than just an observer and chronicler of that play.

And, after more reflection, I thought: Well, maybe it is a better idea for Arrington to go play with all the boys in Silicon Valley, which would probably be more fun than taking flack for lack of traditional journalistic ethics he never ascribed to in the first place.

I once jokingly nicknamed Arrington Yertle the Turtle after the Dr. Seuss book on one dubious king of one small pond in Sala-Ma-Sond, after he went particularly nuts on the topic of news-embargo breaking.

That diatribe on how he saw news rules–which is to say, there aren’t any that bind him–was vintage Arrington, too. And, after reading his latest post, I suddenly realized that it’s pointless to give a turtle a hard time for not being a fish.

But Huffington is another story. She has put herself in word and deed right into the center of the debate on where news is going on the Web, especially after AOL paid $315 million for her Huffington Post news and opinion site.

Huffington has certainly taken a lot of hits over the years as the HuffPo has grown, some deserved, but she has clearly led an impressive effort.

In fact, I think the cute-kitten and celebrity-loving angle played up by her detractors to dismiss her is silliness, because she and the Huffington Post are clearly more than that and are obviously having a major impact on the future direction of content in the digital age.

But that power she has sought also gives her a responsibility to say exactly what that means on a real and granular and consistent level, beyond the platitudes of wanting to make great journalism that she declares all the time now.

In other words, very specifically: What does Arianna Huffington stand for in regards to journalism? What are her rules and standards and codes? And, perhaps more importantly, what does she not stand up for?

These are questions I hope Huffington–who is really good at smacking back at criticism, too (See: the New York Times’ Bill Keller)–will address in one of her patented blog-xplosions and many times over, too.

Until then, here’s a link to my very long and very detailed ethics disclosure on All Things Digital, which is exactly how our little site thinks it should be in the digital age.

In short, besides signing the Dow Jones Code of Conduct–standard at The Wall Street Journal and other DJ publications–all our editorial staff is required to also pen their own in-plain-English personal and detailed account of disclosures that are pertinent to their job.

(You can read an extensive interview with me on the subject, in fact, which was posted here by Two Bananas Marketing, this week.)

My ATD disclosure is probably the most detailed of all of them, since I gay-married Megan Smith a dozen years ago. She later became a VP at Google, which I cover from time to time, especially related to other companies I focus on more, such as Yahoo.

Most of the time, if you care to read my posts on Google, I am probably tougher and snarkier than not, mostly because I know the search giant from its earliest days.

And, even though I once wrote extensively for the Journal about Google since its founding and before Megan arrived there, I thought it wise to lay it all out in detailed detail.

(By the way, if you want to try to tweak me by asking what News Corp.-owned Fox News’ ethics rules are, I don’t know, as ATD belongs to Dow Jones, which has had them forever. I will say, though, that Roger Ailes often freaks me out.)

In any case, as Arrington preaches, the more disclosure the better, and perhaps I should say even more so here, given the current swirl, by noting explicitly that I garner exactly no financial benefits from my relationship with Megan.

That might seem odd, because she certainly earns more. But I don’t know how much nor do I ask, since we have separate bank accounts and she always pays up–well, almost always–when half the bills are due. While it sounds painfully un-romantic, we only spend overall what each of us can afford equally in an exact 50-50 split.

In addition, I also legally signed away all rights to inheritance–although I had no such marriage rights in the first place, being gay–of Megan’s assets, which are in a trust for her relatives and our sons (for when they are too old to have any fun).

More to the point, I believe this makes me the only person to marry an exec at a hot Silicon Valley company with no prospect of any gold-digging.

Thus, I clearly would make the worst investor ever–not that I ever invest in tech or plan to while I am a reporter covering the sector.

Thank god, I suppose, that Michael Arrington is there to take up the slack.

It’s a great, punchy read!  But if you’re in a hurry:

• The New York Times’ executive editor calls media commentators and media recyclers “oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks.”
• He compares aggregators to pirates, then says that AOL’s $315 million purchase of Huffington Post has been poorly described: “Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.”
• He says that Huffington herself “aggregated” his own words and passed them off as her own.

Here’s Huffington’s response, which she’s going to post on her own site shortly:

Bill Keller Accuses Me of “Aggregating” an Idea He Had Actually “Aggregated” From Me

Perhaps unsettled by the fact that, when combined, The Huffington Post and AOL News have over 70 percent more unique visitors than the New York Times, and that HuffPost/AOL News’ combined page views in January 2011 were double the page views of the Times (1.5 billion vs. 750 million), New York Times executive editor Bill Keller decided to unleash an exceptionally misinformed attack on HuffPost in a column released today and slated for this weekend’s NYT Magazine.

After opening his piece by patting himself on the back so hard I’d be surprised if he didn’t crack a rib (it seems everyone — even Woody Allen and those folks on Twitter — thinks he’s super “powerful” and “influential”!), Keller turned to the putative subject of his column: “the ‘American Idol’-ization of news” and the evils of “aggregation.” Hearkening back to the glory years when Rupert Murdoch and his minions labeled sites that aggregate the news “parasites,” “content kleptomaniacs,” “vampires,” and “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet” (the news industry equivalent of “your mama wears army boots!” although, not quite as persuasive), Keller says of aggregation: “In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediashpere, it is a respected business model.”

He then describes HuffPost’s offerings as nothing more than “celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications.”

I wonder what site he’s been looking at. Not ours, as even a casual look at HuffPost will show. Even before we merged with AOL, HuffPost had 148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism. As long ago as 2009, Frank Rich praised the work of our reporters in his column. Paul Krugman more recently singled out the work of our lead finance writer. Columbia Journalism Review has credited our work for advancing the public’s understanding of the national foreclosure crisis, and a pair of our Washington reporters recently received a major journalism prize. Matthew Yglesias, Felix Salmon, Catherine Rampell, are among the many others who have cited the work of our reporters. Did Keller not notice that?

And did he not notice that he lost one of his top business reporters, Peter Goodman, to The Huffington Post — despite his best efforts to keep him? Indeed, on the very day that Keller’s column began circulating, we published a piece Goodman edited, a 4,000-word investigation of a for-profit college by Goodman’s first hire, Chris Kirkham, a former Washington Post intern. Did he think he came over to aggregate adorable kitten videos? And was he too busy scanning all those lists of “most powerful people” he’s on to notice that he also lost one of his top editors, Tim O’Brien, to us?

Even so, if those were the only charges he’d leveled, I wouldn’t have bothered responding. As they say on those TV lawyer shows, “Asked and answered.”

But then Keller went much further, accusing me of “aggregating” his very thoughts! To wit:

How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so… aggregated.

That’s quite the claim to make, Bill, especially without offering a single specific. Luckily, I remembered the panel and the subsequent radio interview very well, and quickly found transcripts of both. So what was it that left Keller feeling “so… aggregated”?

During the panel, sponsored by the Milken Institute, and held on April 28, 2010, Keller said the following:

But what I think will happen, and you can already start to see it, is there’s a little bit of a convergence going on. We’ve talked a lot about how some of the mainstream organizations we represent are adapting the tools and more important, the kind of culture and psychology, of a more open media world. I think it’s also true that a lot of the alternatives — the startups — are beginning to see the need for discipline, resources, standards.

A bit later, during the joint radio interview we did with Patt Morrison, I said:

Well, I think there is a convergence happening. There was a big debate over the last few years about whether the newspapers will survive, whether the future is going to be only online. And I think we are realizing now, increasingly, that online, purely online news operations like The Huffington Post are more and more adopting the most traditional, basic tenets of journalism. Accuracy, fairness, fact-checking, reporters, more and more editors, and mainstream traditional operations like the New York Times or NPR are adopting more and more of the digital tools that can bring in the community to make it part of the creation of journalism, through citizen journalism, through reports from the ground, through video, through Twitter feeds, through all the new media available to us.

The trouble for Keller is that this viewpoint, right down to the use of the word “convergence,” is one I had been expressing to describe the changes happening in the media for years.

For instance, in May 2008, two years before the Milken panel, I told the Star Tribune, “I think that what we are seeing is a kind of convergence of the mainstream media doing more and more online, and those of us in online media and the blogosphere doing more and more reporting, along with citizen-journalism projects.”

In November 2008, 17 months before the panel, speaking of the media’s coverage of the ’08 race, I told Reuters, “There’s this real convergence, where basically you found that the best and most accurate rose to the top, whether it originated from Time magazine or from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, which did not exist before the election.”

And in January 2010, three months before Bill Keller’s “memorized riff” on convergence, I told Canada’s CTV, “And then we can have a hybrid future where there is a convergence between old media and new media. It’s not an either/or world.”

Indeed, as far back as March 2007, over three years before the Milken panel, I wrote a post outlining my take on what was happening in the media world: “Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”

So who was it, Bill, who was “aggregating” someone else’s ideas?

Keller’s attack is as lame as it is laughable. I wonder if that Hollywood screenwriter who Keller giddily tells us has purchased an option on his life-rights will include this scintillating episode in his movie?

In any case, this whole thing has left me feeling, to coin a phrase, “so… aggregated.”

Okay, back to the merger.

Ok, NYT: Your turn!

The publisher hasn’t said how much it will charge readers and isn’t offering many other details for now. But subscribers to the print edition will be able to access the site for free.

By adopting the “metered model,” the New York Times (NYT) is emulating the Financial Times, which lets readers peruse up to 10 stories a month before forcing them to buy a subscription to the online paper.

That model isn’t all that different from the subscription strategy employed by News Corp.’s (NWS) Wall Street Journal: While much of the Journal is theoretically behind a pay wall, it’s a fairly permeable one designed to give both casual readers and search engines access to the content. (News Corp.’s Dow Jones owns both the WSJ and this Web site).

Both are have-cake/eat-cake strategies: Generate as big an audience as possible to sell to advertisers while extracting a second revenue stream from hard-core readers. The Times, which is reportedly generating $100 million a year from Web display ads, wants to do the same thing.

The paper has tried a pay wall before. In 2005, it rolled out “Times Select” whereby it cordoned off access to op-ed columnists like Thomas Friedman and to archived stories and other features. That strategy generated around $10 million a year. But it was considered a failed experiment, and the Times dropped the wall in September 2007.

Now, of course, $10 million a year sounds like a nice boost for a paper that lost more than $35 million in its most recent quarter and saw print ad revenue plummet throughout the year.

A New York Magazine story published on Sunday predicted the timing of the announcement, even though New York Times executive editor Bill Keller told me the piece was “long on speculation.”

The New York Times Announces Plans for a Metered Model for NYTimes.com in 2011NEW YORK, Jan 20, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The New York Times announced today that it will be introducing a paid model for NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011.
The new approach, referred to as the metered model, will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business. It will also provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.
Through 2010, NYTimes.com will be building a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms. Once the metered model is implemented, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com.
“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”
“This process of rethinking our business model has also been driven by our desire to achieve additional revenue diversity that will make us less susceptible to the inevitable economic cycles,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO, The New York Times Company. “We were also guided by the fact that our news and information are being featured in an increasingly broad range of end-user devices and services, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.”
More details regarding the metered model will be available in the coming months.

[Image credit: etoile]

There are lots of media companies anticipating the tablet–the entire magazine industry, for instance–and Apple (AAPL) will eventually want all of them on board. The wondertablet is supposed to be a showcase for media, after all.

But very few media companies seem to have any kind of real information about the device. And only a small number will have new stuff to show off at next week’s unveiling.

Like who? Here’s a starter list of likely and unlikely suspects:

• The New York Times is a good bet. Executive Editor Bill Keller riled up the Web with a passing reference to an “impending Apple slate” in October, but wouldn’t say more. Last week, I asked Keller again about his paper’s Apple plans, and he stayed mum again. So did Martin Nisenholtz, the paper’s digital boss. “No comment” doesn’t equal “we’re cooking something up,” of course. And I’m not convinced that an Apple demo would be directly tied to an announcement about a new pay wall strategy, as New York Magazine speculated Sunday. But I do expect to see something from the New York Times (NYT) at next week’s launch.
• Don’t expect much from the big music labels. Jobs courted Big Music when he opened up the iTunes store in 2003. But label sources I talked to this month said the company had only recently begun briefing them about the tablet, primarily as a “courtesy.” Recall that Apple already has the labels on board with the “iTunes LP” format, which would lend itself quite nicely to a tablet. One label official told me Apple has expressed an interest in selling higher-quality audio files via iTunes, and I’m sure the labels would be happy to do so if they can charge a premium for them. But that discussion doesn’t seem to be tethered to the tablet.
• Do expect to hear about “enhanced e-books.” In the past, Jobs has been dismissive about dedicated e-readers like the Kindle from Amazon (AMZN) and reading in general–“people don’t read anymore.” He has apparently changed his mind about the latter opinion: The Wall Street Journal confirmed earlier stories yesterday with a report that News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins is negotiating to bring some of its titles to the platform. Presumably other publishers–all of which are eager for viable Kindle competitors–want in, too.
• Video? Duh. But who? The most obvious suspect here for an initial launch would be Disney (DIS) and its affiliates. In part because Jobs is both the company’s largest individual shareholder and a board member. But also because Disney CEO Bob Iger has made a point of trying out new digital distribution strategies. Here’s a nonstretch: Disney’s ESPN is already negotiating with Microsoft (MSFT) to bring some of its programming and games to the Xbox 360. What about something similar for the tablet? UPDATE: ESPN won’t be announcing anything in conjunction with Apple next week, says someone who knows.
• Time Inc. won’t be there, according to people familiar with Time Warner’s publishing unit. The same likely applies to rival Conde Nast.

A crucial point here is that if the tablet works with the iTunes store–and it should–it is most likely that all of the Apple’s existing iTunes media partners will automatically be on the new device from the start whether Jobs showcases them next week or not. That is: If you can buy “Cars” and watch it on your Mac, iPhone or iPod, then you should be able to watch it on your tablet, too.

But we’re in pre-Apple announcement mode now, and simply porting old media to a new device just won’t sate our needs! So consider this report a work in progress, and a speculative one at that. I’ll be updating if and when anything new comes to light.

But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple (AAPL) won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device, or even acknowledge that it has plans.*

Condé’s plan, meanwhile, is to create digital versions of its magazines that will work on all the upcoming tablets, using new software from Adobe (ADBE). Those tablets aren’t actually on the market yet, but the publisher says it’s confident that we’ll soon see multiple versions of machines featuring large color touchscreens and wireless connections.

So who’s going to make those gadgets? Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend says his company is working closely with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and that it has also been communicating its plans to Apple. But Townsend made a point of saying that Apple executives themselves refuse to acknowledge that they’re actually planning a tablet: “They’re not talking to anybody openly,” he says.

Adobe is creating a publishing tool for the new format, as well as magazine-reader software that may come pre-installed on the devices or may require a download. The software company says it is working exclusively with Condé now, but will offer its tools to other publishers next year.

[Important technical point several readers have brought up: Adobe says its new reader software will run using its AIR platform, which works on multiple operating systems, including Apple's desktop system. But neither AIR nor Adobe's flash software works on Apple's iPhone, so if the new mystery device runs on that operating system, there's a problem. I'm following up with Adobe to see what it has to say. UPDATE: Here's Adobe's response.]

Condé says its work with Adobe won’t preclude the company from joining the “Hulu for magazines” storefront/distribution joint venture it has been discussing with Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and other publishers. “Those discussions are ongoing and important and imminent,” Townsend says.

Okay. So what will Condé’s magazines look like once the tablets appear? The publisher has been showing a demo video to advertisers, industry executives and employees, and I’m trying to convince the company to show it to the rest of the world. (UPDATE: Here’s a partial, low-quality version of the video).

But until then, you can get a sense of it by checking out the publisher’s first attempt to port a magazine to the iPhone, which was released today at the iTunes App Store.

Like the iPhone version of GQ’s December issue, Condé says its tablet magazines will feature the same content found in the print versions, including original advertising, with the ability to view pages in their original form or in formats designed specifically for the device. They will also import multimedia content, like videos, and offer the ability to synch up with social networks and other Web sites.

Condé also thinks the business model for its tablet mags will mirror that of its iPhone app. The company intends to charge readers for each title, and it plans to convince the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the magazine industry’s standards board, that its online sales are equivalent to newsstand sales. That will allow Condé to charge advertisers the same rate as for print ads.

If all of this works, it’s a dream scenario for Condé and other publishers. The magazine industry gets to keep the revenue streams its print publications generate without having to make the “analog dollars for digital pennies” discount that the Web requires. Meanwhile, Condé gets to bask in the benefits of digital–lower distribution costs, more engagement with readers.

Or put another way: Publishers hope the new devices will repair all the value destruction the Web has wrought.

But all of this assumes that consumers, who’ve shown no inclination to pay for this stuff on the Web, will be willing to pay for it once it appears on devices no one owns yet. We’ll find out soon enough.

*One possible exception is the New York Times (NYT), where editor Bill Keller refuses to talk about possible talks with Steve Jobs and company.

The text in question: The passing reference to an “impending Apple slate” by New York Times (NYT) executive editor Bill Keller in an address to his staff. That’s it.

How is this considered news? Because while everyone in Appleland is positive Steve Jobs has a wonderous tablet computer up his sleeve, no one has actually seen one. But if the guy running America’s newspaper of record mentions it, then it must be true, right?

I had a different take on this: The Times, like every other big publisher, assumes Apple (AAPL) is working on a tablet and would like to figure out how to get its stuff onto the device. But I assumed that the Times, like every other big publisher, has had no contact with the famously secretive company about its plans.

That is, Keller could have said “the Apple slate or tablet or whatever that I believe the company is working on, but don’t know about firsthand.” But he whittled his thoughts down to three words–because he’s good at writing and words and stuff like that, the way you’d think the guy running America’s newspaper of record would be.

But just for kicks, I checked in with Keller yesterday to clarify: Does he actually know what Apple is up to? Or is he in the same boat as the rest of us?

His answer, delivered via a PR rep: “I ain’t sayin’.”

Okay, then!

Let’s start by noting that it’s possible that Keller is simply tweaking a reporter’s earnest query with a purposely delphic remark.

And even if Keller does know something about Apple’s plans, that doesn’t mean he knows much. Apple is famous for keeping its vendors and partners in the dark about its product plans until Steve Jobs unveils the devices onstage.

Still, if Apple has talked to Keller and the Times about its tablet in any way, that news will come as a surprise to other publishers I’ve talked to, who can’t get Apple to even wink or nudge about the device.

Earlier this month, for instance, I reported that executives at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. couldn’t get Apple “to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device.”

Yesterday, I talked to an executive in charge of digital efforts at another big brand-name publisher who said the same thing. “You can’t even joke with them about a tablet,” said the executive. “They get very serious and cut the conversation short.”

Has Keller or any other Times executive had a longer conversation? I pinged Keller again last night for clarification, but haven’t heard back. If I do, I’ll update here.

In the meantime, if you want to read the tea leaves yourself, they show up around the 8:30 mark in this video, first published by the Nieman Journalism Lab:

Bill Keller speaks to the digital group at The New York Times from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The company today announced plans to reduce its newsroom staff by eight percent by the end of 2009. Cuts will be made by buyout, but the company will resort to layoffs should its hand be forced.

“As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs,” New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote in a note to employees. I hope that won’t happen, but it might. I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.”

Sad, sad news for a storied newspaper and an imperiled industry.

Keller’s memo in full, below:

Colleagues,

I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I’ve been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don’t want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.

Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.

We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.

As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.

Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.

In recent years, we’ve managed to avoid the disabling cutbacks that have hit other newsrooms. The Company has chosen to protect the journalism by cutting production and other business-side costs, and the newsroom itself has managed its resources frugally. These latest cuts will still leave us with the largest, strongest and most ambitious editorial staff of any newsroom in the country, if not the world.

I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. But we’ve been looking hard at ways to minimize the impact–in part, by re-engineering some of our copy flow. I won’t promise this will be easy or painless, but I believe we can weather these cuts without seriously compromising our commitment to coverage of the region, the country and the world. We will remain the single best news organization on earth.

I doubt that anyone is shocked by the fact of this, but it is happening sooner than anyone anticipated. When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts this year. But I accept that if it’s going to happen, it should be done quickly. We will get through this and move on.

In my absence, Bill Schmidt and John and Jill have volunteered to take your questions this afternoon. Feel free to bring additional questions to me as soon as I’m back, or check with Bill Schmidt or John or Jill privately, or save them for the next Throw Stuff at Bill session, which is in a couple of weeks.

We often–and rightly–voice our gratitude that we work for a company and a family that prize quality journalism above all. I hope you know that the company and the family, and I, feel an equal debt of gratitude to all of you whose sacrifice and loyalty have kept us strong.

Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.

Bill

Cheers to the paper for allowing itself to be savaged by “Daily Show” correspondent Jason Jones. I particularly enjoyed watching Executive Editor Bill Keller gamely explaining the news business while managing to get a dig into Google (GOOG), The Huffington Post and Drudge Report.

Crave more? Here’s an interview The Wall Street Journal’s new “Speakeasy” blog conducted with Jason Jones about the bit. Excerpt:

How’s the mood at the Times these days?

Edgy? No. It was really quite lovely. Let me tell you this, movies have severely misled me on what newspaper rooms should look like. There was no paper stacked six feet high on people’ desks. No one’s yelling stop the presses.

What are people up to over there?

I think people are using the Internet to look for new jobs. There are lots of great Web sites out there: Monster.com; Craigslist is great.

A decision could come by the end of June, the New York Observer reports, relaying information that executive editor Bill Keller passed on to his staff at a Wednesday meeting (no more tweeting!).

The short version: The Times is mulling two strategies. One would look a lot like the model used by the Financial Times whereby online readers get a certain amount of content for free but are required to pay up beyond that. The other would be akin to the one used by Web 1.0 pioneer Salon–a public radio/TV-style subscription/donation model that lets everyone read the site for free, but gives “members” access to extras.

The long version, from the Observer:

One includes a “meter system,” in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. He warned staff at the meeting that this pay model would be “tricky.” If the word-count limit or page-view limit is set too low, it could chase readers off, compromising traffic and advertising revenue. He said the site presently makes “a lot, a lot of money” from digital advertising–though he wouldn’t specify how much–and that executives at the paper believe it is “substantially more” than The Wall Street Journal presently makes on a subscription-based pay model. On the other hand, he said, set these bars too high and there will be little improvement in revenue.

Mr. Keller described the second proposal as a “membership” system. In this model, readers pledge money to the site and are invited into a “New York Times community.” You write a check, you get a baseball cap or a T-shirt (if it’s like Channel Thirteen, a tote bag!), an invite to Times event, or perhaps, like The Economist, access to specialized content on the Web. He said he wouldn’t even be opposed to offering a donor access to a Page One editorial meeting as long as it doesn’t affect the paper competitively.

Recall that the Times was actually able to extract $10 million a year or so from its Times Select experiment in which it forced online readers to pay $50 a year to get access to opinion writers like Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd.

This was back in 2007, when online know-it-alls (um, like me) jeered the paper for “cutting itself off from the conversation,” etc., and promised that if it only opened itself up to the Web, big ad dollars would come. And actually, the Times has done reasonably well selling display ads–the paper’s online managers say that its pricing for premium ad inventory has held up even during the crash, though classifieds/help-wanted ads have evaporated.

The problem is that the paper now needs much more than $10 million a year to counter its disintegrating print business. Hard to see either of the two strategies described above panning out, but well worth trying.

But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.

In the first three months of this year, the New York Times Company (NYT) lost $74.5 million, or 34 cents a share once you factor out one-time charges, on revenue of $609 million. That’s worse than Wall Street’s low expectations of a five-cent loss on revenue of $630.8 million.

The reason, of course, is that the ad market is miserable in general, and even more so for newspapers. The company’s ad revenue was down 27 percent, notably worse than the awful 17.6 percent decline the Times recorded in the last quarter of 2008.

And as in the last quarter, former bright spots like the Internet business have now gone dark as well: Internet revenue was down 5.6 percent, Internet ad sales declined 6.1 percent, and revenue at the Times’s About.com unit dropped 4.7 percent.

Expect more of the same for the second quarter of this year, warns CEO Janet Robinson: “At this time, and it is early in the quarter, we believe the rate of decline in ad revenues in the second quarter will be similar to that of the first.”

The Times has been trimming costs (via salary cuts and layoffs) and has bought itself a bit of breathing room by getting rid of its dividend, taking on a very expensive loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and selling off assets like its Manhattan headquarters. It still has some moves it can make–it is trying to unload its stake in the Boston Red Sox and to find a buyer for the Boston Globe.

But at some point it’s going to have find a way to start selling more ads again. Because awards alone won’t save the paper–Pulitzers can’t even guarantee their winners’ continued employment.

The Times has stopped providing monthly revenue updates, but it has been pretty good about providing detail via its earnings calls. I’ll be on the road during today’s 11 a.m. call, but will check the transcript and get back to you later with the most interesting nuggets.

Last year, New York Times (NYT) executive editor Bill Keller told the newspaper’s newsroom that he would try very hard to not fire any of them, despite the paper’s worsening financial health. But he didn’t say anything about pay cuts.

The Times today announced that it would be cutting salaries of its nonunion employees from 2.5 percent to 5 percent and that it would be asking for “similar” cuts from its unionized newsroom employees “in a spirit of shared sacrifice and as a way to otherwise avoid layoffs in the newsroom.”

Translation: Cut your salaries or we’ll cut your jobs.

In addition, the Times has canned 100 people from the paper’s business operations. The sweetener: Those who get their salaries slashed also get extra vacation days.

The Times hasn’t officially unveiled its request/demand for givebacks from its unionized newsroom, but plans to do so this afternoon.

Here’s the internal memo:

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, the global economic crisis is taking its toll on a broad range of businesses and sectors, here in the U.S. and around the world. We have reported in our own newspapers and on our own Web sites that the economy is likely to continue struggling throughout this year and possibly longer.

Given this economic outlook and the changes occurring in the media business, we, regrettably, must take even more steps to lower costs. We have been, and continue to, reorganize and reduce our staff, which means we are saying goodbye to many of our close colleagues. Now, in addition, we are lowering salaries through the end of this year for all remaining nonunion employees and, in exchange, providing additional time off. We plan to approach the Newspaper Guild in New York to ask for its participation in the program and to continue working with our unions in Boston and our other locations on lowering our costs, including wage reductions.

The salaries of all employees at The New York Times Media Group (with the exception of the IHT, which is working on other cost reduction measures), The Boston Globe, Boston.com and Corporate in New York will be rolled back by 5%, starting this April, and these employees will receive 10 additional days off to use before the end of the year.

At the About Group, Baseline, Globe Direct, International Media Concepts, Regional Media Group, Shared Services Center and Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the approach is similar, with salaries being rolled back by 2.5% with five additional days off. We made the distinction between the two groups by taking into account location and other factors. Next year, we plan to return salaries to their current levels. Of course, such a decision depends on the state of our business.

Many of you will have questions about these actions. Your manager or department head has been briefed with more details and is your best source of information.

This was a very difficult decision to make. The environment we are in is the toughest we have seen in our years in business. Across our Company, you and your colleagues have worked hard to introduce innovative products and services, reduce expenses and improve productivity. We are deeply grateful for your efforts and proud of your achievements. As we take these painful steps together, we remain confident that our great Company will keep moving forward to better times.

Sincerely,

Arthur & Janet

Makes sense, given that the ad-supported model the paper has been depending on isn’t working. Figuring out a paid model that will work will be challenging, but it’s certainly worth experimenting with. For more details, see PaidContent’s useful summary.

One other related point: Keller reiterates that the Times has a small but extant business on its hands via Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle: For $14 a month, e-book readers can get a digital version of the paper delivered daily to their device.

I played with the Kindle for some time last fall and while I appreciate a lot about it, I can’t see why you’d pay $168 a year to read the Times on it: For one thing, the version that Kindle owners see is facsimile of the daily paper, which means it’s not updated with breaking news, even though the device has a wireless connection. Another negative–you can get the “live,” updated version of the online paper for free via the Kindle’s (admittedly crude) Web browser.

But people do like it, Keller says. How many? He won’t say, just that the business is “modest” (this also applies to the paper’s very, very niche Times Reader product). One hint: It’s generating much less than $10 million a year, which Keller describes wistfully as “real money” that the paper’s previous attempt at a subscription service generated.

Maybe those numbers get more significant as the Kindle becomes more popular: Citigroup (C) predicts the device will be a $1.2 billion business by next year alone. But I think the paper is going to have to find something more compelling to offer than a digitized version of last night’s news if it wants to charge a premium. I’m just not sure that offer should be.

Meanwhile Keller himself has a good perspective on it: “So some people are paying for The Times online. Just not enough of them. So far.”

It is hard to call this a layoff since I’m not an employee of the Times and I will likely still contribute to the paper occasionally. Yet I have been feeling a lot like someone who has been laid off. For starters, I have tried to build a narrative based on the little information that was shared with me by my editors, who have told me they were nearly as surprised as I was about this decision. As in a layoff, the decision was made in response to the economic realities of the media industry, which is a polite way of saying that newspapers are in difficult financial shape.”

The Times (NYT) had a round of layoffs/buyouts earlier in the year, but last month Executive Editor Bill Keller told his troops he would try very hard not to cut anyone else. It seems increasingly clear that Keller will struggle to make good on that pledge, given the Times’s deteriorating  financial picture. But since Alboher wasn’t an actual employee, her canning won’t technically count as a layoff–it just feels like one to her.

The Times has been ramping up its use of columnist/bloggers over the past year, and has brought most of them on as contract workers. I’ve asked the paper if it has made other columnist/blogger cuts recently; no response yet. But it hasn’t made cut any other of its columnist/bloggers, says the NYT’s Catherine Mathis.

As an aside, news of Alboher’s demise reached me via The NYTPicker, which appears to be a month-old blog written by someone who loves the Times so much that they scour the paper each day to write something nasty about it. It’s a sort-of heir to SmarterTimes.com, a now-defunct site that existed solely to point out liberal bias at the paper (its operator, Ira Stoll, moved on to run the now-defunct New York Sun).

Does that sound like something that appeals to you? If so, be warned: NYTPicker won’t be posting for next few days, since its anonymous operator will be traveling to see their folks, who “still subsist on dial-up Internet service.”

Here’s a nice summation of the state of newspapers today: A pep talk to a newspaper’s staff now consists of a pledge not to fire said staff.

That’s what New York Times (NYT) Executive Editor Bill Keller (pictured here) told his charges yesterday, and even then he couldn’t make the promise ironclad.

The New York Observer has the prepared text of remarks Keller delivered to the paper’s editorial workers yesterday.

There’s a lot of back-slapping for the NYT’s coverage of the financial meltdown and some other attaboys (as well as some references to competition from News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal (NWS). (News Corp., owner of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, is also the owner this Web site.)

But here’s the part the staff is most interested in:

A deep, sustained recession will mean the search for savings and the quest for new revenues continues, that there will be no luxuries and little comfort. It will mean, as the company announced last week, that for management there will be some cuts in future pension benefits and retiree medical insurance. … The tough business climate has already meant the consolidation of sections to save printing costs. It will mean, I’m sure, that our hiring is even more selective than before. It will mean some new projects get delayed. It may mean we get more exotic and garish species of advertisements.

What it will NOT mean, I most fervently hope, is a surrender to the short-sighted, serial staff cuts that have hollowed out some of the nation’s great news organizations. There are no guarantees, especially since we have such limited visibility into the future. But as of now, even with the growing misery of the global economy, our aim is to move forward without another wave of newsroom buyouts or layoffs. If I learn that such a staff reduction is on the table, I will tell you, and I will tell you promptly.”

It’d be nice for the paper’s remaining workers if Keller could be firmer with a no-layoff pledge, but he’s not in a position to do that because the company’s revenue, profits and stock price are all in a multiyear slide.

Last week, on the same day the paper’s credit rating was cut to junk status, the company said it would consider cutting its dividend in order to conserve cash.

Readers had a lot of thoughtful reactions.

To recap: Keller (pictured here) had taken wobbly aim at the Web and its bloggers, calling the Internet a “media tsunami” and too much of its fare “unreliable,” such as sites like Wikipedia and Google News.

“Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news,” he said in a speech he recently gave in London, in that tiresome tsk-tsk way that must be in the mainstream media mandarin handbook. “That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

BoomTown, of course, disagreed. I wrote: “This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.”

Readers weighed in.

Wrote Abe Maslow:

That’s an interesting dodge you’re attempting to pull over on us, when you say, ‘This is simply not true going forward…’ What service does that usually useless bit of business jargon mean here?

“And what’s your evidence: You know of an ever-increasing number of bloggers who do reporting. How in the world would that rebut Keller’s point that most (not all, but most) bloggers do no reporting, choosing instead to comment?”

Obviously, I should have removed that caveat of going forward, but I was being polite! I suppose Keller is technically right on most, but it’s really changing fast and seems simply myopic on his part.

First, he has a bunch of great bloggers who report at his newspaper. Too many to list. We have a bunch at Dow Jones, as do all major newspapers, networks and magazines. While those might be considered reporters, they are more than that and relatively new.

In tech and media alone, besides, there are scads who are doing great reporting and analysis and scooping all those newspapers frequently: Om Malik, Rafat Ali, Jeff Jarvis, Nikki Finke, Peter Kafka, Erick Schonfeld, Staci Kramer, Mark Glaser, Matt Marshall, Chris Anderson, Ryan Block, Brian Lam, Nick Carr. I could go on in this and every category–food, travel, gossip, local, all kinds of business.

Still, noted Glenn Kelman:

In this sense, it seems unfair to brand Keller a dinosaur for drawing an accurate distinction about blogging and traditional journalism. Would we have blamed Keller for making the same observation about cable’s sumo pundits?

“I also think your argument ignores a distinction Keller would undoubtedly make, between professional journalists and citizen journalists. We all know it doesn’t matter whether the news is delivered in print, via the Web, or via RSS; a professional journalist like you who breaks news via a blog isn’t whom Keller is talking about.”

Maybe so, but I guess I have to reiterate that I am weary hearing that same old tired tune about how bad blogs are comparatively, since it is increasingly and swiftly not true.

And why beat up on citizen journalists anyway? They are surely additive and often sharper than the so-called professionals.

Maybe Keller is not a dinosaur, but his speech struck me as not exactly forward-looking and, to my mind, the executive editor of the New York Times needs to be that these days.

In fact, I am with Tish Grier, who wrote:

It would be very nice if guys like Keller would come down to where the people are and start talking with the diversity of us–rather than lumping us all under some kind of crazy rubric that fits his particular argument.

“If he listened, he might find out why so many of us blog in the first place; why so many of us really aren’t out to ‘kill’ journalism. He might find that some of us only want to bring in a different perspective to stale discussions that seem to be perpetuated by old windbags (read: columnists).”

As a formerly print-only windbag, now freshly blowing online, I could not agree more.

To his credit, Keller (pictured here) spent the start of the speech in honor of the late legendary Guardian columnist Hugo Young expertly dissecting the appalling attitude of the Bush administration toward the free press.

Kudos to that. But then he could not resist that tiresome tendency of many mainstream journalists to blame the explosion in the popularity of the Internet for the woes of the newspaper industry.

Dubbing the Internet a “media tsunami” and calling much of what is out there “unreliable,” Keller pilloried sites like Wikipedia and Google News for not having things like foreign bureaus in war zones and because they don’t create content and do aggregate it from other media.

It’s a little odd, though, to insult such Web products for doing exactly what they do–neither Google News nor Wikipedia has ever claimed to perform the function of a news organization like the Times.

Actually, I think Keller’s real problem is the audience, especially young people, who are increasingly using those sites and others.

The fact of the matter for an awfully long time now is that consumers of information are sampling all over the Web and don’t just rely solely on the New York Times for info.

That’s too bad for Keller, I guess, but not bad at all for consumers, who Keller never assumes are discerning at understanding what they are getting. But they are and are simply not a mass of dumb sheep just taking it all in and not questioning anything.

While I realize Keller and others are nervous about the confusion caused by the great mass of information on the Web–too much of it inane, incorrect and even, yes, made up–I have always thought most readers are a lot smarter than a room full of journalists could ever be.

Now before the Rupert-Murdoch-owns-Dow-Jones-now accusations start, let me say I love the New York Times and consider it one of the greatest news organizations around. Of course, I read it daily (well, I read it daily online only, to be specific).

And I agree with a lot of what Keller said in his speech about the need for accuracy over speed and the importance of standards-based reporting online as it is done offline.

But I cannot imagine he lives in the present-day world when he claimed in the speech: “Most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.”

This is simply not true going forward, and he should have done some reporting on the subject to find out. There is an ever-increasing number of online outlets who are doing most excellent online reporting.

Not enough, of course, never enough, but it is a clear trend in almost every category.

Um, Bill, reporting would be nice here too, even at your own media organization. You might want to check out Saul Hansell’s stuff in the Bits blog, as it is full of news. And, I personally learn a ton from Virginia Heffernan’s Medium blog. But that’s just me!

Keller also woefully misrepresented what blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine thinks: “Jeff, like many of the most ardent true believers in the blog revolution, suggests that the mainstream media can be largely replaced by a self-regulating democracy of voices, the wisdom of the crowd.”

Jarvis bites back, of course, noting the bad reporting by Keller.

“First, I have never said that the crowd of bloggers would replace mainstream media and professional journalism. That’s a red herring that is too often attributed presumptively to bloggers and their advocates,” he wrote in a long post. “It’s never properly cited because it can’t be. Where’s the link to the quote with me saying that? It’s fiction. I don’t say that. I don’t believe that.”

I don’t either. And, what was also ironic was that Keller was speaking in tribute to the Guardian’s always sharp Young, whom Keller quoted:

“The duty of elucidation falls more heavily on the columnist than simple side-taking, and I hope the complexities, and my sense of agonized indecision, show through the prose.”

Noted Keller about the impact of Young on him: “I don’t know how successful I was at elucidation in my own columns, but I had no shortage of agonized indecision, and I consider that a point of pride. If we have a higher purpose, those of us in the press, I think it is to challenge lazy certainty, conventional wisdom and complacency.”

Yes, we should definitely challenge that.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.