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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.