I’ve been reading Ryan Chittum’s recent posts at Columbia Journalism Review about the whole Murdoch/WSJ “We’re seceding from Google” flap.

Chittum applauds what he sees as a new appreciation in media circles for the “loyal readership” metric as opposed to the “total monthly visitors” tally, and argues, accurately enough, that the core readership — the fraction of your traffic that represents people who read a lot and keep coming back — is more valuable and important than the drop-ins, the folks who arrive via a search query, read a page, and then vanish. He airily dismisses the transient visitors as “junk traffic.”

This relative valuation of these two kinds of traffic is pretty obvious, and widely understood in the Web industry. Chittum concludes that newspapers shouldn’t be afraid to shut out the search traffic in their effort to convert the loyal readers into paying subscribers (though it’s not clear from his argument whether he means subscribers in print or on a pay-walled-off Web site).

There are two big problems with this analysis.

First, many advertisers, sadly, do not share Chittum’s perspective. When they evaluate a buy, they are often obsessed with “reach.” They want to hit lots of eyeballs. They are far less interested in the repeat visitors. Once they’ve shown you their ad once, they know that you’re probably not going to look at it again, even if they were lucky enough to catch your eye on the first exposure. Transient search traffic helps media sites satisfy these advertisers.

Second, and I think more important, Chittum completely ignores the way “junk traffic” visitors provide “qualified leads” to a Web site: they expose your site to new eyes and give you a shot, admittedly fleeting, and turning some fraction of them into loyal readers. This is the way sites have always built traffic “organically.” In the era of Facebook and Twitter that may be changing, but I’d argue that the principle still holds whether folks are landing on your article page via Google or a retweet. This is a far better way to expand your traffic base than expensive offline advertising.

Chittum’s analysis looks to me like a recipe for stagnation, a method media companies might adopt if they want to harvest cash from their websites to keep their offline products on life support. It’s this sort of thinking — “cash out the potential of the future to prolong the agony of the present” — that has dug so much of the media business such a deep hole already.

I’m fascinated by this: Paul Graham’s startup-seeding outfit, Y Combinator, has announced that, with each new funding cycle, it’s now going to issue a sort of open call for submissions in a particular area. The general idea is what interested TechCrunch in writing the story up. But what caught my eye was the substance of the first request: “The Future of Journalism.”

The reason newspapers and magazines are dying is that what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it. In fact, most journalists probably don’t even realize that definition of journalism they take for granted was not something that sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but is rather a direct though somewhat atrophied consequence of a very successful 20th century business model.

What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money–as print media once did–instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?

Bingo! To me, this passage crystallizes the problem with so much of the “how do we get consumers to pay?” headscratching that is consuming media pros today. The death spiral of the old business model for news has some more twists and turns before the beast expires, but it is irreversible. The old bundle of information services and advertising that supported print journalism is gone, Humpty-Dumpty style, and nobody’s going to glue it back together. A deeper rethinking is needed, and those of us who want to see journalism thrive ought to be working hard to come up with answers to Graham’s question.

Graham envisions small teams that encompass writing, programming and design skills; in the Y Combinator model, they get a (very) small investment upfront, some bureaucratic assistance and some networking help. That’s one way of seeding lots of experiments. But I think Graham’s stark framing of the problem is as valuable as the bits of cash he’s spraying around; ambitious journalists and their programmer/designer friends don’t need to wait for Y Combinator to take up this challenge.

I have to admit that the phrase “treating how to make money from it as an afterthought” struck a nerve, because that really was how things were at the beginning at Salon and so many other journalism-oriented startups in the early years of the Web. This approach was understandable, and maybe excusable, in 1995; today, it’s a non-starter.

Graham’s challenge is elegantly simple: Instead of starting with the journalism and then puzzling out how to support it, start with the plan for revenue, then figure out what journalism might complement it. Recognize that the realm where innovation is most needed is the business side and how it relates to the journalism. Stop thinking of the two as a pair of unrelated entities lashed together, like some ungainly antique motorcycle/sidecar combo. Begin dreaming up, and testing out, approaches that provide a more organic connection between the reporting we need and the income that supports it.

This will sound alarms and seem heretical to all of us who grew up in the old “journalism on one side of a wall, business on the other” world. And yes, media businesses conceived along Graham’s lines will need not only a business plan but a plan for earning and keeping their readers’ trust.

I’m not too worried about that. It’s the easy problem, one that smart journalists already know how to handle. The business side, that’s the wicked problem. Ideas for solving it ought to make good starting points.

I’m grateful to Graham for boiling the issue down so neatly. And no, I don’t have any specific examples or ideas yet: if I did, I’d be assembling a team! But maybe you do.

Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age interviewed David Carr of the New York Times. They’re friends, so the interview has a little bit of a smarmy feel. But it’s worth reading for a couple of passages. Carr recently came out with a book of autobiographical reporting on his own violent, addiction-riddled past. He offered this comment about what it was like for him to be covered by other journalists:

Carr: There are two kinds of reporters that I experienced. One was people that just showed up, asked a lot of questions, wrote down what I said, and then went and wrote a story about my answers and what they knew. And then there was another version of reporter that showed up, made a speech about what my book was about, made a number of assumptions about why I wrote it, asked me a few questions and then went and wrote what they thought. And I’ve always, I think, had tendencies toward the second kind of reporter. The people who just came and asked questions, their stories were 10 times better, and I gotta say that had a profound effect on me. I don’t need to make a speech before I start in on a story. I don’t need to explain what I think. I need to find out what the other person knows and then write it up. I need to show more curiosity about the matter at hand, and less authority.

There are several ways to read this passage. One is to think, right, the reporter with the agenda or the angle is never going to give you as open-minded or responsive a reading of reality than the reporter who just opens his eyes and ears. And you can’t really argue with that. Another reading is to notice that the moment the reporter becomes a subject (with a book to promote), he suddenly sees the value of the reporter-as-stenographer and discounts the journalism of perspective and interpretation and challenge.

Of course, it’s also possible that Carr is simply saying, “I’ve always been too interested in impressing my interviewees with how smart I am. Now I know why that’s a bad reporting technique.” And that is something we can all learn from.

Here is the other comment from Carr worth thinking about: He’s lamenting how quickly the pay scale for even the more successful New York journalists has plummeted, and then notes:

I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.

I read that and blinked at first — was this a misprint? The doors of today’s media world are wide open; it costs virtually nothing to publish yourself. There is more creation of media — more publishing of words, images, and video — than at any time before in human history. The roaches aren’t leaving the motel, never to return; it’s more like, the entire world has become a roach colony. We’re all roaches now! (Please note I am not addressing the question of roach quality here, simply the matter of roach identity.)

Then I realized, oh — when Carr says “media,” he isn’t thinking, “people publishing stuff for others to read.” He’s thinking, “the New York media business that I cover and am a part of.” When he says “media,” he means “well-paying media jobs” in a community where, apparently, a dollar a word is not enough to make ends meet.

That’s understandable, but it’s a habit we might as well break. Because we have no choice. “Media” as an industry providing a professional paycheck is rapidly becoming unmoored from “media” as a description of a human activity. It’s a disruptive transition, and it carries curses and blessings, and it’s going to keep on providing us with these moments of misunderstanding, these eye-blinkers.

Carr: What if the combination of secular and cyclical change that we have — what if this is normal? What if all the money that was sloshing around was in fact from the housing bubble, from easy credit, and that credit does not return? I think that’s a much more difficult and scary problem. I haven’t seen the money coming back yet.

Dumenco: Yeah, I don’t think it’s coming back.

I’m afraid I’m with Dumenco on that. And yes, it’s “scary,” but only in the way any economic disruption is — from the collapse of Wall Street to the imploding auto industry. Any time large numbers of jobs vanish it’s a “scary problem.” But in this vast, roachy media realm that’s emerging, at least journalists are much better positioned than, say, auto workers to find new opportunities.

Rick Edmonds at Poynter offers a summary of a white paper that the American Press Institute provided to attendees of the recent newspaper execs’ conclave. (The paper doesn’t seem to be available on the API site. UPDATE: Nieman JLab has it.)

The overall thrust seems to be: time to make the customer pay up. Newspapers must “establish that news content online has value by charging for it.” If this is really the level of the paper’s economic reasoning, the industry is in even worse trouble than I thought. News flash: Pricing a product does not establish its value. What you have to do is find a price that people will pay.

Similarly, the report urges a new “Consumer Centric” strategy, which sounds dandy, until you realize that “Refocus on consumers and users” does not mean “serve the customer better” but rather “refocus” on their wallets instead of those of advertisers.

Reading this made me sigh. In the contours of this latest iteration of the argument over charging for content, I’ve recognized an unfortunate pattern. Those who advocate the “charge ’em” strategy cast themselves as hardheaded pragmatists and their opponents as wild-eyed Web idealists and anarchists.

Sadly, however, I submit that most of us in the “charging for content is a bad bet for newspapers” camp are coming at this from the perspective of bitter experience. We are grizzled veterans of this argument. We have Been There and Done That. We aren’t grave-dancing; we’re saying, “Maybe you don’t want to fall into that grave that almost swallowed us.”

During my time at Salon we tried every online revenue strategy you can imagine: Gate off some of the content. Gate off all of the content. Don’t gate any content but ask users for cash to join a premium program. Slate tried a subscription program well before us. Many others followed. Yes, there are differences between such sites and local newspapers. Yes, 2009 is different from 2000-2002. But the fundamental lesson remains: you can get some revenue from readers, and there’s nothing wrong with trying; but if in doing so you cut yourself off from the rest of the Web in any way, you are dooming yourself to irrelevance and financial decline. Don’t make your content less valuable at the instant you’re telling people it’s going to cost them more to get it.

The strongest confirmation of this fact (as I pointed out in an earlier post that was recently echoed by Silicon Alley Insider, and it’s nothing new either) comes from that poster-child for pay-wall advocates, the Wall Street Journal. The Journal has the longest-running and arguably most successful subscription program around, but it has smashed a giant hole in its pay wall and allowed anyone arriving from Google to read any article on its site. (That’s right: you don’t need a WSJ subscription. Just plug any WSJ headline into Google and walk on through the wall.)

The Journal execs can say, “Hey, we’re just being flexible, it’s a hybrid strategy,” and they’re correct, in a sense. What their strategy fails to take into account is how much traffic and mindshare they have lost from the perception that their articles aren’t a linkable part of the Web.

The Journal’s subscription model isn’t a crime or a disaster. It just isn’t the future. As the company’s own discovery that it needs to let Googlers in for free shows, this model is classic newspaper-industry short-term thinking. It’s backward-looking, and won’t help newspapers figure out where they need to be tomorrow.

When we talk about “charging for articles” we sometimes mix up the impact of charging itself and the impact of the steps taken to make sure people pay. I was guilty of this in my “charging for articles” post.

The problem with newspapers charging for their articles on the Web isn’t that there is anything wrong with publishers seeking to obtain revenue from their Web pages. Publishers can and will find ways to make money from the Web. They just won’t be the same as they were in print, and they probably won’t be as lucrative, because print was often a monopoly in a way that the Web will never be.

The problem is that the steps publishers take to maximize revenue end up minimizing the value and utility of their Web pages. Building a “pay wall” typically means that only a paying subscriber can access the page — that’s why it’s a wall. So others can’t link directly to it, and the article is unlikely to serve as the starting point for a wider conversation beyond the now-narrowed pool of subscribers.

In other words, when you put up a pay wall around a website you are asking people to pay more for access to material that you are simultaneously devaluing by cordoning it off from the rest of the Web. This makes no sense and is never going to work to support general-interest newsgathering (though it can be a perfectly good plan for specialty niches).

If your journalism is utterly unique you might be able to make a go of this approach, though even then I think it would be tough sledding and take a long time to become self-supporting. But 98 percent of the material newspapers are likely to start charging for can’t claim that kind of uniqueness. It’s wishful to think otherwise.

(I wrote more on this last month in The OPEC Plan For Newspapers.)