Two small Colorado daily newspapers have closed their doors, victims of a bad economy. The Vail Mountaineer and the Denver Daily News. Both were owned by Former Vail Daily owner Jim Pavelich.

Founded in 2008, the Mountaineer published six days a week under the slogan “Made By Cool People For Cool People.” It had a staff of seven and apparently free distribution. It published about 20-30 pages daily and distributed online in PDF format. The launch was perhaps the worst-timed in history, coming just before the collapse in real estate prices and declining  economy savaged pricey resort areas like Vail. the competitor Vail Daily soldiers on.

The Denver Daily News, which was also founded in 2008, claimed a circulation of 12,000 for its freely distributed weekdaily. With full-page ad rates topping out at $1,800, according to its media kit, it was not a high-priced competitor to the Post. Information on staffing was not available on the website.

 

How much do you really know about your reader? Chances are it isn’t very much. News organizations traditionally haven’t had to know their customers very well because the booming advertising market ensured they didn’t have to. Now that advertising’s value is in free-fall, however, this kind of knowledge may become the most valuable asset you’ve got.

We had the chance to speak to a group of newspaper executives about new revenue models a couple of weeks ago and were a bit surprised at how foreign the concepts of lead generation and qualification were to them. In the business-to-business (B2B) publishing industry, lead management has been the lifeline that has kept publishers afloat. It has corollaries that would be useful to news executives in consumer publishing, too.
Lead generation (called “lead gen” in the trade) is the process of matching sellers with qualified prospective buyers who are ready to make a purchasing decision. Advertising is a basic shotgun approach to lead gen in which the publisher plays a passive role by merely providing a platform for delivery. The onus is on the advertiser to convert those leads to customers. That’s an expensive process. B2B companies focus most of their attention on so-called “warm” leads, or those who are ready to sign a check. The problem with advertising is that it also delivers “cold” leads, or tire-kickers, and it’s expensive for the vendor to weed those people out.

Know Thy Reader

Publishers can be a whole lot more active about matching buyers and sellers, though. As they gather information about the characteristics of their audience, they can structure programs that generate better-quality leads and charge more for them.
B2B publishers went through the valley of death a decade ago in a market contraction that was a lot quicker and more dramatic than the one that’s hit newspapers over the last five years. Publications like PC Magazine, which raked in more than $100 million a year in ad revenue at one point, were completely out of the print business by 2009. A lot of publishers perished, but those that survived have converted to a lead gen model.
These publishers now focus on developing customized online destinations and real and virtual events that deliver warm leads. The more they know about the customer, the more they can charge for the lead. Web analytics make it possible to know a lot more about our online visitors in particular than we used to know. When combined with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, publishers can now build extremely detailed profiles of individual audience members.
Newspaper publishers know about the value of segmentation. That’s why they created automotive, real estate, arts & entertainment and home sections decades ago. Advertisers wanted to reach more qualified buyers. Online, you can take that to a new level.
Once an online visitor registers with you and accepts a cookie, you can track that person’s every online interaction with you and build profiles that enable your advertisers to make customized offers. A visitor who reads a lot of article about boating and clicks on your offer of a discounted ticket to the boat show is a lot more interesting to local suppliers of nautical equipment than the average reader.  Similarly, a member who registers for your discounted passes to the bridal expo is going to suddenly interest a lot of specialty retailers.

All About Targeting

Is what we’re telling you a revelation? We hope not. Google and Facebook have built their businesses on delivering warm leads as indicated by search activity and member profiles. They’ve sucked a lot of money out of the print advertising market in the process. On LinkedIn, you can now buy ads aimed at engineers with VP titles who belong to construction groups and live in the greater Cleveland area. Can the Plain Dealer deliver that level of granularity? Probably not. But if it had that same quality of information in its database, it could create some pretty compelling packages for local businesses that wanted to reach those people.
We don’t mean to imply that B2B and consumer newspaper publishing are the same thing, but there are lessons news organizations can learn from their B2B counterparts, who have a half-decade’s more experience with adversity. Qualified prospective customers who are ready to make a buying decision have a lot more value to advertisers than drive-by readers. What can you do to capture more information about the people who visit your online properties? How can you use that information to develop high-value – and high-priced – marketing programs for your customers? Finally, how can you use your unique advantage of local presence to distinguish your products from Google’s and Facebook’s?
Tell us what your news organization is doing to tap into this opportunity.
Note: Our book on B2B social media marketing has a lot more detail about this topic.

How much do you really know about your reader? Chances are it isn’t very much. News organizations traditionally haven’t had to know their customers very well because the booming advertising market ensured they didn’t have to. Now that advertising’s value is in free-fall, however, this kind of knowledge may become the most valuable asset you’ve got.

We had the chance to speak to a group of newspaper executives about new revenue models a couple of weeks ago and were a bit surprised at how foreign the concepts of lead generation and qualification were to them. In the business-to-business (B2B) publishing industry, lead management has been the lifeline that has kept publishers afloat. It has corollaries that would be useful to news executives in consumer publishing, too.

Lead generation (called “lead gen” in the trade) is the process of matching sellers with qualified prospective buyers who are ready to make a purchasing decision. Advertising is a basic shotgun approach to lead gen in which the publisher plays a passive role by merely providing a platform for delivery. The onus is on the advertiser to convert those leads to customers. That’s an expensive process. B2B companies focus most of their attention on so-called “warm” leads, or those who are ready to sign a check. The problem with advertising is that it also delivers “cold” leads, or tire-kickers, and it’s expensive for the vendor to weed those people out.

Know Thy Reader

Publishers can be a whole lot more active about matching buyers and sellers, though. As they gather information about the characteristics of their audience, they can structure programs that generate better-quality leads and charge more for them.

B2B publishers went through the valley of death a decade ago in a market contraction that was a lot quicker and more dramatic than the one that’s hit newspapers over the last five years. Publications like PC Magazine, which raked in more than $100 million a year in ad revenue at one point, were completely out of the print business by 2009. A lot of publishers perished, but those that survived have converted to a lead gen model.

These publishers now focus on developing customized online destinations and real and virtual events that deliver warm leads. The more they know about the customer, the more they can charge for the lead. Web analytics make it possible to know a lot more about our online visitors in particular than we used to know. When combined with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, publishers can now build extremely detailed profiles of individual audience members.

Newspaper publishers know about the value of segmentation. That’s why they created automotive, real estate, arts & entertainment and home sections decades ago. Advertisers wanted to reach more qualified buyers. Online, you can take that to a new level.

Once an online visitor registers with you and accepts a cookie, you can track that person’s every online interaction with you and build profiles that enable your advertisers to make customized offers. A visitor who reads a lot of article about boating and clicks on your offer of a discounted ticket to the boat show is a lot more interesting to local suppliers of nautical equipment than the average reader.  Similarly, a member who registers for your discounted passes to the bridal expo is going to suddenly interest a lot of specialty retailers.

All About Targeting

Is what we’re telling you a revelation? We hope not. Google and Facebook have built their businesses on delivering warm leads as indicated by search activity and member profiles. They’ve sucked a lot of money out of the print advertising market in the process. On LinkedIn, you can now buy ads aimed at engineers with VP titles who belong to construction groups and live in the greater Cleveland area. Can the Plain Dealer deliver that level of granularity? Probably not. But if it had that same quality of information in its database, it could create some pretty compelling packages for local businesses that wanted to reach those people.

We don’t mean to imply that B2B and consumer newspaper publishing are the same thing, but there are lessons news organizations can learn from their B2B counterparts, who have a half-decade’s more experience with adversity. Qualified prospective customers who are ready to make a buying decision have a lot more value to advertisers than drive-by readers. What can you do to capture more information about the people who visit your online properties? How can you use that information to develop high-value – and high-priced – marketing programs for your customers? Finally, how can you use your unique advantage of local presence to distinguish your products from Google’s and Facebook’s?

Tell us what your news organization is doing to tap into this opportunity.

Note: Our book on B2B social media marketing has a lot more detail about this topic.

Bill Densmore has drafted a 55-page white paper outlining some ideas for sustaining journalism in the free-mass-media age that should be of interest to anyone who worries about the future of trusted media.

We say “trust” because that is at the essence of Densmore’s argument in “From Paper to Persona:” the vast profusion of online information has created a trust crisis that represents a business opportunity. People have no incentive to pay for information any more, but they may be willing to pay for information they can believe. The risk is that the collaborative effort needed to solve this problem may be so massive that no one will attempt to undertake it.

Densmore’s “nut graph” is the following:

Free information is so devalued and so frequently untrustworthy that the public is now looking for alternatives that save time, promise reliability and are always available from multiple platforms.

Sound familiar? Have you recently sought medical advice online? The most common complaint we hear about the Web in general these days is that you can’t trust anything you read. While Wikipedia, Snopes and IMDB are pretty accurate, they aren’t going to tell you much about the possible negative effects of drug interactions or the real risks of radon in the average home.

Not to mention whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead, a conspiracy theory topic that already shows signs of reaching Elvis Presleyan proportions. Not only has news become a commodity, it has also become so politically polarized that partisan echo chambers continually corrupt whatever the reliable channels of news may tell us.

Densmore proposes that this chaos may be quelled by consortia created – with or without public funding – that “uniformly exchange payments for the sharing of text, video, music, game plays, entertainment, advertising views, etc., across the Internet… Consumer users should have a choice of providers – agents – for accessing services, with one account and one ID providing simple access to multiple resources.” Sort of like iTunes, except a lot broader in scope.

This is going to be a tough pill for many conventional media veterans to swallow, however. It requires that they migrate from “the most-trusted information source” to and “information valet,” which Densmore describes as “a combination of curator, adviser, authenticator and retailer of personalized news, entertainment and service information from anywhere.”

The proposal makes sense, but the problem is that news people aren’t trained to be valets; they’re educated in the school of hard knocks and worn shoe leather, where scoops were trophies and one would no more cooperate with a competitor than evict one’s mother from her apartment. But as this blog has been arguing for three years – and Densmore argues much more eloquently – all that stuff has got to change.

Sustaining journalism requires rethinking the very notion of advertising, and of news as a service…Aggregate for advertisers and sponsors audience measurement and selected demographic data…track, aggregate, sort and share revenues, including payments to users for the use of their “persona.” The user should be in control of the data use and flow concerning them.

In other words, trade the two assets consumers have to offer – money and personal information – for a service they increasingly crave: truth. The answer isn’t all-or-nothing notions like paywalls; it’s creating something with perceived value and flexible options for paying for it.

Can Densmore’s vision work? It has to. The two billion people in the world who are now connected to the Internet have already moved beyond the notion that information is a scarce commodity, even if a lot of news publishers still haven’t. The information-consuming public understands that today’s problem is not lack of knowledge but lack of trust. News organizations are actually in a pretty good position to deliver on the trust equation, but they have to discard the notion of propriety and exclusivity.

In Densmore’s words:

The Next Newsroom could be a service organization — like a law or accounting firm — and it will be paid accordingly. For now, it will be extremely difficult to convince people to pay for such a service. But as the years go by, it will be seen as an absolutely indispensible way to get through the day. People will become as reliant on their “newshare” as on their doctor, lawyer, accountant, teacher or business colleague, or for 1their water, gas heating or phone service, all of which are services for which we pay on a project or metered basis.

Good point.

Nieman Journalism Lab scored a coup in landing the eloquent and insightful Ken Doctor as a weekly columnist focusing on the economics of news. His analysis of the cost of journalism at California Watch is well worth reading if you want to understand why nonprofit investigative ventures are so popular right now (ProPublica just nabbed its second Pulitzer).

California Watch’s “On Shaky Ground,” an account of the dangerous vulnerability of many California schools to collapse in the event of an earthquake, is “old-fashioned, shoe-leather, box-opening, follow-the-string journalism, and it is well done,” Doctor says. It also cost over a half million dollars to report, an amount that would have caused most newspaper publishers to gulp even before the industry entered its string of 21 consecutive quarterly revenue declines.

But a half million is a relative bargain when you consider the number of media organizations that benefited from it. Pieces of the series ran in six major dailies and were picked up statewide by ABC-affiliate broadcasters. Top public radio stations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles ran with it, and a number of ethnic and online outlets (including more than 125 Patch sites) also picked up the coverage. Many localized the content by snipping local maps or extracting information about their area from the voluminous database of school-by-school information that the project produced.

Doctor notes that California Watch is building a new kind of syndication business around investigative journalism, which is the branch of news that has been hardest hit by budget cuts over the last three years. This is not a reincarnation of the Associated Press model, which mainly delivered breaking news. Bloggers, citizen media and Twitter have diminished the value of that function considerably. What citizen journalism can’t do it spend 20 months developing a story, which is what California Watch did.

California Watch is still “feeling its way along,” in Doctor’s words. Syndication revenue won’t support its current $2.7 million annual budget, so donations are grants are still essential to its livelihood. But look at what donors get for their money: About 70% of that $2.7 million goes to support the project’s 14 journalists. By comparison, a typical daily newspaper’s editorial costs are about 20% of overall expenses. These nonprofit models are vastly more efficient than the newspaper investigative teams they’re replacing.

And when you spread those costs among a lot of subscribers who pay a few thousand bucks a year to get access to the reports, it’s really not that expensive. “An owner…can hardly reject the offer of paying one-hundredth of the cost for space-filling, audience-interesting content,” Doctor writes. Particularly when compared to the value of a single child’s life who might have been saved (hearings are already under way).

Doctor’s analysis raises an important point about the evolving economics of information. In a world in which raw data has become a nearly valueless commodity, value is derived from filtering and contextualizing information for specific audiences. The small California weekly that could never dream of spending a half million dollars on an investigative project can spend a few hundred dollars to buy the work of a dedicated investigative team and then extract the information that’s relevant to its readers.

This is a much more efficient way to deliver news, but taking advantage of it requires discarding treasured assumptions like the not-invented-here syndrome and the belief that scope and scale define importance. It’s good news for local publishers. In the traditional model, only a handful of California papers could have tackled a project the size of On Shaky Ground. Now nearly everyone can share the wealth.

The Long, Slow Bleed

Lest anyone think the lack of major metro daily closures over the last couple of years is a sign of strength in the newspaper industry, consider recent earnings reports. Ad revenues at Gannett, McClatchy, Media General and Journal Communications were all off between 6% and 11% in the first quarter, and there’s no sign of a turnaround. Alan Mutter’s analysis makes an important point about why newspaper advertising isn’t sharing in the sputtering recovery.

The more advertisers of all types experiment with Web, mobile and social advertising, the more they will come to appreciate the power of the digital media to tightly target qualified prospects while granularly measuring the costs and effectiveness of their campaigns.

In sales jargon, the buying process is a funnel, with a large number of uninformed prospects at the mouth and a few qualified buyers at the tip. As consumers increasingly research their purchase decisions online, the need for merchants to advertise their availability declines. They get more leverage from intercepting buyers during the decision-making process. The deeper into that process buyers get, the better the prospect of converting them to customers. And incidentally, vendors only have to pay for actions like clicks and leads, not vague measures  like circulation.

The reason newspaper closures have largely stopped is that the industry’s near-death experience in 2008 – 2009 focused publishers on slashing costs, raising subscription prices and squeezing as much blood as possible out of the stone of an aging and shrinking circulation base. That is not a prescription for growth. We continue to stand by our 2006 prediction that major metro daily print newspapers will all but disappear by 2025. In fact, we think it’ll happen sooner than that. It’s just that death will come from cancer, not heart attack.

Miscellany

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is expanding its business model beyond pure advertising. according to a press release,  a partnership with parent company Stephens Media LLC’s digital arm will enable the Review-Journal to launch a service to  provide local businesses:

…full website, branding and logo design; hosting and customer support for websites and related digital services; email marketing; mobile marketing; training to provide local businesses easy tools to maintain and update their own sites and analyze web traffic; search engine optimization and search engine marketing; customer reputation management with daily reporting; social media presence and tracking tools for digital and traditional marketing efforts to ensure monitoring of ROI.

Hmmm, why didn’t we think of that?

Desperation often drives innovation, and the miserable state of the Las Vegas economy no doubt played a role in this quest for new revenue sources. We think it’s a smart move; most small businesses have no idea how to market themselves online and a local newspaper is a trusted partner that’s in a great position to give them a hand.

AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal news sites intends to recruit 8,000 bloggers over the next few days. It’s asking each of its 800 sites to sign up 10 community members to blog. No word on whether the contributors will be paid, but given that Arianna Huffington is now running the show, we think we know the answer to that one.

And Finally…

Reports emerged in the Twittersphere early this week that the world’s last manufacturer of mechanical typewriters was closing down its India production plant. A lot of people, including us, were taken in by this. But there’s good news for the old-timers who still appreciate the clatter of metal on paper. Atlantic Wire reports that several factories in China, Japan and Indonesia are still manufacturing typewriters. Even if production shuts down, there’s a pretty good used market. For old time’s sake, we bought an IBM Selectric, which used retail for $450 in the 1970s, for a buck at a yard sale a couple of years back. We’re still not sure what to do with it.

Should journalists avoid expressing opinion in their social media comments for fear of calling their objectivity into question? Or is the myth of real objectivity finally being torn by a global conversation in which everyone is expected to weigh in with his or her views?

There’s a vigorous debate going on over at Gigaom about this subject. It was kicked off by a post by Mathew Ingram, who took issue with a social media policy recently installed at the Toronto Star that prohibits reporters from discussing stories in progress, commenting negatively upon their employer or colleagues or expressing any opinion that could raise questions about their objectivity.

Ingram thinks the policy is nuts, and the story’s headline – “Newspapers and Social Media: Still Not Really Getting It” – leaves no question that Ingram’s objectivity isn’t in doubt. We’re not so sure we agree with him.

We’ve written three books about social media, and we buy in fully to the idea that we are all better off when there is an open and free exchange of views about just about anything. However, a journalist’s ability to behave in an impartial manner – even if he or she has an opinion – is a core skill of the profession.

The issue isn’t whether people are biased or not: Everyone has opinions. It’s whether a professional journalist can put those opinions aside in the name of telling a story objectively. The ability to do that is essential to good journalism. It’s what enabled Alex Haley to draw a revealing interview out of American Nazi Party head George Lincoln Rockwell for a Playboy interview in 1966, despite the fact that Rockwell wouldn’t even look Haley in the eye during the session.

We frankly worry less about how opinions expressed on Twitter may raise doubts about a reporter’s impartiality in the minds of readers and more about how they may influence sources. Another core asset that professional journalists and media institutions bring to the table is access: They can reach people in the know because they’ve earned their trust. Revealing bias about an issue may influence a reporter’s ability to speak candidly to people who hold contrary opinions. That isn’t right, but it’s human nature.

Does this mean reporters shouldn’t engage in social media conversations? Of course it doesn’t. For one thing, the issue is situational. Sports and entertainment reporters for example, have more latitude to share their views than journalists covering a presidential campaign. And even a reporter covering Chicago City Hall probably isn’t going to do himself or his employer any damage by expressing a preference for the Cubs over the White Sox.

Then there’s the issue of language. It’s one thing to called Donald Trump “unconventional” or “controversial,” and quite another to refer to him as a “fruitcake.” Social media has become synonymous with rampant editorializing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Journalists can add value to a discussion without using inflammatory words. In fact, a voice of reason is often a welcome respite from the flame throwing that characterizes many online debates.

As to the Star‘s prohibition on trashing coworkers or tipping one’s hand on a scoop, that strikes us as common sense. In any case, we suspect the management at the paper would consider the circumstances before taking action against an employee in that situation.

We’re curious about your views, particularly if you work for a media organization. Does your employer put strict limits on what you can say in social media, and if so does it enforce those rules? Let us know, and let’s have our own rational discussion.

Paywalls and Social Media

Mashable looks at three news organizations with paid subscription models and asks how they’re faring in social media. Paywalls are a problem in social channels because they go against the culture of free information exchange. Mashable’s Meghan Peters says encountering a truncated story on a link from Twitter or Facebook is an “unpleasant reader experience.” She talks to community managers at the Dallas Morning News, The Economist and the Honolulu Civic Beat.

All treat their social followings differently, but all are hyper-conscious of not delivering poor experiences to fans and followers. The Economist has actually made its paywall a bit more porous recently. Visitors can now read a limited number of articles each month, whereas previously the entire site was gated. The strategy has produced a surge in social media referrals, says the site’s community manager.

The Civic Beat has what we think is the most interesting strategy. The site is free to casual visitors at any time, but readers who return frequently are asked to subscribe. The timing of the paywall is based upon an algorithm that takes frequency and time spent on the site into account. “If you read a couple of times a week, it will take a while before we ask you to register,” says Dan Zelikman, the marketing and community host.

Miscellany

The New Zealand Press Association (NZPA) is closing after 132 years, apparently a victim to a major subscriber’s decision to go it alone. The NZPA is an agency that employs a staff of about 40 journalists and provides up to 1,000 news items to New Zealand’s news outlets each day. Until five years ago, the agency used an Associated Press-style model in which all New Zealand newspapers shared their content. More recently, it has focused on providing original reporting. The union that represents journalists in New Zealand said the closure was “a huge loss for journalism.”

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With their ranks depleted by layoffs, media organizations are becoming appealing targets for pranksters with an agenda. Last week, a group called US Uncut, which describes itself as “a burgeoning grassroots movement pressuring corporate tax cheats to pay their fair share,” succeeded in taking in both USA Today and the Associated Press with a fake press release announcing that General Electric would donate its entire $3.2 billion tax fund to charity. The AP story that ran in USA Today is here. The stunt was pulled off with the assistance of Yes Lab, an organization that describes itself as “a series of brainstorms and trainings to help activist groups carry out media-getting creative actions.”

We expect we’ll see more stunts like these as media organizations continue to pare back on frivolous expenses like copy editing and fact-checking. We’re just waiting for the story about the Nigerian princes with the huge inheritance to share to hit The Wall Street Journal.

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 the San 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).

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 the San 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).

The pundits (ourselves included) just can’t get enough of analyzing, trashing and otherwise second-guessing The New York Times‘ new online subscription plan. Here are some recent posts we noticed.

Steve Outing Pretty Much Trashes the NYT Paywall

For starters, it’s too expensive. The $15/mo minimum makes the Times all but inaccessible to cash-strapped young readers, which happen to be the people the paper most needs to engage. He also hates the defensive posturing publishers are using to justify subscription fees: “We need to do this to survive.”

Now THERE’s an incentive to customers to support you: Tell them if they don’t, you’re going to go out of business. How’s that working out for you, General Motors?

Outing points to the Times‘ own David Carr as the source of the right price: $4.99/mo. Respondents to Carr’s defense of the paywall plan posted on nytimes.com repeatedly refer to that fee as one they can swallow. Is anyone upstairs listening?

How To Hack the New York Times Paywall … With Your Delete Key

Mashable reports a new way to easily breach the paywall: “Readers need only remove “?gwh=numbers” from the URL. They can also clear their browser caches, or switch browsers as soon as they see the subscription prompt. All three of these simple fixes will let them continue reading.”

The NYT’s Melting Iceberg Syndrome

Frédéric Filloux suggests that The New York Times could improve its profitability by going to Sunday-only publication and forgetting about the other six days of the week, at least in print. “Sunday circulation is 54% higher than on weekdays…Sunday copy sales bring five times more money than any weekday…Some analysts say the Sunday NYT accounts for about 50% of the paper’s entire advertising revenue.”

If the Times could cut more than half its expenses by eliminating six days’ worth of print, it could theoretically make more money by publishing less frequently.

We also liked Filloux’ use of an iceberg as the analogy for a business that’s collapsing from within: “As an iceberg melts, the resulting change of shape can cause it to list gradually or to become unstable and topple over suddenly.” See any similarities to what’s happening to print?

A Big Op to Upgrade Op-Ed at New York Times

Alan Mutter believe the departure of Times columnists Frank Rich and Bob Herbert presents an historic opportunity for the Old Gray Lady to become the amazing technicolor dreamcoat of diversity of opinion. If Times‘ columnists are so smart, how come they missed the historic events going on the Middle East? Mutter asks. That’s what happens when your world is limited to Manhattan and the Beltway.

“Instead of dedicating the bulk of its limited and precious op-ed space to another generation of slightly more diverse Pooh-Bahs, the Times should publish the best of the online conversations in its print editions,” the Newsosaur recommends. That would be both good journalism and good promotion for the Time’s pricey paywall.

New York Times Digital Subscriptions: The Unofficial FAQ Updated

PaidContent.org has a useful rundown of the ins and outs of the Times‘ paywall, including pricing tiers, thresholds and platforms. Can you get a family account to nytimes.com? You’ll just have to read this FAQ to find out.

From the Onion: NYTimes.com’s Plan To Charge People Money For Consuming Goods, Services Called Bold Business Move

“In a move that media executives, economic forecasters, and business analysts alike are calling ‘extremely bold,’ NYTimes.com put into place a groundbreaking new business model today in which the news website will charge people money to consume the goods and services it provides.”

It took The New York Times more than a year to design its paywall, and it took the rest of us about 24 hours to figure out ways around it. Ah, the wisdom of crowds.
The Times‘s paywall won’t go up in the U.S. until next week, but it’s already in full flower in Canada, where a programmer named David Hayes has come up with a bookmarklet that vaporizes the Javascript overlay that blocks a non-paying reader from accessing an article. Drag the “NYTClean” tool to your bookmark bar and click it when you want to read.Voilà. Read on to learn how it works.
The Times has also asked Twitter to disable an account someone created last week that uses the social media exemption in the paywall design to permit free access. The feed is called FreeNYTimes, but we don’t expect it to be around very long. The Times charges trademark infringement, which is pretty ridiculous, since someone will simply reconstitute the same idea under a different name. On the other hand, the Times had no alternative, since the account doesn’t violate any of its terms of service.
Joshua Benton dissects this emerging cat-and-mouse game, and also explains how Hayes’ workaround works. The Times chose a novel way to intercept and block visitors who exceed the limit of 20 free articles per month. Instead of denying them access to the content, the site covers the article with a Javascript overlay while leaving the full article visible but obscured in the background. Blocking Javascript is easy. In fact, browsers let you do it  by default. NYTClean basically strips some tags from the HTML source code that the browser sees so that the Javascript overlay doesn’t show.
The Twitter workaround is simpler and much tougher to prevent. It takes advantage of a unique provision in the Times‘ terms of service that permits links from social media sources to go around the paywall. The Times should be commended for acknowledging the importance of word-of-mouth marketing, but it also created a gaping hole in its revenue plan in the process.
Consider this: The entire contents of nytimes.com are available as RSS feeds, which presumably aren’t going away when the paywall goes up. Free services like Dlvr.it can take any RSS feed and deliver it through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Buzz and any number of other social outlets. All you have to do is purchase one free subscription, grab all the RSS feeds and syndicate them through the social network of your choice. Everyone in your circle can now share your subscription. That’s what @FreeNYTimes.com is doing. Anyone can do the same thing in about a half hour.
Which means that if the the Times’ sincerely wants to shut down rogue operations like @FreeNYTimes, it is buying into a giant whack-a-mole game. Except maybe the Times isn’t all that worried about those scallywags. Joshua Benton quotes Times executives as being concerned about violations, but not inclined to throw too many resources at preventing them. They say any preventive scheme will be defeated by a small number of geeks, but the vast majority of readers won’t go to the trouble of seeking out the workarounds. They’ll just shell out the $15-$35 per month. As Benton points out, it’s been possible to get the Wall Street Journal for free for years, but most people don’t go to the trouble.
It’s a balancing act for the Times. Make it too easy for operations like @FreeNYTimes to flourish and you undercut the revenue model of a subscription system that reportedly cost more than $30 million to build. Try to whack every mole and you end up employing armies of lawyers and people to track down violations. We’re sure there will be plenty more to report on this story.