Bottom line, The Daily was a budding asset, well positioned for growth and possible dominance if people who knew digital were given the chance to unlock its potential.

100,000 paying subscribers, with a 98% renew rate netting $2.5M – $3M in revenue after Apple’s cut is a lot to work with. Any year-old start-up would be envious of those numbers.

Here’s some more about what we were thinking.

We had a huge level of immediate support, with over 50 donations pouring in over a short six days. Together we raised almost $5000 for The Mayor’s Fund to Advance NYC, 100% of which will go directly to efforts on the ground with a focus on immediate aid, including food, water and hygiene supplies, as well as long-term relief and restoration efforts.

Though our fundraiser was pegged to my Philadelphia Marathon run, we are keeping the site up and donation window open. If you’d like to donate (or donate again), please go here:

http://www.crowdrise.com/heysandy/

We are New York City company. We love our town. And we’d like to see it recover and come back stronger… the way it always does.

As Alyson Shontell at Silicon Alley Insider wrote in her coverage of Ken Lerer’s video news start-up: “If people watch TV all day, why wouldn’t they watch news streamed online all day?”

The same is true for all programming, not just news.

Viewers no longer differentiate between platforms (TV, tablet, computer, phone — it’s all the same), the digital audiences are there, the ad dollars are available. It’s time to start delivering some epic programming to mass audiences.

Check out my column here.

And here is a collection of links for more information/background:

PandoDaily: The Future of TV is More Than Social, It’s Distributed and Always-On

Vanity Fair: The Oral History of Friends: Jennifer Aniston Almost Didn’t Play Rachel Green

VideoNuze: What is “Premium” Video Anyway and Why Should We Care?

The Hollywood Reporter: Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Explains Original Content Strategy

TechCrunch: Hulu Announces Four More Original Series, Bringing Total Lineup To Seven

Billboard: Exclusive: Andrew W.K. To Star In New Myspace Series

The New York Times: Online Show Wins Fans in High Places

The Hollywood Reporter: Poll – 9 out of 10 Call Social Media New Form of Entertainment; Young People Want Texting in Movies

PaidContent: Yahoo Video Chief: How To Get $3 Billion Closer To $50 Billion

PaidContent: YouTube Isn’t Just Short-Attention-Span Theater Anymore

I am not the first to say it. (Read what John Paton, CEO of MediaNews Group told a conference of journalists earlier this month, this report The Annenberg School published in January, and this blog post Clay Shirky published over the summer. There are a host of others.)

I wrote the post, because the fact is print as we know it – as in newspapers and magazines delivered by truck and humans to homes and newsstands, as in old guard companies in which the primary source of revenue is derived from publishing text and photos on plant pulp – is over; and the big print media companies are not doing enough, and moving fast enough to ensure their futures.

A few big print companies will survive in the paperless future, and a small handful may even prosper. It’s likely that standard bearers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which benefit from positions as undisputed papers-of-record and still employ a few smart people will adapt. The Economist with its multi-platform juggernaut, resurgent brand and own really really smart people might evolve into a superlative new media company. And even Hearst, with its portfolio approach to digital investment may turn into the quintessential content company of the future (…or maybe a really successful venture fund and investment house, not bad either).

In the past week more, clear and present signs have popped-up, each revealing some of the sources of Old Print’s cloudy future:

The old media mindset is forcing way too much reliance on the PAYWALL as savior.
Gannett’s $100M plan to set-up paywalls in all 80 of its local newspaper markets made big news, as did yesterday’s paywall announcement from LA Times. These are big bets driven by industry-wide ego (that people “must pay” for what we do), and a mad dash to copy mild successes like The New York Times and others. But the fact remains: It is incredibly hard if not impossible, to get users to pay real dollars in a completely commoditized market. What the $.99 song is to the music industry, the paywall is to print.

Further commoditization, and fragmentation.
Pressly – With the launch of its self-serve platform that transforms WordPress sites, Tumblr blogs and Twitter updates into beautiful tablet friendly presentations is completely commoditizing the magazine – its form factor, and its content. Pressly now turns anyone’s content into an iPad app that looks just as good as the big magazine companies’ flashy new bespoke apps. And with a fancy – and free – shell, Jane Blogger is now competing head-to-head with the best and highest paid writers and editors.

Industry-wide fear and self-loathing.
Onswipe – With the release of its cross-publisher content recommendations just revealed its ambition, and is starting to steal business from its partners, companies like Ziff Davis, Slate, Thomson Reuters, NY Times and Conde Nast, by rockin’ a classic 90’s dotcom move: We (Onswipe) will provide you (publishers) a service that you can’t seem to figure out, and build our own platform/network off the backs of your content while we’re at it. Rad. Onswipe is preying on the old guard’s fear of the future, its rush to tablets, and its self-doubt that it can build great apps and interactive experiences internally.

Paleolithic technology, and no respect for the right data.
Poynter smartly rang the bell feeling it was necessary to tell publishers Buzzfeed is a “real news site.” Yes, it is. It’s a news website and it’s the future. Buzzfeed is data driven, and it knows in a real and provable way what its readers want – and it’s growing like gangbusters. As HuffPo proved – and as the history of digital media keeps proving again and again – data rules. Data is how you find audience. Data is how you retain it. Sure, old guard websites deploy analytics to track usage patterns on the sites themselves, but they are missing the boat on analyzing the important stuff – share, search and social – to inform their edit and product decisions.

Print people are confused about what’s valuable, and most don’t do digital.
Vogue is making much ballyhoo of the fact it has decided digitize its archives and make them available on the Web – and searchable by Google boot! Of course, Vogue should do this. They should have done it a dog year ago – think about all of that lost SEO – but it’s a web 1.0 tactic, and no big deal. The announcement just shows how behind the times they are.

With all of that said, there were some bright spots too:

Spin launched a it’s new site, embracing a “digital first” strategy, and showing signs it is starting to think more about its digital products – and it looks pretty good – though it’s just scratching the surface.

The Washington Post started dabbling publicly with personalized news.

PBS’s Mediashift published a good, if belated, piece about teaching future journalists to think agnostically about the format of their reportage.

New Yorker editor David Remnick sat down with Kara Swisher at the WSJ to talk about digital and the future of his magazine.

For a roadmap to old print’s new digital future, read my original post on TechCrunch.

Bottom line, bad idea. Here’s why… (read it on TechCrunch).

That’s why when clients ask for our advice, we start by defining goals. This may seem obvious – but given the complexity of the web economy and eco-system, a product or brand’s goals aren’t always self-evident. Obviously, everybody wants traffic, but what kind? Do you want to monetize it or is the goal promotional, or brand awareness; do you care where your audience engages with you? Is it acceptable for Facebook to own your traffic? We necessarily think about platforms and networks. What already exists that can be leveraged? Product strategies need to be part of distribution and promotional strategies; popularity and engagement impact Google’s rankings, and Google is still king.

If the goal is to build a self-sustaining digital business, supported either by advertising or transactions, then you need a platform you can own. You also need to connect that platform, at the most granular and atomic levels, to highly trafficked networks so that your audience discovers you, and you have to define very specifically who it is you want to engage and what, specifically, you want them to do once you have their attention – because you won’t have it for very long.

The things we think about when we advise our clients are:

1. Goals & Targets – What are we trying to achieve? What’s success look like? Who’s the competition?

2. Brand & Audience – What’s the value proposition to the consumer? Who is your audience? Who is it not?

3. Experience & Product – Form factor, product definition, functionality, habituation, behavior. What’s the aesthetic, behavioral experience you want your consumers to have? What’s the emotional experience you want them to have while they’re engaging with your content and products?

4. Promotion & Distribution – Where does your audience spend time? How can you earn their attention, engage and reward, and do so efficiently? Anybody can buy attention, the challenge is to earn it so that media dollars are efficient and effective. What networks, platforms and partners will be effective and what’s the best way to harness them? What blogs lead your category, who do you want to follow you on Twitter, how should you talk to your segment on Facebook so they actually like you when they Like you?

What works depends on all of the above. More than ever, the mission of a digital agency needs to be to advise clients how to leverage existing platforms and behaviors to build their business or campaign. The tools at our disposal keep proliferating, the technologies and tactics change and multiply, the question now is, “what and why?” Doing it all gets very expensive very quickly; the goal of every engagement, therefore, needs to be targeting the right areas to invest in – pick the battles you can win, and exploit the tactics and practices that will yield specific results with maximum efficiency.

We were at lunch with a good friend, client and advisor, talking about how our business was evolving, and how social media had become a core component. Our thinking, our product ideas, the work we launched and the requests we were getting from clients had over the last few years become (not surprisingly) driven by social. Then the friend said, this is all great, you guys do great work and have great ideas about social media, but what’s your digital strategy for your own company? “Walk the walk,” he was saying, and that is where the idea for this website started.

Treating ourselves like a client, we thought critically about what business an agency like ours had marketing itself via social media.  Is social media too mass?  Too consumer focused for a b-to-b marketing play?  Could social really do something for us?  

Or, more to the point, is the idea of the “social web” a useful or relevant distinction? Or has the web, in fact, become social? And what’s this mean about the work we do and the Internet we live in? The reality is that the web has gone through another revolution. With the colossal rise of Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr, and of course, the blogosphere, the web has matured. It’s no longer a homesteading game; it’s a media game. Attention is now aggregated on several large platforms – just like the old days of network TV. But the “shows” on these networks are our identities.

This was what crystallized for us over lunch: what matters now, more than ever, is creating great content – content that articulates your point of view, demonstrates your value, and differentiates you from the competition – and injecting that content effectively into the established, thriving streams of attention.

And that’s the point: the web is established; it’s come of age. Yes, great, creative product matters, especially if you want to grow a real owned and operated digital business, and not just feed Facebook and Twitter with your labor and your customers’ or followers’ time. But, there is also, at long last, a truly interconnected, interoperable, content-driven Internet, in which topics, interest, and identities flow from platform to platform, and in which entities – be they citizens, brands or, say, digital agencies – can, and must, persistently engage in the conversations that matter to earn attention and, ultimately, business.

And, so, back to this very website, built on WordPress, even though we are a company that loves to conceive and develop original products and platforms. Advising ourselves, we realized we had to practice what we preach – don’t over-engineer, don’t over-design, use what works, harness established platforms and behaviors, be everywhere, be relevant, be pragmatic, invest where it matters – tell the world what you do, and take your message to your audience.

So, you can find us here, in our little corner of the interweb, and on Facebook, and Twitter and wherever else you might be, because if you’re interested in digital products and media, we want our content to find you.

Will there come a moment when machines can create what we read? Would financial markets be more rational if computers reported on the data instead of humans? It’s a frequently proven fact that reporters are apt to provide color and skew a story one way or another (intentionally or not); or, as often the case, people simply make errors. Sure, the news might be less entertaining, but could computers make it more reliable? And even harder to imagine, could a computer become the next Dostoevsky or Joyce or Shakespeare?

For news, there are of course a number of challenges to solve, for example:

All monumental tasks, and all requiring an artful human touch to get computers thinking straight — which data sets to target, fact checking methodology, algorithms for language disambiguation etc. — but seemingly none insurmountable.

After a quick Google search (All Hail the Great Googs!) I found a couple of curious and amazing products that begin to suggest feasibility:

Methinks we are on our way.