Is hyperlocal the magic bullet when it comes to fixing all that’s wrong with the news business? That’s the issue up for debate in this month’s Media Talk USA.

Joining Jeff Jarvis in the studio is self-styled queen of hyperlocal, Deb Galant from Baristanet.com, and Jim Willse editor of the The Star Ledger and NJ.com.

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In newspapers’ game of revenue roulette, there’s a lot of talk lately about their trying to create membership plans. The New York Times (NYT) and the Guardian, to name two, reportedly have visions of tote bags, mugs, and events in their heads. And I think that’s a fine idea. No salvation. But a fine idea.

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The newspaper industry should be sobered by Martin Langeveld’s calculations, based on the Newspaper Association of America’s misplaced bragging about Nielsen internet data, that only about a half one one percent of time spent online is spent on newspaper sites.

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Arnon Mishkin says he has found the fallacy of the link economy but I think his argument is itself built on some fallacies, among them:

If links are not valuable, then fine, get rid of them: refuse all aggregators’ and search engines’ robots, complain so much about links that no one bothers to link to you (a la the AP). Or put all your stuff behind a pay wall where the links won’t pay off.

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In bringing together their search traffic, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are fighting an unwinnable war. Worse, they are still fighting the last war. Now that Yahoo has agreed to send its users’ questions to the Microsoft Bing search engine for answers, the companies’ combined share of the search market will be 7.7 percent in the UK and 28 percent in the US, according to comScore (SCOR).

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The Associated Press is becoming the enemy of the internet because it is fighting the link and the link is the basis of the internet. From Richard Perez-Pena’s New York Times (NYT) story today:

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it.

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How can and should news organizations and others add value to the new news ecosystem that is being used in the Iran story?

Or to put the question another way: The New York Times (NYT) keeps talking about how expensive its Baghdad bureau is and what a fix we’d be in without it. Well, the essential truth in Iran is that no one has a Tehran bureau (or if they do, it has been rendered useless by government diktat).

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Three apparently unrelated items on the shift from valuing the product to valuing the process as the product:

* Trendwatching tells the story of what it calls “foreverism”–that is, that things never end (friendships, news stories, product development) and uses as illustration not only process journalism but also beta chocolate.

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An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again. But the latest assault reveals as much about The Times and the culture of classical journalism as it does about bloggers.

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The Observer’s John Koblin reports that the NY Times is considering putting a meter on usage of its site and charging once you’ve read too much.

Incredible.

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Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight–that is, more efficient–times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?

Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story.

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The Newspaper Association of America is meeting in San Diego this week and they’re preaching up at their own choir loft with angry, self-righteous fire and brimstone about their plight. Today, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt will address them, but he’ll be polite because that’s the way he is and because there’ll be a few hundred aging but armed publishers with blunderbusses aimed at his heart.

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For more than a century, the public face of companies has been their advertising, slogans, brands, and logos. How much better it would be if a company’s public face were that of its public, its satisfied customers who are willing to share their satisfaction, and its employees who have direct relationships with customers. Brands are people. If that’s the ideal, then here’s the goal: Eliminate advertising. Or at least fire your ad agency. Oh, you won’t get rid of advertising entirely. You should be so lucky. But every time a customer recommends you and your product to a friend is a time when you don’t have to market to that friend.

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When I saw Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, on my last trip to London, he said over breakfast that he’d been thinking about my book title’s question—”What Would Google Do?”—in relation to newspapers and he came up with a radical notion:

What if newspapers handed over much of their work to Google? Edward reasoned that Google already is the key distributor online. He said that Google is great at technology and newspapers aren’t, and for the future, where are the best technologists going to go? Google. Google is also brilliant at selling ads, and Edward even wondered where the best sales talent would go in the future: there or to a newspaper? So why not hand over those segments of the business to Google and concentrate on what a newspaper should do: journalism?

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One problem I’ve had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it’s too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’s problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media, and there are many different ways to look at it. And until we realize that, I don’t think we’ll begin to create successful new models for news. So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here’s an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media.

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