England may be becoming more well known as a nanny state gone to extremes but it always hasn’t been that way. Even back in the 18th century the question about freedom of speech and the citizen’s right to know what was happening in the halls of its parliament was fought and won by journalist and MP John Wilkes. The end result of all that was the 1688 Bill of Rights.

On Monday that freedom was threatened when The Guardian was prevented from reporting some parliamentary proceedings. In a post on Monday David Leigh wrote

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Following that post the story erupted on Twitter and started making the rounds of blogs around the world. Much of the credit for the spread of the story has been credited to how fast it spread on Twitter with Techdirt noting

Update: After this story got spread all over the internet (especially on Twitter), it looks like Carter-Ruck backed down. Of course… the end result? Much worse than if they had never tried to gag the newspapers. A lot more people are aware of the story. Why do lawyers still think banning such things will work?

And Alan Patrick at Broadstuff who wrote

Anyway, Twitter is being used to get the message out (#trafigura) and I suspect that by trying to bottle up the “official” channels, the outcome will actually be far more damaging to the company. (A bit like the BBC banning the Sex Pistols guaranteed their popularity).

In a follow-up post once the gag order had been removed Mercedes Bunz at The Guardian wrote a post about the effect that Twitter had had on the story

As the statistical page CrowdEye shows, tweeting increased slightly yesterday evening, and a steep rise of more than 5,500 tweets including the word “Trafigura” followed this morning.

[....]

While the Guardian was prevented from reporting the question – from MP Paul Farrelly to a minister – until law firm Carter-Ruck withdrew its opposition at lunchtime today, Twitter wasn’t: instead of suppressing the story the attempt backfired. Factor in the Streisand effect, and starting here the topic spread across the internet and became the top trending topic on Twitter. The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, tweeted the gagging order with the question “Did John Wilkes live in vain?”. The gagging order was lifted after Carter-Ruck dropped its claim.

Many of us in the blogosphere, especially the more cynical members, may question the whole Twitter effect but it is a question we are hearing less of especially after incidents like this one. It makes me wonder the following about this specific case: Did The Guardian utilize Twitter as a way to get the story out there without “breaking” the gag order?

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It appears that the union representing Los Angeles police officers isn’t too happy with the editorial stance being taken by the San Diego Union-Tribune and is pressuring the paper’s owners to make changes.

The newspaper’s owners, private Beverly Hills firm Platinum Equity, it turns out relies on a $30 million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles police officers and fire fighters to help fund its acquisitions. It is this investment that the League President Paul M. Weber believes makes them part owners in the newspaper and as such have a voice in the editorial position taken by the paper.

"Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced," Weber wrote in a March 26 letter to Platinum CEO Tom Gores.

Weber, in an interview, emphasized that the League is not demanding changes in the paper’s news coverage of the issue or in its staff of reporters. "It’s just these people on the opinion side. There is not even an attempt to be even-handed. They’re one step away from saying, ‘these public employees are parasites,’ " Weber said

Source: LA Times Blogs

Bob Kittle, editor of the newspaper editorial page, says that no one from Platinum or the paper’s management has contacted him about the union’s request.

Hopefully the investment company’s hands-off policy with the newspaper will stick because to do otherwise sets a very dangerous precedent.

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Marriott says it’s seen a 25 percent drop in newspaper demand by guests. “I visit more than 250 hotels a year, and more often than not, I’m stepping over unclaimed newspapers as I walk down the hallway,” says CEO J.W. Marriott, Jr.

Starting this month, you’ll be asked at check-in whether you want to receive the paper outside your door in the morning. You can opt to get USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, a local paper, or nothing at all.

Marriott says it was the first major hotel company to start offering automatic paper delivery about 25 years ago.

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It’s a simple inescapable fact – news is free.

It will happen at any time of the day and at any point in the world. It use to be that distance is what made it hard for people in one part of the world to know what was going on in another part. With the advent of newspapers it became much easier to keep up with current events – even though the current events might be a couple days old by the time you actually got to read about it. In the process though we became accustom to the idea that newspapers, radio and later television were our eyes to the world of news as it was happening.

This was great for the people who owned those newspapers, radio and television stations because it provide them with a great way to capture people’s attention. Attention that was also used to show them advertisements about all the cool new things that they could buy. Companies with products to sell were more than willing to pay for that ability to get people’s attention – the larger the audience the more they would pay. Fortunes were made in the news business – not on the news itself but on all the packaging that surrounded those little news bites.

Then along comes the big bad Internet and suddenly news was instantaneous and if you knew where to look it was free as well. Sure smart operators would follow the typical business model of including ads with the news; but equally smart surfers either grew blind to them or found ways to remove them. Suddenly the the major providers of the news found themselves with a business model that didn’t work the same way it had in the past.

Scrambling to catch up with the direction the web was heading news providers of the old media hopped on the whole social media train and made their news free but still wrapped in advertising. It was their hope that this hold over from the old days of packaging news would hold true in today’s so-called freenomics markets – the problem was that the economy tanked and along with it so did the ad dollars. For most of the new media bloggers this might mean tightening the belt a little more but this is a situation that they are much better equipped to survive.

Old media on the other hand as it tries desperately to make the transition to a web based world is carrying too much baggage. It is still steeped in a world where they desperately need ad sales to shore up the huge expenses of maintaining a physical world printing and delivery system; and do it while the news is still worth something to the advertisers. This is one reason why we have seen a resurgence in discussions among the old media mavens about bringing back subscriptions; or that new fangled idea of micropayments. In other words return the majority of their content back behind a paywall.

In an excellent post at CenterNetworks one of the questions that Dan Lewis asked was – What broke?

While Dan suggests that it was the arrival of the Web that broke everything I would agree in part; but I would also suggest that people have figured out that you don’t need all the fancy packaging in order to be really up to the minute aware of what is happening in the world. This is the problem that the old news industry hasn’t been willing to grasp as they struggle forward.

The interesting thing is that for all the bitching we read about advertising on the web the biggest complaint is that it is very rarely relevant to what the reader is interested in. It’s not so much that that the packaging of the news has failed it is that it is very rarely packaged in a way that add any value to what we are reading – regardless of what the ad networks would have us believe.

Combine that with operations; and ways of doing business, that no longer match the speed of news delivery that we have become use to and old media news businesses are destine to fail. If they keep believing that it is all about the packaging the way that they have been doing since the first newspaper was published they will disappear.

The thing is that advertising could work but the way it currently behaves whenever we are engaged by it – whether on a blog, the New York Times or an overlay on a video – only serves to push us further away from it. It isn’t that we are struggling with ways to keep the news flowing because that will never stop, the problem is that old media hasn’t figured out yet a new and better way to package something that is inherently free.

Free news isn’t going to kill old media but it’s reliance on the old methods of supporting outdated and expensive methods of packaging the news is what will kill them. After all you can’t kill off something that is free.

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UK Newspaper The London Evening Standard is set to change hands after facing financial issues related to a decline in circulation and advertising. The paper is believed to be losing £10 million a year.

The buyer of the paper though may come as a surprise: ex-KGB officer and Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. According to the Times of London, he will pay just £1 pound ($1.49) for the paper.

The paper was founded in 1827 and has a circulation of 263,000 copies as of October 2006.

On the other side of the pond, well known tech book publisher O’Reilly Media has cut 30 jobs, or 13.5% of its 222 person workforce.

According to reports, the Digital Media branch of O’Reilly was restructured into one publishing division along with the company’s Missing Manual group, O’Reilly Technology Exchange and its Head First series.

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The conservative leaning broadsheet launched with the backing on the now disgraced Conrad Black among others in 2002 and has struggled to find profit despite increasing revenue in recent years.

In remarks made to staff published on the Sun’s site, Editor Seth Lipsky explained that the economic crisis had contributed to the papers downfall by making it harder to raise new capital to keep the paper going:

We have spoken with every individual who seemed to be a prospective partner, and everywhere we were received with courtesy and respect. I tend to be an optimist and held out hope for a favorable outcome as late as mid-afternoon today. But among other problems that we faced was the fact that this month, not to mention this week, has been one of the worst in a century in which to be trying to raise capital, and in the end we were out not only of money but time.

Although not a classic case of an old media company going to the wall, the economics around the Sun’s collapse will soon hold true with thousands of papers around the United States and the world. If papers are losing money through declining advertising, there will be no Plan B back up finance to help them when the money eventually runs out altogether.

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The whole thing started when Jody Rosen over at Slate discovered an article of his reproduced nearly verbatim in a weekly newspaper from Montgomery County, Texas. The Bulletin, he explains, made some minor modifications — but largely just lifted his copy and put it under its own staff member’s byline.

Rosen investigated further and found chunks of content from two other publications within the same story — and it didn’t stop there. Some creative Googling uncovered article after article in the Bulletin matching previously published stories, almost word-for-word.

The ordeal gets more interesting as it goes on. Rosen ended up having a couple of conversations with the publisher, but never got a real answer. The publisher, he says, stopped returning his calls — and now, the Bulletin’s web site has mysteriously disappeared.

In his engaging, funny, and well-written account, Rosen takes us through his mixed emotions: Could this have been a big joke? Could such a paper — one purporting to have been around since 1969 — actually have built itself on such journalism practices? Or are those practices, Rosen suggests, perhaps not as evil as they seem? Maybe, he suggests, the Bulletin is “bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media.”

The Inquisitr has certainly seen its share of discussions about the line between 2.0-style blogging and good old-fashioned splogging. This is the first time, though, I’ve seen the same kind of argument come up in the world of print. Sure, at a glance, any journalist would label the Bulletin as a plagiarist based on Rosen’s discoveries — but could it, in fact, be doing the same thing sometimes argued as acceptable within web publishing? Maybe it’s just a step ahead of the rest of the newspaper publishing industry. Where does one draw the line?

The case does raise some interesting questions. In the end, though, I think most would agree to call it content theft. The Web may have loosened some rules and opened some opportunities for sharing, but there’s a difference between excerpting with due credit and downright ripping off. Lifting someone else’s words and passing them off as your own is plain ol’ plagiarism, no matter how you spin it — or how many different sources you combine.

That’s my take, and you can quote me on it…though you’d better properly attribute the words.

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