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Gordon Borrell is a former reporter who says it pains him to conclude that local news online is doomed to be "a loss leader" that will never pay its way.

Mark Potts is a former reporter who says Borrell "is smoking something," and argues that the main reason local news has never generated much advertising support is that "no one has ever tried."

Borrell and Potts are among an array of execs, entrepreneurs and experts sharing the spotlight this week at Borrell's annual conference examining local online advertising. (I will attend and tell you what I learn there.) Kip Cassino, Borrell's vice president of research, will project an online ad landscape for 2010 that predicts modest recovery of 15 percent from the pits of 2009, about a third of it local.

"We're still bumping along the bottom of a well," Cassino told me in a telephone interview last week. With revenue prospects still relatively low, the stakes get higher for each and every segment of potential growth.

Read on and decide who's got it right -- Borrell or Potts.

Stack up the price of Apple's iPad against what it costs to put a newspaper in your driveway for a couple of years and you'll find an e-reader business model that just might work.

Let's look at the numbers: Every week, a typical American newspaper spends $1.50 per subscriber for production and another buck on delivery, according to estimates assembled by John Murray of the Newspaper Association of America.

Add to that another dollar or so to cover telemarketing and other costs of acquiring the subscription in the first place. Because of the churn of newspaper subscriptions, it takes two subscription acquisitions to sustain the equivalent of a single annual subscription, bringing the acquisition costs up to $2 per subscriber per week.

On the revenue side, Murray, the NAA's vice president of audience development, puts the average seven-day subscription at $3.85 a week.

Read on to see the math that would be involved in newspapers swapping a $250 iPad coupon for two years of digital delivery.

It looks like we can add government assistance to the pile of disintegrating business models facing the media.

A new study of historic subsidies and emerging trends tracks various tax breaks, reductions in postal subsidies first enacted in 1792, and upcoming cutbacks in public notices that government regulations have traditionally forced into American newspapers.

In addition to a detailed review of past practices, the report by Geoffrey Cowan and David Westphal of the University of Southern California serves up some even-handed perspective on the hot-button issue of government funding for news.

Read on for the authors' suggestions of how the government should proceed on the question of state and federal subsidies for news.

Just in time for a meaty year in Connecticut politics and government, a nonprofit news site launches Monday with an online resource its editor touts as "the most comprehensive guide to the state's elected officials anywhere."

Michael Regan, editor of Connecticut Mirror, said the site's "Guide to Politics and Government" includes disclosure forms that state legislators are required to complete but that the state has failed to make available online.

"This is astounding to me," Regan told me in an e-mail interview. "We've got them all up on our Guide... That's a central part of our mission -- in addition to covering the news, we want to give people access to stuff that's hard or impossible to find on the Web."

The Mirror hopes to fill some of the gaps left by a diminished state house press corps that Regan says has shrunk from about 24 reporters in 1989 to about a third of that today.

Read on for funding details and a Q&A with Mirror editor Michael Regan about coverage plans.

Wednesday's announcement by The New York Times that it will begin charging for online content in 2011 poses at least one big opportunity and one big challenge.

The opportunity -- for the industry as well as the paper -- resides in the year the Times has given itself to get this right.

The challenge will be preserving its relationship with the huge global audience that will bear the burden of a metered pay plan: heavy users of the Times Web site who do not subscribe to the newspaper in print. Avoiding a significant drop-off in ad revenue is at the heart of the paper's financial challenge, of course, but that will hinge largely on how well it retains -- or fails to -- those online-only loyalists...

A content analysis of a week of news in Baltimore suggests coverage with a fast-food feel: limited nutrition served up quickly by a growing number of outlets adding little that's new or interesting.

In a report released Monday, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found most local news still generated by legacy media, with both the quantity and quality of the journalism diminished from years past.

"While the news landscape has rapidly expanded," the study concluded, "most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by old media -- particularly newspapers."

PEJ examined stories from July 19 to July 25, 2009 and discovered smart use of new platforms by old media, excessive reliance on official versions and an intriguing example of the city police department breaking news on its own.

The study represents an important snapshot of news in transition, with some of its greatest value -- clues to future possibilities -- found mostly between the lines of the 40-page document.

A new study by two leading analysts of media economics sketches a stiff challenge for legacy news organizations: equipping themselves for what the authors project will be a dramatic tilt of ad spending to the Web.

Penelope Muse Abernathy and Richard Foster highlight the gap between the rate at which people are getting information online and the rate of online spending by advertisers. They say that gap is going to close -- and that publishers better be ready.  

The study, to be presented Friday at a conference at Yale, contrasts findings by Barclay's Capital Internet Data Book that "currently only 8 percent of traditional ad budgets in the U.S. are allocated to online" with data reported by analyst Mary Meeker that "Americans consume roughly 30 percent of their content online."

Read more to learn how newspapers can bridge the gap.

[UPDATE: I've added comments below that I received earlier today from Lindsey Hoshaw.]

Several hours after I published yesterday's post about Lindsey Hoshaw's crowdfunded story in the New York Times, NYU grad student Leah Taylor raised a good question by e-mail: "Do you think something like this is sustainable?"

The key stakeholders in the Garbage Patch story have been exploring the many dimensions of that question over the past year.

No one is suggesting that reader-financed stories will become the dominant means of paying for news. But the project provides a vivid illustration of how the combination of a reporter's drive, a publisher's flexibility and an innovator's imagination can fill gaps left by journalism's crumbling old business models.

New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt told me in an e-mail Tuesday...

The New York Times published half of a very good story this morning -- Lindsey Hoshaw's account of her visit to the massive patch of garbage floating in the Pacific.

In an italicized note, the Times hinted at the rest of the story: "Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists."

As Hoshaw was raising money for the story this summer, both the Times and Spot.Us made a point of insisting that the roles played by both organizations did not, collectively, represent any kind of collaboration. Spot.Us would help raise money for the trip, they said, and the Times would consider the story for publication.

In retrospect, their efforts look very much like a collaboration...

The great debate over the future of news is missing some voices.

I'm talking about readers, viewers, users, community members -- the people journalism serves.

Their absence from our wither-journalism confabs limits our ability to understand how they value their news experiences -- which is different, I'm learning, than how they value news itself.

I heard a few of these voices recently in Ann Arbor, where my Poynter colleague Kelly McBride organized a community conversation about life without a newspaper as part of training provided by the Online News Association.

To her credit, McBride focused on areas "where other organizations can step in and serve the community" rather than bemoaning the loss of the Ann Arbor News, which shut down on July 23.