Add CNN to the list of news outlets that sees at least some of its future playing out on Apple’s iPhone. The Time Warner-owned Cable News Network plans to tell the world on Tuesday about its new $1.99 iPhone application. (Expect the press release at 8 a.m. ET). They’re charging for it, betting that people will pay for news. That’s a bet that some folks — such as News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch — have been willing to make. Now CNN is making a similar bet.(PS, we were going to hold this until midnight because it was embargoed. That embargo has been broken, so bombs away.)I’ll do a rip-and-grab from the press release to highlight its features, but its most interesting one is the ability it gives its viewers/readers to be the amateur reporters in the field that more news organizations are courting:For the first time on a mobile device, the CNN App provides a direct gateway to iReport.com, allowing users to browse user-generated content; register, sign-in to their account or sign on as a guest to capture and instantly upload user-generated photos and videos (with the iPhone 3GS). Users also can browse iReport.com’s latest “assignments,” asking the community to weigh in on local and national news stories.Here is another feature that accomplishes the dual tasks of promoting the news outlet as well as the reader:

• Users can share stories via email, SMS and Twitter, as well as Facebook Connect by posting a story directly to their wall.

The “app” adds CNN to the list of news organizations that are betting on increasing consumption of their news by people touting mobile devices. So far, these include The Associated Press, Bloomberg and The New York Times. There also is The Wall Street Journal, whose ultimate boss, News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch, already has made clear that you’re going to pay for the news that you get on your smartphones, unless you already buy the print edition AND the online edition.My question: How, in the end, will CNN and its brethren turn this into an opportunity to make some money? Can mobile advertising bring in the cash? Or is mobile bound to remain a mostly promotional tool, no matter how many people use it?Meanwhile, here are the other features, slightly rewritten and shortened from the press release copy:

• Users can flick through news stories across categories. Additionally, when the device is rotated horizontally, stories can be flipped through quickly.
• Each story features bulleted highlights above the full article, designed to satisfy mobile “snackers,” allowing them to scan through the latest stories, as well as meet the needs of users who want the whole story.
• Local news, weather and traffic based on user’s actual location or the ability to select a specific location.
• Ability to “follow” a story or topic: As CNN publishes breaking news alerts or new stories related to a chosen topic, the app will push the updates to the device.
• “Saved” content, which enables users to access text stories even when they’re offline.

(Reuters Photo: Picture Spanish director Pedro Almodovar… as a CNN iPhone app.)

I got this invitation in my e-mail this week:Because press space at the invitation-only event is extremely limited, kindly contact me as soon as possible to secure a seat.Following is background on the event:

WHAT: A unique invitation-only gathering of more than 100 senior leaders from media and technology, the UCBerkeley Media Technology Summit is being organized by the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. The summit, which will run from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 at the Googleplex, is intended to provide the leaders of traditional media companies with new insights into the technologies, consumer behavior and advertising systems that will affect their businesses at a time of momentous change (Sounds like the latest opportunity to smack around traditional media companies for being traditional, no? — ed). The Koret Foundation, Google and the McCormick Foundation are generously sponsoring the event.

I got my invitation from Alan Mutter, who blogs about the future of the news business at Reflections of a Newsosaur and someone whom I frequently ask for expert comments for my news stories. Because it’s from Alan, I know it will be interesting, and I wish I could attend (I’ll be in Toronto on covert military maneuvers for the Parti Quebecois for the Thomson Reuters investor day at the time).One thing strikes me, however, and it’s been on my mind all summer: We need to come up with some answers about how to keep the news business alive in the 21st century. So far, the cycle tends to be: talk, scratch head, talk some more, scratch head, ask questions, blame newspapers for everything, blame the media, talk, scratch head, lay off some staff… and it goes on and on. Is this event really going to change anything?If nothing else, it has an impressive list of companies that are attending (UPDATE: Mutter’s e-mail says that folks are coming from companies “such as” the ones listed below which means that maybe none of them will come! Thanks to Dan Hayes at Lee Enterprises for pointing this out. ). UPDATE 2: Alan Mutter tells me that people from the companies listed in the initial e-mail are registered to come. I’m sorry for saying in what I thought was a lighthearted manner that folks might not come. Alan is an honest operator and one of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to the future of news, and whatever happens at the conference, it’s going to be interesting. It also will feature former News Corp No. 2 Peter Chernin, a media vice president from Microsoft and even a Thomson Reuters VP for Semantic Technologies. Here’s the whole list so you can see exactly how many hands will be scratching their heads (they represent traditional media, tech companies, startups, universities and more):Advance Publications, BusinessWeek, Cable News Network, CBS, Comcast, Community Newspaper Holdings, Emmis Broadcasting, E.W. Scripps, Fox Television Networks, Hearst Corp, Lee Enterprises, McClatchy Co, MediaNews Group, MSNBC, National Public Radio, News Corp, New York Times Co, Schibsted, Thomson Reuters, Times Publishing Co, Tribune Co, U.S. News and World Report, Village Voice Media, Wired Magazine and Yahoo. Also: the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chi-Town Daily News, Everyblock.Com, Google News, Internet Archive, MinnPost, New America Media, PaidContent.Org, Pegasus News, Salon Media Group, San Diego News Network, Texas Tribune, True/Slant and West Seattle Blog, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Truviso, YuMe, Starcom MediaVest, Austin Ventures, Piper Jaffray, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT.

I stumbled across this headline on Wednesday morning:FT Bosses Launch PR Offensive For Paid-Content ModelI thought: “Launch? Don’t you mean ‘Launched’?” The Financial Times brass has been arguing for months that the only newspapers that will survive the tough times they have been through lately are those that stop giving away the news online, and can do it without sacrificing the advertising money they earn on the Web.Here’s an excerpt from the blog that produced that headline, courtesy of digitalarmm:

Editor Lionel Barber tells Channel 4 in an interview that there is now “an inexorable momentum behind charging for content” and he urges other national papers only considering introducing paywalls — essentially all of them — to act now (See the video link inside the digtalarmm blog post)

Here’s more:

Meanwhile Barber’s boss, FT CEO John Ridding, was busy telling Guardian.co.uk’s resident press blogger Roy Greenslade that the FT now makes one fifth of its profits from its website, compared to 17 percent in 2007.

None of this is too surprising, but here’s the third prong in the strategy: the equivalent of a house ad supporting the FT’s doctrine on paid content, not published as a real ad, but as the thrust of a commentary in the FT’s Lex column:

The challenge is to restore growth. Those titles most likely to benefit from any eventual rebound will be the top brands or specialist publications that held the line on advertising prices and can credibly charge for content. Weaker publications, having ceded pricing power in their desperation to win business, are unlikely to get it back.

It’s a good thing that the Lex team feels this way because it saves the FT from having to take out ad space in its own paper. That’s synergy!

The Bald Mountain resort in Sun Valley offers moguls for advanced skiers all winter long. Media reporters show up every July for the other kind of mogul, who lands among the picturesque Idaho mountains on a private jet and has a name like “Rupert Murdoch” or “Barry Diller.”Reporters are supposed to be part of the scenery — not part of the conference itself.* They must stand around and hope that one of the more than 200 invitees decides to speak to them, and hopefully dispense a few nuggets of news. Fortunately, this week’s weather is supposed to be sunny, dry and warm during the day, and comfortably chilly at night.For a Sun Valley freshman like this Reuters reporter, it sounds scary terrifying, despite the clement weather forecast. I asked New York Times media columnist David Carr, who covered the conference in 2007, for some advice. Here are some excerpts from our phone conversation;Why did you go to the Sun Valley conference?I was sent because (NYT deals columnist) Andrew Ross Sorkin was getting married. I was actually on vacation at the time, (but) Andrew is somebody at the paper who, whatever he asks for, we have to do. I was actually happy to step into the breach.What kind of reporting do you do?You’re arguing over real table scraps and taking deep meaning from people sitting physicallyadjacent to each other by the duck pond, but you can’t hear what they say… I got a big get. I saw Rupert Murdoch in a parking lot walking and talking to somebody. I can’t remember who he was talking to, but that constitutes a huge get in the context of Sun Valley. (Was it CNN’s Anderson Cooper? We don’t know.)Where does a reporter fit in to the Sun Valley pecking order?Your status there is non-status. When people say you spend your time jumping out of the bushes, they’re not kidding. … You’re all confronted by the same miserable circumstances. … The Allen people make it clear that no accommodation at all will be made, and that you are not invited. They’re not nasty about it, they’re not pernicious about it, but they’re very clear about it. (Read about Carr’s close-up shot with a burly security guard if you want proof.)How do you make news there?At Sun Valley, you’re more or less handed some lint balls, a couple of twigs and some rocks and told to make a narrative out of that. It can get ugly and it can lead to some fatuous journalism. … If you’re willing to leave your dignity at the door, keep your expectations under control and make sure to manage your editor’s expectations, you’re going to get your moguls in frolic. There’s worse things than that.We’re not above asking for some avuncular, reporterly advice about how to handle Sun Valley. Leave your comments here!* Some journalists do get invited, and this year’s elite include CNBC anchorwoman Erin Burnett, interviewer of the high-and-mighty Charlie Rose, New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta, longtime NBC news anchorman Tom Brokaw, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Huffington Post Senior Editor Willow Bay and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.(Photo: The sign says it all for reporters and photographers covering last year’s Sun Valley media and tech conference. Reuters/Rick Wilking)

Allen & Co’s annual Sun Valley media conference attracts more than moguls, technology executives and money managers. Of the more than 200 people on the invitation list, there are plenty whose connection to the conference’s themes are tangential at best.This is a perennial feature, previous attendees told me, but they usually don’t get as much attention because reporters are trying to break news on the big media guys. Many of them come because they have ties to banker and conference organizer Herb Allen. Others come because they’re just plain interesting people.Also, you can detect what likely themes will emerge in panel discussions. We’re guessing a host of generic discussions that usually mark high-level meetings: world health, making U.S. children more competitive in math and science so they’ll “innovate” and start tech companies, the United States’ export of “soft power” through which it influences other nations through its cultural and media exports, how sports and media can continue to get rich off each other, how to make big money in poorer countries and various other topics that we mention below. The “huh” category is reserved for pure guesswork.P.S. Here is one other observation we discovered while researching all 250+ names on the invitation list that we obtained: A far higher-than-expected number in their official biographies list the interviews they gave to Charlie Rose on his show as one of their top accomplishments. Rose, as you might expect, is expected to attend.P.P.S. We heard that there are one or two “special guests” scheduled to come, but have no idea who they are. Any guesses? I’ll start with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and director Steven Spielberg.Sports:

• Jerry Reinsdorf: Owner of the Chicago Bulls basketball team and the Chicago White Sox baseball team.
• Peter Ueberroth: managing director, the Contrarian Group Inc. (But better known as the former commissioner of Major League Baseball)
• Francis (Fay) Vincent, chairman, Vincent Enterprises. (Former MLB Commish.)
• Stan Kroenke, chairman, The Kroenke Group. (Real estate magnate, married to Wal-Mart heiress Anne Walton. Owns the Denver Nuggets basketball team and is majority shareholder of the U.K. Arsenal soccer team. He also owns way too much other stuff to list.)
• Allan “Bud” Selig, commissioner, Major League Baseball.
• David Stern, commissioner, National Basketball Association
• Roger Goodell, commissioner, National Football League
• Gary Bettman, commissioner, National Hockey League
• Jeffrey Wilpon, COO, New York Mets, and Fred Wilpon, chairman, Sterling Equities Inc., who also owns the Mets.
• Ted Leonsis, principal owner, Washington Capitals Hockey team. (And former AOL executive.)
• Daniel Gilbert, chairman, Quicken Loans. (He is the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team and bought an American Hockey League franchise in Erie, Pennsylvania. He also is a venture capitalist, and has invested $4 million in the social networking and style tips website StyleCaster)
• Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James. (The Chosen 1!)

Washington, D.C. types and other politicians:

• Ambassador Henry Crumpton. President, Crumpton Group LLC. (Former CIA agent in a variety of rather high-up positions. His company, according to a now-defunct version of his website, identifies ways for other companies to make profits in parts of the world that might not seem all that friendly at first.)
• David Kilcullen, partner, Crumpton Group LLC.
• Montgomery Meigs, visiting professor, Georgetown University. Also General, U.S. Army (Ret.)
• Luis Alberto Moreno, president, Inter-American Development Bank.
• Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City. (He is not on our latest version of the list, but you never know.)
• Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
• Sam Nunn, former Georgia Democrat senator and head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. (With this much starpower in Sun Valley, one hopes the missiles are aimed somewhere else for a few days.)
• Manuel A. Roxas, senator, Philippines.
• Raymond Chambers, secretary-general’s special envoy for malaria. (After all, if Bill and Melinda Gates are coming…)
• Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow, The Brookings Institution
• Martin Indyk, director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Senior Fellow, foreign policy, The Brookings Institution
• Michael Berman, president, The Duberstein Group. (Lobbyist for some big companies, including Comcast, General Motors and Goldman Sachs. He was counsel to former Vice President Walter Mondale during the Carter administration.)

Doctors:

• Delos Cosgrove, president and CEO, Cleveland Clinic.
• Donald Stein, department of emergency medicine, Emory University School of Medicine.
• Joseph Vacanti, chief of department of pediatric surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital.
• Denis Cortese, president, CEO, Mayo Clinic
• David Snow, chairman and CEO, Medco Health Solutions Inc.

Teachers:

Nearly every powerful media and technology executive you can think of will be camping out in the idyllic and affluent ski resort town of Sun Valley this week. They have aimed their Gulfstreams squarely at Idaho so they can show up at the 27th edition of Allen & Co’s media and technology conference, which investment banker Herb Allen holds every summer here.That means nearly every media reporter you can think of will be hovering among the hedgerows and parking lots (and in the bar, naturally), waiting to get a few precious seconds with super-wattage movie executives from DreamWorks’s Jeffrey Katzenberg to Paramount’s Brad Grey, technology heavyweights such as Michael Dell and Bill Gates, media kingpins Philippe Dauman and Rupert Murdoch and fresh-faced startup darlings like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Evan Williams and Ning’s Gina Bianchini.Reuters, of course, will be among the press crew at the scene. Reporters Yinka Adegoke and Alexei Oreskovic will show up, as will I, and photographer Rick Wilking will be shooting the pictures that at Sun Valley often tell a more eloquent story than any text dispatch can.We and a bunch of other journalists will be working around the clock (literally) to get these powerful, and often reclusive bigs to tell you what the next stunning media and technology deals will be. We’ll also be asking them how they are keeping their companies in business amid big changes in the ways people inhale their news and entertainment, as well as how they are dealing with the fallout of an economic crisis last year that nearly capsized the financial system.Also, keep an eye out for the glamorous or the unusual. Sun Valley guests typically show up with their families, and the whole affair is supposed to be casual. That means there’s always the possibility that Murdoch could lose more than his wedding ring. And celebrities, such as investor Vivi Nevo’s wife, actress Zhang Ziyi, are often part of the program.Check back with us at MediaFile, and remember to read Reuters’s dispatches from Sun Valley. Allen & Co might keep the press outside, but we’ll be working hard to bring you the inside story.(Photo: Designer Diane von Furstenberg and her husband, IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller at last year’s conference. They are the kind of media star-power that cruises around Sun Valley, Idaho, for a few days every summer. Reuters/Rick Wilking)

It’s refreshing to read some reasoned thinking about the future of newspapers that does not come from

• Newspaper executives whose cheerleading about how they will survive — somehow — gets undercut by reporting a 30 percent drop in profits one quarter later, or
• Internet Cassandras who want newspapers to burn and die because they hate editors who get precious about how the calling of journalism trumps the rules of free markets and (more typically) because they hold dear the tradition of thinking that newspapers only print lies.

The Financial Times is the bearer of these encouraging if cautionary words in an editorial that it ran on Tuesday:

There are legitimate concerns about the disappearance of general papers. The best dig up stories and provide coverage of local, national and foreign news that enlightens readers and citizens. It is easy to undervalue such news when it has been plentiful for decades, but society would feel its absence.

Perhaps some of the reporting done up to now by for-profit papers will in future be funded by foundations or trusts. But the industry should not lose faith in the free market. When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.

The FT is not saying that all newspapers have a future; it’s saying that the ones that don’t waste your time will survive because you will pay for them. To be sure, there is news that we want to know and news that we need to know (whether he want to or not). The question is: how many of our papers provide that? We would enjoy getting your response.