The Inquisitr » new york times

NYT subtly frowns on Deadspin’s ESPN horndog dossier shenanigans

Kim LaCapria — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:16:53 +0000

A new media campaign retaliating against ESPN for scandal related subterfuge got some old media attention today.

Deadspin, a Gawker media blog, gets oodles of sports and sportscaster news related tips and rumors in their inbox. Back at the beginning of September, Deadspin’s editor AJ Daulerio contacted ESPN for confirmation of the rumors swirling around Steve Philips regarding the unhinged intern (Brooke Hundley) that Philips totally turned out to be tapping. ESPN spokespeople were less than forthcoming about the brewing scandal, and Daulerio got scooped and got mad- so he decided to devote a day to posting all the tips he’d gotten regarding sexual impropriety at ESPN.

Daulerio tagged the entries “ESPN horndog dossier,” and posted rumors about Erik Kuselias, Stephania Bell, Jed Drake, Katie Lacey and David Berson. There was even a “glossary“ posted that gave a bit of background info on some alleged less savory seduction practices common at ESPN. The intended effect was swift and painful for ESPN- the names named by Deadspin showed up in the top results of Google searches frequently late last week and even prompted ESPN President George Bodenheimer to issue a memo asking staff to quit blabbing about the constant in-house boning to media.

The New York Times kind of chided the Deadspin for their “ESPN horndog dossier” today, and ESPN only commented in a statement, saying:

“Deadspin’s self-admitted rumormongering is despicable behavior by any standard and shows callous disregard for its impact on people’s lives. It is not worthy of response and those responsible should be called to account.”

Although the Times piece seems to imply that the posts were all rumor and supposition posted purely out of spite, quotes at the end not only lend credence to Daulerio’s sources, but also the reasoning behind the decision to go after ESPN in the first place:

But in the interview (with the New York Times), (Daulerio) said he adhered to the same standard of proof as any traditional news organization, repeating only those things told to him by multiple sources with close knowledge of the subject.

He and Nick Denton, owner of Gawker Media, said the larger issue was sources being dishonest with journalists. “When an unnamed source misleads, as far as we’re concerned, they lose the right to remain in the shadows,” Mr. Denton said in an e-mail exchange.

Daulerio also contends that none of the tips posted were kept under wraps very well anyway:

“Do I bend the rules a little bit? Of course I do. We’re still a blog at the end of the day, a Gawker Media blog. The larger truth out of this, outside of my temper tantrum over getting scooped out of a story, is that this is the worst-kept secret in sports media.”

What do you think? Questionable judgment, or epic win?

New York Times Goes Hyper-Local With Weekend Bay Area Edition

Paul Short — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:36:29 +0000

The New York Times has added a San Francisco Bay Area metro report to its Northern California editions on Fridays and Sundays.

The new addition to the paper went into effect Friday, Oct. 16 and includes content written by New York Times staff as well as other local contributors. The Times already had a staff of 10 people in the bay area who, along with contributors, will write about public affairs and local lifestyle.

In the past, the Times had shown an interest in partnering with local news organizations and building a cooperative news outlet. Warren Hellman’s Bay Area News Project was one of those organizations said to be considering a partnership.

From Mediabistro:

“At a time when so many news organizations are in a forced retreat, it’s exciting to be part of a venture that has set out to build more and better news coverage,” said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, in the official release. “And as someone who grew up in the Bay Area, I’m proud that we can play a role in enriching the quality of reporting about the region.”

Rogue ad battle at New York Times

Steven Hodson — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:22:01 +0000

According to Steven Musil at cnet Security The New York Times is in the midst of a battle to get rid of a what they are terming “an unauthorized advertisement”.

In typical fashion the ad warns readers that their computer could be infected with some sort of virus and then redirects the reader to a site offering “antivirus software”. The site readers are being redirected to is best-virus03.com and is a hijacking site that takes over your browser and will attempt to install software.

As one cnet reader told Musil

One CNET reader described how the pop-up ad essentially hijacked his browser, preventing him from navigating away from the site.

"They took me to an ‘antivirus site,’ which kept attempting to scan my computer and install software. Using the back button kept reloading the virus page," the reader said. "It was not possible to close the page, necessitating a force quit."

At this point other than a short blurb in the newspaper’s Media & Advertising section NYT isn’t saying a whole hellva lot.

Kidnapped New York Times Reporter Freed In Pre-Dawn Raid In Afghanistan

AHN — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:45:52 +0000

NATO forces rescued a New York Times reporter on Wednesday who had been kidnapped last week in Afghanistan.

Reporter Stephen Farrell and Afghan journalist Sultan Munad had been kidnapped in northern Kunduz Province by armed gunmen on Saturday while covering a NATO airstrike on Taliban forces.

Farrell, 46, was rescued in a pre-dawn raid this morning, but Munad was struck and killed by crossfire, along with an Afghan woman and child, and a British commando also died in the operation, according to reports.

For security reasons, the New York Times had not reported Farrell’s kidnapping while he was held hostage, according to reports.

[Image: Guardian]

Wikipedia under fire for publishing Rorschach “cheat sheet”

Kim LaCapria — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:48:26 +0000

Psychologists are getting their panties all knotted up because Wikipedia has ostensibly ruined their Rorschach Ink Blot party. The controversy came to light yesterday with a New York Times article regarding the well-known and oft-mocked “ink blot” test. Proponents of Wikipedia are opposed to suppression of freely available knowledge, and this includes the 90-year-old diagnostic tool.

The debate raged on a small scale for months due to the publication of one of the ten Rorschach plates, but in June, all Wikipedian hell broke loose. James Heilman, a doctor from Canada, posted all ten plates and common responses to each. Dr. Heilman explained his motivation to the Times:

“I just wanted to raise the bar — whether one should keep a single image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I put all 10 up,” Dr. Heilman said in an interview. “The debate has exploded from there.”

Dr. Heilman further illustrates the impetus behind his actions:

“Restricting information for theoretical concerns is not what we are here to do,” Dr. Heilman said, adding that he was not impressed by the predictions of harm from those who sought to keep the Rorschach plates secret. “Show me the evidence,” he said. “I don’t care what a group of experts says.”

To illustrate his point, Dr. Heilman used the Snellen eye chart, which begins with a big letter E and is readily available on the Wikipedia site.

“If someone had previous knowledge of the eye chart,” he said, “you can go to the car people, and you could recount the chart from memory. You could get into an accident. Should we take it down from Wikipedia?”

Indeed, the most vocal of Wikipedia’s critics in this debate seem to be those who stand to lose money over the publication of the plates. At 90 years old and having been ingrained in pop-psychology for years, the test has to be of limited value as it stands. While doctors have had nearly a century of responses to study, it has to be taken into account that Wikipedia is not the only place a determined test-cracker can get the lowdown on Rorschach results. Instead of blaming Wikipedia for being a platform for mass-distribution of information again, the complaining parties need to accept that we live in a time where this kind of thing is not only possible, but highly likely.

Is it not the responsibility of those to which we entrust our medical care to be aware of and proactive about concerns such as the corroded value of certain diagnostic tools? Rather than bemoaning the inevitable, shouldn’t they be hard at work finding a new way to gain insight into humanity’s supressed urges?

[Image courtesy of two gay Darth Vaders being dusted simultaneously by blue crabs as seahorses laugh at their predicament.]

The inevitable? New York Times floats $5 per month access

Steven Hodson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:00:52 +0000

Newspapers as they move away from the print world and try to embrace the online distribution of news are being faced with how they are going to make money. Advertising might work for blogs and other small news oriented endeavors but when it comes to the size of operations like The New York Times advertising supported distribution isn’t going to cut it.

Even at the peak of advertising on the web some would argue that there wouldn’t be enough income from ads to keep the newspaper running the same way it has been. Now that we are in an advertising slump it is even harder to pay the bills, let alone make a profit. So the folks at NYT has been floating a survey asking if people would be willing to pay $5.00 a month to access the NYT’s website.

As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker pointed out – if all 650,000 print subscribers paid this $5 a month NYT would see an instant influx of $39 million per year. Now as nice as that kind of money would be the chances of even getting close to that is next to nil. The fact is that as iconic as the New York Times might be in this day and age of news coming at us a mile a minute from more places than you can shake a stick at there is nothing special about NYT that would justify paying a per month fee.

The reality is that very few news organizations will ever be able to get away with charging any kind of subscription fee. Where the news in the past was made available by those with the money to invest in things like printing presses and vast distribution chains that is no longer the case. Today news distribution is a zero sum game where anyone can distribute both broad ranging news and niche news.

Does this mean that organizations like the New York Times can’t survive in a zero cost distribution world? Definitely not. The problem is that they are still trying to mold old world practices into a new world of news instead of using their brand and immense database of news to create a new organization that can live – and profit in the new world of news.

Sheepish NY Times admits manipulation in “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age”

Kim LaCapria — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:01:32 +0000

It was jarring, stunning, moving and very sad. And it was also shopped.

The New York Times Magazine piece “The Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” was an essay composed of atmospheric shots, each depicting the stagnation of growth and dashed hopes that most Americans have become well aquainted with in the past few years. It struck a chord and was rapidly passed along on the internet.

One of the places it landed up was Metafilter. A poster there, having seen a few ’shops in his time and noticing some pixellation, was impressed by the photos but skeptical. Early on in the thread, he posted a gif showing how one widely re-posted pic had clearly been flipped. The poster, Adam Gurno, described the clear fakery in the shot:

Watch the wiring and the woodgrain. 98% of it is identical. (It’s much clearer in the original JPG, but can’t animate those.) There’s simply no way to build a house with studs having mirror-identical wood grain and electrical wiring with matching running.

Furthermore, it would be the most pointless idea ever – all that stuff will be covered by drywall and invisible to the homebuyer. No one will pay 500% more to have mirrored framing that they literally cannot see.

Pretty soon, Metafilter contributers and posters on other forums spotted fakery in nearly all the pics. Repeating leaf patters. Symmetrical thermostats in one room of a vacant home. Staircases leading to nowhere. Identical wood grain patterns on two-by-fours. Construction fencing that bent identically on two opposite sides of the fence. Twin tree clusters.

The Times has since pulled the piece from the internet, but pretty much everyone who was initially moved by the piece is wondering why the photographer bothered mirroring images that would have served the point of the piece just as well without the post-production edits. While that remains unclear, the Times said in a statement:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on Nytimes.com entitled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.” A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for esthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from Nytimes.com.

No related posts.

Wikipedia damages shaky credibility with Rohde coverup

Kim LaCapria — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:50:15 +0000

Earlier this month, we learned about the kidnapping and subsequent escape of Times reporter David Rohde in Afghanistan. But did you know Wikipedia was in on it, too?

Back in November of 2008, Rohde was taken near Kabul and held for nearly seven months- all the while, the Times managed to execute a surprisingly successful media blackout, which very well may have saved Rohde’s life. But yesterday the Times ran a piece detailing how they worked behind the scenes to kill the story on Wikipedia, with the help of founder Jimmy Wales, time and time again.

It’s an interesting conundrum for Wikipedia. The site is kind of a mascot for new media, how our concept of citation and fact has been shaped by the ubiquitous source, the benefits of crowd-sourcing versus the possibly biased opinions of one or a handful of crusty old academics. I’ve often argued that while vandalism on Wikipedia happens, undetected bias or other academic pollution is just as likely in traditional sources for citation and learning- and arguably more dangerous because people don’t use the “grain of salt” rule there. It even famously spawned a Colbert segment on “Wikiality.” (Colbert is a known and shameless Wikipedia vandal.)

But as Wikipedia struggles to maintain legitimacy as a source for reliable information, this story casts a new light on the issue. Luckily for Wikipedia, this issue was clearly life or death. But what if it isn’t? Or what if it’s just a ho-hum person and not a NY Times reporter? And how can you stop the crowd from releasing possibly harmful information- and should you? If so, when? In the Times piece, Jimmy Wales said in reference to a particularly fervent editor who tried repeatedly to edit the Rohde entry:

“We had no idea who it was,” said Mr. Wales, who said there was no indication the person had ill intent. “There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’ ”

But the crowd is not necessarily sympathetic to the nuances of these particular gray areas. Wales unfroze the page personally that Saturday, the day Rohde’s release was finally reported.

When the news broke Saturday, the user from Florida reposted the information, with a note to administrators that said: “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.”

A professor at NYU who studies Wikipedia commented on the controversy in the piece as well.

“Wikipedia has, over time, instituted gradually more control because of some embarrassing incidents, particularly involving potentially libelous material, and some people get histrionic about it, proclaiming the death of Wikipedia. But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

[Image: XKCD]

NYT Grooms Readers for Impending Paywall, with Unmarked Advertorials

Paul Short — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:15:16 +0000

Clark Hoyt, the public editor over at the New York Times web site published an article on Saturday, June 20 that I’m having a few problems with. Well, I guess using the word ‘article’ would be a bit of a stretch, since it’s just an unbalanced advertorial that is not clearly marked as an ad.

At the beginning of the article, Hoyt pulls no punches. He talks of how the newsstand price of the NYT went up significantly while the size of the paper and some of it’s coverage decreased. He quotes concerned readers showing their dismay at the publication’s pay-more-for-less changes, then goes on to reassure readers that this is a good thing, that quality will actually increase and that readers will get used to it.

Then comes the current financial situation facing all newspapers and how the last uncharged-for content is fully accessable online to anyone with a web enabled device. That’s where they will turn to next. Hey, if people are going online and reading the NYT for free, we want their money and we’ll put up a paywall to get it.

And, you’ll be getting prime online multimedia content because they’ve had to hire and train an army of videographers who’ll have tons of the latest news up, that you’ll only be able to see online, after paying.

But Hoyt does it with finesse. He can write, I’ll give him that.

Page 2 is where he drops the real bomb, though, with this:

Times executives are studying possible ways to charge readers for online content, an increasing focus in the industry as the world moves to the Web.

Which, if you noticed, drops the bomb first and cleans up after it in the second part of the same sentence by trying to justify the price increase. Everybody else is doing it so we are too.

He then spends the rest of the article using the classic sales copy tactic of having everyday readers just like you sell the new price increases with testimonials, conveniently filling in information between them to put the story in perspective.

NYT readers, they’re going to be charging you for online content, because everyone else is doing it, and you’re going to like it, because everyone else likes it.

The article is just too much. It’s thinly veiled advertising that should be marked as such. In fact, the only things that differentiate it from one of those direct marketing minisite letters is that it doesn’t have a huge red headline, or a big BUY NOW! button at the end… yet.

NYTimes Reporter David Rohde escapes Taliban

Kim LaCapria — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:43:45 +0000

After seven months in captivity, the New York Times is reporting that investigative journalist David Rohde has escaped captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Rohde, along with local reporter Tahir Ludin and driver Asadullah Mangal, were kidnapped more than seven months ago outside Kabul. Rohde was researching a book on November 10th, 2008 when he was abducted and held by the Taliban. Rohde and Ludin finally escaped by climbing a wall of the compound in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan where they were being held. Rohde was unhurt, but Ludin suffered an injured foot.

Wondering how this story escaped your attention? It turns out that the Times deliberately kept the situation under wraps to keep the men safe, and other media outlets complied with their wishes. Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, said in the piece:

“From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several government and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.”

This also wasn’t the first time David Rohde was captured and detained in the course of researching a story. Early in his career, he was held for ten days in Bosnia while investigating ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the region. After a long e-mail to his then-editor indicating that he “couldn’t live with himself if the massacre went unheeded,” Rohde vanished. He was released after nearly two weeks of interrogation and sleep deprivation. Rohde won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre.

Cool idea, it just sucks that it is based on murder

Steven Hodson — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:01:42 +0000

Google Map mash-ups, there’s all kinds of them. Some are mundane while others can be really interesting. In the latter would fall this mashup from The New York Times where they mash together a map of the five boroughs of New York and add in all the murders that happened in them.

The map includes all the murders that have happened between 2003 and up until 2009. Each of the blue dots you see on that is where a murder took place. When you hover the mouse over one of the blue dots a few details about the murder will be displayed.

You can zoom right in street map level as well

Now this is a rather cool idea and an interesting way to check out potential neighborhoods you might want to move to – just in case you know.

The Boston Globe sets the battle lines

Steven Hodson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Management versus employees – it’s old story but in the case of the Boston Globe it could been the possible death of yet another newspaper. The Globe, which is owned by The New York Times, has said that it needed to come up with $20 million in annual savings in order to keep the paper running. The most recent negotiations with the Boston Newspaper Guild, the union representing the Globe workers, sought wage concessions and benefit cuts. the threat being that if they didn’t get the concessions from the Guild that the paper would resort to implementing a 23 percent wage reduction for all Guild members.

In a vote last night the Guild members voted 277 to 265 against a new contract that included the concessions. This morning the Boston Globe published this following statement:

We are disappointed that in a very close vote of 277 to 265 the Boston Newspaper Guild did not ratify the Globe’s final proposal. As we have stated, the $10 million in cost savings from this multifaceted proposal is essential to The Boston Globe’s financial future.

This evening we have sent a letter to the Guild stating that as a result of the rejection of this proposal, we have reverted to our alternative Final Record Proposal which provides for a 23% wage reduction for all Guild members. This will secure the $10 million in costs savings needed from the Guild, and will allow the Globe to reach the targeted $20 million in savings needed from all our major unions.

Since the parties are at an impasse, the Globe will implement the wage reduction effective next week. We have told the Guild that we are available to meet any day this week to review implementation of the pay cut.

We regret having to take this action, but have no financially viable alternative.

The comments on the posted announcement are probably not exactly the encouragement that the paper or its staff would like to see as most of what I read could be summed up by this comment:

Good Bye Globe, don’t let the door hit you on the way out – Frank

The New York Times tells staff … “Please don’t use TweetDeck”

Steven Hodson — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:48:57 +0000

As most hardcore Twitter users know, there is a very strong third party developer community that has built up around Twitter. Name your operating system and chances are you will find a dozen good desktop clients and a complete range of web mashup. At the top of the pile of desktop clients the heavy favorite would have to be TweetDeck.

Personally I have tried it but it never really grabbed me as a solid choice for a Twitter client. While it wasn’t the deciding factor the memory consumption of TweetDeck is pretty heavy. So heavy apparently that Terry Schadron at the New York Times sent out a memo to all the newsroom folks asking them to please not use the program as it was dragging down the workstations.

Here is the memo in full (with a hat tip to @mathewi on Twitter)

Email sent to the New York Times newsroom from Terry Schwadron. —Zach Seward, Nieman Journalism Lab

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Schwadron, Terry
Date: Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 5:06 PM
Subject: [NYT Newsroom] To newsroom twitter users
To:

To Newsroom Twitter users:

We are seeing a growing number of complaints from people with computer
performance problems that have been traced to TweetDeck, an
application that some have installed on Times workstations and laptops
to follow Twitter messages. Though still in beta and not officially
released, TweetDeck is indeed a handy tool for high-power Twitter
users to keep track of multiple threads simultaneously.

However, it also takes a serious bite out of the performance of many
computers, particularly older PCs.

We recommend against installing it or using it on Times computers.

Several other applications, including Twitter’s own website, will
suffice for most users. We plan to test some of the favorites against
Times workstation configurations, and make a recommendation shortly on
some that appear to be both safe and easy to use, for both casual and
power users.

If you do install TweetDeck, know that it will slow your workstation.

News Technology

Ooops.

New York Times ad sales down 28.4%

Duncan Riley — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:36:15 +0000

Ad sales at the New York Times Company dropped 28.4% for the first quarter of 2009, an accelerated decline as the recession continues to bite.

The company reported an operating loss of $61.6 million for the quarter, vs a profit of $6.2 million for the same quarter in 2008. Excluding depreciation, amortization, severance and special items, first-quarter 2009 operating profit was $16.5 million compared with $77.7 million in the first quarter of 2008.

Online offered no help to the company, with About.com reporting a decrease in revenue of 4.7% off a 4.1% drop in advertising. Total internet revenues dropped 5.6%, with the newspaper web sites reporting a 8% drop in advertising.

The only bright spot was a decrease in operating costs of 9.5%, not enough to offset the decline in revenue, but heading in the right direction.

Full release here.

Boston Globe may close without Union support on pay cuts

Duncan Riley — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:02:11 +0000

The New York Times Company has threatened to shut the Boston Globe if employee unions don’t agree to broadscale cuts of pay and conditions.

The cuts, that will save the struggling paper $20 million a year, includes pay cuts, the end of pension contributions by the company and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees now enjoyed by some veteran employees.

To complicate matters, the Globe’s 700 employees are represented by 13 individual unions, and the Times Company will need to negotiate with each one individually. It’s not clear on whether the threats to close the paper would be followed through if some unions refused to accept cuts, but others did.

E&P has more.

The Huffington Post acquires the New York Times

Duncan Riley — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:00:29 +0000

The Huffington Post today announced that it has acquired a majority stake in the New York Times Company.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but is believed to have been facilitated with the help of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a major investor in the company. Slim will maintain a minority ownership stake, and under the deal obtained ownership of the physical assets of the group, including outright ownership of radio station WQXR-FM.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington said in a statement that the New York Times would cease print publication on Friday, after which it would become an internet only publication. A decision has not been made about the future of the New England Media Group, (which includes The Boston Globe) but it is believed that the group will be shut down, and the Boston.com web portal folded into a new Boston local site on HuffingtonPost.com. Successful blog come information portal About.com would be folded into a new service tentatively called “The Huffington Wiki.”

“This is an important milestone in the history on online journalism” said Huffington. “The New York Times has a long future ahead of it, and we look forward to the challenge of making this company great again, without the burden of newsprint.”

Final job cuts for the group have yet to be finalized, but Huffington assured any employee laid off that they would be welcomed warmly if they applied for unpaid blogging positions at either the NYTimes.com or HuffingtonPost.com sites.

Media companies may challenge extract linking

Duncan Riley — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:36:25 +0000

Unnamed media companies may start taking to court blogs and sites that quote extracts and links, according to a report by the New York Times.

The report specifically names The Huffington Post and The Business Insider (formerly Silicon Alley Insider) as being particularly guilty of the practice. What both sites do is run an extract of a post or article on another site, then link to that article at a certain point. The argument is that by printing only an extract of the original article, the method is legal under fair use doctrine. The problem being is that fair use under US law has never been really clear on how much content is acceptable.

Without wanting to extract too much (ironically, I picked the NY Times article up on an aggregator site), here’s some choice parts:

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “They think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

There’s wrong on one level though. What the Huffpost and AlleyInsider do isn’t scraping, it’s a manual selection of interesting content. Scraping is what a spam blog does when they pull the full content automatically.

The bigger question though is will this discontent result in further legal action to test what constitutes fair use in a court of law? The New York Times sadly settled with Gatehouse Media when the question was last raised.

Where we’ve done a similar post here we’ve always done so with permission of the author, on the basis that we wanted to be on the safe side, and I’ve said previously that I found it interesting that The Huffington Post was acting in this way without permission, given how many sites would beg them to be included. Lets hope someone sues so we can settle what’s acceptable once and for all.

New York Times suspends dividends

Duncan Riley — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:04:04 +0000

The New York Times Company has suspended quarterly dividends due to difficult market conditions.

The move followed a cut from 23c a share to 6c a share in November 2008.

NY Times Co Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said in a statement that

“Today’s decision provides the Company with additional financial flexibility given the current economic environment and the uncertain business outlook. We have taken decisive steps to reduce capital spending, lower operating costs and re-evaluate our assets. Last month we announced a private financing transaction for $250 million in senior unsecured notes and warrants. We also recently announced that we are exploring the possible sale of our ownership interest in New England Sports Ventures, LLC. We expect the suspension of the dividend, coupled with our other actions, will help us decrease debt and improve the liquidity of the Company, a difficult but prudent measure in this operating environment.”

Shares in the company (NYSE:NYT) traded up 1.63% in after marketing trading after being down 5.39% for the day prior to the announcement being made.

The move isn’t surprising, and does reinforce the difficult situation both the Times, and the broader industry is in.

About.com slashes staff, guide pay

Duncan Riley — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:09:20 +0000

The New York Times Company’s About.com has announced a 10% staff reduction and pay cuts for guides.

The 10% cut totals 22 employees, and come from ad sales, client services, marketing and editorial.

Guides will see a 7.5% cut in page view rates, and a drop in guaranteed base monthly payment from $725 to $675, although the $500 floor rate remains the same.

In a memo sent to guides, the company no surprisingly cited the recession as the driver behind the cuts

As you know, About.com is an important part of an exciting, growing and competitive industry. Among our many assets are some of the best minds in the industry, a strong business model and expert content that helps millions of users manage the challenges of everyday life. Despite the deteriorating economic conditions that exist today, we remain confident about our future and are committed to creating lasting value for our customers, Guides, team members, and The New York Times Company and its shareholders.

In the short term however, we find ourselves in a position where we need to realign the organization to respond to the unprecedented economic turmoil that is affecting organizations large and small across the country and around the world.

Until recently, About.com was one of the few rosy entries in New York Times earning reports, but things started to change late last year along with the rest of the market. Even the Times can’t buck the massive decline in web advertising many are seeing at the moment.

Silicon Alley Insider has the full memos here.

New York Times/ Gatehouse Media settle links lawsuit

Duncan Riley — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:41:24 +0000

The New York Times company has reached a settlement over a lawsuit from community newspaper publisher Gatehouse Media over linking.

The lawsuit from Gatehouse, filed just before Christmas argued that The New York Times Co, through the Boston Globe (Boston.com) violated copyright law by copying headlines and the first sentence from articles in the Newton Tab, Daily News Tribune of Waltham, and other GateHouse papers. GateHouse also claims illegal use of trademarks as Boston.com also named the papers when linking to them.

In short, the alleged crime was linking.

Under the terms of the settlement, neither party paid damages or admitted any wrongdoing.

It’s just a shame it didn’t go to court so the insanity could have been put to bed properly.