The numbers have quieted most of the skeptics, including Clay Shirky. Today, the New York Times summed up a year of its digital circulation strategy, and the report reinforced the notion: there’s a there there. It’s not the there of saving the newspaper industry, or even the Times, but it’s a strong indication that some readers will indeed pay for digital news access — and that paying for subscriptions opens other doors as well. The numbers in brief, from this morning’s Times 2011 earnings report:

• 390,000 digital subscribers overall.
• Growth rate of 20% fourth quarter over third quarter.

An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. “There’s a gold mine of data that hasn’t been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact,” says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea.

People from all sides of the debate seem to agree at least that some definitions are needed. Today there seem to be three camps, or “theories”  for trying to define journalism and the modern journalist.

As the digital marketing landscape has evolved, so have the strategies. Changes in the structure and definition of media have broken apart the silos of paid, owned, and earned media and have spurred marketers to re-examine how paid, owned, and earned media can be integrated for greater success. In doing so, marketers have realized better ways to engage audiences by offering relevant information that informs and helps the consumer make better purchase decisions, rather than a one-size-fits-all message that is simply blasted where consumers happen to be. Integrating paid, owned, and earned media means that marketers are now viewing paid media as a means to amplify the impact of earned and owned media. It also means marketers are putting increased emphasis on the value to the consumer rather than treating each media channel as a separate and totally disconnected effort.