In addition to earlier investors, who include Lerer Ventures, Oak Investment and Bedrocket, SoftBank Capital has also put money into the new round; SoftBank principal Nikhil Kalghatgi will join the company’s board.

NowThisNews has now raised nearly $10 million in the last year; Eric Hippeau, Lerer Ventures’ managing director, says NowThisNews is still talking to some strategic investors about kicking in a bit more. Danielle Morrill noted the new round earlier this month.

So that’s the money part. How’s the startup itself doing?

Just fine, said Hippeau. He said the company, which launched last fall, has already created 300,000 videos, and that last month it generated 20 million video streams. By comparison, HuffPost Live, Huffington Post’s own version of a video news service, generated 48 million streams in March.

The big caveat with NowThisNews’ video stream numbers is that the conceit behind the service is that it’s “mobile first” and is supposed to reach a new generation of video viewers who live on their phones. But Hippeau said that a majority of the company’s views are coming from the Web, via syndication deals it has with outlets like BuzzFeed, MSN, the Guardian, Forbes and the Atlantic.

“They’re going through the same experience that a lot of people who are trying to do mobile are going through, which is that you’re going to build a mobile audience not only through mobile but from the Web, as well,” Hippeau said.

The big question is whether NowThisNews’ product, which generally leans on quick-twitch, MTV News-style summaries, or found footage with music overdubs, can stand out in a world where there’s a whole lot of that stuff — particularly on YouTube, which pulls in a billion viewers a month, and is increasingly reaching those folks on their phones, too.

Here’s NowThisNews’ take on a pregnant panda story. If you’re looking for a voice-over, there isn’t any. But there is some explanatory text on the video’s homepage: “‘Evolutionarily Challenged’ Panda Is Artificially Inseminated. Dying breed can only mate once a year.”

The mantra of a “free” Internet has shaped the prevailing view of how we access information and entertainment in the digital age. This enduring myth is actually a misnomer.

– Peter Osnos, writing at The Atlantic about how much people pay for Internet connectivity, cable access and smartphones

But here’s a really good one: Lincoln spent a ton of money so that Beck could re-record “Sound + Vision,” a pretty obscure David Bowie track, with a cast of dozens.

If you’re a certain kind of person of a certain age, you’ll still have some cognitive dissonance about the “Loser” dude shilling for a luxury automaker. But you’ll get over it, and you’ll enjoy it (also note: Zero mention of Lincoln and zero branding, period, during the video’s 9 minutes and 22 seconds):

Lots of backstory here, which is where Lincoln would really prefer that you watch the ad (they don’t make it easy to find the YouTube video itself).

Bear in mind that since this isn’t a dude parachuting out of a spaceship, Lincoln is spending piles of money promoting the promotion: I’ve seen ads in the New Yorker and on the Web and on the home page of YouTube. And you’ll see them on TV if you watch the Grammys tonight.

Easy! For bonus points, you can go on Good Morning America and the like to talk about what happened.

P.S. It’s not a requirement. But if your dad is an academic with a professional interest in viral media, it doesn’t hurt. The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen explains.

I get “native ads.” Those are ads that give Web publishers a chance to say they’re not selling ads, because they’re selling stuff that people want to look at, at least theoretically. I think that can work in some formats — especially with video.

But these things never seem to work when it comes to print, or print-like Web publications. Not because they fool readers into thinking they’re reading “real” content. But because they seem like lousy imitations of “real” content.

I can’t figure out why that is. Making “real” content, that readers would find inherently interesting, is a specific skill, but not a rarefied one. For whatever reason, though, these things just don’t work as ads, or as anything else.

That held true for magazines and newspapers in the olden days, and it holds true now. For instance: Check out the “sponsor content” that the Atlantic is still running, after apologizing for its Scientology blunder — this stuff from IBM is unreadable. Ditto for Huffpo’s work for Prilosec (I think? The URL seems to be the only hint on this one).

Even the sharp minds at BuzzFeed, blessed with a spooky ability to make click-worthy stuff, end up falling flat when asked to create fake content for clients like the Nevada Commission on Tourism.

Still, I’m all for ad revenue, because it helps foot the bill for typers like me. And we’re still in frontier times when it comes to Web ad rules, so we’re going to see lots of experiments for a long time.

So here’s one easy ground rule for Web publishers and advertisers to keep in mind as they draft their next advertorial campaign: If the fake article you’re going to write can be easily, mercilessly parodied with a couple keystrokes and some nifty Photoshop work, try something else.

Readers may click through your slideshow, but they’ll hate you a liiitttle bit more than they did when they got to the site. And I bet they’ll feel the same way about whatever advertiser was unlucky enough to get stuck on the page with some stupid thing that a reporter did with a little bit of hate in his heart and fingertips.

– The Atlantic magazine reporter Alexis Madrigal, in a story called “The Pernicious Myth That Slideshows Drive ‘Traffic’”

It’s funny that people think iPad stories generate ad revenue for media companies. That’s not how it works.

– The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, via Twitter

The site is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood.

– Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, describing the Drudge Report in an article entitled “Drudge Report Looks Old-School, but Its Ad Targeting Is State-of-the-Art”

The site’s new section joins many other sites’ video verticals which bring you clips from around the Web. But unlike some competitors — see: Gawker, Mediaite and others — the Atlantic is taking a relatively old-fashioned approach to aggregation: It’s asking permission from copyright owners to run their stuff.

TheAtlantic.com edit boss Bob Cohn says his site will get a signed licensing agreement from every owner whose stuff gets featured on TheAtlantic.com’s proprietary video player. (The Atlantic will also feature clips from other sites using their own embeddable players — in those cases, it won’t need to ask for permission.)

That doesn’t mean video makers will get paid — compensation will come in the form of links — but the olde-timey practice highlights the different tack the site is taking here. If you want clips of TV news readers saying embarrassing things, or media magnates getting a pie to the face, there are plenty of places to get those. The Atlantic will instead focus on higher-brow, higher-minded stuff that you probably haven’t seen.

Atlantic editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, a former producer at Current TV who Cohn describes as “an embed in the video-generating community,” is in charge of picking the stuff and will also interview some of the creators.

Here’s a sample of what she’s looking for: An excerpt from “California is a Place,” a slice-o-life documentary series:

Aquadettes from California is a place on Vimeo.

Now Verizon says it is “taking its ads in a different direction,” says the Atlantic, which makes it a good time to read up on Marcarelli’s life story.

It’s a great piece, and you should definitely read the whole thing yourself, but here are a couple highlights:

• Verizon’s official name for Marcarelli’s character is “Test Man.”
• Marcarelli’s contract with Verizon required him to work “a couple hundred days a year” for the company.
• The role is a very hard one to shake: “A few months ago, he attended his grandmother’s funeral. As her body was being lowered into the ground, he heard the hushed voice of a family friend: ‘Can you hear me now?’”

I’ve always been fascinated by people who become identified–publicly or not–with commercial characters. I even wrote about it years ago–remember the Taco Bell chihuahua?

Which reminds me: Still love to chat with Dan Bakkedahl, who continues to play “AT&T” in those anti-AT&T ads that T-Mobile is still (!) running. Dan, drop me a line when T-Mobile gives you the go-ahead!

That’s supposed to change next month, when the site adds a new “In Focus” photo blog, curated by Alan Taylor. The assumption is that Taylor will be doing something very similar to the work he has been doing at the Boston Globe’s site, where his “Big Picture” site has been averaging eight million page views a month.

It’s fairly easy to describe what Taylor does: He grabs brilliant images–culled from Getty, Reuters and the Associated Press, as well as from a personal network of photographers–and assembles them on a no-frills site. But it’s impossible to describe the photos’ impact, so best to take a minute and see the work he’s been doing at Boston.com.

Back? Okay. Now, head over to check out a few of Gawker Media’s beta sites, which showcase the blog network’s upcoming emphasis on big, pretty pictures.

Again, hard to really appreciate how good this stuff can look on a lot of browser windows, but if you’ve got a big enough display–or more interestingly, if you’re looking at this stuff on a TV screen on your wall, or your iPad screen on your lap–you’ll get the full effect. Which is: This stuff doesn’t really look much like the Web–it looks like TV.

And that’s sort of the point.

I’m with Fallows on the first point. Not convinced at all about the second one, but Fallows is, and he spends many pages explaining Google’s reasoning and plans.

Short version: Google thinks newspapers are good for Google, because they generate information people want to search for. And when newspapers stop printing actual newspapers and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads, everything should work out fine.

In the longer version, Fallows walks readers through the basics of the newspaper crisis (disappearing classifieds, disappearing display ads, disappearing subscribers). And he touches on some tinkering Google (GOOG) is doing that might be useful for publishers and news organizations (Living Stories, Fast Flip, YouTube Direct, help build pay walls).

That stuff won’t matter, though, unless newspapers can cut a lot of costs and make a lot more money from online ads.

Part of the cost-cutting is kind of easy, because it will happen whether papers like it or not. Their print product will eventually wither away, and they’ll save a lot of money on paper, ink, delivery trucks, etc. And part of Google’s growth strategy hinges on more money flowing into online display ads. If Google is right, some of those dollars will flow to publishers, so that’s good.

But assuming that online ads will be as valuable, per eyeball, as offline ads have been is a very big leap of faith. And unless they’re close, there’s no way a news organization can have anything like the workforce it employs now–even if the entire operation is digital.

This line of thought leads us to a dark place that we’ll probably be visiting anyway, so let’s not leave on that note. Let’s try Fallows’s tempered optimism instead and hope he’s right and I’m wrong:

The problem Google is aware of involves the disruption still ahead. Ten years from now, a robust and better-funded news business will be thriving. What next year means is harder to say….If the prospect is continued transition rather than mass extinction of news organizations, that is better than many had assumed. It requires an openness to the constant experimentation that Google preaches and that is journalism’s real heritage.

Robert MacMillan, writing for Reuters, takes almost 700 words to argue that there’s a lot of lousy and long writing on the Internet, too.

They’re both right! And both worth reading! And this post is 64 words long.

We know that, in general, the papers have been talking about ways to make more money from their products, including subscriptions and microtransactions, and have been talking about this for months. And we know, via the Atlantic’s James Warren, that the subject of yesterday’s meeting was “Models to Monetize Content” and that the agenda included sessions titled “Journalism Online: Presentation on proposed service to charge for access to newspaper content and to license that content that (sic) online aggregators” and “Fair Syndication Consortium/Attributor.”

That first session sounds pretty straightforward. What’s that second one about? I asked the PR firm that reps Attributor, the content-tracking service referred to in the session’s title, and it declined comment. But it did refer me to the Web page for the Fair Syndication Consortium, which it turns out is the name for the Attributor-led program that wants to get the likes of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) to share some of the ad revenue they make when they sell ads against copyrighted content.

You can read more about that in this Wall Street Journal story published in April. See? Not so mysterious, after all.

Back story: Hirschorn, a former Viacom executive (and general NYC media star–New York Magazine, Inside.com, etc.) published a widely noticed column this month that took a gander at the New York Times’s troubled finances and concluded that it was “plausible” that the paper could go out of business in May.

This week, the Times responded with a lengthy letter tut-tutting Hirschorn for breaches of protocol–”It’s not unusual that a journalist calls the subject of a piece before actually publishing the article or column. In fact, in some areas of journalism that’s standard practice.”–and arguing that he’d overstated his case.

Today, Hirschorn responds with a mea-sorta-culpa of his own, which you can see at the The Atlantic’s site (which is really good these days). Part of the problem, he says: The Times didn’t release some details about its financials until his article had gone to press.

Verdict: Both sides are correct! The New York Times (NYT) will not fold in May, when its $400 million credit revolver closes up. And the New York Times is in serious financial trouble. More details on the latter from my former employer, Henry Blodget, who did a nice job of explaining the Times’s credit crunch yesterday.

The big picture: This debate–will the New York Times exist by the end of 2009?–would have been inconceivable a year ago. That fact that it’s happening now underscores just how quickly the industry’s fortunes have declined.