The New York Times is making strategic investments in the news content delivery category. The publisher, along with other news organizations, are financially backing news- aggregation software company, Ongo.  Details of the investment are not yet known, but some insight on this deal by The Wall Street Journal is quoted as follows:

The company, called Ongo, filed a trademark registration in April. In the filing, Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.” The reason for the Times’s investment in Ongo was unclear. As news organizations have grappled with how to deliver their content to digital devices and make money off of those readers, there have emerged a number of efforts to collaborate on packaging and selling content. News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.

This investment news is quite significant because the New York Times is a mainstream print publication, and it’s investing in such projects shows the potential in the company as well as the product’s purposefulness.  This technology could be used towards hyperlocal targeting purposes, especially if extended into the mobile market.

Also, news companies are trying to find some sort of workable mechanism/standard to distribute news online for a fee. Efforts in this regard are focused on both payment model and news format & distribution. At the end of the day, the response from the public is the determinant  for these steps to monetize online digital efforts by the newspapers and magazines.