Declared dead yesterday, Arts & Letters Daily appears to have been resurrected as Philosophy & Literature. Have A&L’s editors, Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, simply hung out a new shingle?

If so, the shuffle effectively serves to move traffic from the ALdaily.com URL before the bankrupt owner’s assets are liquidated later this month. The layout and content are similar, and the big space at the bottom of the new site says “Don’t worry, readers. This space will be filled with fresh, interesting material in no time. ‘ D & T.”

Thin media passes whole through the needle’s eye.

The “WINTER 1987 volume 1 number 1” issue of the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter sold for $1025 yesterday. (Via BoingBoing.)

Gordon Borrell and Clark G. Gilbert have applied great empirical rigor in examining the way newspapers respond to the Internet. Highlights from their access-restricted report:

“In every instance of disruptive technology studied, the disruption causes a net expansion of the marketplace. So, it seems, will the Internet create net growth of local advertising expenditures.” While cable-TV advertising took 11 years to achieve a 2.5% share of total ad spending, the Internet achieved the same share in 4 years.

But, focused on winning yesterday’s battles online, newspapers turn their backs on the real growers. “Our estimate for 2002 is that the newspaper industry is missing out on $289 million in ad revenue by not offering targeted advertising and other high-growth revenue categories that are achievable on the Internet today. By 2005, those missing categories could represent as much as $880 million…”

Newspapers are wired to defend current franchises rather than greenfield, and millennial-era Internet-pioneering losses reinforced this reflex. Currently, 72% of the typical newspaper’s online revenues come from classifieds, with half this only an upsell from print.

Even in plowing old fields, newspapers often undershoot; in Pressflex‘s experience serving newspaper websites, an astonishing number of papers fail even to promote print subscriptions online, something that can work remarkably well.

Speaking to a group of investment bankers, Dennis FitzSimons, President and Chief Operating Officer of Tribune Company, said, “There is value in Internet advertising, and we’ve invested to get our share. But the reality is this: the hyper-targeted, one-to-one marketing that the Internet can provide is what we originally thought it would be; a great tool for marketers’much like direct mail or telemarketing. It’s a great add-on. But it is no substitute for the brand-building capabilities of local mass media.”

FitzSimons also said Tribune Interactive reached profitability in the second quarter (six months ahead of schedule) based on online classified revenues. Print classified advertising represents 21% of the company’s total revenue. Finally, LATimes.com registers an average of 7,000 users a day, he said.

The CSMonitor reports: “Since May, 12 police departments ‘ in locations as diverse as Ozark, Ala., and Caddo Valley, Ariz. ‘ have signed up for the offer:” placing ads on police cars.

A critic says, “We’ve already tracked the rise of ads into every area of life from urinals to golf holes. I think this will diminish respect for the whole institution of police.” (Via Adrants.)

The company’s site explains, “If your local Law Enforcement hasn’t received Government Funding for Homeland Security or if your tax base is insufficient to provide the Vehicles your Department needs, your Local Government may be a candidate for our program. We have a virtually unlimited amount of capital available for Brand New, Fully Equipped, Local Law Enforcement Vehicles. Our Sponsors will require recognition on the vehicles. The Vehicle Theme can be your choice of very creative or conservative.”

Tackling the view that an Internet-powered glut will make words worthless, Nick Denton argues “even if bandwidth and publishing systems are free, talent and marketing critical mass will always be in short supply.”

Clay Shirky writes: “Weblogs aren’t a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can’t read if they don’t pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media.”

If you write something long enough, people will draw diametrically opposed lessons. Jeff Jarvis reads the same post as “very depressing to the community of bloggers.”

My view: the pie for professional writers is going to get lots bigger.

Doc Searles writes: “I already have a dependency on Google News, without which I wouldn’t have found the last three links in the item above.”

Me too. Noogle makes writing about the news a completely different and more interesting game.

In months of scouting, I’ve never found a Drudge with a business focus. Now this page serves me.

You can do the same yourself with agriculture, sex, the NFL. But why not get more specific? There’s the Cleveland Browns, mutiple sclerosis, NRA or even the Google itself.

Of course, Google can probably never (in the next five years?) filter out the crud and provide the necessary context. Which leaves a huge amount of room for bloggers to add value.

Noogle may create a wonderful opportunity for bloggers to refine and interpret the spew of news. Energy that went into crawling the web can now be devoted entirely to thinking and writing about the product of that crawling.

When Google.News (aka Noogle) pulled an obscure ABCNews.com article on Kashmiri violence onto its front page, the site got 500 referrals in ten minutes, according to Staci Kramer. (The Kashmire article had not made the front of ABCnews.com.)

Millionaire and aspiring LA publishing mogul Dick Riordan is a “rebel without a blog,” quips this article.

Hell, why doesn’t Riordan stop putzing around and just pay the LAEXAMINER team $300,000 a year to cover five journo salaries? Three scribes would report, with the other two copyediting and blogging.

Riordan could be battering the LAT next week rather than sometime in 2004. He could turn a profit quicker with far lower risk and, more importantly, have a bigger impact on LA life.

(Looking for further thoughts on the idiocy of funding a newpaper rather than a weblog swat team, Riordan should read this post, and this, and… in fact, he should read this whole blog.)