The embattled Tribune Company is among those who have decided to centralize its editing and design functions. The Hartford Courant, a Tribune-owned paper, announced plans this month to outsource all copy editing and design to Tribune Co.’s Chicago Tribune, eliminating 19 newsroom positions — about half related to the outsourcing — according to Rich Graziano, the Courant’s CEO and publisher.

The move to consolidate editing and design is gaining traction as newspaper groups search for ways to offset plummeting ad revenues. Gannett and Media General are two major chains who have announced similar plans. Having a remote editor who is not sitting in the local newsroom interacting with staff face to face is not that much different to the revelation, in 2007, that the Pasadena Now website was hiring writers in Mumbai and Bangalore, India to cover local Pasadena politics by rewriting press releases and watching governmental meetings live on the internet. A professor of journalism at Cal-Berkeley summed it up best: “It just seems so fundamental to journalism to be there.”

No one can argue that newspapers must streamline to survive. Consider this: most newspapers use two content management systems (CMS), one for print and one for the web. Millions can be saved over time by using one system (as The Washington Post has learned). Also consider what a major newspaper chain has learned and experienced in savings by centralizing backend IT services for a group of its papers in the same region. The point is smart operational changes—even outsourcing such things as application development– can save money without stripping a local paper of its character.

William Lynch, Barnes & Noble CEO calls the NOOKcolor “a reader’s tablet,” and from advanced word, he appears to have nailed it. From its description, the device aims for all three reading segments: book, newspapers and magazines. It adds periodicals to the mix by offering color and browser support and overcomes the tablet-reading shortcoming of excessive glare. As Martha Stewart said at Adobe Max, reading Martha Stewart Living on the iPad is great on an airplane “when they dim the lights.” Lynch says B&N has invested in screen technology that reduces device glare.

Other notable features is 8GB of onboard memory and a built-in social experience that extends B&N’s booking lending capabilities to a richer platform that integrates with popular social networks. This comes at a time when the publishing industry is intently focused on social commerce—the role of book recommendation’s from one’s social graph leading to transactions. Nook Color will also offer Quickoffice, a mobile productivity suite. It will not support e-mail clients but obviously will allow consumers to utilize webmail services.

B&N is also offering a Nook Developer SDK with the intent of inspiring developers to create enhanced book application such as adding video to cookbooks and travel books. Enhanced books, to date, has been an elusive, poorly defined category for publishers hoping to bring to market differentiated reading experience for which they can charge a premium. An area of low-hanging fruit for value add is children’s books, to wit B&N is launching Nook Kids, a platform aimed at facilitating value-added features of children’s books such as animation, “read to me” applications and games.

Many, myself included, questioned a retailer’s entry into the e-reading device scrum believing it would not have the technology chops to build and stay ahead of the digital reading device space. Not only is the Nook one of the best (if not the best) e-ink devices on the market, by expanding its offering to include a tablet reader with broader publishing distribution opportunities, Barnes & Noble may have elevated themselves to the head of the class. The NOOKcolor, based on its specs, offers the color and rich flexibility of a tablet blended with the reading experience of the gen one e-ink readers. Let’s not forget that B&N operates a large number of college bookstore as well as Nook Study, a platform for e-textbook reading which could make the Nook Color the go-to device for e-textbooks

So what’s the market impact? I would say that Apple’s iPad suffers a blow as a digital publishing distributor competing head-to-head with a tablet reading device from a major bookseller. Apple has not exactly endeared themselves to publishers with its lack of Flash support (although NOOKcolor won’t support Flash at launch) as well as its policy of not sharing consumer data with publishers and its reported entry price to be part of the iAds program.

The newer tablets en route such as the Samsung Galaxy and Blackberry Playbook will be scrambling to capitalize on their publishing opportunities and the Kindle…well… Amazon’s not saying but it’s safe to say, the company has something up its sleeve and the smart money is on a color tablet device. When? What will be the cool features? Amazon may know, but mums the word

Skiff, at launch, was a device and a platform for “content.” While somewhat nebulous in its position, given the company was part of the Hearst Corporation, the emphasis was on magazines and newspapers in that order. News Corp, with no magazine holding, will clearly be using Skiff for its global newspaper assets as a platform for distribution across myriad devices, none of which will likely be a Skiff.

While the news releases are somewhat ambiguous, it appears the Skiff device is not part of the Hearst-News Corp deal. The smart money says that Hearst is giving up on the device space especially since e-ink-based devices appear to be on a slippery slope with the advent of multimedia e-readers and tablets which offer color, video and web surfing in addition to a “good enough” reading experience. The somewhat sad irony is that Hearst was one of the prime forces behind the development of e-ink at the MIT Media Lab. Also feeling the pain on the possible shelving of the Skiff is Sprint, the hard luck telco, dumped by Amazon in favor of AT&T, looking for its niche in the new content ecosystem.

That takes us to News Corp and its deployment of Skiff. The biggest challenge for the global media giant is where best to house and deploy Skiff to leverage its capabilities. News Corp has struggled with leadership and direction in its digital strategy much of which has resulted in a series of soiled assets (Fox TV/films, newspapers, sports league relationships, MySpace) that are not able to play in the same sandbox not because of technology limitations but rather a common vision. Unless News Corp has a plan—and a good one at that—Skiff will go down as one of those e-publishing pioneers that seemed like a good idea at the time and nothing more.

For book publishers, some of whom were waiting for signs of wide-scale acceptance of the universal e-publishing standard, ePub, the iPad came through…sort of. Although the device supports ePub, Apple is believed to be planning to implement its own DRM (Fairplay) to secure the ePub files, which could presumably then be distributed only through iTunes (that is, iBooks). If that is the case, Apple’s book efforts puts it in the same category as Amazon which utilizes a proprietary DRM that ties Kindle books Amazon.com. Hence any e-book purchased from Barnes & Noble, Sony or any of the countless e-book retailers will not work on the iPad. In addition, e-books from libraries, which are powered by Overdrive who uses Adobe’s DRM, also would not work on the iPad.

For both newspapers and magazines, the iPad remains a mystery. The demo of The New York Times, which was created in a compressed timeframe, is not much indication of what potential newspapers have on the iPad. Those are questions that can only be answered by developers who are busily downloading the new SDK and attempting to devise compelling paid or ad-supported content applications. The initial focus is on paid applications (and again, there is no evidence that consumers will pay for digital newspaper content) as there was no mention of advertising support from Apple, which many were expecting following Apple’s recent acquisition of Quattro, a mobile ad network. The same goes for magazine publishers who now have the color device they have asked for but will need to experiment with varied content applications and business models, while scrambling to source enough video to do justice to consumer expectations raised in demos.

The iPad launch will create ripples throughout the publishing industry: supply chain providers who digitize and format content as well as develop applications will thrive; standalone e-reader device manufacturers will have to re-price their devices now knowing that the WiFi-only 16G iPad can function as a high-end e-reader. Plastic Logic’s Que, the Alex and Entourage Edge may be forced to revisit their announced retail prices.

For video content such as TV and movies, a similar catch was apparent. While the iPad can clearly render beautiful hi-def full screen video, its lack of support for Flash was evident in the tiny blue cubes that appeared on web pages during the demos. This means that TV-friendly web distribution platforms like Hulu are unlikely to work on the iPad. (A Hulu app for the iPhone/Touch has been rumored for some time but has yet to materialize.) Here, too, Apple appears to have reserved the distribution of TV and movies for its device for iTunes, although YouTube remains a wildcard if it should release a sound model for content owners to monetize through rentals or sell-through. Also unexplored was the possible connection between the iPad and Apple TV, which have clearly enticing possibilities.

Then there’s the mysterious absence of any mention or demonstration of the device’s advertising potential, or Apple’s apparent newfound interest in participating in the business. With iTunes emerging as the sole channel for monetizing content of any kind on the iPad, advertising remains a critical source of revenue to publishers and video providers alike, and one on which Apple’s chief emerging rival, Google, is laser-focused with innovations like Google Goggles and QR barcodes readable by Android devices, and distributed to 100,000 businesses. Of course, these ideas require a camera, which the iPad lacks.

Still, Apple did not fail to push the envelope and generate enthusiasm for its latest creation. Now, with Apple setting the standard for content consumption devices, other manufacturers—most notably PC OEMs, will begin to launch their tablets and will look to Android and possibly Windows as device platform. In particular, Android will thrive with Google deploying its Google Editions and YouTube strategies to offer cloud-based delivery of all content to the universe of Android devices, with a well-proven advertising component.

And let’s not leave communications service providers out of the mix. Whether Apple’s choice of AT&T is one consumers find popular, it leaves Verizon and Sprint as ready partners for HP, Dell, and others whose tablets are in queue.

All that said, content companies of all kinds need to examine the iPad and the new version of the iPhone OS with a few things in mind. First, Steve Jobs is without peer in his ability to provide a vision of the future through the medium of the product he happens to be introducing at the time. In the case of the iPad, he described the magic of having the “…Internet in your hand.” True that, but for a lot of us, that came with the iPhone, the Touch and the AppStore. And as revolutionary as those products have proven themselves to be, the real magic has come from the integration of all those elements into a set of compelling content experiences.  Second, the iPad extends by one the form factors those kinds of experiences can be delivered through. Third, and this is really important, we’re still talking about the “Internet” as defined by Apple. The potential for game-changing killer apps to come for the iPad is not in question.  And the potential power of content experiences Apple can enable is not in question.  But the handle on that potential is being controlled by one entity.

In that regard, we remain puzzled at the continued estrangement between the iPhone OS-based product line – iPhone, Touch and now iPad – and Adobe Flash. Do the power-management issues cited by Apple as reasons for the iPhone’s persistent lack of Flash support? We think lack of Flash support still causes many, many media and content companies, and their developers, a great deal of strategic angst.

The iPad is not the iPod for publishing. Music was a ready and waiting asset that needed little “post-production” work to be suited for a portable device, and, when the iPod arrived, the industry had already been badly disrupted. Hence the iTunes store was quickly filled with both quantity and quality. But other forms of content are not so enthusiastic to commit to a closed channel platform that controls both device and distribution, and the next 60 days will be crucial as Apple hopes to load its electronic storefront with a selection of content that will encourage consumers beyond the “fanboy” crowd to be iPad lovers.

(This post was co-authored by Mike McGuire and Andrew Frank)

For those of you whose New Year’s resolution was to forget 2009, I must reiterate a research position stated late last year: devices by themselves just don’t matter. Consumers will buy content and expect to consume that content across a set of devices based on usage scenarios. Sure I will have a ball pushing buttons and asking questions to the device folk this week; what will dictate winners from losers is what standards the device supports, what publishers it is working with to build enhanced content and what formats will be used on these devices to drive new content experiences. Having played with the Kindle, Nook and a few others, reading a book on a device is table stakes; show me what you have that will delight consumers and encourage publishers (and leading authors such as John Grisham) to go full bore into e-publishing.

I hope to see device companies and their partners (service providers, software publishers, developers) go far beyond book experiences to showcasing newspaper and magazine content on varied devices. To date, I have yet to see an e-reader implementation of such content that looks better than the glorified RSS feed popularized by Amazon’s Kindle.

Lastly, it’s expected that much of the e-reading talk will be about a company whose product isn’t even expected to be at CES—the Apple Tablet. Based on the “where there’s smoke” principles of journalism, a device from Apple is imminent (loosely defined) and may be among the first to offer a viable ecosystem (developer community, iPhone OS, device) that will present e-reading experiences to consumers that are based, at least in theory, on Apple’s iTunes LP (Extras) enhanced music downloads.

Stay tuned for on location updates on e-readers and other news from CES.

If this report is true, then I suspect Yahoo’s newspaper consortium will lose much of its momentum if not outright come to an end; there are more than 600 newspapers in the consortium and HotJobs is one of the key services Yahoo provides its partners. Based on Microsoft/Bing’s desire to work with newspapers (well, at least News Corp.) and Google’s recent efforts to attract newspaper publishers (Living Stories, search blocking), two companies are eager to take over what Yahoo started.

So why should you care? For starters, Living Stories amounts to a template or interface that fits nicely into a publisher’s content management system. With a move toward open source CMS, (i.e. Drupal) the area of third-party development of interactive templates that seamlessly work with existing workflow could be a godsend. It’s a safe bet that Google and other developers are able to take a more innovative approach to content presentation than either a newspaper or its CMS vendor. It’s also a safe bet that a CMS template designed by Google will be metadata friendly leading to easier SEO.

Bigger picture, think news on mobile devices. As Google rolls out its media cloud strategy (more on that in subsequent research reports), it’s easy to imagine it hosting a giant CMS in the cloud with templates built by eager developers. Logically, in a cloud world that is device agnostic, many of those templates will be well suited for mobile devices (no doubt developed with HTML 5).

What’s in it for Google? Well, there’s advertising as in each template comes complete with some ad avails easily populated with contextually aware ads. Also imagine Google charging for these CMS-ready templates, becoming the cloud app store for media companies.

All of this presupposes Google is able to convince newspapers that it’s a publisher’s friend and not a doer of evil to the news world. If Google’s media cloud plan works (and on paper, it looks frighteningly solid), the company is positioned well beyond the search space for the next several years

To be fair, Kindle has a large number of public domain books it has wrapped in  its proprietary .azw DRM, but again we’re talking walled garden.

Here’s what I like about the Nook:

Freedom to buy books from multiple sources as well as read library books: The book I downloaded from my public library (in secure PDF) was easily transferred to the Nook using Adobe Digital Edition software. When connected to your PC via USB, the Nook shows up as a device in the software, and from there, it’s a simple drag and drop to the device.

The Daily: The first tab on the color-screen menu is called “The Daily,” a nice little what’s new page with some sort easy and commentary from such authors as Dave Barry and Steve King. This is just one of the little surprises that give the Nook its personality.

The ability to loan books: with The Nook, readers can loan anyone with either Nook or Barnes & Noble software on their desktop or smartphone, a book for 14 days. Not all books can be loaned (the titles are chosen by publishers) and one book cannot be lent to the same person twice. When a book is lent, it will show up in the recipients’ “the daily” section.

The mutlichannel experience: While not in place yet, bringing your Nook into a Barnes & Noble store should result in a few surprises. The Nook will automatically connect to B&N’s free AT&T wireless and present special book offers as well as other in-store special (i.e., free coffee at the B&N coffee bar).

The navigation buttons: In this case, I am referring to the page turning buttons alongside the e-reading window. They are nicely recessed and have small raised bumps to allow you to push without looking directly at the buttons.

Here’s what I am still pondering about the Nook

The color screen: At first, I found the color screen distracting because it interfered with the reading experience in the e-reading window above.  The color screen goes dark after 30 or so seconds and becomes a navigational tool meaning you can swipe the screen to turn pages. I found the swiping on the color screen to be less responsive than what I am used to on my iPod.

Device synching: Perhaps and early bug, but the book synching between my Nook and my desktop PC e-reading software does not work. I know a software update for the desktop and iPhone app is being planned.

Here’s what I don’t like about the Nook

Newspaper e-reading: Like all other dedicated e-readers, the newspaper experience is not very good. The content is rendered in ePub, so it looks slightly better than the Kindle, but not enough to be of significant interest.

Odd navigational features: Some of the reading navigation such as up and down arrows and opening content take place in the lower color window. I find it awkward; there should be some sort of controller by the e-reading window to handle those functions.

In reality, the battle is not an all-out war as the Kindle is in ready supply and Barnes & Noble is fulfilling pre-orders; you cannot walk into a Barnes & Noble retail store and buy one just yet. Once the Nook is on the shelf in its close to 800 B&N stores, a number of other e-readers will be in retail channels (such as the Alex) or close to shipping. With that in mind, it will be interesting to see how the Nook does when there are other e-readers on the market that have similar features (two screens) and support ePub. Clearly, the Nook will have a window of opportunity, but just how big that window is remains to be seen.

In homage to the late Paul Harvey, here’s the rest of the story: Google’s forthcoming cloud/content distribution plans dubbed Google Edition suggests a portable, secure storage locker for an individual’s e-books that is accessible across a number of devices surely can extend to news publishers. That virtual storage locker also could contain newspaper and magazine content. As Google develops rich content applications, built in HTML5, for cloud content consumption, a few innovative newspaper readers must be in the works. Google is primed to support any sort of content application it builds or distributes with a variety of business models (ads, ala carte, and subscription) so the company that does not evil hopes to show publishers it is their friend.

The message is clear: if you want to block you content from the most powerful search engine on earth, be our guest. Want to build your own platform for distribution or work with any number of nascent partners (ala Journalism Online) to build paywalls, go right ahead. Google is betting these efforts will fail and that via Google Edition it will play a major role in the content distribution business. At that point, Google no doubt feels newspapers (along with magazines) will line up behind book publishers to ride the cloud into future profitability.