Time.com is focusing more on news niches and the strategy is paying off, PaidContent reports.

Newly-launched verticals like Techland, Swampland (for politics), Battleland (military), Moneyland, and more have only subtle Time branding but are part of what is driving a 12 percent increase in the site’s digital revenues. According to internal Time metrics, PaidContent says, vertical visits are 40 percent of Time.com total site visits.

Before the end of the year, Time will add up to four new blogs to its roster of nine existing ones, which contribute up to 200 posts per day. Look for new blogs (and possibly openings) on opinion, entertainment, society/family, and criminal justice. Openings are not posted right now but if they were they would probably be here.

The E. W. Scripps Co has merged its paper and TV digital teams “under one umbrella” in order to make it easier to launch new digital products and services, the company announced yesterday.

Scripps has 13 daily newspapers and 10 TV stations; the digital heads at each of those stations now reports to Adam Symson, the company’s new chief digital officer. Symson, pictured, according to the company press release, started life as a TV journalist, and has bounced around within Scripps corporate headquarters since 2003, first as investigative reports director, ultimately vice president of interactive for the company’s TV division.

Scripps president and CEO Rich Boehne added: “This new structure will result in better products, faster development, more efficiencies and improved financial performance while staying true to the Scripps mission of building value through enterprise journalism and public service.”

Fighting words from Detroit’s MetroTimes, the city’s alt-weekly, which got a copy of a memo from an editor who works for the Journal Register Company (they of open newsrooms and Project Thunderdome) talking about the newspaper’s digital strategy.

The editor asked reporters to, any time they cover a story:

• crowdsource the topic beforehand
• share relevant documentation with readers ahead of time
• check in on Foursquare and post relevant tweets or FB updates
• Shoot video of the event
• Write a breaking news version of the event and then post a more thoughtful story later, and promote both with social media
• Host a live chat about the story

This “is the single most stunning example I’ve ever seen of what is wrong with print journalism today,” MetroNews’s Jack Lessenberry, the paper’s contributing editor, wrote.

MetroNews isn’t made up of Luddites; they have a very nice website, a Twitter account, and appear to be cashing in on the daily deal craze. So what on earth is going on here?

Lessenberry added, by the way:

“Try to imagine Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reporting Watergate and being asked to do any of this. You can’t even imagine anyone doing these things, except as a bad Saturday Night Live parody of the life of a multimedia reporter.”

You “can’t even imagine” a reporter Tweeting about a story? Huh?

Here’s Journal Register editor-in-chief Jim Brady’s response, by the way:

Now it’s ON.

The Classical, a new sports site that will feature the work of Tom Scharpling, Eric Nusbaum, David Roth, Lang Whitaker, Pete Beatty, Bethlehem Shoals, and more, could exist for a year thanks to Kickstarter.

The group is asking for $50,000 to fund the site’s operation for a year. With just over a month to go, they’ve raised a little more than half.

If the site goes live, sports fans will get daily columns, long features, “and contributions from the world: prizewinning novelists, internet celebrities, guys and girls we went to school with who are unappreciated geniuses, members of the public. There will be theme weeks in the spirit of FreeDarko’s “Dream Week,” on-the-ground reporting when we can, and essays commissioned by you, the readers.”

$50,000 doesn’t leave much in the way of decent pay for writers—that money will need to be split between setting up the site and paying the editors, Neiman Lab says. But being able to raise $50,000 from potential readers, notes Neiman’s Justin Ellis, serves as a sort of proof to advertisers that the site has an audience, which would help in lining up ads and a bigger budget for Year Two.

“No one leaves this fundraising drive with empty hands,” The Classical’s Kickstarter page says. So if you want a sticker ($1 or more) or a branded chip clip (awww yeah, $10+), or if you just like supporting sportswriters who are trying to do something new, head over and donate.

The Daily Dot, the “hometown newspaper of the Internet,” is a bizarre proposition to say the least. But founder Nicholas White is determined to make it work, and more power to him. (Jobs! Journalism! Awesome!)

He’s hired scads of talent, including former Valleywag editor Owen Thomas, and as White says in this piece for MediaShift that that’s all part of the plan.

“Everything, from Backfence to Patch, is about creating a technological solution and keeping human expenses as low as possible. That only works if you’re creating a content farm,” he says. “When sites have gone (comparatively) premium — The Huffington Post, Politico, TMZ — they can be successful, but they are expensive. They have a lot of employees.”

Out of White’s five tips for other media entrepreneurs, two of them involve hiring.

One: “Get the team in place, and get them in place early. You can never have someone too early — you can always manage budget or other timing issues by having someone keep their current job for the time being and start in a month, or three months.”

Two: “Don’t compromise on people. People make any business. But early on, there are no norms, no momentum to sweep people along. Everyone is going to feel like they’re dragging a big boulder uphill. There’s going to be lots to improvise, and relatively little room for learning on the job. You need people who are ready to operate on the best information they have, and yet still question everything they know. You need people who can take surprises in stride, who are ready to plan, but also to act.”

The Daily Dot exited beta this week.

One analyst has estimated that AOL is spending $150,000 per year on each of its roughly 1,000 Patch sites, the WSJ says.

That’s insane.

We know that each Patch has a jack/jill-of-all-trades editor who makes around $40,000. Then there’s the freelance budget (roughly $26,000 a year, we hear) and the salary for each regional editor who oversees a number of individual Patch sites. Let’s estimate that each regional editor makes $100,000 and oversees five sites. That’s $20,000 a year per Patch.
Then there are the ad sales people, roughly $40k a year, but they must work on more than one Patch each; let’s be conservative and assume 3 sites per salesperson.

That’s $93,000 per Patch per year.

Someone at AOL want to tell us where the rest of the money is going?

At any rate, the $160 million per year AOL is reportedly spending on Patch pales in comparison to the $315 million it spent earlier this year to buy the Huffington Post; AOL also spent nearly $100 million last year to acquire TechCrunch, 5min Media and Thing Labs.

The Wall Street Journal argues that AOL is spending more than it can hope to make back.

“If you sell lemonade for $1 and it costs $800 to make it, that’s not a great business,” Robert Peck, managing partner at Quasar Capital Advisors, which advises Internet and technology companies, told the WSJ.

On the other hand, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said that things are looking up: AOL’s domestic display-ad business should start growing in the second half of the year.

Progressive site Truthout looks at the growing movement of comic book/graphic novel writers and cartoonists tackling journalism.

Comics journalist Dan Archer has drawn comics about the 2009 Honduran coup and the 2007 Nisoor Square shootings. Joe Sacco’s “Palestine,” based on two months of on-the-ground reporting, is considered a seminal work of comics journalism.

But recently, there’s been a new way of doing comics journalism that doesn’t require a book deal.

Cartoonists Ted Rall and Matt Bors traveled to Afghanistan in 2010 on $25,000 raised on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. The resulting book is going to be picked up by Farrar, Straus & Giroux for a 2012 publishing date.

On a smaller scale, Sarah Glidden rose $2000 to fund a trip to the Middle East.

Truthout says:

For the uninitiated, Glidden’s quest to report from Syria without journalistic experience or funding and to do so in comics, may seem laughable. Yet Glidden, whom I talked with after she returned from traveling to Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria with a group of veteran reporters from the Seattle-based Common Language Project, might be the first to laugh. She told me she is in awe of great reporting and is fully aware that she isn’t a reporter and that comics are not a medium that the average reader takes seriously.

And while many readers may not take her chosen medium seriously, Glidden, also observed, the average American reader – her 30-something urbanite friends in particular – don’t take serious news seriously anymore. Her friends “hate journalists, distrust the media and want to tune out.”…By contrast to the typical, sterile establishment reports from Iraq, Glidden’s comic report is full of life: she thrust herself into an underreported story half-way round the world, spending her own money and devoting countless hours translating interviews into images and shaping an accurate and compelling narrative that brings her subjects to life and, hopefully, “tricks” her world-weary friends past their cynicism.

Could this be the first wave of successful crowd-funded journalism projects? We hope so.

A screengrab from Stumbling Towards Damascus is below.

Last month, the Wichita Eagle reorganized its newsroom, affecting 50 of 60 staffers.

Most now report to deputy editor of digital, John Boogert, instead of reporting to a print section editor, reports the Knight Digital Media Center (which funded a leadership workshop in which the reorg was apparently planned).

Boogert reports to editor and vice president Sherry Chisenhall along with three other senior editors: a deputy editor for print, a deputy editor who “focuses on the news desk and production of both online and print,” and a senior editor for investigations.

The print editor’s responsibility is to make sure online stories are “tweaked, augmented or reshaped for the next day’s newspaper.”

“We clearly place print at the end of the process,” Chisenhall told KDMC.

Will it work? They’re only a month in to the reorg, KDMC notes. But if this change can create a more engaging online experience that people will pay for, great!

Writing about boobs and sex noises is probably not part of the job description for writers at Min, that publication that provides breaking news for people in the publishing business—Min contains lots of serious articles about which ad sales reps have changed jobs and how to monetize content.

But that has changed—at least for today, when Minonline digital editor Steve Smith reviewed Hearst’s new Cosmo For Guys iPad magazine.

The gist: While Smith concedes that building an interactive iPad app is not cheap, it’s so much less expensive than launching a new magazine that Hearst could afford to put lots of interactive gizmos in.

He writes, playing it straight:

The best thing about CFG is that it presses against the confines of magazine convention. Because they are not tasked with starting an “enhanced” version of a print entity, the creators have freed themselves to engage more interactive and real-time features than most mag apps we have seen. … The features on women’s bedroom moans and the large collection of women recounting best sexual experiences are immeasurably more effective because you can tap audio samples and hear the narrative.

….
And like fantasy football, this app is filled with stats, almost all of them calculated in real time as users interact with the app. The best of these features in the CFG Sex Map, which monitors how women across the country are answering a set of burning questions like “Nipple biting: hot or not?” The page pulls in the current percentages as women enter their responses but also maps the binary responses on a map so you can see how the answers are running in your vicinity. This is fun and cool.

Smith goes on to compare and contrast other features (the 3D sex position models are “fun but less informative”; the quizzes are useless without a 3G connection) and ultimately gives the app a B+.

But we would have killed to be inside the newsroom when this story was being written.

The New Yorker said that it has 100,000 iPad readers, including 20,000 who have paid a $59.99 subscription fee for the year, the NYT reports.

That’s $1.2 million in revenue for what is essentially the same product as the print magazine.

It proves, the Times said, that iPad apps don’t have to be complementary to the print product, with extras or video ads. The iPad app can be the print product.

“There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go,” Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor, told the Times.

In fact, the New Yorker app is outselling every other Conde Nast app out there, including the much-lauded Wired. It helps that demographics for iPad owners (wealthy consumers of news) are similar to the demographics of New Yorker subscribers. It could be that the New Yorker’s text-heavy format works better on a tablet than a magazine with “highly stylized photo shoots and sleekly designed page layouts.”

But can we say again: $1.2 million in revenue since subscriptions became available in the spring. And yes, someone needed to get paid to develop the app, but it’s not a complicated app, with just a few extras (one such extra links to primary sources from articles). This is good news for digital media all around.