Newspaper Association Kills Off Print Magazine -- Goes Online Only

from the that-seems-ironic... dept

The Newspaper Association of America, who just recently has been out pushing the value of a print product as opposed to an online-only product, seems to not be taking its own advice. According to Romenesko, the NAA has not only laid off nearly 50% of its staff, but it's also switching its own print magazine to an online-only production. Seems difficult to take the group seriously when it claims print is somehow fundamentally a better product, doesn't it?

Filed Under: newspapers, online, print
Companies: newspaper association of america

Would You Rather Renegotiate Your Contracts... Or See Your Business Collapse?

from the which-is-more-stupid? dept

You see it all the time with companies in trouble, where they are able to renegotiate certain contracts for the sake of saving the overall business. So, I have a lot of trouble with Hollywood studios claiming that they simply can't figure out a way to offer movies online, because the contracts they signed won't let them. In the link above, Slate's Farhad Manjoo tries to figure out why the movie studios aren't offering up a decent, easy to use online movie service, and unfortunately falls for the studios' claims that they know they need to get online, but they just can't because of "a byzantine set of contractual relationships between many different kinds of companies studios, distributors, cable channels, telecom companies, and others." That sounds good, and it's no surprise to see Hollywood lawyers jump all over this as a defense -- but it's laughable. If the studios, distributors, cable channels, telecom companies and others actually realized how quickly the market is changing, they'd rush to change those contracts. No, it wouldn't be easy, but it is doable. Not doing so is a cop out from a group of folks who don't want to change and are hoping that things "just work out."

Filed Under: contracts, movies, online

Is There Something Fundamentally Better About 'Print' Than 'Online'?

from the please-explain dept

Via Jay Rosen comes a discussion sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America about how to "reinvent" the print newspaper. Of course, it seems like the premise here is a bit skewed. It's like saying "how to reinvent the horse-drawn carriage" rather than "how do we improve transportation." There's no rule that news has to come in print form, but it seems like some newspaper folks believe that print has special powers. As Rosen highlights, Charlotte Hall, an editor from the Orlando Sentinel, says during the discussion:

It stops the clock once a day and takes an assessment, offering the kind of in-depth and analytical work that the 24/7 breaking news world on the Web cannot provide. Print is good at the things the Web is not good at--watchdog, explanatory, enterprise, narrative storytelling.

That sounds good, but it's not print that's doing that. It's the reporters and editors who are doing that -- and there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing it online as well. And, therein lies the problem. Some folks in the newspaper world seem to have imbued "print" with special powers that it just doesn't have. Yes, for many people print newspapers are convenient -- and they don't necessarily need to go away. But it seems that so many people get so focused on the physical paper that they forget about actually serving their community.

Filed Under: journalism, newspapers, online, print

The Importance Of Realizing Your Content Is Probably Available Online For Free

from the funny-way-to-state-the-obvious dept

We talk a lot about how it makes sense for people to make their content available online for free and adopt business models that take advantage of that, rather than complain about "piracy." While unauthorized file sharing is usually illegal, it's pretty silly to pretend that it doesn't happen or that you can stop people from sharing stuff they like with others. That said, artist Evan Roth has launched an "Available Online For Free" prank-style promo campaign for his new art exhibit (via Urban Prankster) by creating stickers that can be snuck onto products in a store to advertise the fact that... well, they're probably available online for free. ("Available Online For Free" is the name of the art exhibit and the exhibition book is, not surprisingly, available as a free download.) While it's probably not a good idea to go around putting these stickers onto products in a store (disclaimer: I wouldn't recommend it -- the pictures are kind of funny... but you likely won't make friends with the store owner), the campaign is a pretty creative and humorous way of stating the obvious -- anything that can be, will be available online for free, one way or another. Making your content freely available online doesn't mean that you can't still find ways to sell it, but you need to recognize that this is the lens through which a lot of people see products on a shelf. If you don't realize that yet, you may be in for a lesson via sticker sometime soon...

Filed Under: free, online

Hulu Tries (And Fails) To Up The Arms War Against Boxee

from the this-will-end-badly dept

To be honest, we're still quite confused as to why Hulu's content partners think it makes sense to stop Boxee from showing Hulu videos. If you don't know, Boxee is basically a web browser for your television. If you have a computer hooked up to your TV, you can watch Hulu (and other) videos. You could do it via any browser you want -- including Firefox or IE -- but Boxee is designed to function better for TVs. Yet, for some reason, even though it's just a browser, Hulu's content partners freaked out and demanded Boxee stop. Since then, there's been a bit of a technology back and forth, with Boxee offering workarounds, and Hulu trying to block Boxee's workaround (which Boxee got around quickly again). The latest, as pointed out by a few readers, is that Hulu is now trying to encrypt its content to keep it from working in non-browser apps. Of course, Boxee on the Mac is just like a browser, so the encryption doesn't even do anything -- and Boxee is planning to upgrade its software on other platforms to do the same thing. Honestly, though, the whole thing seems like a waste. Hulu is dedicating technical resources towards making its content less useful, and trying to stop people from using the content in perfectly reasonable ways. That's a recipe for failure. Even if the company is only doing this to appease angry content partners, you have to wonder how Hulu can possibly survive while sitting between content providers who want to lock everything down, and users who want to do the opposite.

Filed Under: online, video
Companies: boxee, hulu

Detailed Investigative Report On College Sports Recruiting Violations Dismissed As 'Blog' Story

from the sorta-missing-the-point... dept

We've been pointing out that just because journalism is moving away from print newspapers, it doesn't take away from investigative journalism, at all. In fact, we've seen how there are a number of new online investigative journalism operations that are moving in to pick up the slack. In fact, in the sports realm, it's been pointed out before that the best sports journalists are getting snapped up left and right (for much higher salaries) by the various online entities, and they're still doing tremendous investigative reporting work. Just last week, Dan Wetzel and Adrian Wojnarowski, both well-respected sports writers with pretty long resumes in the field, broke a story about how UConn had violated recruiting rules.

It had everything that a typical investigative report should include. It involved a six-month investigation, and the amount of background and detail is quite impressive. It's exactly what an investigative report should be, even if it was published only online and there were no subscribers who had to "pay" to make it happen. It seems to pretty clearly disprove the idea that the only way to fund investigative journalism is to have it paid for by subscribers. That's never actually been true in the past, but it's even clearer with this story.

Still, perhaps the most ridiculous part of the story, as pointed out by one of our readers, Dave, is that the basketball coach who was implicated for recruiting violations in the story, Jim Calhoun, decided that, rather than respond to the allegations, he could dismiss them entirely because they appeared online only:

It was a newspaper story that ... it wasn't a newspaper, I'm sorry. It was a blog story that appeared, I guess, in something I probably can't get a hold of, which is Yahoo! And very simply my comments are what I said.

So, this guy thinks that since the publishing of an in-depth investigative report happened in an online only source (a) it's obviously "a blog story" (even though it wasn't) and (b) it can be waved off. Of course, now that the story isn't just appearing on "a blog" -- it's appearing in the NY Times and the NY Daily News and the Boston Globe, among many other print newspapers -- maybe he'll admit that perhaps it's an issue?

Investigative reporting is investigative reporting, whether it happens online or in a newspaper. Journalists (and investigation subjects) who ignore that do so at their own peril.

Filed Under: adrian wojnarowski, blog, dan wetzel, investigative reporting, jim calhoun, journalism, online, recruiting violations, uconn
Companies: yahoo

Politicians Overreacted To Terrorist 'Threat' Online

from the moral-panic dept

It seems that with every new communications tool online, we get some politicians absolutely freaked out about how "terrorists" will use it to communicate, and how that must be stopped. In just the past few months, we've seen politicians freak out about terrorists supposedly using Second Life, YouTube and Twitter -- and how each of these need to be stopped. Every time this has come up, it has seemed pretty ludicrous for a variety of reasons. First, these are communication tools. They can be used for good or bad purposes -- but it seems pretty ridiculous to freak out over the fact that some might possibly use them for bad purposes. But, even more importantly, the idea that these tools would help "recruit" new terrorists seemed particularly silly. If someone is going to be convinced to become a terrorist based on a YouTube video, there's a bigger problem.

And, in fact, that's exactly what a new report is finding. The whole "freaking out about terrorists online" thing is totally overblown. The study found little evidence that terrorists were effectively recruiting people online, and even if they were, they found no conceivable way to stop such tools from being used by terrorists at all -- and pointed out how pointless it was to even try. At best, they would get some content taken down from a few websites, which would only serve to draw more attention to the content, which would quickly appear on other websites instead. But, of course, most politicians don't care. They need to create such moral panics so it looks like they're actually doing something to "protect the children" in order to get re-elected.

In the meantime, if they were really concerned about "terrorists" using technology, they might actually want to focus on getting the folks who hate us to use the technology even more. At least that's the feeling I get after reading this article about a Taliban leader and former Guantanamo prisoner, who's now obsessed with his iPhone. I have to admit, most of the article reads like an Onion-style parody ("'It's easy and modern and I love it,' Zaeef said as he pinched and pulled his fingers across the iPhone's touch screen last week. 'This is necessary in the world today. People want to progress.'"), but it does show that perhaps using enabling technology to allow people to better their lives, gets them a lot less focused on looking for ways to kill us.

Filed Under: moral panic, online, politicians, terrorists, threat

If Newspapers Went Offline For A Week... People Might Realize They're Fine Without Them

from the it's-hard-to-keep-up dept

Honestly, it's getting difficult to keep up with the massive amount of stories every day from old school journalists -- often with no business or economics background -- either complaining about how things used to be or somehow wishing they could put in place solutions to bring that world back again. It's gone. We'll start with a piece by James Warren in The Atlantic, which you would hope would be a bit more intellectual -- but instead makes the same old errors. Warren seems to imply that investigative journalism can only be done by newspaper reporters -- apparently not realizing that the investigative reporting he's talking about is a very new concept, rather than true "traditional journalism." Also, in trashing online sites, he seems to totally miss why sites like the Huffington Post enjoy such a large community. He blames it on their combination of stiffing writers (including himself) and simply building off the works of those wonderful newspaper reporters.

But that's obviously ridiculous. If online sites were only "winning" the traffic battle because they were ripping off others' content, then that would be easy to fix: those very same newspaper sites should do the same damn thing. Hell, it should work better, since they'd have the original content. The problem is that it's not the reporting that's attracting the community. It's the community. For way too long, the newspapers have ignored or diminished the role of the community. They were forgetting that, in the end, it really is the community that's their "product." They sell the attention of that community. But, for years, they had little to no competition in doing so. That meant they could basically ignore serving the community... and they did. Now that there are sites that actually do serve the community, people prefer going to them than the sites that treated the "community" like lower class riffraff to be kept away. Funny how that works.

Warren also gets quite mixed up in pretending that when newspapers put content for free online, they get nothing back for it. He goes on for a few paragraphs about the disaster of giving away content "for free" (gasp!) even making a stupid joke that maybe the NY Times' columnists should work for free if they want their work distributed for free. Apparently Warren (like so many others) seems to be missing the point again. News organizations sell readers' attention. You don't get that attention if you don't get the readers. And you don't get readers by charging for content. So, when newspapers give away content for "free" -- it's not for "nothing" -- it's because it's supposed to be a part of a larger business model. The problem is that the newspapers have fallen down on that end of the business model. But the answer isn't making it more difficult to get more community attention. That's like purposely burning your most valuable asset.

Along those same lines, Romenesko points us to a painfully bad idea from another journalist: getting all big newspapers, and the Associated Press, to collude with each other to stop publishing any news online for a week. The idea, of course, is that suddenly the rest of the online world will recognize what they're "missing" without these big newspapers. Of course, that (once again, incorrectly) assumes that journalism only comes from newspapers (aren't these big time journalists supposed to research this stuff before publishing such obviously wrong things?). If all the big newspapers don't publish online for a week, what they may actually discover is that people get on just fine without them.

Why? Because the demand for good content is still there, and someone smarter than these journalists will supply it. Imagine if you're a young news organization entrepreneur, and all of the biggest names in the market have just decided to take themselves out of the competition for a week. Talk about a huge market opportunity. So, sure, let the dinosaurs hide for a week (and watch out for antitrust complaints). The journalists who think this is a win-win idea, may quickly discover that all it really shows people is how little the old model is needed. There's plenty of room for good journalism to thrive. It just might not involve newsprint.

Filed Under: competition, journalism, newspapers, online, payments

Carl's Jr. Apparently Unaware That People Share Discount Coupons Online

from the welcome-to-the-internet dept

I remember a decade or so ago stories of online coupon offerings where companies would use a single coupon code, and not realize that people would share it with tons of others. However, those types of promotions went away after companies started using unique codes for promotions to make sure people couldn't share them too widely. Apparently, however, the folks who work for marketing at Carl's Jr. were unaware of how news of deals spread online. They offered up a promotion at a basketball game, where certain attendees were texted a code to download a coupon for a free burger. However, all attendees were given the same code... which was quickly leaked online and Carl's Jr. was forced to cancel the promotion after a lot more people than expected started to show up with the coupon. It's hard to believe that no one involved in the promotion had any idea that this would happen.

Filed Under: coupons, online, sharing
Companies: carl's jr.

More Musicians Discover That Online Is The Path To Fame

from the and-so-it-goes dept

Whenever we point to examples of musicians succeeding by embracing what the digital world enables, we always get some angry comments, often from folks claiming to be music industry insiders insisting that what we describe is really impossible -- especially for unknown artists. They say this despite repeated evidence this is untrue, including an increasing number of musicians who pulled off success stories. The response is always a search to find exceptions -- especially when it comes to live shows. One popular comment is that it's impossible for unknown musicians to ever get gigs. And, of course, there are some who still insist that you have to spend a ton of money to do a decent recording to get noticed.

This is, of course, ridiculous. The Wall Street Journal pops up with the story of Justin Vernon and his band Bon Iver. Vernon recorded a bunch of songs at his parents' hunting cabin in Wisconsin with a computer and some software, and put them on MySpace, where he was able to build up a huge following -- often by giving the music out for free. While he eventually went a more traditional route -- signing with a music label, his success suggests those criticisms are once again unfounded. This, of course, does not mean that every musician who records some songs on his computer will be a huge success, but those who say it's impossible are going to have to dig deeper, as it appears pretty much every day we hear of a few examples of musicians making all of this work despite the naysayers.

Filed Under: bon iver, justin vernon, musicians, online