They are boldly predicting that within the next five years, all but four major daily papers will have completely left the printed newspaper market.  That’s right, only four!  Those making the cut are The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.  The Center also found it worthy to point out that two of these dailies already charge for online content, and that would be the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  USA Today is planning to start charging within the next year.  As of now the Washington Post plans to still keep its online content free.

The issue at hand, is really a wide question.  What will happen if all content is really only available online?

For a lot of us, the idea that the printed newspaper is going the way of the dodo has already been long accepted. The increased online focus of many papers offers real time news and constant breaking updates, but the  lingering questions remain about what the loss of print papers will mean for the news itself.  Will online journalism, if it is the only medium, replace in depth investigative journalism?  For that we have to wait and see.

The Bell Tolls For Newspapers? Think Tank Says The Day Is Almost Here is a post from: The Inquisitr

The first Family Circus cartoon debut on February 29, 1960 and has run continuously since that time and it will now carry-on without it’s creator Bil Keane who passed away this week at the age of 89. Originally named the “Family Circle” (hence the round border around each comic) the name was changed at the request of the women’s magazine which carried the same name.

In recent years Mr. Keane drew the comic which was then inked/colored by his son Jeff Keane.

The AP dug up a conversation Keane had in 1995 in which he explained why the simplicity of his comic made it stay popular for so many years:

 ”It’s reassuring, I think, to the American public to see the same family (Billy, Jeffy, Dolly PJ and their parents).”

“We are the last frontier of good family humor,” Keane said. “On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can’t tell what you’re going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.”

Before his own passing Peanuts creator Charles Shultz said of the Family Circus creator:

“We share a care for the same type of humor. We’re both family men with children and look with great fondness at our families.”

It’s a sad day for Family Circus fans but it’s nice to know that the legacy can be carried on by Jeff Keane, hopefully with the same poignant wholesomeness that his father brought to the table. Even in our age of electronics and constant distractions Family Circus reminds us that the little things in life shouldn’t be over looked.

Our condolences go out to the Keane family.

Family Circus Creator Bil Keane Dead At 89 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Extreme couponing has become a buzz term ever since TLC’s Extreme Couponing debuted in April 2011 but it hasn’t come without it’s consequences, for example some stores have had to revise their coupon policies, while some locations have reported newspaper thefts numbered in the hundreds.

In one case a female in Arkansas was arrested after she allegedly stole 185 Sunday newspapers from outside of a grocery store. Jamie VanSickler, 34, has been accused of stealing the papers from outside of a grocery store before they could be picked up by a newspaper carrier, however she claims the store gave her permission to take their unsold papers.

According to VanSickler’s attorney:

“Mrs. VanSickler is shocked and embarrassed by the whole situation, since she obtained permission from Harps prior to taking any newspapers, and she was just trying to save some money.”

In the meantime some of the worst hit states for newspaper thefts include,  Idaho, Texas, Alabama, Florida, California and Arkansas.

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the TLC show, coupon collecting people head to grocery stores where they buy bulk amounts of food for low costs, in some cases taking $1000 shopping tabs down to just a few dollars.

I just have one problem with Extreme Couponing and it’s not the theft of Sunday papers, I just don’t understand why buying 27 bottles of mustard is seen as a good idea, no one needs that much mustard and most of the foods bought on the show are unhealthy processed products that should be avoided when possible which is evident by the number of obese people who appear on the show to demonstrate their “couponing skills.”

Newspaper Thefts Blamed On TLC’s ‘Extreme Couponing’ Reality TV Series is a post from: The Inquisitr

News International’s CEO Rebecca Brooks brought in some extra help to ensure the 200 disgruntled staffers at News of the World didn’t sneak any defamatory, libelous or otherwise untoward statements into the tabloid’s final issue.

The paper, which folded under the pressure of an ever increasing phone hacking scandal after over 150 years in circulation, printed its last issue Sunday. And while the senior Sun staffers reportedly brought in to proof the content for veiled insults and digs may have caught something, it’s almost definite they missed something else big: the crossword page.

The final crossword puzzles in News of the World are littered with seeming references to editor Rebecca Brooks- who kept her job while the rest of the staff was cut. The clues contain various insults as well as predictions of further trouble for News International as the phone hacking claims intensify:

Clues for the quickie crossword on page 47 of Sunday’s paper included “Brook,” “Lamented,” “Stink,” “Catastrophe,” “Digital protection,” “Less bright,” and “Criminal enterprise.” Answers included “Deplored,” “Stench,” “Racket,” “Menace,” and “Tart… Clues to the cryptic puzzle contained the phrases, “Mix in prison,” “Stellar student follows a star incorrectly,” and “Woman stares wildly at calamity,” a reference perhaps to the much-printed photo of Brooks staring intensely from the back seat of a car as she left News International headquarters…

One clue, “We’re off to get a jug,” seems to reference Editor Colin Myler’s final email to staff. Myler said:

“As I said to the staff this morning this is not where we wanted to be or deserved to be, but as a final tribute to 7.5 million readers this is for you and for the staff. Thank you. And now in the best traditions of Fleet St., we’re going to the pub.”

The final edition reportedly sold 4.5 million copies.

‘News of the World’ Staffers Publish Revenge Crossword in Last Issue 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

Way to go Rupert.

Not only are your reporters pissed at the drop in traffic but your advertisers are leaving in droves. All because you knew better than the rest of the web and put everything behind a paywall.

As Rob Lynam told Ian Burrell at the Independent recently

Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. “That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it’s a reflection on reality or not, I don’t know.”

He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. “Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it’s not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration.”

I hate to be the one to say we told you so Rupert, but hey – we told you so and so did a whole bunch of really smart people. I realize that Rupert thinks that he is at war with new media and that like Julius Caesar he will triumph but damn man 90% of your traffic down the tubes, advertisers think your not worth consideration anymore.

How you call that winning any war is beyond me, but hey keep it up your competitors will enjoy the increase in visitors and profits.

The cost of Murdoch’s paywall experiment? 90% of The Times traffic. is a post from: The Inquisitr

Dawson is giving the closing keynote at the Newspaper Publishers Association’s Future Forum in Sydney on 26 August. Dawson’s global reputation as a prescient futurist was established by his acclaimed 2002 book Living Networks, in which he wrote about social networking and micro-blogging many years before Facebook or Twitter existed.

Topics that Dawson will cover in his speech to Newspaper Publishers Association include:

• Media revenues will soar but will be unevenly distributed. We are shifting to a “media economy” dominated by content and social connection. Yet established media organisations will need to reinvent themselves to participate in that growth.

• The successors to the iPad will be our primary news interfaces. Australians will most commonly consume news on portable devices, of which the iPad will be recognised as the forerunner.

• Digital news readers will cost less than $10. By 2020 entry-level devices to read the news will cost less than $10 and often be given away. More sophisticated news readers will be foldable or rollable, gesture controlled and fully interactive.

• Journalism will be increasingly crowdsourced. Substantial parts of investigative journalism, writing and news production will be ‘crowdsourced’ to hordes of amateurs overseen by professionals.

• The reputation of individual journalists will drive audiences. Many journalists, most leading experts in their fields, will still be employed in Australia, with public reputation measures guiding audiences on how much to trust their work.

Wire: Death of Newspapers by 2022, says Leading Media Futurist is a post from: The Inquisitr

I laughed at first, but then I remembered that sometimes I tell the driver of the car to “scroll up” if I want to see something out of view.

[via Neatorama]

Newspapers, assimilate! is a post from: The Inquisitr

Freudian slip anyone?

A FAIL that is actually the ultimate #WIN is a post from: The Inquisitr

So, the iPad is here. No more speculation. The gushing – and the bashing – has commenced as was totally expected. The news organizations are claiming that their salvation has arrived courtesy of Steve Jobs having a vision. It has already been broken, blended and other wise abused as everyone and their brother is flooding the blogosphere and mainstream press with stories about the revolutionary and magical device.

Is it really though or is it really nothing more than a further siloing of the Web?

I have been reading a lot of the news coming out about the iPad, both the gushingly positive and the pageview grabbing negative but all the things things that everyone is lauding as groundbreaking and game changing strike me as the beginnings of a type of segregation of the Web. It is a segregation that has the free and open Web on one side and the controlled silos of access and increasing cost on the other.

The singular view

One of the more hotly debated points of the iPhone and now the iPad is the lack of multi-tasking (the ability to view or do more than one thing at a time). The defenders of this discrepancy say that it really isn’t needed and besides if it is then Apple will add it in at some future point, which is really a nice way to say we’re so in love with our shiny bauble that we’ll suffer through not having it.

But the lack of a multi-tasking ability in this day and age is curious because it returns us to a time in computers when everything was full screen and single program at a time. Doing anything else meant trying to use all kinds of hacks – DesqVIEW or NovellDOS anyone?

So the idea that returning to some sort of singular view when using even a web-enabled <computing> platform doesn’t strike me as any real leap forward. If anything it is more about locking in one’s attention to one thing at a time and reducing options. This is neither magical nor revolutionary.

Same old media greed, just a new platform

If there is one industry that is trumpeting their salvation all because of the iPad it would have to be the print media. Regardless of whether or not their vapid drooling over is reminiscent of the similar proclamations made when the CD-ROM came on the scene I find it rather humorous that this so-called resurrection of their dying business model was available to all on Easter Weekend.

Hopefully that will be enough to instill some humor in people because the obvious cash grab being made by newspapers and magazines is nothing short of obscene. Indicative of this highway robbery attitude is TIME magazine where not only do you have to pay $4.99 each week but you have to download a whole new app to be able to read their content.

How is that greedy you ask?

Well answer this simple question: how much does it cost any one of these newspapers or magazines to create one copy of an issue?

As I pointed out in another post when talking about e-books there is an inherent cost when publishing a physical newspaper or magazine. Beyond the costs that can also be associated with a digital version, such as digital typesetting, you have the incurred costs of the paper, wages to people manning the presses, wages for delivery people and any number of other costs.

Those all disappear when you are selling a digital version. Sure your costs for design and typesetting might be slightly higher given the supposed interactivity the new medium brings with it but in the end you are only paying for the creation of one item that can be forever copied. So how many of those digital copies do you need to sell before you actually start making a profit – a 1,000 … 5,000 … 10,000?

Then you have those media companies that figure that since the rubes were silly enough to buy the iPad in the first place chances are they won’t be smart enough to see that we’re charging more for the digital version than for the hold in your hand newsprint version. Much like the Wall Street journal is with wanting to charge you $17.99 a month when in fact you can subscribe to the WSJ site for $1.99 a week.

If this isn’t being greedy then I don’t know what is but perhaps the words of some-one like Paul Kedrosky, venture capitalist and private equity investor, will carry a little more weight than mine. As he said on Twitter about WSJ’s move

Paying $17.29/mo for WSJ iPad app should disqualify you for something important, like being allowed to use money.

Yup we’re seeing a lot of revolutionary change there.

It might be a silo but damn it’s a pretty one.

The thing about the non-iPad Web is that you can easily go wherever you want, read whatever you want and for the most part it won’t cost you a cent beyond what your broadband provider is reaming your for. When it comes to the iPad Web though things have changed and the old media companies are betting the farm on the fact that we won’t care that we now have to increasingly pay for what we want to read or watch as well as creating an ecosphere where you are like a the very captive audience we decried as we fled to the web in the first place.

This iPad Web is nothing about changing the world or making it easier for grandma to surf the web and everything to do with locking us in one more to a monetized experience. As Kevin Anderson said on Strange Attractor

Looking at the iPad app rollout, you can easily separate the digital wheat from the chaff in the content industries, and you can see those who are developing digital businesses and those who are trying to protect print margins and who see the iPad as a vertical, closed model to control and monetise content.

There are those who believe that they sell content and that they should be compensated for it. Just as with the music industry, they couch this in terms of repaying content creators, when it really is more about wistfulness for the days of double-digit profit margins.

Those who view their primary business as selling content believe that not only can they charge for it but that they can actually charge the same or more for it, just because it is on the iPad.

However it is not only the old media companies that are salivating at the mouth over the hope that the iPad Web is the next hot territory. I would imagine that companies like Facebook and Twitter are just as busy frothing at the mouth at the potential of having a platform where they can get our undivided attention and occupy even more of our dwindling free time. After all just think of all the advertising they will be able to serve up to such a captive audience.

Gee .. sounds like some sort of next generation television eh.

Will any of this common sense change anything?

Not likely.

Look, the iPad is going to be a success no matter how you slice or dice it. Jobs will have another feather in his cap and Apple will make billions of more dollars.

People will love it and people will hate it but the reality is that Apple isn’t targeting the geek – or even semi-geek crowd with this. Just as with the iPod Apple is going for the general consumer jugular and on that basis alone the iPad will be the answer for a lot of people.

Regardless of the hype and all the frothing the iPad isn’t transformative neither is it game changing or magical. It is however the next ATM machine for old media and trust me they are going to pump it for all it is worth and that in itself could be the biggest stumbling block to a wider success and adoption.

Is the iPad the beginning of a second class Web? is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the biggest things that both the freetard and the Web 2.0 warm and fuzzy crowd have been trying to implant in our heads is that the future of media is online and it will be free. Not free as in beer but rather geotargeted social media data-mined we know what you really want type of advertising.

It’s kinda cute to watch all the hype fly by but really when you stop and give your head a shake – to get rid of the hot air that has built up around you – the reality is far different from the propaganda.

For all the talk about openness and sharing we are slowly finding ourselves being sucked into the same game that has played itself in our real world.

Which considering that this is all happening within a landscape where battles have been fought over everything from operating systems to browsers this spineless walk like a lamb into the wolves dens is both sad and hilarious to see happen.

Facebook has become the defacto center of the social media world with it’s brain sucking games and never ending sucking up of user data. Google still remains the only way to get on the Internet for a large number of people. Newspapers and magazines are planning a return to paywalls while they trace the cross on their Armani covered chests in the desperate hope Apple will save their collective asses.

Television – not long ago thought to be the latest conquest by geotarded web start-ups – is finding that things are better in the warm embrace of their longtime masters the cable companies. After all why anger those already paying billions of dollars per year just because some nubile start-ups is promising untold fortunes.

It is true that the future of media will be on the Web – that is inevitable – but the thought that it will be free and dominated by a new breed of whiz kids flush with money from some web start-up sale to a dinosaur is looking to be more of a fantasy.

Sure it’s a nice fantasy to have but as broadband providers implement caps and more expensive packages, not to mention the wireless carriers rubbing their hands in glee over the rise in smartphones as they charge for both data and voice, even getting to the Web is getting costly. Once there it is all about subscription this and subscription that. It’s about playing games that suck up all your data and market it to advertisers and companies.

We might like to believe the garbage hype about how everything is new on the Web but the fact is for the most part it is just a rehash of the same old stuff we’ve been doing for as long as we can remember only now – in the end – we’ll have less choice.

Our online media world is beginning to look like .. well .. our offline media world is a post from: The Inquisitr

In the run-up to today’s announcement of the iPad by Steve Jobs there was some quiet rumbling in the newspaper industry that this could be the magical moment they were looking for. Some believed that the iPad could end up being their new delivery system and deliver them from oblivion.

So now that the show is over and the pundits have had – for the most part – their say have the newspapers been saved from their own ineptitude courtesy of the iPad?

The simple straightforward answer is - no.

I am pretty sure that now the Jobsian Glow has dissipated reality is setting back in and it looks suspiciously like yesterday and the day before. There is no white knight in a black turtleneck coming to save their asses. In fact one simple example shows exactly the contempt that Steve Jobs has for them.

It was actually Paul Boutin over at VentureBeat that caught this but if you look at the following graphic, and think back to all the publishers who were lined up for this shindig – notice something missing?

You see that used to be a nicely balance graphic that had six logos on it. That was before Harold McGraw III got all talkative in a news interview the night before the announcement. The thing to remember here is that McGraw is the head of one of the largest publishing companies around, McGraw-Hill, but word is that as soon as Jobs heard about the interview he had the company cut from the presentation.

In other words you don’t screw with Steve Jobs’ game which was precisely the mistake that McGraw made. He obviously hadn’t heard of Jobs’ reputation or if he had he didn’t believe that Jobs would mess with a company the size of McGraw-Hill.

What McGraw didn’t realize is that Jobs isn’t doing this to be nice to content producers. they are a necessary evil that Apple has to suffer in order to change the world into their vision of technological perfection. That doesn’t mean though that Jobs will play nice with them as that concept just isn’t a part of his make-up. It’s the Jobs’ way or hit the highway.

The iPad wasn’t created to rescue the newspaper and magazine industry regardless of what they may have hoped. The iPad was created as Jobs’ perfect trifecta of world changing technological wonders. What better way to bow out of the game.

Now that said I do believe from what I have seen and read that there is one industry that could very well blossom under the iPad. That would be t he text book industry and now it makes perfect sense as to why there were rumors of Apple reps at the different universities and college lately.

The fact is that the iPad could very well revolutionize education from the textbook standpoint. Again I point to another Paul Boutin post about a new technology that when combined with the iPad brings a new life – literally – to textbooks.

“The book will never die. But the textbook probably will,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis. Inkling is working directly with textbook publishers. First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.

In the end though I find myself still wondering if this is really something that is as momentous as everyone seems to think it might be. Unlike Apple’s other innovations there is no problem – other than the one being created by marketing hype – that the iPad solves.

In fact when you sit back and look at the whole thing the iPad seems to cause more problems than it mythically solves. As Alex Wilhelm said in a post

No flash. Come on, Apple, why are you still kicking this horse? No flash on the iPhone was barely tolerable. On a device that you call internet specific to not have flash is more than annoying, it’s insulting. Flash, love it or hate it, is one huge slice of the internet. This is not optional.

Guess which new mobile non-laptop Apple product cannot multitask? Well, all of them, but the iPad loses here as well. Even with an Apple designed chip, the iPad cannot handle what every other companies product offerings do already. You can of course jailbreak your iPhone and run things in the background, but not natively. Why not? Beats the hell out of all of us. Again, this problem is annoying on the iPhone, inexcusable on the iPad.

And just because the software is not flawed to hell does not mean that the hardware cannot be broken as well. It can! The iPad has no camera, meaning that many of the nifty things that you wanted to do on the device you cannot. Skype on the couch? No! Tinychat? No! Again, Apple, what were you thinking? That we don’t?

I am a bit let down. I suspect that you are as well. Perhaps version two is what we really wanted all along. See you all in a year.

I don’t know about a year but I do know I’m looking forward to seeing if Microsoft has something called Courier up it sleeve and if we’ll see it sometime are the MIX10 conference.

So, is the iPad the savior the newspapers hoped for? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Old media websites took a beating in November as traffic to new media sites grew, according to new figures from Nielsen Online.

In the top five news sites online, CNN saw a drop in traffic vs the same month of last year of 12%, MSNBC 16% and the New York Times 20%. Yahoo, which remains the most popular online news site saw no change from November 09, while AOL News grew 9%.

In the next five, Tribune Newspapers dropped 14%, Fox 14%, ABCNews Digital 3% and Gannett Newspapers 15%. Google News grew 10%.

In the full top 30 list, other notable drops included CBS News at 17%, McClatchy Newspapers 19%, USAToday 20%, and the BBC with a drop of 27%.

New media sites in the Top 30 picked up at least some of the traffic, with The Huffington Post growing 27%, and Examiner.com growing a staggering 228%.

It wasn’t all bad news for old media, with some outlets growing: The NY Daily News grew 21%, NBC Local Media 148%, The Guardian 33% and The New York Post up 10%. In new media, the only decline in the Top 30 came from news aggregator Topix, which dropped 37%.

While the composition of the Top 30 sites remains mostly unchanged over recent times, the reduction in numbers may demonstrate that the audience is fracturing, with some turning to smaller new media plays in place of traditional heritage media outlets.

(Figures via Editor and Publisher)

Old Media Takes A Beating As New Media Sites Grow In November is a post from: The Inquisitr

More than a little bit of a fuss was raised not long ago when word came that Microsoft was trying to cozy up to news industry titans like News Corp suggesting that they might consider encouraging them to yank their content out of Google and go with Bing in exchange for some sort of financial arrangement.

Even though there were no official statements confirming or denying the common consensus from around the blogosphere is that this would be an incredibly stupid move on Microsoft’s part.

Well it seems that maybe Microsoft might have been listening, or had no plans in that direction in the first place, as word comes out today courtesy of The Financial Times that top search executives at Microsoft have all but dismissed the idea.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice-president for online services, refused to comment directly on talks with News Corp, but said that Bing was not looking to get a leg-up on Google by securing preferential access to information.

“That’s not at all a focus for us,” he said, adding: “We generally are not focused on getting non-Google content.”

He also said that keeping information off Google was “not the thing that would be a benefit to us in the long run”.

Source: Financial Times

I for one sure hope they stick with this decision.

Microsoft tells news moguls – you’re on your own is a post from: The Inquisitr

Among the hue and cry of the irrational newspaper industry, Google is adding to the newspapers’ argument by playing silly buggers with them at the moment.

On one hand, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is calling foul on newspapers, saying that “‘Frustrated Newspaper Execs [are] Just Looking For Someone To Blame” (Paid Content) and yet in the last week, Google has launched two new features that do nothing more than play into to the hands of newspaper owners.

The first was adding the ability for newspapers to block Google News via their Robots.txt files. A small announcement to be sure, except that newspapers have always been able to take themselves out of Google News by simply contacting Google (indeed, most people apply to get in.) The announcement was naturally spun as being a concession to the newspaper industry…despite the ability already being available via a request to remove, or by blocking Google altogether through the very same robots.txt file.

The latest move though was far worse again: Google has announced that it will allow newspapers to restrict the “free click” on news links program to five clicks per user over a set period, vs the alleged free-for-all today.

It’s got newspaper owners so fired up that Gavin O’Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and CEO of Irish and South African newspaper publishers Independent News & Media had this to say on the move:

“…then yesterday, we heard that GoogleNews has just decreed – seemingly in acknowledgment of the damage that their existing rules cause to publishers – that it will limit free news access with its new “first-click-free program”

and

“The lack of copyright functionality online is, though, also down to the content aggregators who have broken that link between audience and success, who have seized the opportunity and opted for an “a la carte” vision of copyright to serve their own business needs and who, as we have seen with Google’s announcement yesterday about First Click Free, believe it is their role to dictate to publishers which business models Google will permit them to follow.”

Except that everything O’Reilly says is blatantly untrue. Sure, Google didn’t previously limit access via the first click free program, but why exactly should they? The program itself was introduced after newspapers requested it. But here’s the big catch: newspapers already had the ability to limit access with the first click free program, besides their ability to not participate in it to begin with (see Danny Sullivan for more.) The only difference is that they previously could do so themselves on their OWN sites, vs an option in Google.

How hard is it? well, check your cookies the next time you visit a newspaper sites, because you’ll without fail get one, if not more. All the newspapers have to do is use cookies to tally the number of times you read a free article over X time, then restrict access based on those cookies.

Is the method foolproof? No, but neither is what Google is offering, because (wait for it)…..it also relies on cookies to tally how many times you’ve got your free share of their content. Most internet users wouldn’t even know how to look at their cookies, let alone care for deleting them, so either method will have about the same success rate.

The whole “Google is stealing from us” line by newspaper publishers while at the same time they have the ability to take themselves out of Google tomorrow (which they haven’t) is nothing different to the whole “Google is ripping us off with the first-click-free program;” both lines are grossly disingenuous and say more about those saying it than they do about Google.

Which is why I ask again: why does Google keep playing silly buggers on the subject? Eric Schmidt and Google management seem to be fence sitting, attacking with one hand and giving in on the other, which as far as I’m concerned makes them not all that much better than the newspaper industry, the same industry that attacks Google, but won’t pull themselves out of Google index. Google needs to say enough is enough, and simply start saying “if you think we’re stealing from you, then lets take your content links out of Google Search and Google News, because that will be the end of story.”

Why Is Google Playing Silly Buggers With Newspapers? is a post from: The Inquisitr

In July New Zealand’s National Business Review (NBR) decided to jump the curve and put all its content behind a paywall – the same thing that people like Rupert Murdoch and other news media moguls are recommending.

NBR it seems was betting on the idea that their content was unique enough that people would be willing to pay for access to the content. Well at least enough people that would make up for the drop in readership that they were expecting by the move. When it was happening New Zealand blogger Lance Wiggs wrote about it on his blog where he said

This is an indication that the NBR leaders don’t really understand the current news internet business model. The aggregators, such as google news, are driving traffic to the NBR site, and without them the NBR would be even worse of than it is. By locking them out of the subscription area NBR will dramatically reduce their ability to make their compelling, orginal and timely content available to the world. The writers behind the wall will lose relevance, and the newspaper itself will diminish.

Yesterday Lance posted another follow-up to his original posts that takes a look at how successful, or not, this move behind a paywall has been for NBR. The short of it as you can see in the graph is that this has definitely turned out to be not such a good idea.

NBR’s page impressions have clearly declined since the wall was erected, and we can expect that this was expected by them. It’s surprising to me that Interest.co.nz had not performed better versus NBR though:

Here are all of their key traffic statistics measures gathered into one chart. and all indexed from April 6 as above:

It’s not hard to tell that NBR definitely took a hit from the move to a paywall model and in most cases it doesn’t show any signs of abating. Sure NBR might be a ‘local’ news organization that some will say shouldn’t be used to forecast what might happen to big ‘global’ newspapers like The New York Times or other big brand papers. The problem is that NBR, much like the Wall Street Journal, is a specialized news publication and as such it should be able to sustain, or even grow, its revenue based on the fact tha tit is a unique provider in contrast to its competitors.

Yet we can see that its numbers are floundering and if it can happen to a niche paper like NBR how can people like Murdoch expect that the same thing won’t happen to their news properties that report the same news as their competitors who aren’t going behind a paywall?

Brand names in news – like The New York Times or Washington Post – may at one time been able to cash in on their brand recognition factor but that was before literally anyone could have the same type of recognition.

It’s a changing world out there in newspaper land where looking to the future doesn’t mean falling back on the past thinking it’ll save your ass – because it won’t.

What newspapers can learn from New Zealand’s NBR paywall – FAIL! is a post from: The Inquisitr

The biggest part of the argument that newspapers are putting forth for pulling out of Google’s search index is that Google is profiting by stealing their content. Now I won’t bother repeating ad nauseam just how stupid and wrong this point of view is suffice it to say that they are now building off of that claim with a new slam against the search giant.

Both Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine and Danny Sullivan on his personal blog Daggle point to this new argument against the value that Google says they get from the millions of people they send to newspapers. The argument being that all those millions of people being sent to the newspaper sites are “worthless”

“We can’t monetize those readers,” the hapless publishers whine. What’s the problem with these readers? “They read just one article and then leave,” is one complaint. “We can’t sell enough ads,” is another. - Jeff Jarvis

That’s a hell of an attitude to have but Danny frames the whole thing with this great analogy

Let’s say a newspaper executive opens a store. They put some story headlines up in their shop window.

Now one of those old fashioned newskids comes along. You know, the type that you’d see in movies selling papers on the street. Let’s call the kid Google.

Google reads the headlines and then scampers off down the street, shouting out to people things like “Senate’s debating health care!” or “1 out of 4 homeowners are in the red!”

Some of these people are interested. They ask this Google kid for more information, and Google sends them back to the news store.

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. “Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don’t need riff-raff like you in here.” – Danny Sullivan

As Jeff says it’s time for these newspapers to finally quit whining and actually try and come up with innovative solutions. Solutions that don’t involve treating me and others like we are the scourge of the earth. With attitudes like that it is no wonder they are heading down the road to self-annihilation.

Isn’t it nice to know that news editors think we’re useless asshats is a post from: The Inquisitr

Yesterday I wrote here at The Inquisitr about how stupid I thought the idea of Microsoft paying News Corp to pull its media properties from Google’s search index. Of course this is something that Rupert Murdoch; the power behind News Corp, has been advocating for sometime in the hope that he would be able to bluff Google into coughing up money for access.

Well so far Google isn’t blinking, and to be honest I don’t expect them to, but news out today shows that some more newspaper owners are swallowing the Murdoch proposal hook, line and sinker. Bloomberg is reporting that several MediaNews Group newspapers are considering the cut off your nose to spite your face action of pulling out of the Google search index.

A.H. Belo, based in Dallas, hasn’t decided if it will block Google News and any action isn’t “imminent,” said Moroney, who is also publisher of the Morning News. Blocking Google would be part of a larger strategy, he said.

A.H. Belo is considering models for charging for some of its Web content and plans to implement a pay wall within six months at either the Morning News, Rhode Island’s Providence Journal or Riverside Press-Enterprise, published in Riverside, California, Moroney said. That may require Web readers to go directly to the newspaper’s site to read stories, he said.

“This is traffic that’s not being monetized to any great degree,” Moroney said. “It’s akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.”

The whole problem with that argument is that none of these newspapers are international, or even national to any large degree. Unlike newspapers like the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal their typical markets are regional at best in a world where borders are meaning less and people are looking to get their news from more globally oriented newspapers.

Where once this might have meant having a subscription to those large papers and waiting for delivery of them the reader can now get that news immediately on the web. Those types of newspapers could foreseeably survive on subscriptions and no presences in the Google search index.

The smaller regional / city newspapers however don’t have that big brand name luxury to bring in readers. For them survival may just very well rely on getting the best position they can in any and all search engine results.

By pulling out of search indexes like Google’s shows a total lack for foresight from the people involved. All they will be doing is hastening up their eventual demise.

What might work for the big boys like Murdoch could very well have the opposite effect on his competition; but then maybe that is what is hoping for because Google isn’t going to have any sleepless nights either way.

The stupid line-up continues to grow as more newspapers commit to following Murdoch is a post from: The Inquisitr

We hear the scare tactics everyday. The news industry is tanking and the only way to save it is by returning to putting everything behind the paywall or instituting some sort of micro-payment schemes. News can’t survive by being given away for free is the mantra of the old school media companies.

News organizations after news organizations are crying the blues and cutting back on staff in order to keep the industry profitable enough for the owners and well placed editors. You would think that the coming news Armageddon will see the end of news as we know it.

The problem is that this is a specious argument that is put forth in order to protect the status quo of the news delivery systems. News will never die. Seriously. News is something that happens around us every day, every minute and nothing we do will ever stop news from happening.

What will change is the way in which we get our news and this is what is scaring the shit out of the old guard of the news industry – because at its root news isn’t an industry, we have just been led to believe it is.

While the boardrooms of the old world media companies are struggling to maintain any control they can over their profits that feed their million dollar lifestyles there are journalists and reporters who are finding a whole new freedom that comes from being exactly that – reporters of the news as it is happening. They are finding new freedom in being able to create content that will outlast even the outmoded methods of our current news delivery systems.

Even as these dinosaurs of newsprint carry on about returning to behind the paywall long time journalists are say no to the idea. Case in point is Saul Friedman who has been writing a column for Newsday since 1996.

Then he found out that Newsday, owned by Cablevision, would be returning its content back behind a paywall. It was a paywall that saw anyone other than a Cablevision and Newsday print subscriber having to pay $5 a week to access the site. This for Friedman was the breaking point and decided the time to quit had come. The idea of losing readership because of this paywall wasn’t acceptable to him.

Just as some journalists and reporters are deciding that the time is coming where they have to consider doing their job outside of the normal confines of a newspaper there are also a growing number of them that are looking to expand the way that they can keep on reporting on the news.

It is people like long time crime and court reporter Ron Sylvester who have seen the future of the business and realized that it is no longer just about the written word as published under some newspaper’s masthead. For Sylvester the role for journalists is going to become one of being a multi-media journalist where things like the written word are included with podcasts and videocasting.

As well it will mean being a part of the social media movement both as a way to promote one’s work as well as a way to find out about new stories that might be of interest. Journalist and reporters are becoming their own editors and ad departments. They are becoming their own sound man and videographers.

In Sylvester’s case he is also lucky enough to be able to draw on the skills of like minded contemporaries for projects that exceed his abilities to properly cover a story. This is almost the beginnings of the independent mobile teams of experts who can react quickly and without having to deal with the bureaucracy of an established newsroom.

While there is plenty of room for the independent journalist maintaining their own blog or being a part of a larger one I think the real power of a new world of news delivery will come from people like Ron Sylvester and other like him who will utilize all the aspects of technology in order to bring the real news to their readers. It will be the news without the preconceived filters that established old media organizations dole out what they think we need to read.

Regardless of what the dinosaurs of news might have us believe with their scare tactics news will never stop being delivered – only the methods of delivery will change.

The coming world of the multimedia journalist is a post from: The Inquisitr

Everyone has seen it coming but those effected by it:  the mainstream media has been in a long, slow slide that will inevitably end in its death, and they have long since decried this as outrageous – but the cracks are beginning to show.  Newspapers are asking for federal permission to collude as an industry, magazines are failing left and right, and all forms of publishing media has seen extensive layoffs and the closure of “extras” like non-local bureaus.

But what about the venerable media institutions that fall somewhere in-between newspapers and magazines?  These are the TIME Magazine‘s, Newsweek‘s, and U.S. News‘ of the world.

TIME, along with it’s weekly brethren, typically has historically had more journalistic integrity per paragraph than any newspaper does per page – this is common knowledge, and it was assumed by many that they would weather the perfect storm of media collapse better than most.  This, apparently, was an incorrect assumption.

Looking over the last three issues, disturbing trends begin to emerge.

The November 9th, 2009 issue of TIME has 64 pages:  25 are ads, and 11 are the beginning filler nonsense no-one reads – that’s over half the magazine, and another 5 pages are dedicated for entertainment “news” that doesn’t belong in a publication like TIME.  But here’s where it gets good:  there’s two “book adaptation” articles that total 6 pages.  All told, that leaves just 17 pages for true journalism, half of which are actually commentary pieces.

The November 2nd, 2009 issue has 80 pages:    44 are ads, 11 are introductory filler, 10 are entertainment “news”, and there’s another 5 for commentary – leaving just 10 pages for journalism.  The trend continues in the October 26, 2009 issue:  64 pages in length, 17 are ads, 5 are full-page “infographics”, 12 are intro filler, 3 are full-page pictures, 5 used for entertainment, and another 5 for commentary – 17 for journalism.

Did TIME think its readers wouldn’t notice?  That people who care enough about politics and world issues to read lengthy stories are somehow too busy or ignorant to realize the content they pay for is dwindling substantially?  The content I personally pay for now only represents somewhere around 20% of the magazine each week, and this is somehow supposed to be acceptable?

There was a time, just a few years ago, where the magazine took well over an hour to read – and it was an enjoyable, informed, educational timesink.  Now it takes less than half an hour of mostly brainless reading, depending on the week’s content, because the majority of the magazine gets ignored.  It’s understandable that such publications are going through tough financial times, due to a decreased readership and a number of other issues, but the way to increase your membership, or even maintain the status quo, is most definitively NOT to follow TIME’s current behavior.

To all the media moguls out there, here’s an important point you might want to write down for future use:  when you need to increase your publication’s readership, replacing content with ads and journalism with reprints or filler is not going to net you the results you desire.  This, in all honesty, should be common sense.

It goes without saying that I am not only disappointed in TIME for such behavior, but also that it deserves to fail in a miserable and public fashion, because it has proven itself incapable of making rational editorial decisions when threatened with existential questions.  Since I don’t subscribe to Newsweek or U.S. Magazine, it’s hard to say definitively whether they are acting similarly, but this industry has proven to be very open to groupthink…

In short, let TIME and its ilk die the slow, painful death that they deserve.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction.  He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Mainstream Media’s Death – Pending is a post from: The Inquisitr