Feb 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 3 Comments
Steven Rattner, a Wall Street money manager — and former reporter for the New York Times — wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, looking at alternative business models for the newspaper industry, an industry he says is failing to not only find new customers but to keep its existing customers. “The news about newspapers could hardly be more dismal,” he says, with “falling circulation, repeated rounds of layoffs, disappearing ads and a chain of bad earning reports. It’s an unsavory stew of ills, one that shows little prospect of becoming more appetizing.”
Rattner doesn’t seem to be a fan of newspapers going private — that just “substitutes one rapacious posse of shareholders for another equally fierce brigade of capitalists,” he says. So what are the other options? “Not-for-profit status might be one possibility,” he says, such as the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the Poynter Foundation (which also runs the Poynter Institute). He also suggests that the U.S. could somehow “create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded)” and then hand that out to news organizations that apply, in the same way public televsion does.
Jack Shafer of Slate says he thinks that for a capitalist, Rattner’s piece is short on business specifics, but from the sounds of it Shafer wishes that he had been harder on the industry. The Slate columnist says that newspapers have seen their business shrinking for at least 30 years and done nothing about it.
“Rattner’s piece neglects to mention that for better than 50 years newspaper companies have feasted on their advertisers, charging steep ad rates everywhere and confiscatory rates wherever they owned the only daily.
Now that the Web is underselling them on the ad front and other media are stealing eyeballs, should we weep for them?”
Shafer goes on to say that we should “call off pledge weeks for newspapers…. and let’s amend the Constitution to ban tax subsidies for newspapers. If dailies can’t make it on their own, they deserve death.” Howard Owens has some thoughts on newspapers as a business here, and Stowe Boyd says he thinks that Rattner is “cracked.”
Feb 16th, 2007 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From the OUT-LAW blog comes news that Scoopt — the site that takes cellphone snapshots and other “citizen media” and tries to commercialize them — decided to pass on some home videos of the British Royal Family that somehow came into its possession. The company apparently decided that publishing the video would have represented an invasion of privacy that wasn’t justified by any “news value,” and also that it might face legal issues.
Kyle MacRae of Scoopt told the legal issues blog: “Essentially it was private pictures and videos of the Royal Family taken for a particular event that through some bizarre sequence of events ended up with somebody who sent it to us.” He said his initial instinct was that the video could be “pretty valuable,” but on further reflection he decided against trying to market it.
“We don’t own the copyright nor do we have any legitimate licence to that copyright, nor does the Scoopt member who sent it to us. Do we have an over-riding public interest story? Is it worth it?”
“In this case it was just completely harmless, it was innocuous, it was nice [so] we weighed all that up and 24 hours later we just decided we weren’t going to handle this.”
Scoopt acts as a broker for people who have cellphone photos or videos, and tries to sell them to newspapers, magazines, websites and other media. The service was set up about 18 months ago, and splits any revenue 50/50 with the owner, who keeps the copyright to the content. One of its successes was the sale of a photo of the airplane that baseball star Cory Liddle crashed into the side of a New York skyscraper last year.
Feb 15th, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Another day, another poll that shows a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the media. And this one — from polling firm Zogby and WE Media — also indicates that most Americans (55 per cent) believe blogs and bloggers are important to the future of American journalism. Almost three-quarters of those surveyed said that citizen journalism will “play a vital role” in the media of the future. More than 75 per cent said that the Internet has had “a positive impact” on the overall quality of journalism.
Zogby released the results at the recent WE Media conference on social media, and the poll was done online — so there will no doubt be some suspicion that it is skewed towards seeing blogs as important. But online or not, the survey involved 5,384 adults nationwide between Jan. 30 and Feb. 1. More than 70 per cent said that they were “dissatisfied” with the quality of American journalism. More than 60 per cent said they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.
“When it comes to blogs and journalism, the cat is out of the bag, the train is out of the station, the plane has pushed back from the gate,” Zogby told Eat The Press. More respondents (81 per cent) said Web sites are important as a source of news, although television ranked at 78 per cent, and radio at 73 per cent. Newspapers and magazines trailed at 69 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. While blogs were rated as important sources of news by 30 per cent of the respondents, they were not considered as good a news source as a neighbour or friend -– 39 per cent of those surveyed said that the latter was an important source of information.
Update:
This is sort of tangentially related, but Vin Crosbie has a rant up about “citizen journalism” and how it is far from a panacea for the problems that are affecting journalism.
Feb 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 10 Comments
I confess that I still don’t get the whole Belgium vs. Google thing. I keep reading about it and reading about it, and thinking about it — hoping that I have somehow missed a crucial point or argument in the newspapers’ position that makes this whole thing sensible in any way. But by now I am totally convinced: It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It is just dumb, with a capital D.
As Danny Sullivan notes in his overview of the case, this complaint from the Belgian group known as Copiepresse dates back almost a year. After the first complaint — as is customary in these types of cases, when sites don’t want to be included in Google’s index — the search engine advised the agency (as Google notes here) to use the well-known “robots.txt” file to exclude parts of its websites from Google’s spider-bots. Copiepress apparently said that this process, which takes about 10 minutes, was unacceptable.
So after a year of legal wrangling, and millions of dollars in legal costs, the Belgian group has “won” and has forced Google to remove its newspaper content. In other words, it has prevented the world’s largest and most respected search engine from showing links to that content to people who want that content — and doing so for free. And the claim that Google makes money from this content, which others have argued in the past, is just as stupid, since Google News doesn’t carry advertisements on its content pages.
Carlo at Techdirt shares my feelings on this matter, and I know many other journalists who do as well. Some companies would kill for the kind of profile and access that being linked in Google News provides to potential readers. Someone at Copiepresse clearly sees this as some kind of noble battle against a U.S. tech giant, but all they are really doing is harming themselves. Oh yes, and looking stupid. Did I mention that part?
Update:
Tim O’Reilly says over here that he supports the publishers — who complain that Google’s “cached” links provide access to their archived content (for which they charge). But as a commenter notes, there is already an established way to let Google crawl your pages without caching, called the “noarchive” tag. I also fail to see why Tim supports Google’s use of “snippets” for book search, but doesn’t support the same thing for news search.
Feb 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Courtesy of Lucas Grindley’s blog comes a comment from Rob Curley, the digital media whiz-kid behind the Washington Post’s great new OnBeing video feature, which I wrote about here. In a comment on Melissa Worden’s blog, Rob responds to questions about how the new feature can be monetized:
I’m going to say something that I’ve never said in my 10 years as an online journalist: I don’t care how it’s monetized. Don’t get me wrong: I love capitalism. I want our newspaper to make money hand-over-fist so that we can continue to do journalism that matters, but …
and then he adds:
Why are online journalists treated so differently at most newspapers than the print journalists are? I mean, if a print editor was planning a huge enterprise project that was going to be really special for the newspaper (and would take some resources to do successfully), would people ask that print editor how he or she was going to monetize it?
The answer, Rob says, is “never.” I’m not quite sure that’s the case, however. I know that at our newspaper, new projects that take a lot of resources are often subjected to a rigorous business case analysis — although to be fair that isn’t alway the difference between a project living and dying. But still, I think Rob’s point is a good one: if it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea. Period. The rest of his comment is worth reading too.
