A few hours later, CNN reports his return to golf at the Masters.

Well played, EA.

The Pulitzer Prize

It’s nearly impossible to talk about the future of news without someone predicting the extinction of two species at once: investigative journalists and working democracies. You can’t argue that wouldn’t be bleak. But Google’s chief economist Hal Varian points out that the biggest cost center at newspapers isn’t the journalists.

“There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”

He also points out that newspaper circulation declines can’t entirely be pinned on the Internet: “Circulation has been falling since 1985 and circulation per household has been falling since 1947!”

Perhaps the Internet isn’t killing news, it’s just making what one New York Times writer calls a new kind of news junkie — one that doesn’t demand we spend enormous amounts of money putting that news on paper and tossing it to her doorstep.

From NYT:

“A garishly multicolored image of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, in the film ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ occupies most of the paper’s cover page, superimposed over what looks like the usual, sober front page. Above him is the ‘Los Angeles Times’ banner, and bracketing his face are actual, recent articles.”

According to a spokesman for the LA Times, the idea was inspired by online advertising formats and motivated by the extraordinarily tough times in the print newspaper business.

“Ads that completely cover a publication’s front page, or are made to look like part of it — or both — are not unusual for trade magazines and some tabloid newspapers, but broadsheets have generally shunned them. But Mr. Conroy [of the LA Times] noted that however unorthodox the ad may be for print, it mirrors a common practice online of having an ad cover part or all of a Web site’s home page for a few seconds.”

Last April the LA Times ran a front page ad for NBC series “Southland” that took a different approach. The above ad for “Alice in Wonderland” is more interruptive (”garish,” as the NYT calls it), but it’s quite clearly an advertisement. The below ad integration for “Southland” takes the format of a regular news story in the paper, with headline graphics that identify it as an ad — not unlike paid search ads at Google, Digg Ads at Digg, or sponsored stories at the Huffington Post or Daily Beast.

Which is a better direction: Invasive ads that you can’t miss, but require you to navigate around them to get to your news? Or ads that convey a brand’s message in a format that is native to the medium, but you might accidentally read the content without first noticing it’s an ad?

I’m thrilled that the IAB and 4As have rolled out Version 3.0 of the standard terms and conditions for online advertising. The two sections I love the most: One, that v3.0 addresses auction-based ad platforms such as Google’s AdWords and Digg’s Digg Ads. Two, indemnity for publishers and platforms — like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo — where some of the content is links to other publishers’ content.

Make the move, agency friends!

The folks at AdTech invited me to join their new Ambassador program, which means I’ll be live blogging from the April 19-21 event in SF, and I’ll be expecting a whole lot more respect than you all normally give me.

They asked me what my “daily challenges” are, to which I said:

“Too much information, not enough context. Web and mobile tools have helped me aggregate more information more quickly than ever before, but I’m drowning in it. I want better filters so that I don’t miss anything important, but get some helping in missing everything that’s not important.”

Any ideas?

Also let me know what companies I should check out while I’m there.

Mashable describes the Digg Ads product better than I do:

“DiggAds is powered by a complex auction-based system that attempts to serve users with the highest quality ads — Digg assigns its own quality score to ads — while factoring in the advertiser’s bidding price. It’s like Google Adsense but with quality scoring. The idea is to reward high quality ads with lower CPCs; the more diggs an ad gets the less the advertiser pays.”

Bob Buch on Digg’s blog says:

“In the first four months, DiggAds has been extraordinarily successful for Digg. From a revenue perspective, things have been great — we view this as a positive sign that giving users control over the advertising they see is a good user experience.”

And Liz Gannes at GigaOM says:

“Social networking behavior — endless repetitive page views, unvetted content — isn’t a great fit for traditional forms of online advertising. Early attempts to bring search or brand ads onto sites like MySpace and Facebook had pathetic results compared the trajectories of the sites’ popularity and attention. But now, a few years in, social media companies are starting to discover how to advertise to their own audience. And in the last five months, Digg has figured out a model that makes sense. So much so that its new site-specific ad formats already account for more than a third of its revenue.”

(Liz interviewed me for the article.)

And the approach is earning GE some praise from the notoriously tough crowd at Digg.

A Digg reader posted a screenshot of the GE sponsorship to Imgur.com and submitted the image (with his commentary) back to Digg: “New UI feature for digg.com debuting early? I think it’s a classy and non invasive way to feature revenue generating links.”

Another reviewer, the author of the respected brentcsutoras blog, reminds his readers that on other occasions he’s come out as a critic of ad integrations on Digg — before going on to say that he’s impressed with the tastefulness of the GE program:

“Clean, non-intrusive or annoying, the click-able banner takes you to a pretty cool landing page off HealthyMagination, which is GE’s attempt to help people become healthier ‘through the sharing of imaginative ideas and proven solutions’ by helping gather, share and discuss healthy ideas…. I have to say I am rather impressed with GE and their use of social media.”

The brentcsutors blog isn’t just respected by its readers like me, either. It’s highly regarded by Google’s PageRank algorithm too. Here’s how that benefits GE. Right now when a user goes searching for that high-profile socially-curated news site called “Digg,” Google returns brentcsutors’s favorable review on the first page of results.

GE has gone one better than “positive association with the Digg brand,” it has literally inserted itself into the online conversation about Digg.