Well, the media is full of those these days, from Dean Singleton to Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch just told Rueters that people will be paying for newspaper content on the Web, saying premium content will be available and widely-accepted.  That’s easy for him to say: people already pay for the premium news that the Wall Street Journal offers.

But would you be willing to pay for the gossip columns in the New York Post? I’ll admit to reading them occasionally, but I wouldn’t pay for them.

In fact, what kind of premium content does Murdoch think newspapers will be able to offer? Media companies are shedding editorial jobs at an alarming rate. That means fewer people to report and write those premium stories.

I’m the first to admit there’s no good business model about making money online, though some people have interesting ideas.

But those are least something approaching a plan. They have actionable steps, goals and metrics.

Both Murdoch and Singleton have promised new and exciting content without ever saying what it would be. They’ve both also cut jobs. Those two things aren’t compatible.

Very few media companies have figured out how to charge for their content, and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. How about trying something different?

But he’s wrong, too. Start-ups filled with people who’d be using social media and social networking tools don’t really need someone to show them the way; they can just trust their people to do the right thing. But large media companies, ones that have resisted social media (at least somewhat), do need a voice and they need a person pushing reporters and editors to understand what they need to do. They also need people — dedicated people, not catch as catch can like so many other newspaper projects — to help train the staff.

I know that I’m biased, since my job is just that, but even if it weren’t, I think I’d see the necessity. No one needed to explain Twitter to me, but I know that other people need help. There’s a whole range of experience in newsrooms with regard to social media. Some people just get it, others want to ignore it.  We need to get everyone comfortable in this new space, and putting one person in charge of doing just that makes sense.

He really likes a plan from the New York Times to allow people to buy sponsorships. I wrote about the other plan from the Times last week.

Sponsorship is a fascinating idea, and Outing suggests some cool things that people could be willing to pay for.

And that’s exactly what we need. Too many publishers and CEOs are looking backward to models that were tried and failed in the mid-90s. Instead of trying to do the same thing in a different way, why not try to do something different?

So I’ll ask: what novel ideas do you have to make newspapers profitable, and how would those ideas work?

Jeff Jarvis makes that point (and more) more eloquently that I could.

I’m much more concerned about what Singleton wants to give away. He’s expecting to create a rich site filled with user-generated content and other information, but no local news stories.

Putting aside that the company should being doing their best to create context, including using that user-generated content; or arguments about the actual worth of most local news these days; or even questions about how much user-generated content there will actually be, this sends the wrong message. It tells readers that their content is less valuable than content produced by trained reporters.

In some cases, it might be, but not all the time. In fact, to some people, the user-generated content is more important than the latest on sewer rates or the zoning board. It shows life in the community, and it also can help to break news. It isn’t secondary anymore. Having a user base that’s dedicated to documenting their community and talking about issues that matter to them isn’t optional, and it isn’t secondary to the local news that’s being written by staffers. It’s a vital part of any news organization’s future, and giving it (or appearing to give it) second-class status is a mistake.

Smarter people than me are weighing in, but I think I might be able to add something to this conversation, since I’m training the staff at The Gazette on using social media.

My two-line social media policy:

If you’re using an account for work purposes, identify yourself as an employee of The Gazette.

If posting something would embarass you or the company, or call your professional reputation into question, DON’T POST IT.

That’s it. I give out pages of best practices, too, but those two get to the heart of the issue. Just as we would have never in the past expressed a political preference, we should refrain from doing so now. if it seems like common sense, it kinda is, but it still bears repeating.

The biggest issue people seem to be taking with the WSJ policy is that it shuts down transparency. It forbids staffers from discussing how a story was reported, written or edited. Bad advice, and among the reasons so many newspapers are failing at social media. When there was one edition a day, the story was all that mattered. Now, reporters need to be transparent at all stages. How they source and write the story is important, and so is the discussion afterward.

Rather than grasping and trying to control something (since no one’s been able to control falling readership or declining revenue), newspaper executives need to trust their reporters, calm down and embrace social media.

I can’t close any more eloquently than Patrick Thornton did.

Just use common sense, and common sense says not being social on social media doesn’t make much sense at all.

There’s been a lot more talk about making people pay for online content recently. Dean Singleton made a big deal of that at the AP conference, and has now announced a plan to make people do just that.

It’s a bad idea, one I made fun of and Jeff Jarvis did an intelligent take down of. I could keep making jokes at Singleton’s expense (and still might, actually), but I also want to explain why this idea is so wrong-headed.

The argument is that people pay for content when they buy a newspaper, so they should do the same when they read content online. I’ve been wondering how much people actually pay per story in the newspaper.

Between May 4 and May 8, The Gazette published 335 stories (collections of briefs are counted as one story). That works out to an average of 67 each day. A few years ago, that would have been much higher, but with cutbacks, that sounds about right for a mid-sized daily in a small city. The Gazette’s newsstand price is $0.75 per issue. That means if you bought the paper at your favorite convenience store, you paid an average of about $0.01 per story. In weeks where the number of stories is higher, you’d be paying under that. If you subscribe, that number will come down even further. That penny doesn’t go toward reporting and writing the stories, either. It goes toward the (many) costs to make the physical newspaper.

But who reads all those stories? Some do, I know, but I certainly don’t, and I’m not alone. I read stories that I already know will be interesting to me. But when you’re buying a paper, you have to buy the whole thing, not just the news or sports sections. Online, there’s no such requirement. And who is willing to pay for stories they’re not going interested in?

Now think about how much it costs to publish a newspaper every day. Presses, workers, paper and ink all cost money, not to mention paying people to plan routes and then deliver the papers. The paper shows up at your door, and that’s why you’re willing to pay for it.

You have to seek out—at least somewhat—news stories online, and it doesn’t cost the company nearly as much to publish or display them. So what’s the justification for charging?

I don’t have good figures about the exact daily cost of printing a newspaper (does anyone? I’d love to hear them), but let’s be generous and say it costs twice as much to print a paper than to display it online (I bet that number is closer to five times more expensive). That makes each story online worth about $0.005. How do you collect that? How do you handle readers who feel the story didn’t deliver what the headline promised and want their money back? And, more importantly, isn’t it time to figure out a truly new business model, one that might actually work and help media companies survive, instead of hastening their death?