The New York Times Corporation lost more than $39 Million dollars in 2011. The company has not been profitable for more than a year at this point. The company reported Thursday that its fourth-quarter profits fell by 12.2 percent compared to the same period in 2010, and that its net loss for the whole of 2011 was $39.7 million.

The New York Times blames the losses on the decline in print advertising and huge loses from their stake in About.com.

The New York Times is the third largest read paper in the United States with a readership of around 390,000 people.  The paper has been struggling since the removal of its long time CEO, Janet Robinson.  Robinson has a multimillion dollar golden parachute and their were several other high profile staff buyouts this year limiting profitability .

The New York Times Corporation said it may lessen its stake in the Boston Red Sox to free up some more cash.

The ongoing slouch in the advertising market continues to weigh upon The New York Times Company, the publisher of The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and 15 other daily newspapers. While the papers continue to cover their operating costs the company has hinted that it expects drops to continue as advertising dollars decrease and internet readership continues to grow.

Do you fear for the New York Times?

New York Times Loses $39 Million in 2011 is a post from: The Inquisitr

A staffer at the New York Times had an “oops” moment on Wednesday when they accidentally sent an email to 9 million New York Times readers instead of the few hundred the email was meant for.

At first the New York Times called the emails accidental “spam” but later said the message was only meant to go out to a few hundred people who had recently chosen to cancel its home delivery service. Instead the email was sent to anyone who had ever provided an email to the New York Times for any reason.

Almost immediately after the New York Times made its announcement fears began to surface that the “spam” came after recipients’ security was breached by a hacker, allowing them to steal user information.

The security breach concern was valid as the company’s email provider Epsilon had been hacked earlier in the year, a fact that led many industry analysts to suspect that the new spam messages were part of a phishing scheme.

A spokeswomen for the paper quickly revealed:

“We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised.”

The New York Times has apologized and promises that no information provided to the company was used erroneously.

Here’s a copy of the exact message that was sent out to readers:

From: The New York Times
To:
Subject: Important information regarding your subscription
Date: Dec 28, 2011 12:03 PM

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,

Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.

We do hope you’ll reconsider.

As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*

Continue your subscription and you’ll keep your free, unlimited digital access, a benefit available only for our home delivery subscribers. You’ll receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com on any device, full access to our smartphone and iPad® apps, plus you can now share your unlimited access with a family member.†

To continue your subscription call 1-877-698-0025 and mention code 38H9H (Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. E.D.T.).

Did you receive an email from the New York Times?

New York Times Accidentally Emails 9 Million People, Promises It Isn’t Spam is a post from: The Inquisitr

Donald Rumsfeld is mad as hell at Paul Krugman for his piece yesterday regarding 9/11, so much so that the former defense secretary cancelled his subscription to the New York Times.

In a tweet on Monday Rumsfeld noted:

 ”After reading Krugman’s repugnant piece on 9/11, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times this AM.”

In his blog post Krugman wrote:

“What happened after 9/11 … was deeply shameful” while calling the memory memory of 9/11 “irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”

After hearing of Rumsfeld’s tweet Krugman responded to the Politico noting:

“I’m not saying anything in that post that I wasn’t saying back in 2002, when people like him [Rumsfeld] were riding high.”

The times and Rumsfeld have never gotten along, he clashed with paper editors after they praised a decision allowing two Americans who said they had been tortured in Iraq to sue Rumsfeld. The paper also panned his book “Known and Unknown” at one point calling it a “tedious, self-serving volume” that is “filled with efforts to blame others.”

For some reason I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear from Rumsfeld about the New York Times or vice versa.

In the meantime, while I can honestly care less what Krugman has to say about the event, his self serving need to bring up an old argument on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is shameful on its own.

What do you think about the Krugman 9/11 piece and Rumsfeld’s idea to cancel his NYT subscription after the blog post was published?

Donald Rumsfeld Cancels NYT Subscription Over Krugman 9/11 Remarks is a post from: The Inquisitr

I will admit at the outset that I am a devoted e-book reader- I have a Kindle, but mostly use the Kindle app on my iPhone and have shunned paper and ink books since my very first Kindle Edition.

That said, people decide on whether they should lay the mack on someone on the subway based on their reading choices? Doing it wrong. Intellectual compatibility is very important, but an otherwise attractive and fancy-smelling person can be reading a dodgy book for any number of reasons. The fact that other riders could be judging me by my choice of embarrassing vampire romance novel is worrying- so it’s probably good that I rely solely on my iPhone e-reader. Maybe they think I’m doing something more highbrow and respectable, like playing Bejeweled.

The notion Kindles are putting a dint in the subway-based dating scene comes courtesy of the New York Times. The writer, Lisa Lewis- in her not at all dramatically titled piece How E-Readers Destroyed My Love Life, bemoans these awesome devices because she cannot judge a prospect by his choice of reading material:

I had one good pickup line, and e-readers ruined it. I can no longer hit on a handsome man on a long commute by asking about his book — because I can’t see it. Gone are the days when, sitting on a train delayed in the station, I could imagine exactly where in the New York Public Library we would first kiss — in the stacks between Mailer and Malamud or Foer and Franzen? E-books may be saving literature, but my dating life has suffered.

So, you spot Dreamy McHotterson on the G Train. He smells like jet fighters and punching. He’s enlightened enough to not only invest more than $100 in reading, but he loads up his device and brings it with him to work. And the Kindle isn’t enough to “hey, baby” him? An opener raving about battery life? Lauding the newfound lightness of your work bag? Complaining about a hot new release that costs more than the hardcover for the Kindle edition?

I suppose paper books could serve as a shibboleth for all the luddites- do you judge hotness based on reading material and/or format?

[via Gawker]

[Or Look At it This Way] Kindle Spares You Shallow Chat Ups is a post from: The Inquisitr

Just a few months after they got their own New York Times Bestseller list, electronic books hit another acceptance milestone- they’ve outpaced paperbacks as the single bestselling format in the US.

The sales stats turned in favor of electronic books earlier this year, with paperbacks outselling them in January. By February, ebooks took the top spot:

The Association of American Publishers revealed in their latest report, which compiled sales data from US publishing houses, that total ebook sales in February were $90.3m (£55.2m). The AAP said this report makes digital books the largest single format in the US for the first time ever, overtaking paperbacks at $81.2m. Paperbacks led up until January, with ebooks coming second.

Adult hardback and paperbacks plummeted 34.4% in February, compared with sales growth of 202.3% for their electronic counterparts in the same period. Deputy editor of The Bookseller Philip Jones commented on sales projections for the format:

“Ebooks have grown massively, but they do not yet match overall print books and nor is it predicted that they will. The most bullish predictions suggest that ebooks will account for 50 per cent of the US market by 2014 or 2015, and then will probably plateau.”

The AAP credits an influx of Christmas-gifted readers as well as broader offerings in the market for the recent jump in e-book sales.

E-books outpace paperbacks in February sales is a post from: The Inquisitr

I wonder how you explain to your bosses that the $40 to $50 million that they spent of eighteen months has been torn down in less than a couple of days with nothing more than four lines of code.

It turns out that the fancy overly that they use to block people from seeing the content is nothing more than a bunch of CSS and lines of javascript, and for those especially nerdy types it’s all there in the page source.

As Joshua Benton pointed out in a post on the Nieman Lab Blog there are a lot of tools out there that are very good at dealing with bits of code like this:

Unfortunately for the Times, there are plenty of popular (or popular-among-nerds) tools that tactically remove little bits of CSS and Javascript. There’sGreasemonkey, there’s Stylish — not to mention the ease with which a browser extension in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari can be built to strip out code.

Joshua goes on to point out a bookmarklet already created by a fellow Canadian, David Hayes, that with on click tears down that over-priced paywall and all it takes is four lines of javascript.

Called NYTClean it hides a couple of <div>s and turns the page scrolling back on and Joshua notes it works as advertised

It barely even qualifies as a hack. But it allows you access to any New York Times story, even when you’re past the monthly limit. (I just tested it out with a Canadian proxy server — works just like it says.)

Yup have fun explaining that one to the bosses.

The New York Times $40M paywall taken down with four lines of code is a post from: The Inquisitr

When I came across the news this morning that The New York Times had finally put up its paywall subscription my first reaction was – oh well no more quoting the NYTimes anymore.

Then I read some numbers about the whole paywall thing and found out that it has taken the NYTimes some 14 months and $40million dollars to figure out the plan of attack and then putting it all in place.

$40 million for a method of trying to get people to pay for the same stuff they can find from other big name news sites on the web; and not a single innovative idea to try and encourage people to subscribe.

But the part that really got me was that, in what has to be a first, Canada gets to be the guinea pig. As if we’re big consumers of the New York Times in the first place.

Now I was going to try and put together a post full of biting sarcastic thoughts on this brain dead idea but then I read what has to be the absolute best rebuttal of both the paywall idea and the fact that they think Canadians are going to jump all over this.

It is a post by Marcus Carab at Techdirt and as much as I would love to just repost the whole thing I’ll pick out a couple of the salient barbs and then suggest heading over to Techdirt to read the whole thing.

First Marcus thanks NYTimes for letting us be the guinea pig:

Your plan makes perfect sense. The average Canadian starts his day chopping down trees and ends it with igloo sex (which is awesome, by the way) so we don’t need something to be “smooth” and “fine-tuned” unless it’s an axe or a Chippewa concubine. So by all means use us as your whetstone before you go hacking away at the American market – we don’t mind in the slightest. New York is still basically a mythical place to us, so every article you publish is like a dispatch from Oz, and who wouldn’t want to pay for that?

Then a shot at the paywall idea as it stands today

So thank you New York Times for singling Canada out as the only place on the entire planet that deserves to test your unfinished product. Of course, it’s not entirely clear why it’s still unfinished, since the $40-million you spent developing it is more than the combined wealth of our entire nation ever since Celine Dion moved to Vegas, but we have faith nonetheless. I sincerely hope that, with our help, your paywall will be a big hit in the real world.

Awesome stuff Marcus, you make Canada proud.

The best response yet to the New York Times paywall, from a Canadian of course is a post from: The Inquisitr

The “paper of record” has established a policy on removing content from the New York Times website, a leaked memo published by Gawker indicates.

New York Times Standards Editor Phil Corbett (who you may remember as dissuading NYT writers from using the word “tweet” outside of “ornithological contexts”) authored the memo, date of distribution unavailable, explaining the pitfalls associated with “unpublishing content, as well as the credibility hit news organizations take when enacting such measures without properly annotating the original piece.

While the stance of the Times in and of itself is not notable, perhaps leaking of the (rather unscandalous, while we’re making up “un” words) memo will drive home to less-prolific organizations that the practice known as “scrubbing” not only breaks links, but also doesn’t trick anyone, doesn’t halt the dissemination of information relating or linking back to the piece, and makes you look like a massive tool in front of the whole internet. It also makes bloggers really, really mad.

Below, the memo in its entirety:

Subject: [NYT Newsroom] From Phil Corbett: Reminder on “Unpublishing”
To: [NYT newsroom]

Colleagues:

This is a reminder that we have a general policy against “unpublishing” Web articles and blog posts.

There are a number of reasons: pulling down an article causes a broken link that gives readers a frustrating error message; it can create the appearance that we are covering up errors; and it leaves a trail for the conspiracy-minded to follow in RSS feeds and search caches.

If a problem is spotted after publication, the best practice is to quickly fix any mistake and to publish the new version with a correction or an explanatory note. In rare cases, if we can’t sort out the problem immediately, an interim note on top of an article may alert readers that something has been challenged and that we are still seeking clarification. There may also be cases – such as a duplicated article – where we can simply redirect traffic automatically to a single version.

Short of unpublishing, it is acceptable to reduce the visibility of a story on the site until the problem can be fixed.

In any of these situations, editors and producers should consult with the news desk, the day news editor or the standards editor.

Thanks.

Phil

‘New York Times’ tells staff not to ‘unpublish’ stories is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hilarious, and my crush on Brian Williams has just increased by 137%. It’s like Marrakesh!

[via TDW]

[Video] Brian Williams slow jams about NYT’s ‘discovery of Brooklyn’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well, this kind of feels like a bit of a pivotal moment for e-books- the most nationally referenced best-seller list is getting an e-book list, too.

The New York Times, whose best-seller list is often used as a reference point for an author or work’s legitimacy or success (the Times itself modestly refers to its own list as the “industry standard”), has been ranking best-selling books since 1935. Janet Elder, the gray lady’s editor of news surveys and election analysis, said the e-book best-seller ranking was a long time in the works:

“We’ve had our eye on e-book sales since e-books began,” Ms. Elder said. “It was clear that e-books were taking a greater and greater share of total sales, and we wanted to be able to tell our readers which titles were selling and how they fit together with print sales.”

It’s probably about damn time the NYT began ranking e-books, which according to Mashable are expected to top a billion dollars in sales this year. One of the nation’s top booksellers, Amazon, said earlier this year that e-book sales have outpaced hardcover books, and that they’re expected to outsell paperbacks by the end of 2011.

‘New York Times’ to add e-book best-seller list is a post from: The Inquisitr

Oooh, look at the fancy New York Times with their fancy fifty-cent zoological words!

Hot off the heels of their recent investigative piece on “bros icing bros,” the Times has issued an edict banning the colloquial term “tweet” from the Gray Lady’s pages when not used to describe avian activities. While Times writer Dave Itzkoff tweeted (TWEETED!) that the story posted by The Awl containing an email from the paper’s standards editor Phil Corbett “wasn’t true,” it appears that Corbett did write the email in question. (The writer snarkily -SNARKILY!- added “Not true, of course, but hey, it’s the Internet.”)

Itzkoff backpedaled, saying that the memo itself was real, but that “others wrote back to say they use ‘tweet.’” Corbett told Yahoo News that he can’t even convince Times writers to use proper grammar, much less force the lot of them to quit it with the new media slang:

“I think it wouldn’t really be right to say the word’s banned,” Corbett told Yahoo! News after the Awl’s post quickly bounced around the Twitterverse.

Corbett said that in straight news stories, “tweet” should be avoided except in special cases. As for banning, Corbett said he doesn’t actually have the power to issue such decrees. “I can’t even convince people to use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ correctly,” he said.

Corbett haughtily added:

“It’s guidance,” he said. “It’s trying to put people on alert that, in my humble opinion, ‘tweet’ is a word that hasn’t become … dictionary-level standard English.”

Wired points out that the AP Stylebook is perfectly cool with using “tweet” to describe Twitter transmissions, though:

…another arbiter of newspaper style — actually the Bible of journalism style — has no problem with the word “Tweet” at all.

In its entry on “Twitter” — added in 2009 — the AP Stylebook says this:

“A message-distribution system that allows users to post continual updates of up to 140 characters detailing their activities for followers or providing links to other content. The verb is to tweet, tweeted. A Twitter message is known as a tweet.

Full text of Corbett’s tweet-ban, below- the suggestion is to use the far more awkward “wrote” or “said on Twitter” in lieu of the banned word:

How About “Chirp”?

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.

One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

“Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

New York Times bans the word “tweet” when not used in “ornithological contexts” is a post from: The Inquisitr

How is it that a leading newspaper with a global reach doesn’t get it. I mean here we have the New York Times competing with all the other big brand papers to establish a foothold on the Web and yet when an iPad app uses their publicly available RSS feed they get all pissed off and have it yanked from the Apple app store.

Not only that but they sent Apple the take-down notice on the same day that the app got high praise from no other than Steve Jobs during the WWDC conference keynote speech. I am of course talking about the Pulse RSS reader app that everyone who has used it has nothing but good things to say about it.

This action of course has lead to the take-down being the hot topic of discussion in the tech blogosphere this morning with just about everyone wonder what the hell is up with the New York Times.

From Kara Swisher at Boomtown

Kothari said that the pair plan to contact Apple in the morning and take steps to remove Times material from the feeds.

It is not immediately clear why they need to, since Pulse draws from publicly available Times RSS feeds, as do many other apps, and does no scraping.

In fact, Pulse is little more than a really well-designed RSS reader, which is what the Times said it was in its write-up. You add feeds to it and it visualizes them in a way that’s easy to get through.

From Charlie Sorrel at Wired

Pulse takes the plain text from the NYT RSS feed and displays it. If you choose to read further, it opens the actual NYT page in a new browser window which, like every other in-app browser, uses Safari’s webkit engine to display it. The person reading it is therefore getting the exact same content as they would if reading in Safari.

Clearly the NYT doesn’t understand the purpose of RSS.

From Mathew Ingram at GigaOM

It’s not clear why the New York Times decided to target the Pulse app, however, apart from the fact that it is (or was, until it was pulled) one of the most popular paid apps on the iPad. There are dozens of applications and services that do fundamentally the same thing as the news-reading app does, by pulling in the RSS feeds of media sites such as the New York Times — and many of them are paid applications, just as Pulse is. There are also many websites, including Yahoo and Google’s customized homepages, that allow users to embed RSS feeds from other sites.

The argument being put forward by the NYT lawyers boils down to a section of their Terms of Service when it comes to the newspaper’s RSS feeds

The Pulse News Reader app makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

Well I hate to break the news to the NYT’s obviously overpaid legal counsel but this is how just about every RSS reader out there operates. Are they now going to start going after Google Reader or my favorite reader, FeedDemon, after all I paid for the licence to use it (or at least to remove the ad) which is no different that me buying Pulse from the App Store.

The funniest part of this whole thing – one of New York Times’ own bloggers gave Pulse high praise

Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator. Users select which news sources to follow and the latest articles are presented in a grid of texts and photos. Users can finger-swipe back and forth across various articles from a single news source, or up and down through up to 20 news sources.

This is definitely one case where the lawyers should have been lead back to their cage and told to shut up.

image courtesy of alphonsolabs.com

The New York Times pulls dumbass move after getting free Apple publicity is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you’ve seen an episode of HBO’s Hung and the title didn’t clue you in, you know the show basically depicts a world that actually does revolve around the main character’s huge dick.

Via Copyranter comes this suggestive billboard from New Zealand, where the show has yet to premiere. Breasts have been used to sell things probably since the first beer ad was scrawled on a cave wall. It’s less common to see the target gender (or sexuality) reversed like this.

Could you see a concept like this flying (or dangling, as the case may be) in Times Square, like right where that steaming Cup O’ Noodles billboard was? Are you not dying to know what the planning and execution sessions to get this produced were like? Is this the crowning glory of some ad exec’s portfolio? And also: penis.

Billboard for HBO’s ‘Hung’ in NZ may have invented massive wangvertising is a post from: The Inquisitr

A large fireball sparked by an underground electrical transformer broke out on 6th Avenue between 19th and 20th Streets in Manhattan today, gutting a Radio Shack and damaging a few other businesses.

The Daily Intel has a picture of the fireball, and quotes a witness on the explosion:

“As far as I could tell, firefighters seemed to be putting out a routine fire,” event planner Austin Riggs, who took this picture of the explosion as he was walking back to his office after a trip to City Bakery, told Daily Intel. “And then all of sudden there was this huge flame ball. I could feel the heat on my face.”

An Apex Technical School and a Bally’s Gym were also damaged, although the extent of the damage is not currently known.

The New York Fire Department first received reports of smoke emanating from a manhole cover at 10:44 am. The explosion occurred 37 minutes after the NYFD dispatched personnel to investigate the report. There have been no injuries or deaths reported, and the New York Times has a timeline of events here.

Pic: Huge fireball in Manhattan manhole fire is a post from: The Inquisitr

As a native Long Islander, I was amused when Newsday, our local paper, waded fearlessly and without irony into the ice-cold waters of charging for news on the internet.

I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for a physical copy of Newsday. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I thought they were passed out free on the Long Island Railroad until I was about eighteen. Even in high school, in a year full of stoners, everyone was totally too good for Newsday and favored the New York Times when they could afford it. Still, Newsday felt they would be able to charge for access to their poorly designed and annoying to navigating site, done in dark blue with white print- and not at a bargain rate, either.

Back in October, Newsday decided to charge $5 a week (a week!), or $260 a year for access to news about the Hamptons and Massapequa. And how many people do you think availed themselves of that fantastic offer? 10,000? 1,000? 100? Try 35. Not 35,000, 3,500 or 350. 35 people were interested in paying for access to Newsday content. That’s like, not even half of a single car on a rush hour train from Babylon to Penn Station. Fail.

In fairness to Newsday, a large portion of Long Island has access to the paper without having to pay the online fee. 75% of Long Islanders have either a subscription to Newsday itself, or subscribe to Cablevision/Optimum and are comped access to the site. But that figure of 75% has not been broken down into paper subscribers versus those who get freebies with cable, and most telling is the fact that traffic has dropped significantly since the paywall went up:

According to Nielsen Online, traffic has fallen since the paywall went up. In October, the web site had 2.2 million unique users. After the paywall went up that total fell to 1.7 million and 1.5 million in November and December, respectively.

While I like to mock the very public failure of my very local newspaper, the numbers are a cautionary tale to others who think a pay-for access model (and a ballsy one at that) is going to work any differently in this market. Newsday will continue to hemorrhage funds (the site redesign ahead of the paywall cost $4m) until they realize no one on the internet is going to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere. Unless you’ve got something very unique with a completely dedicated base of readers, it will fail. Spectacularly.

[Observer via Gawker]

So, Newsday, how’s that paywall working out for you? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The New York Times has announced that their services will go behind a paywall, however their “pay to read” model won’t go into effect until 2011. They’ve also announced that the system will include a “metered model” which will allow users to read a certain number of articles each month before any charges will be required.

New York Times Chairmen Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. voices his confidence in the companies new approach, stating:

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism. Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

Given the reputation of the New York Times they may just be able to pull off the multiple level model by providing users with access to various stories and then hooking them into a pay based model, although only time can tell if this oft-failed attempt can actually succeed.

The Times have also reported that exact details about the plans payment structure will be revealed over the next few months, which leads me to believe that specifics are still being worked out.

While the move may help the New York Times gain money from paid subscriptions, it will also more than likely kill their web authority among bloggers and other forms of new media. As Mashable’s Stan Schroeder points out, no website will want to link to an article only to get complaints from readers that their link doesn’t work, which could occur if that reader has read too many NYT articles in any given month.

With other companies, including Hollywood insider Variety going live with their own pay based models, at least the folks at the NYT will have time to determine what works and what doesn’t. If history repeats itself however, it could be a long and bumpy road for their new model.

New York Times Will Implement “Metered” Paywall In 2011 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Expected at some point during the next couple of weeks is the announcement by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, Chairman of New York Times, that the illustrious Gray Lady well be retreating to her petticoats of a paywall. As a side note there have been a few who have noted that this is around the same time that Apple is suppose to be unleashing its tablet computer.

While the announcement might come as soon as a couple of weeks chances are that it will take a couple of months for the change over to actually take place. During that time you can be sure that the freetards and other interested parties will be be raising their unified voices in opposition to the idea. Of course there will be dire warnings of failure and thousands of words will be written prognosticating how long it will be before NYT comes to its senses and tears down the wall.

It’s not like NYT hasn’t been down this road before as noted by Gabriel Sherman at NY Magazine’s Daily Intel blog

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a “gut call about what we think the audience will accept.” Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

With this move the New York Times will be joining other online newspaper operations like The Financial Times as well as the rumored widening move by News Corp to switch its news properties on the web to a paywall access.

In many cases though this move is and will prove disastrous for an increasing number of organizations that retreat to behind a paywall because they are under the illusion that news is finite product. The problem is that the web has proven this to be a totally wrong assumption.

News isn’t finite. It is a constantly evolving and flowing stream of information that anyone can tap into and report and express opinions on. Wherever you turn on the web someone, somewhere is either reporting late breaking news or trying to provide thoughtful commentary.

What there is though is a finite resource of recognizable and brandable names, either individuals or organizations, that bring global eyeballs to the table. It is these people that are really the strength of any news organization as it is their journalistic reputations and editorial opinions that are sought by the person on the street.

It is the ability to create a niche market within a global market of news that is flooded with everyone wanting to have their say that is the real testing ground of whether the paywall method will work. It has worked for The Financial Times precisely because they have voices that people are willing to pay to listen to. However The Financial Times is a rarity of success as a paywall example as they have a recognizable brand that people have always been willing to pay a premium for so extending that to the web really wasn’t that much of a stretch.

Will the same thing work in favor of The New York Times?

Personally I think it does have a shot at working. The New York Times is an iconic brand that is known around the world. While its reputation has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years it still is considered to be one of those few “world class newspapers”. It might not have the same type of niche appeal as the Financial Times but even within the broader landscape of global news brands it is one that people are willing to pay for.

It’s going to be a risky move no doubt but if done right it could work for them. That said though it isn’t something that is going to work for other news organizations. The reason being that regardless of how important they might think they are in the eyes of the Web they are just another news outlet among hundreds of other outlets.

The Web is global in nature and increasingly the news is being separated into two types – global and hyper-local, anything in between is just news that anyone is capable of reporting or opining on. The thinking that by moving these run-of-the-mill news outlets behind a paywall is going to save them is flawed at its core.

The only thing it will result in is – in the words of  Tom Friedman: “I used to read you before you went behind the wall.”

The New York Times to retreat behind a paywall is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google’s still feeling all announcey, with the addition of something called “living stories” to its repertoire of announcements over the past few days.

The project looks like the Google News topic pages got drunk and shagged Wikipedia, and the result is a hybrid results page that condenses the hell out of results to give users an overview of any given topic. Google’s got a rundown on their blog explaining the initiative, teaming up with the New York Times and the Washington Post to present a couple of sample topics for Living Stories.

Blogging in general has been a bit of an influence, with a heavily hyperlinked summary at the top of the page:

Below that is a menu on the left side, allowing users to focus on certain aspects of a story: Events, Articles, People, Quotes, Resources, Images, Videos, Audio, Graphics and Opinion are the choices currently listed:

Interesting especially is the inclusion of the two big print news names, the Washington Post and the New York Times. It may signal a coming larger acceptance on the part of print media to bend or break now, to change revenue models before it’s too late. (If it isn’t already.) Google addresses this in the first paragraph of the post, basically acknowledging that they’re at the center of the issue and ha, ha, ha!, they’re totally running with it!

The interface is truly cool, limiting the legwork needed for casual users to get much more dynamic, relevant results. (For instance, once you visit, some of the information you’ve seen becomes greyed out so new to you tidbits are easily recognizable- try that with your newsprint, Chicago Sun-Times.) There’s a video below from the Google blog, and here’s how they described it in their own words:

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

Google still on announcing kick, now introducing “living stories” is a post from: The Inquisitr

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?

NYT subtly frowns on Deadspin’s ESPN horndog dossier shenanigans is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.”

New York Times Goes Hyper-Local With Weekend Bay Area Edition is a post from: The Inquisitr