The federal judge has ruled that a woman who describes herself as an “investigative blogger” is not entitled to First Amendment protection for allegedly defamatory statements she made about an Oregon attorney.
Crystal Cox (right), a real estate agent and blogger from Eureka, Mont., set up a network of websites, including this one, that criticize the conduct of attorney Kevin Padrick in his role as trustee of the failed financial firm called Summit Accommodators, which collapsed in 2008 amid charges of fraud.
Among Cox’ accusations is that Padrick hired a hitman to kill her, a charge that Padrick vigorously denies. The attorney says that Cox’ allegations have so overwhelmed the search engines that his business is off more than 80% this year. “Google ‘Kevin Padrick’ and you’ll see the first 10 pages are from Crystal Cox,” Padrick told Oregon Live.
Cox, who sarcastically describes herself as an “Unhinged Blogger Exposing Corruption in the US Bankruptcy Courts,” fills her blog with accusations, obscenities and character assassination, tactics which are typical of hate bloggers. “‘Unhinged Blogger’ Crazy Crystal Cox Says that Jeff Manning of the Oregonian is Bought and Paid for AGAIN, oh and Jeff Manning, Oregonian, is an Asshole,” she titled one post. It’s filled with accusations about an investigative reporter for the Oregonian newspaper, none of which are backed by citations. The post is peppered with links to copies of the same article on other websites, most of which are presumably maintained by Cox, as well links to other hate sites that the author has created.
On the other hand, Cox has also assembled a substantial library of documents related to Kevin Padrick and the trust he administers. She presents most of these without comment, challenging her audience to do their own research. We demurred, but we admit that she appears to have done her homework.
In ruling that Cox was not entitled to the protections provided to mainstream news outlets, U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez said the blogger “was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story,” according to the AP report.
So who’s right in this case? Much as we find Cox’ vendetta-fueled tactics repugnant, we’re more concerned about any efforts to inhibit free speech, even by someone who is clearly a little nuts. However, we are also concerned about attempts to create distinctions between traditional and new media. We’d rather see this case judged as a libel issue, where precedents are clearly established. Why is the distinction between blogger and media outlet even meaningful at a time when properties like Huffington Post and Mashable can go from sideline to superpower in a matter of a couple of years?
There is an intriguing dimension to this case that the court didn’t address: the impact of Cox’ activities on her target’s search engine performance. The case illustrates that a motivated and energetic blogger can significantly damage someone else’s reputation by surrounding their name with negative keywords in search results. Is that a form of libel? Could Google be compelled to change its search algorithm as a consequence of a First Amendment court decision? Do we even want to go there?
Jim Romenesko tells his side of the story behind his messy and public breakup with Poynter Institute, and he couldn’t be more gracious. Actually, there’d be no point in scolding the rank-amateur behavior that prompted him to resign suddenly earlier this month over allegations of improper sourcing by his Poynter editor, Julie Moos. Visitors to Moos’ Nov. 10 commentary have done the talking for him.
Romenesko is the prolific blogger who has attracted a large following with his almost obsessively updated newsfeed about the latest goings-on in media. His style for years has been to post short summaries or excerpts and one or two links to the source. Most media outlets consider it an honor to get a link from Romenesko, who has more than 40,000 Twitter followers and a huge mind share among media professionals.
However, Moos saw peril in the practice, and on Nov. 10 raised questions about Romenesko’s sourcing of third-party content, essentially accusing him of plagiarism. Using examples provided by a Columbia Journalism Review reporter, Moos demonstrated that Romenesko has republished rather lengthy passages without using quotation marks to cite the source.
What Moos failed to do was consult others for their opinions or give Romenesko himself much more than a cursory heads-up that the post was going to appear. The reaction from readers – including several of the sources allegedly wronged by the sourcing practices – came down like a ton of bricks. As of this morning, Moos’ post had collected nearly 300 comments, most ranging from critical to hostile. Rather than taking umbrage at the Romenesko, most people said they were grateful for the service he provided and had no confusion whatsoever about where his information was coming from. And even if the sourcing wasn’t always rigorous, the outcome was: gushers of traffic to their websites. Which is a good thing.
Romenesko’s account on his new blog, JimRomenesko.com, fills in some of the background details. According to Romenesko, Moos’ blog post was preceded by months of negotiation over renewal of Romenesko’s contract, which expires on December 31. Two days before the post appeared, Moos expressed concern to Romenesko about his plans to sell ads on his new website, potentially cannibalizing Poynter’s business. Without explicitly accusing Moos of anything, Romenesko’s timeline portrays an increasingly panicked editor who is about to see her star columnist become a competitor. The sourcing accusations appear to be timed to cut off competition at the knees.
It’s unfortunate that this issue degraded into personal attacks, because the issues that Moos raised are legitimate. The old rules of attribution seem out of touch with the new age of copy-and-paste publishing. A decade ago, publishers sued each other over “deep links.” Today they beg for them. Erika Fry, the CJR reporter who first raised the sourcing issue to Moos, published a calm and level-headed account of her concerns shortly after Romenesko quit. She was never out to get Romenesko, she says, but rather to understand how his own rules of sourcing work. Poynter could play a valuable role in facilitating a discussion over the new ethics of plagiarism. It’s unfortunate that one editor chose to use the issue for character assassination instead.
Gannett CEO Craig Dubow (right) resigned last week for health reasons, saying that back and hip problems prevent him for fulfilling his duties. He leaves a job that could pay him as much as $9.4 million this year, but don’t feel too bad for Dubow: He’s eligible for severance pay of up to $37 million.
The irony of this kind of executive compensation for a company that has laid off nearly 40% of its workforce over the last six years isn’t lost on former New York Times columnist Peter Lewis, who posts a savage send-up of Gannett’s extravagance on his blog. Lewis is particularly brutal in contrasting Dubow’s performance to that of Steve Jobs, who died last week:
Annual base pay: Steve Jobs $1. Craig Dubow $1.2 million.
Stock price during CEO tenure: Apple, up 4,000+ percent. Gannett, down 85 percent.
Job creation during CEO tenure: Apple, plus 28,000. Gannett: minus 20,000.
Notable new products as CEO of Apple: Macintosh, iMac, MacBook, iPod, iTunes, Apple Stores, iPhone, iPad, etc., etc.
Notable new products as CEO of Gannett: ?
Executive pay has been out of control at US companies for decades now, but the practice is particularly offensive at companies in dying industries that are downsizing their way out of existence. Is it conceivable that a talented and motivated executive could be found to lead Gannett at a salary of less than $9 million? How does a company look its employees in the eye and ask them to accept yet another layoff or salary freeze when it nearly doubled the salary of the head of its US newspaper division?
We might just go occupy Wall Street over this.
Open Source Journalism
Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis dig into the application of open source software principles to journalism and find some parallels. “The news industry is one of the last great industrial hold-overs, akin to the car industry,” they write. “Newsrooms are top-heavy, and built on a factory-based model of production.” In contrast open source software and the so-called “maker” culture exemplified by Make magazineencourage collaboration, sharing and continuous experimentation.
Rethinking journalism requires time and open-mindedness that a lot of journalists might not have, but the power of the open source model can’t be denied. Usher and Lewis imagine a new role for journalists as creators of “the building blocks for the story. And while they write this code, it can be commented on, shared, fact-checked, or augmented with additional information such as photos, tweets, and the like.” Seems to work OK for Wikipedia. The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is working on ways to make this model viable. We hope they succeed.
Quality at 5¢ a Word
Demand Media, whose mission is to erase the distinction between journalism and typing, says it doesn’t need freelancers so much any more. That’s because Google changed its search algorithm, and that means Demand’s editorial mission has shifted.
In case you’re not familiar, Demand Media employs freelance writers to churn out search-optimized content for posting on enormously popular websites like Cracked.com, LiveStrong.com and eHow.com. The company assigns stories based upon search popularity, meaning that it favors how-to and top-10 formats. A perfect Demand story would be “10 Ways to Remove Coffee Stains.”
Demand is noted for paying freelancers next to nothing while touting the benefits of brand-building and flexibility. “No matter where you end up, you have the potential to influence millions of people with your articles,” says its Writing Jobs page. Writers can make up to $25 an article, or even more! With so many journalists out of work, Demand has succeeded in a recruiting a large pool of contributors, despite its starvation wages.
But apparently not so much now. Google is on a campaign to remove the stuff that these content farms churn out, so the company is shifting to slide shows and videos. Demand says it has eliminated 300,000 low-quality articles from eHow and is focusing on going upscale. “It’s all about quality for us,” said Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford. At a nickel a word.
It’s Not a Paywall, It’s…
Paywalls continue to sprout like crabgrass, but publishers are beginning to show some creative thinking. The Day of New London, Conn. will now charge between $9.99 and $22.99 per month for access to its online content, archives and mobile versions, but subscribers will also become part of a brand loyalty program called The Day Passport, “which features rewards, events and giveaways to local businesses, entertainment venues and cultural institutions.” We were pushing this idea two years ago. Publishers need to expand their revenue base beyond advertising and subscription fees. Affinity programs for local businesses are a natural extension.
We also like what the Richmond Times-Dispatch is doing: Instead of firewalling its content, it’s creating premium content packages such as this one on the Civil War sesquicentennial. The Civil War feature combines historic pages from the newspaper archive with original new material. Pricing begins at $1.99/month, though it’s not clear what other premium packages are planned. We like the concept the concept of charging for added value, and we’re particularly glad to have the chance to use the word “sesquicentennial” in a sentence.
News Corp. CEO Rebekah Brooks is facing police questioning and at least nine journalists and three police officers could face jail as the scandal unfolds, reports the Daily Mail. New e-mail evidence indicates that “four-figure payments” may have been made to police officers to ignore the activities of private investigators hired by the tabloid. The Telegraph says the payments may have totaled more than £100,000
And it gets worse. Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, could face criminal prosecution in both the UK and the US over the phone-hacking charges, several outlets report. James Murdoch is chairman of News International, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns News of the World. He has admitted to making out-of-court settlements to victims of the phone hacks and to misleading Parliament, although he maintains he didn’t do so deliberately. Murdoch is liable for prosecution in the US because News Corp. is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. “Under American law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a crime for American companies to offer corrupt payments to foreign government officials,” says the Telegraph, which, like most British papers, is covering this scandal with gleeful abandon.
We are pleased to inform our readers that News of the World is not the same tabloid as Weekly World News, the US tabloid that has long been a crusader in its coverage of the threat of space aliens to our way of life. WWN is alive and well, and will continue in its mission to cover the stories that others fear to expose.
The 168-year-old News of the World, which boasts a Sunday circulation of 2.5 million, will publish its last edition on July 10. The move comes as outrage in Britain reached a fever pitch over allegations that the tabloid had illegally accessed and even deleted voice mail messages on the phone of a 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped and later found murdered.
Allegations of phone hacking are nothing new for the tabloid. Reports of reportorial excess have swirled around News of the World for two years. However, public anger and advertiser boycotts grew this week amid allegations that as many as 4,000 people have been victimized by such tactics, including relatives of terrorist attack victims and soldiers killed in combat.
The tipping point came with reports this week that hired investigators had not only hacked into the phone of 13-year-old Milly Dowler (left) but also deleted some of the voicemails, giving her parents false hope that the girl was still alive. James Murdoch, the heir apparent to the Rupert Murdoch empire, issued a statement saying such a practice – if it occurred – ”was inhuman and has no place in our company.”
Analysts speculated that the decision to shutter the News of the World and lay off 200 employees was made by the younger Murdoch and supported by his dad, although such drama has not been typical of the elder statesman. Skeptics saw more nefarious motives.
Specifically, they questioned why News Corp. didn’t demand the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and editor of News of the World at the time the allegations first surfaced. Brooks is a Murdoch confidante, and critics suggested that the jobs of 200 people had been sacrificed to preserve hers.
The scandal also broke as News Corp. neared the final stages of its bid for BSkyB, the largest pay-TV broadcaster in the United Kingdom, with over 10 million subscribers, according to Wikipedia. Critics suggested that the cloud created by the News of the World allegations could have jeopardized Murdoch’s bid.
Writing in the Telegraph¸ Harry Wallop quotes politicians and media commentators speculating that an even more cynical business objective was involved. News Corp. had already announced plans to move to a seven-day-a-week publishing schedule across its four UK titles: the Sun, News of the World, the Times and the Sunday Times. The expansion could potentially create internal competition across the News Corp. properties. Eliminating one title may have little impact on revenues as advertisers simply migrate their business to other holdings within the portfolio.
Whatever the motives, the decision strikes us as a massive overreaction. Scandals like this are usually addressed by a few high-level resignations and some corporate self-flagellation. It could be that the timing was simply bad for News Corp., but depriving 200 people of their livelihoods – and a couple of million Brits of their weekly celebrity scandals – strikes us as a bit over the top.
How bad is it in the magazine world? Two years ago we bought a subscription to ESPN magazine after finding a promotional offer of 26 issues for just $2. We subscribed simply for the experience of getting a fortnightly magazine for less than the cost of postage.
But it turns out we were getting a lot more than just ESPN. Around the time our subscription expired, we started getting Golf magazine every month in the mail. Golf’s promotional price is $10 a year, but we never paid for or requested a subscription. Then, about three months ago, Sports Illustrated began showing up in our mailbox each week. We like that because we’ve actually paid for Sports Illustrated in the past. However, we aren’t paying for this one. It appears to be another side=benefit of our $2 ESPN deal.
We’re not sure if this embarrassment of riches is at an end, but we do know that altogether we’re receiving about $70 worth of magazine subscriptions for $2. Why? Because the publishers are desperate. New Audit Bureau of Circulations rules have significantly relaxed the criteria for paid circulation. That means the publisher statements for Golf and Sports Illustrated now count us as subscribers despite the fact that we never requested or paid for either subscription. Any advertiser that thinks it’s getting an engaged audience through this accounting sleight-of-hand is fooling itself. Don’t get us wrong: We hope the SI subscription never runs out, but we are never, ever going to pay for it. Are we as valuable to an advertiser as a paying subscriber? Not so much. Is the print magazine industry in a crisis? We think so. BTW, we did not get the attractive tote bag that comes with a paid subscription..
Gannett Pounds 700 Nails in Print’s Coffin
If you need any further evidence that print has no future, look no further than Gannett’s announcement of 700 layoffs this week, says Poynter’s Rick Edmonds. Revenues at Gannett’s 81 community newspapers were down 7% overall and nearly 10% in print, even as most mainstream media are experiencing a modest recovery right now. Not so in print. Publishing operating margins fells four times as fast as revenues, and it’s been a decade since Gannett bought any print properties at all. Meanwhile, the company has reduced its stable of newspapers from 99 to 81. Its broadcast and online operations are actually doing just fine, but they’re not growing fast enough to make up for declines in print advertising. That’s the problem across the industry. Online revenues are growing, but the volume and margins are a tiny fraction of print revenue.
Gannett, which traditionally dances to the tune of Wall Street, is sending a message in aggressively cutting back on its already lean print businesses. In that respect, it’s ahead of the market. Edmonds points out that, ironically, “Metro papers like the Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News that have adopted a high price/high quality circulation strategy know readers will not be satisfied with skinny papers that have little worth reading. So those newsrooms are protected and, in a few cases, growing.” For a while, that is. Those papers are milking an aging but still profitable population that will dwindle sharply over the next decade. When the tipping point is reached and paid subscribers no longer justify a printed product, the closures will happen en masse.
Nonprofits Figuring It Out
We wrote recently about California Watch, a nonprofit investigative news operation that is breaking even by syndicating its content at low cost to dozens of news outlets to customize as they wish. California Watch and others like it understand the economics of multiple revenue streams. Few newspapers can afford to support large investigative reporting staffs, but a bunch of smaller publishers can collectively contribute enough to make an independent investigative team viable.
Co-director and veteran New England TV reporter Joe Bergantino (left) says, “To be successful you have to walk through the door and immediately think about how to make money.” And what’s wrong with that? For the last 50 years or so, journalists have had the luxury of having the bills paid by people they don’t even know. Very few businesses operate that way, so Bergantino and his tiny team are simply functioning by the same rules that small businesses have lived with for years. Does that make the quality of their work less reputable?
Got HTML5?
The Financial Times’ new mobile app racked up 100,000 users in its first week. The twist is that the FT decided to develop the app in the new HTML5 format instead of coding it for the iPad or Android platform. If you don’t know what HTML5 is, here’s a tutorial. It’s an important new technology that could make Flash animation and other plug-in-based multimedia obsolete.
HTML5 works entirely within the browser and gives the publisher considerably more control over display, organization and animation than earlier HTML versions did. Information can be stored and read offline, as well as updated automatically without user intervention (No more Adobe updates; how cool is that?) The trick is that most browsers don’t fully support it yet, but that’s just a matter of time. Apple’s Safari is one of the best browsers for HTML5 apps. That’s not surprising, given that Steve Jobs has engaged in a bitter public dispute with Adobe over Flash. The downside for Apple is that HTML5 enables publishers to deliver apps themselves without using the iTunes store as an intermediary. That’s why the FT is updating its content directly, without going through the iTunes store. HTML5 will also make it easier for publishers like Playboy, whose content wouldn’t make it past the Apple censors, has also gone the HTML5 route.
Miscellany
If you’ve ever wondered whether the image you’re about to publish has been Photoshopped, try out this new service from Google. Upload or type the URL of an image and Google will now scan its database for images just like it – including the exact same image. We’re not sure what it will find if given a photo of one of Lady Gaga’s dresses, but for those beautiful sunset landscapes that come in from “citizen journalists,” it might be worth a try, just to be safe.
John Locke has become the first self-published author to sell over 1 million books on Kindle. The 60-year-old Louisville, KY resident has written nine novels, mostly thrillers, and charges only 99 cents for the Kindle versions. He says he has no intention of raising his prices. Having brought in about a million dollars this way, Locke is making a decent income for a novelist, especially since he doesn’t have to pay publisher and distributor costs that typically leave the author with only about 10% of a book’s cover price.
In deference to Huffington Post, The New York Times plans to intermingle news and opinion in its “Week in Review” section, saying, “We thought readers would find it more useful to have the stories, photographs and charts offered in an integrated way.” Back in the day, op-ed sections themselves were controversial. Now they will be indistinguishable, although the Times says it will clearly label opinionated content.
And Finally…
This one is almost too bizarre to be believed. A couple weeks ago, it was revealed that a popular Syrian lesbian blogger who went by the name of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” is actually a 40-year-old married dude from Scotland. Despite the fact that gay activists in Syria believe this guy put their safety at risk, he continues to blog under the pseudonym, although he did post a profuse apology for the ruse.
The very same week, a guy in Ohio named Bill Graber admitted that he is Paula Brooks, an executive editor for lesbian site LezGetReal.com. Graber used his wife’s name in the hoax and even posed as the father of the fictitious blogger for media interviews, claiming Paula is deaf. Graber got away with hoax for three years because he was so believable, according to LezGetReal’s managing editor.
Months ago, Graber, posing as ”Paula Brooks,” reportedly encouraged “Amina Arraf” to start a blog, but neither Graber nor MacMaster knew the other was really a man posing as a lesbian woman online. According to the Washington Post, Arraf and Brooks “often flirted” with each other online as well.
This week, after both hoax identities unraveled, Graber described his interactions to the Washington Post with Arraf/MacMaster as a “major sock-puppet hoax crash into a major sock-puppet hoax.”
We can only hope neither sock puppet survived the collision.
A group of bloggers is suing Huffington Post, founder Arianna Huffington, and AOL for $105 million, saying they deserve to be paid more – or ever paid at all – for the content they’ve contributed to the site. The bloggers are miffed by the fact that Arianna Huffington sold the site for $315 million to AOL and didn’t offer to share any of the windfall with the 9,000 or so bloggers who have contributed free content for the last four years. On the other hand, Huffington never promised to pay those bloggers anything, so no contract has been violated.
The plaintiffs actually aren’t challenging HuffPo on contract terms. In a press conference, they said they’re suing under common law based on a claim of “unjust enrichment.” In other words, what Huffington did is just wrong, despite the fact that there was no legal prohibition against her doing it.
Spokesman Jonathan Tasini (above left), who is described as both a union organizer and journalist, had some eyebrow-singeing words for Ms. Huffington. “We are going to make Arianna Huffington a pariah in the progressive community,” he said. “No one will blog for her. She’ll never [be invited to] speak. We will picket her home. We’re going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell.” Restraining order, anyone?
Journalists Deserting Bay Area
The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club surveyed its membership and found that there wasn’t much membership left to survey. A non-scientific census found that 45% of the 700 journalists “accepted a buyout or voluntarily left their job during a period of downsizing during the past 10 years,” according to a news item posted in theSan Francisco Business Times. The wording is vague about whether that means those laid-off journos are still out of work – and only 3% of respondents said they’re currently unemployed – but the research is being interpreted as a sign that nearly half the journalists in the San Francisco area have fled during the last decade.
The findings are unsurprising in light of the massive hits Bay Area newspapers have taken in the face of electronic competition. The San Jose Mercury News has cut well over half its staff in recent years, and the San Francisco Chronicle was only weeks away from being shuttered by Hearst before heavy cost cuts spared its life two years ago. Neither is at all well.
Miscellany
Fortunately, those laid-off journalists won’t have to pay as much for their Amazon Kindles as they used to. Amazon just introduced an ad-supported version of its e-reader that’s priced $25 lower than the version without the commercials. That means the Kindle, which was introduced in 2007 at a price of $399, is now only $114, and we can’t imagine why Amazon doesn’t just drop the price to $99 and make the device an impulse purchase. It continues to make strange decisions in the face of heavy new competition from tablets.
Speaking of which, a survey of 1,431 tablet owners by Google’s Admob mobile ad network found that tablet-toters spend more time with their devices than with magazines, newspapers, radio, laptops or TV (although not combined). We’re not sure if the total includes time spent cuddling the tablets while sleeping, but it was an excuse for Search Engine Watch to put together this nifty infographic (click to super-size).
It’s disconcerting when the CEO of one of the emerging giants of online publishing is quoted referring to the acquisition of a news organization as “the future of the content space.” However, that’s how AOL CEO Tim Armstrong apparently sees the hundreds of millions of dollars in recent investments his company had made to acquire properties like TechCrunch, Patch.com and now Huffington Post. He’s filling a space.
He could do worse than to fill it with the staff at Huffington, however. The $315 million deal, which was announced late last night, puts HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington (right) in charge of all of AOL’s editorial properties, which include TechCrunch and the rapidly growing Patch.com network of local news sites. She also gets Mapquest and MovieFone thrown into the deal. This should be a dream come true for Huffington, who launched HuffPo as a blog six years ago and who has taken only $1 million in investment capital since then. The New York Times has all the facts.
Huffington has a chance to shape a new kind of media company as AOL struggles to recover from its disastrous merger with Time-Warner and its reputation for editorial superficiality. AOL has made some innovative strides in investing in Patch, and its earlier acquisitions of TechCrunch and Engadget demonstrate a willingness to invest in distinctive editorial models that challenge mainstream media. However, as The New Yorker noted in a recent critical profile of AOL and Armstrong (summarized on PaidContent.org), the company’s failure to hire an editor-in-chief has made it appear strategically aimless. The installation of Huffington in that job is a chance to fix that.
HuffPo is growing like a weed. The organization now has more than 200 employees and is on track to generate $60 million in advertising revenue this year. Paywall fans might want to note that HuffPo has no paid subscription model. In fact, as The New York Times points out, readers’ ability “to leave comments on Huffington Post news articles and blog posts and to share them on Twitter and Facebook has been a major reason the site attracts so many readers.”
AOL has been such a backwater of editorial mediocrity for so long that it’s hard to shake the assumption that the company will find a way to screw this up. However, Armstrong does appear willing to place bets on some properties that are breaking the mold of how journalism has traditionally been done. With Huffington at the helm, AOL has a strong leader in this “space.” Please just don’t call it that.
Shaky Daily
Have you downloaded your copy of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily for the iPad yet? Don’t rush. A lot of early adopters are apparently still waiting for it to load. PaidContent.org says the app routinely takes a minute or more to start and that crashes and freezes are common. In ratings on the iTunes store, “even the positive reviews mention load problems and crashes,” writes Staci Kramer. Adds John Gruber, “My opinion of it has declined each day.”
Alan Mutter is a little more definitive, pronouncing The Daily “a dud” based upon its first issue. With “the barest possible news report back-filled by a bunch of vapid features,” the journal is “more like the Etch-A-Sketch edition of Us magazine than the ground-breaking news platform it purports to be,” he writes. Ouch.
To be fair, The Daily is in start-up mode, and anyone who has ever launched a new publication will tell you that the first issue is usually not portfolio material. Few people will remember these early negatives if the venture turns out to be a hit (remember Amazon’s frequent outages in the late 90s? Neither do we). One impressive achievement for the new publication is the stable of blue-chip advertisers it’s lined up. AdAge says they include Macy’s, Verizon Wireless, Land Rover, Pepsi Max and Virgin Atlantic. It also ran a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl, but that achievement is made less notable by the fact that its parent company owns Fox Broadcasting.
The Times They Are Delaying
It’s been nearly a year since The New York Timesannounced plans to charge for access to its online content starting in January. Now January has passed and we’re still waiting for what publishers hope will be a model for other subscription wannabes across the Internet.
Perhaps the Times is dallying because it doesn’t want the paywall to be another Daily. Times staffers are laboring to fix more than 200 bugs in the technology for charging readers, Bloomberg says. The difficulties apparently stem from the complexity of the app, which has several payment tiers and which must balance limited access with the offsetting needs to be visible to search engines and to enable readers to easily post links on Twitter and Facebook.
While the world waits for the time strategy to unfold, the paper has quietly launched an unrelated and useful recommendation engine. Neiman’s Megan Garber caught up with Marc Frons, the Times’ CTO for digital operations, and discovers that the engine does a lot more than simply spit back articles that share similar tags. Frons says the program also looks at “people’s patterns, and how they move around the site, and what sorts of different things they might look at.” It tries to figure out what you might like even if you haven’t read stories in that domain recently. On the back end, it gives the Times greater insight into what readers want, which probably has some value in determining what they will pay for.
And Finally…
We were so stunned by the ad for coupon broker Groupon that ran on the Super Bowl last night that we fished it out of YouTube to be sure we hadn’t heard it wrong. We hadn’t. Actor Timothy Hutton delivers a solemn soliloquy on the suffering of the people of Tibet under Chinese rule. “Their very culture is in jeopardy,” he says. But there’s a bright spot: “They still whip up an amazing fish curry,” and you can get it for half off with your GroupOn membership.
We hope this ad is a subtle joke. If so, it sets new standards for subtlety. In a posting on the Groupon blog, founder Andrew Mason explains that the ad is partly satirical. “What if we did a parody of a celebrity-narrated, PSA-style commercial that you think is about some noble cause (such as ‘Save the Whales’), but then it’s revealed to actually be a passionate call to action to help yourself (as in ‘Save the Money’)?”
Actually, we think it’s a terrible idea. Using the suffering of people and the peril of entire species to sell advertising is sort of baldly offensive on its face, don’t you think? If the ad is intended to raise money for Tibet, it would have been nice to offer diners the option of sending their savings directly to Tibetan relief. But the ad neglects that detail.
If you agree that this campaign is over the top, please tweet your thoughts to Andrew Mason. Better yet, give to The Tibet Fund, where Groupon is saving face by matching donations up to $100,000.
“You don’t transform from broken. You don’t tinker or tweak. You start again – anew
“Doing more of the same with less results in the same done worse. It is prolonging the death of a broken business model rather than adapting to the realities of the present.
“Just about everything we are doing at JRC – and just about what every newspaper or legacy media company is doing – is focused on getting ON the Web. Very little is being done to position legacy media companies to be OF the Web.
“There is now an even bigger audience for our core product – news – than ever before. And in the crowded marketplace that is the Web, it is the deep trust the audience has for print that is leading us and them online.
“To be in the news business now means you must run your business as digital first. And that means print last. That is how this new world works.
“[The reason the industry isn’t changing faster is] fear, lack of knowledge and an aging managerial cadre that is cynically calculating how much they DON’T have to change before they get across the early retirement goal line. Stop listening to the newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world.
“We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Reduce it or stop it. Outsource it or sell it.
“We bought every reporter – and now some ad salespeople as well –a Flip video cam. They paid for themselves in about a month as we have gone from 100,000 video streams a month to about two million.
“One [JRC] group in Pennsylvania is trying to meet a challenge set by Jay Rosen [called] the ‘100% solution:’ Cover everything that happens on a particular subject in a particular area. Using the crowd, Twitter, smartphones plus Google Docs to manage it all, they are attempting to create real-time game coverage of high school sports. That’s every game in real time.
“Citizen Skip Harrison of Trenton New Jersey has an all-abiding interest in the New Jersey educational system. He is part of the Community Media Lab at our paper The Trentonian. We are training interested citizens to be journalists.
“We have successfully printed pages on a press using only free Web tools. The next time some rep comes to your shop brandishing a $20 million system, tell him the price just went down. Way down. Our capital expenditures have been reduced by half.
“In Torrington, CT at the Register Citizen, our young publisher Matt DeRienzo deputized his entire community to fact check all of his products online and in print…He issued an invitation to every reader, source and community member to hold them accountable and engage in correcting, improving or expanding the story. Matt’s innovative approach…has created an online audience 6.5 time greater than his print audience and he has taken what was a money-losing operation into a profitable one.
“As of Q3, year to date, the Journal Register Company['s financial performance] is handily outpacing the industry as compared to figures provided by the Newspaper Association of America. JRC’s ad performance has been three times better than the industry. More importantly the company’s digital revenue has grown from negligible to 11% of ad revenue in November – in less than a year. With each passing day, that revenue is also less tied to the print buys. More than 60% of digital revenue this month is NOT tied to print sales. Our company which was bankrupt in 2009, is projected to have a profit margin of 15% this year.”
Poynter’s always-insightful Rick Edmonds asks if he’s missing something: In Hyperlocal News, Where’s the Urgency?, He examines an assortment of hyperlocal news startups and comes away wanting more. “Sampling a host of aspiring online hyperlocal franchises — Examiner.com, Outside.in, OurTown.com and others — I’m consistently underwhelmed. One roundup of ‘news within a mile of me’ had crime stories a month old and many reports on the business travails of Outback Steakhouse’s parent company.”
Edmonds makes an important point about the distinction between “content” and quality. Basically, having a blog does no one any good if it’s used to publish crap. However, a lot of blogs (many hyperlocal publications are essentially blogs) put publishing ahead of reporting. Throw it up there and see if anyone reads it because – you know – you can. This is a natural result of the current fascination with social media as a shiny new object. People are publishing because it’s cool to publish. Five years from now, that novelty will have worn off and we’ll be figuring out what these new tools are really good for.
We expect that hyperlocal journalism ventures will consolidate into a small number of professional publishers who have the operational and sales skills to run profitably a lean organization of semi-professional journalists who contribute news about their immediate area. There will always be neighborhood bloggers – and some of them will be good enough to build significant followings – but readers won’t adopt the current cacophony of amateur local reporters as a replacement for major metro newspapers. Professional oversight will be needed.
There’s a land grab going on in this area right now, with aggregators like Patch, Everyblock (above) and the three organizations mentioned earlier each jockeying for position. They’re mostly using whatever low-cost sources of content they can find, and people like Rick Edmonds are astutely calling them on the shortcomings of that approach. We expect that as more ad dollars funnel down from dying dailies into hyperlocal ventures – and as the owners of these ventures become savvier about finding new sources of revenue – the quality will improve and jobs for professional journalists will emerge. They won’t be the cushy union gigs that the previous generation of scribes enjoyed, but they will be enough to bring some pros back into the business.
How to Manage a Blogger Network
Megan Garber speaks with Eric Berger about what it takes to build a good blogger network. Berger is the Houston Chronicle science reporter and blogger who created a network of scienceblogs at the newspaper back in 2008. The experiment was somewhat groundbreaking for a newspaper at the time, although ScienceBlogs and LexBlog were doing the same thing years earlier. Garber wants to know what makes a blog network successful and Berger shares advice that anyone can use to head down the same path:
Blogging requires passion – “If you’re writing about stuff that you’re interested in and enjoying what you’re doing, it’s going to come through in your writing.” Forcing people to blog never works. If they don’t catch the bug, they’ll simply mail in their entries until they can gracefully escape.
Blogging is a conversation – That includes responding to comments. A lot of folks think once they post an entry, they can walk away, but that isn’t so. The best bloggers want a dialog with their readers. Berger notes that it’s particularly difficult to find scientists who want to follow up on their original posts.
Don’t ignore the news hook – Key advice here: “People want stuff either that’s related to the news of what’s happening or that has some kind of popular hook.” Blogs are best at communicating timely information.
Good source = good blogger – This is a great point. “Experts who make good sources might also make good bloggers,” Berger notes. That’s because they have a natural inclination to explain.
Miscellany
Lauren Kirchner does what reporters do too rarely: Updates us on last year’s hot news. In this case, the subject is Kachingle, a tip-jar-style service that lets readers contribute micropayments to the Internet publishers they like without having to make a conscious effort to do so. The service was all the rage when announced in early 2009 (we gave it several paragraphs in February), but its star seems to have faded since.
Kachingle has signed up about 300 publishers, but none whose title begins with the word “The.” Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos said she’s been getting a great reception from news organizations, but the sales process seems to die at the executive level. Kirchner speculates that Kachingle’s transparency – visitors can see which sites inspire the most contributions – may be one barrier. But more likely it’s just bureaucratic intransigence: “Fitting a little Kachingle widget seamlessly onto a homepage isn’t actually as easy as it sounds, if the homepage you’re talking about is nytimes.com.”
Huffington Post has scored another big hire: Howard Fineman . The 61-year-old veteran Newsweek reporter and MSNBC news analyst will become HuffPo’s senior political editor. In an interview with MediaMatters, Fineman contributes some insight on why his new employer is having so much luck attracting senior journalists. Arianna Huffington is trying to bootstrap a professional news organization that stresses quality journalism and independent politics at a time when news is splintering into partisanship and theatrics. She apparently has the money to do it. “Bringing in the best of the old involved more money than we had when we launched. But now that our Web site is growing, we’re able to bring in the best of the old,” she told The New York Times. Journalists like Fineman don’t work 16-hour days and file stories every four hours. Huffington is doing something right to attract prominent people like him and veteran technology editor Jai Singh. We’d suggest that HuffPo is emerging as one of the first big winners in the race to supplant conventional news organizations.
And Finally…
“The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead, ” begins a wonderful essay by the Washington Post‘s Gene Weingarten. He proceed with a litany of recent butcherings of the language by some of the US’s most notable publications, including The New York Times, which has used the term “reach out to ” as a synonym for “attempt to contact ” at least 20 times this year. Other offenders: The Winston-Salem Journal‘s use of was “Alot ” to describe the number of locals Salemites who would be vacationing that month, the Miami Herald‘s report on someone who “eeks out a living ” and his own employer’s publication of a letter referring to the first couple the “Obama’s. ” We hope you’re socialize this article to others and reach out to Weingarten to complement him.
Crystal Cox (right), a real estate agent and blogger from Eureka, Mont., set up a network of websites, including this one, that criticize the conduct of attorney Kevin Padrick in his role as trustee of the failed financial firm called Summit Accommodators, which collapsed in 2008 amid charges of fraud.
Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis dig into the 
The plaintiffs actually aren’t challenging HuffPo on contract terms. In a press conference, they said they’re suing under common law based on a claim of “unjust enrichment.” In other words, what Huffington did is just wrong, despite the fact that there was no legal prohibition against her doing it.
. The 61-year-old veteran Newsweek reporter and MSNBC news analyst 
