Do you want your blog to get found? Are you looking to drive new, loyal readers to it? Do you want to expand your thought leadership? Are you tired of your tweeted links evaporating? Do you want to create conversation around your content?

Whether you’re blogging for yourself or your business, Pinyadda’s platform allows you to connect your content with the people interested in it and create community around it. Here are the top 5 reasons you and your blog should be on Pinyadda:

Reach new readers

When you publish a post on your blog, Pinyadda places it into topic-based feeds. People choose to follow these topic feeds so if, for example, your post covers mobile and social media, anyone following those topics will see the post in their feeds. Many people discover new sites from posts they read in their topic feeds and in turn follow that site. While the average online news reader visits 2-4 sites regularly, the average Pinyadda member follows 12-16 sites!

Users also discover new sites by visiting the Newsstand on Pinyadda, an interactive way to connect people with the content, sites, and people who match their interests. For example, users can find recommended sites related to a particular topic. The Newsstand is also the first place new users are dropped when they register for Pinyadda, so it is one of the most frequented visited pages by the community.

Curate your posts

You actively curate your content within the Pinyadda community by sharing it (we call this pinning), perhaps asking a specific question about the content or summarizing what it is about. When you pin an article, everyone following you on Pinyadda will see that you shared it (similar to a tweet on Twitter) and they can then pin and discuss the article too, passing it along to their friends and followers. These pins also hit a community feed that people visit to discover what’s currently being pinned and discussed on Pinyadda.

Reward your top readers

People who pin and discuss your blog posts regularly can become the Ambassador of your site. This is part of what we call value mechanics on Pinyadda, automatically rewarding your top users, and allowing them to boast the status on their profiles. Knowing your Ambassadors also allows you to get to what other content they follow and the people who follow them.

Establish influence

Another part of Pinyadda’s value mechanics are topic Mavens. You become the Maven of a topic that your blog covers by pinning and discussing news and blog posts related to it. Mavens and Ambassadors are featured heavily in the Pinyadda community – from feed pages and the Pinyadda Newsstand to our weekly newsletter and blog posts where we promote all the top people and influencers on Pinyadda. Being featured in this way means more people will follow you on Pinyadda and find your blog’s content.

Create community

As you begin to pin and discuss your posts as well as other articles, you will begin to create community around your content. Regardless of whether you are discussing your own blog posts, other content on the same topic your blog covers or general news, this activity on Pinyadda is inbound marketing for your blog. Once people feel that they have a connection with you and see you as a real person, they’ll be much more likely to help evangelize your content and come back for more. As any social media pro will tell you, it’s all about conversation!

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How do you use Pinyadda with your blog? Let us know in the comments!

First, the shutdown. In what may be an example of the Alamo strategy I described last Friday, Gannett made the decision to shut down the print publication of one of its small UK-based papers, the Hounslow – Brentford Times, formerly the Chiswick Times. According to MediaBistro, both publications will go online-only starting this week. The decision ends a run of continuous print publication that’s lasted for over a century. Somewhat ironically, an article on the web version of the publication describes the paper’s storied history and runs a large picture of the first printed edition. We may as well get used to these announcements and start to embrace the print eulogy as a new genre that everyone should master. Whatever Gannet’s motivations, it seems like the hard reality of print economics is starting to set in for everyone.

WikiLeaks this week released over 9,000 military documents, causing quite a stir among the media elite and prompting several discussions about the place of such an institution in the larger media landscape. Almost every media outlet published about the documents and their implications for the confluence of national security, freedom of information, and journalistic integrity. It’s a debate that’s sure to continue. While my own thoughts on the topic aren’t yet fully formed, I found a wealth of great opinions and commentary in the Media feed on Pinyadda, including this great post from our friends at the Nieman Lab, this post from Dan Kennedy over at Northeastern which includes a great comment thread, this interesting comparison between these documents and the Pentagon Papers from Mediaite, and yet another great rumination on the subject from James Fallows at the Atlantic. There are tons more opinions out there and we’ll be tracking the spread of this story through our index in the coming days. Regardless of your own position on the behavior of WikiLeaks in this incident, it’s certainly an interesting study in the emergence of an important new outlet in the news industry.

On a lighter note, the season premiere of Mad Men on AMC last night saw the news media play a crucial role in the development of the acclaimed series’ plot, as lead character Don Draper’s botched interview with Advertising Age led to unrest within his fictional ad firm. The show ended with Draper taking another interview, this time with the Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to right the ship. While perhaps not the most scientific study, the episode got me thinking about the changing role of newspapers in our public relations and marketing landscape. Set in the 1960′s, the shows characters had no other choice of outlet – any large-scale public image campaign had to run through the newspapers. But what would a firm in a similar situation do today? It seems almost obvious that they’d turn to social media and the web instead of the staid print institutions of today. Instead of a single reporter sitting in a smoky room, it’d be the crowd asking questions:  ”Who is @dondraper?”

To get your daily fix of great news from around the world of media, be sure to check out Pinyadda’s Media topic. From breaking news to in-depth analysis of the news industry’s past, present, and future, we’ve got you covered.

I visited the site earlier today to get a better sense of exactly how the implementation works. After a horrific paywall experience last week, I wasn’t hopeful that the experience would be very friendly. But to my surprise the Press+ experience wasn’t all that bad. When I clicked on an obituary item, I was presented with a fairly clean modal window that helped me understand what was about to happen:

The dialog box offers me its sympathy. That was nice of it.

The dialog thanked me for visiting and even offered me its sympathy in case I had been looking for the obit of a loved one. It explained the model to me in relatively simple terms, and then asked me to either create a Press+ account or to continue reading my article. The modal window was an important part of the experience, allowing me to keep my goal of reading the content literally within site, behind an opaque overlay.

The after clicking the ‘Sign Up’ option, the modal presented me with a new screen that offered payment options.

Two payment options: $1.99 for the month, $19.99 for the year.

I didn’t really care to read the actual obituary, and even I had the prices seemed a little steep for me. But the experience itself was lightweight enough to allow me to consider the financial cost benefit without the added burden of frustration and confusion. It’s a lot different from my last experience. But it’s still a hard sell.

So why did Lancaster Online choose the obituaries section? The explanation, as reported here by paidContent.org and here in more depth by Poynter, makes fair sense. Says the paper’s editor, Ernie Schreiber, “…we chose to meter obituaries because they are unique content for us.  Readers cannot easily access them elsewhere.” It’s probably a fair point, even at first the notion seems rather grotesque. While Schreiber admitted that the meter will not, by itself, fundamentally change the revenue picture at the publication, the move was executed strategically and only after a well thought-out process that considered audience, revenue, and price. I highly suggest reading the article from Poynter in full to get a better sense of how intensely (and publicly) Schreiber thought about the process. It’s an encouraging sign, a bright spot in what has often seemed to be an industry unwilling to embrace experimentation as a vital part of its survival. Let’s hope we continue to see similar thoughtfulness elsewhere.

The obituary experiment and the Press+ system don’t, I think, mark the end of our journey toward a fully modernized news ecosystem. On average, the American local newspaper isn’t as well prepared as Schreiber’s publication, and it’s not clear that the current obituary stranglehold he’s banked on will survive beyond the rest of the paper’s relatively commoditized content  (and yes, I checked, obituaries.com is already up and running). There’s still a missing piece of the puzzle for the news industry on a large scale, and I’m still not convinced that newspapers can generate adequate revenue without a central distribution mechanism, even with systems like Press+ that can help reduce the friction of actual payment. Don’t get me wrong – getting the payment right is a key piece of the puzzle. But in a content market that’s being flooded ever faster each day, it’s not going be enough to hope the customers come to your front door every day – especially when your neighbor’s giving it away for free.

Gannet just rolled out paywalls at three of their regional papers. I found out because I follow paidContent.org on Pinyadda, which, ironically, is a free publication. After I got through the painful period of disgust/anger/befuddlement/hilarity that ensues when I hear about new paywalls being erected, I went to visit the Tallahassee Democrat, one of the sites sporting the shiny new system. It didn’t go very well.

At first glance, the site looks like every other newspaper site, replete with all the design failures and clutter that you’d expect: flashing banner ads, a confusing structure of headlines and highlights, and whole bunch of moving parts that I don’t really understand. There’s no mention of a paywall and no indication of what’s about to happen when I click on a story.

I clicked on the feature story in the top left corner, which at the time was about the race for Mayor of Tallahassee (the module rotates). So far, so good; aside from the expected clutter and the annoyance of moving banner ads, I was able to move toward my goal of reading the news on the internet. That single goal is important to keep in mind – the only thing I’m hoping to accomplish is reading a news story on my computer. Here’s what I saw next:

The paywall rears its ugly head.

Once the page loaded, I was able to see the headline, byline, and about half of the first sentence. Not much of a teaser. The items with the most visual weight are an image of a heavy padlock, a series of large, black buttons, and a bright yellow banner ad. Before we dive into the actual payment options, it’s worth noting some things about the design. The padlock image makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong, perhaps by choosing this article over another, perhaps by committing some internet sin in another life. I’m not being invited inside, I’m being locked out. People don’t like being locked out.

It’s not immediately clear to me which button I should choose, as they share identical visual characteristics. This isn’t make or break, but it takes time to read the text, weigh my options, and make a decision. It’s enough time for me become distracted from my original goal, which, I think, was to read an article about the Mayoral race in Tallahassee. After some deliberation, I chose the third option – ‘Purchase a day pass for $2.’ There is a link to see more subscription options, but I didn’t notice it while I was on the page.

As a user, this step was complicated. When the page loaded, I was presented with an unexpected result that triggered a negative emotional response. I has to decipher what was going on, consider several options, and make a purchase decision. This presents a large barrier for the average user and diverts all attention away from the original goal of reading an article. The $2 isn’t the most significant deterrent in this equation. In fact, the financial commitment may actually be the least important factor in my decision to continue beyond this point in the process.

Once I chose an option, I was taken away from the page and presented with this screen:

The form monster emerges.

As far as forms go, this one is relatively clean and accessible. I’m not thrilled about having to switch my brain into data-entry mode, but at least I understand how this page works. I just fill this out and I get to read my article, right? Not so fast.

Red ink, take one.

I’m pretty good at the internet, and I was terrible at this form. Three errors spit back on the first try. First, my username didn’t fit in the 6-13 character window of bliss. Second, my Gmail alias (which allows me to filter messages later) was rejected. And third, I mistakenly entered my full birth date instead of my birth year, as was requested. I don’t particularly appreciate being asked for my birthday (I bet you don’t either) and so the last error left a particularly poor taste. At this point I have no idea what my original task was. This one is quite challenging enough. After fixing the form, getting two more errors during validation, and then clicking submit for the third time….

Nothing happened. The form submission hung for about 60 seconds (if you look closely, you can see the loading message ‘Registering…’ in the error field at the top of the form) and never submitted. I started looking for a way out and found the only viable option to be the ‘Send Again’ option buried beneath the submit button. I clicked it and was presented with a nice-looking but terribly annoying modal window that didn’t really solve my problems. Nevertheless, I threw in my email address and clicked the button.

Error. Despite entering a perfectly valid address, the form rejected my  submission. Back to the drawing board. Let’s remember that I haven’t been asked for any payment information at all up to this point, and my incentives to abandon the process are numerous. This feels like work. Why should I have to work to give someone else money (especially for something I can get for free elsewhere!!)? But I’m an internet masochist. I trudge on. I really want that article. I think.

Finally, I get to the payment screen. Lean to the side, get out my wallet, set the card up on the keyboard, and enter the information.

The phone number seemed a little intrusive to me, and there was no indication it was a required field, so I left it blank. Should have known better. Maybe they want to call me later and see how my experience with the paywall went. I grudgingly entered the number – a piece of information I’m loathe to part with in the rest of my life – and click the OK button in the alert. Finally, it’s over. But then…

I have to confirm my information again. They’re almost daring me to bail at this point, and I sure as heck can’t remember the article I wanted to read way back at the beginning of this newspaper odyssey. But what the heck. This is surely the end.

Nope. One more step, another chance to forget why I came here, and one more screen between me and my original goal. Finally, I click the submit button of death, shut my eyes, and hope for the best.

Voila! Magic! I finally get the prize! It’s …. a 500 word article smattered with flashing yellow banner ads. I’m confused. And tired. And poorer than I was a few minutes ago.

Am I here to bash Gannet for their ineptitude? No. Is it concerning that this attempt at paid content  is the result of formally architected effort from one of the largest newspaper chains in the country? Yes. While I understand the value of reporting like this – local, public-service-based journalism that truly does improve our communities – I’m not willing to believe that I got an equal amount of value from the deal. I feel like I got the short end of the stick. And the $2 is the least important part of that feeling.

You want me to pay for content? Fine. But you’d better understand that I’m a discriminating shopper, that I appreciate customer service, and that I value my time and energy as much as my wallet. I wanted to read an article about the mayoral race in Tallahassee. It took me a total of 12 screens, well over five minutes, and two of my hard-earned dollars to accomplish that goal. During the process, I was confused, frustrated, and rejected multiple times.

I really hope that we can work with publishers, large and small, to improve the user experience that goes along with finding news online. Because there’s a generation right on my heels that won’t wait for the old guard to get it right.

Are you a publisher? Have you been the victim of a poor paywall experience? We want to work together as we build a new future for news – a future that’s sustainable, powerful, and pleasant for all of us.

“[My friends] prefer the quality newspaper over the cheap news site. Yet they’re not paying for the content. I don’t blame them. If you can get it for free, why would you give even one penny? Plus: online news has become a free commodity. It’s not in people’s mindsets to wire some money to some newspaper’s bank account for a smashing piece on the future of energy.”

- dutchproblogger.com

“What many print outlets are guilty of is letting journalism go while placing a laser-like focus on reporting. And reporting is dead.  Well, not dead, but has been made into a commodity by the web.  Consumers of news don’t want to pay for reporting anymore because they can get it for free via mobile phones, PDAs, computers and laptops.  Reporting is what the internet is really good at.”

- hightalk.net

“Asked whether investigative journalism was under threat from the pressures of the modern media industry, Arlidge said the internet could be an asset. He said he had feared Goldman Sachs’ ‘spin machine’ would kill his story once it broke, but its fast spread online prevented this. Good stories as a commodity still held value, he said, even if the future of print looked troubled.”

- Kaye Wiggins

“As I said here many times, we are now facing three types of news: the Commodity one (everyone gets the same account of the oil spill in Louisiana or the deadly unrest in Thailand); Mashup news (the more it buzzes, the better it works); and the Quality Niche, that tries to defend its standards.”

- the Monday Note

“ABC News President David Westin hits the nail on the head with his remarks (watch video from Blip.TV here) at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit when talking about the commoditization of news. ‘There’s a certain amount of news information that’s a commodity. It just is,’ he said, explaining that many stories are available everywhere on the web … So he tells his ABC News staff that ‘news may be a commodity, but reporting is not.’”

- lostremote.com

“What we’re talking about is simple: non-investigative print journalism is a commodity. It’s not much more complicated than that. Reporting as the art of regurgitating the traditional who, what, where and when’s demise probably began with the rise of TV, maybe even the radio. Today, everybody knows everything. Fast.”

- tecosystem.com

“But consumers, for our part—and, of course, from the journalism-as-commodity perspective, our part is paramount—appreciate almost instinctively the narrative tension between the world as we experience it and the world as journalism packages it.”

- CJR Online

All these sites are available in our Media feed and at the links provided beneath the excerpts. While there are lots of people talking about the issue, and using many different terms, it seems that a consensus is emerging. There are different kinds of news out there, and they are differently suited to online mediums. For the sake of argument, I’ll do my best to break them down, talk about each, and try to place them in a larger context.

News as Commodity

The internet, as a distribution mechanism, has virtually eliminated the traditional concept of a “scoop” when it comes to breaking news. Real-time networks, search, and alert technology have made the time gap between first publication and mass distribution insignificant. If a bridge collapses, or a bomb explodes, or a sports team wins, it takes less than a few seconds for that information to travel through the web and into every corner of the globe. It’s powerful, amazing, and immediate. Even less immediate and objective realities – the recent departure of Gen. McChrystal, for example – are communicated almost instantly. These types of information are what I mean by news as a commodity. Wikipedia defines a commodity as “a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is fungible, i.e. the same no matter who produces it.” For most of what we might consider traditional reporting on the web, I think this definition applies. Whether I read this information from the New York Times or from an independent blogger is rather insignificant and largely a matter of which story appears first in search results or, increasingly, social streams like Pinyadda (come and get us, Rupert).

Like it or not, this is our reality. It’s not to dismiss the differences between follow-on pieces or the quality of analysis that most certainly exist between large publications and small bloggers. The point is simply that the distribution advantages once held by major newspapers and media institutions are no longer relevant when it comes to news as commodity.

The advantage that larger publications still have lies in their human capital and their ability to create news as value. But as you’ll see – even that advantage is shrinking.

News as Value

News as value is almost everything else. It’s the good stuff – everything from the stellar New York Times feature piece to your best friend’s thoughtful musing on a topic they know well. It’s the kind of content that’s entertaining and informative because someone took the time to make it so; the kind of content that passes the effort contained in its creation on to its readers.

Big media institutions and traditional newspapers have two major advantages when it comes to producing this kind of content: their distribution edge (which is rapidly shrinking, thanks to killer platforms like ours), and their editorial capacity (which is being devalued by the burden of their fixed operating costs). But these advantages are far smaller than they used to be, and they’re trending toward zero.

On Pinyadda, we often see high quality posts from small publishers generating more engagement and discussion than similar offerings from bigger publishers. By eliminating distribution advantages, encouraging individuals to support and curate the content that’s important for them – content that they value – we’ve been witness to the incredible transformation that internet is predicating upon the news industry. It’s exciting.

Authors from small and medium-sized publications are producing phenomenal content that people enjoy. And their readers are doing something remarkable – taking it upon themselves to become the distributors of that content. It’s truly a seismic shift in the way we think about news, and we’re proud to be playing a part in enabling the transformation. We think you’ll want to be a part of it, too.

To get in on the next generation of news, where value trumps distribution, create your Pinyadda account today. Leave a comment and let us know what you value most when it comes to news.

The system, as real or fictional as it may prove to be, isn’t alone in concept or execution. A number of other entities, including Journalism Online, a venture that recently received additional backing from Rupert Murdoch, are jumping into the news payments game. While it may seen inevitable that subscription models will make their way to the web, the prospect of these products attaining long-term viability is tenuous but not completely out of the question.

While it’s easy to knock the subscription model as a legitimate revenue source – after all, it’s never been the way newspapers stayed afloat – there’s some reason to think that it may fit the online model better than the print model. Chris Anderson,  in his controversial but insightful book Free: the Past and Future of  a Radical Price, makes the contention that bytes (digital content) are fundamentally different than atoms (printed content). Since bytes are produced once and copied, distributed, and replicated at a price that’s always approaching zero, our traditional business models inherently fail.

There’s no cost per unit for producing a story on the internet, as there’s no additional paper, ink, delivery costs, or distribution fees associated with each additional copy. So what we’re essentially receiving when we read a news story is not a product but a service. We may not pay for the news itself, but are we willing to pay for the service of news? If so, the subscription model makes perfect sense. We already pay for the service of television, the service of internet, the service of the health club and, increasingly, the service of mobile data. But we’re not quite ready to pay for the service of news. Why is that?

This is where both a unified payment system and some bright young entrepreneurs come into play. The payment system is an obvious but significant hurdle to paid content. It’s awfully hard to get someone to take out their credit card and type 15 digits into a web form, for reasons that relate to both financial security and user experience (have you ever forgone an online purchase because your wallet was in the other room? You’re not alone…). In order for web content to survive a subscription basis, someone needs to make this as easy as possible, and many, including Google, will try. There’s an obvious model to follow in Apple’s iTunes store, but that company has always possessed the rare superpower of being able to pry thousands of dollars from innocent, unsuspecting victims who then turn around and shower the thieves with praise. To steal a phrase from New York governor David Paterson, on planet Apple, there is no gravity and light bends right around Cupertino…

But assuming someone solves the credit card challenge, and assuming our hypothesis about news as a service is correct, there’s one fundamental problem that remains to be solved. No one has yet to make the news experience pleasurable in all the ways the internet makes possible. We’re stuck in a half-integrated world, where newspapers exist as strange islands drowning in an online sea. To make a long story short – the service isn’t that good. We’ve come to expect more of our online content, and I think we deserve it. Want to publish a print version online and make me visit your poorly designed destination site? Fine with me. Want me to pay for that service? Think again.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a different scenario. A scenario where content is delivered to you by a hand-picked group of curators who can provide filtration, context, and added value. A scenario where you’re rewarded for providing opinions and adding perspective to content that’s judged on merit alone, regardless of the size of the publication that produced it. A scenario where publishers, advertisers, and readers all work together to create value for each other in a way that’s unobtrusive and beneficial for all. That’s the future of Pinyadda, and we’re building it, together, right now. Come join us.

Read more about Newspass here and here. Who do you think will win the news payment war? Will it be Google, Rupert, or some other upstart? Let us know in the comments.

I think the API model is a great example for the newspaper industry. It allows them to stop worrying so much about their distribution problem and get back to doing what they do best – producing content. Let the rest of the developer community worry about finding ways to get the news to readers. But I’m not so sure the Times thinks about their API this way, and the announcement that they’ll be erecting a pay wall in the coming year seems to reinforce that doubt.

It seems like the Times sees this API as a way to establish itself as the definitive archive of all events past – the lens through which history is viewed and dissected. As such, it will be incredibly valuable, allowing historians and documentarians to uncover meta-trends and write fascinating feature pieces about them (who they’ll get to publish those pieces, well…). But when I think API, thanks to Twitter, I think “now.” I think about developers building great experiences around the wealth of content that belongs to the Times, about innovative new ways to organize and discover its content, about new solutions to the old media problem. The Times’ management, I fear, does not share my sentiments.

If the pay wall goes up – and I’m not entirely convinced it actually will – the API either becomes far less useful or far more useful, depending on the restrictions applied. I find it hard to believe that it will exist in its current form, with open access to all articles one hour after publication. I could be wrong. I hope I am.

The point of all this rambling, you ask? The point is that the Times seems like a two-headed monster to me. Half the time, they do everything right – the first to truly incorporate lots of multimedia, the first to successfully incorporate the blog form, the first to understand the web as an opportunity and not a threat. The the other half of the time, they seem trapped in the same delusional nostalgia that’s handicapping the rest of the industry – the display ad run-around, the formatting stalemate, and now the paywall. I suspect that there’s considerable internal tension between these two forces as well. And I’m not sure who will win.

Maybe the pay wall will work for the Times. But its life span, as far as I see, is inherently limited. No matter what we believe in, no matter how long it takes, the price of content will eventually reach zero. There’s just no way the generation that’s coming up behind us will swallow a monthly fee for access to a publication that holds no emotional or collective social value for them.

I give the Times credit for trying something – anything – to stop the revenue drain that’s been their standard operating procedure for the last few years. But they should keep looking for a long-term solution – one that’s closer to the API than the pay wall.