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.

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]

Much ado is being made about the best-selling books on Amazon being skewed by the prevalence of free books.

By my count on the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon, 59 books are either free or cost a cent. Only three books in the top ten cost more than a quarter. And the book publishing industry is not pleased. Interesting, though, is the contrast between how the book industry feels about the free books versus authors. Industry flak says:

“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”

Indeed, said Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, “free is not a business model.”

But dude- now it totally is, actually. And again, industry tries to control the market instead of going with the fast-moving stream to their peril. As a kid, I was an avid consumer of books (as well as Ring Dings.) I burned through at least three a day on weekends, sometimes one and a half under my desk away from Sister Anthony Therese’s gaze, at the risk of being whacked with a ruler. But when the internet came along, I stopped reading books. As long as content was in my eyes, I could give a frick if it was on a blog or in a book. All the better that I didn’t have to put on clothes or go out in the sun to get books from the bookstore or library. Books vs. internet, internet wins.

Now the publishing industry is being handed a golden opportunity in the form of e-books and all they can do is whine that it’s not good enough. Even though it’s been like ten years since Napster came along and people quit buying music the old fashioned way- and in fairness, that one kind of slapped the industry in the face- book publishers refuse to accept the the market has changed and won’t go back to suit them. The authors, who wisely point out that without the chance to hook readers in with a freebie, they’d be buried under a thousand million copies of RPattz’s face seem to get it:

Charlie Huston, the author of the Henry Thompson crime trilogy and a series of books about Joe Pitt, a vampire detective, said that “the part of me that grew up in a union household” still feels as if he were occasionally undermining himself by sanctioning digital giveaways by his publisher, Random House.

But, he said, “I guess my attitude right now is that I can be afraid of what’s coming or I can try and aggressively embrace it in some form.”

Going back to my random sample of one, in the ten years before I got my Amazon kindle iPhone app, I bought a handful of books. Maybe three. I’d already given up my reading attention to the internet, where I could read high quality things that never ran out of pages. Actually, I lied. After being pulled into a fascination with True Blood, I bought a discounted set of the Sookie Stackhouse books. The key here: content drew me in. Then I got an iPhone.

In the past 5 months, I’ve amassed 60 books on my iPhone. About 20 are free, the rest purchased happily even though free books are readily available. I even bought duplicate copies of all my Sookie books because I love them so much. I paid more for the Kindle versions than I did for the paper copies. The money I’ve spent on books has skyrocketed something like 5,637% merely because books became easy to obtain and easier to read. My phone is backlit. I can read in the dark. I always have it. I can carry all 60 books in my bra, where I keep my phone. Easy peasy.

Although only 5% of the market share of all books now, e-books will eventually stomple the paper book market. It’s coming. And free books will always be available by authors who are very good and know they’ll hook you on their crack content. As it is with the internet, these excellent authors will float in a sea of horrible writers, but the good ones will be evangelized and people like me and you will pay for their content and they will make a lot of money.

Seth Godin, in his laser-y and pithy way, addressed the general issue of whining about “the market” in a recent blog post:

The Marx Brothers were great at vaudeville. Live comedy in a theatre. And then the market for vaudeville was killed by the movies. Groucho didn’t complain about this or argue that people should respect the hard work he and his brothers had put in. No, they went into the movies.

Then the market for movies like the Marx Brothers were making dried up. Groucho didn’t start trying to fix the market. Instead, he saw a new medium and went there. His TV work was among his best (and certainly most lucrative).

It’s extremely difficult to repair the market.

…it’s not easy or fair, but it’s true. You bet your life.

The wealthy people who peddle books can’t fall back on this being news, like it was to the music industry when everyone started downloading music rather than paying $20 an album. The writing is on the wall- but will they accept the opportunity they have to reclaim some of the market they’ve already lost to the internet at large, or just sit their throwing their toys out of the pram because consumers have more choices now? I’m inclined, if the quotes above are any indication, to think it will be the latter.

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.

The FTC has hinted in an interview with Daily Finance that the rules about fairly disclosing comps in blog posts doesn’t apply to people who happen to be awash in a sea of free goodies.

Yes, you, poor mommy blogger, must disclose a sample of baby wipes you didn’t pay for, but people who are important and better than you like Gwyneth Paltrow deserve nice things and thusly don’t have to abide by FTC disclosure rules. While celebrity endorsement has way more pull than your average blogging nobody, details like that don’t matter much to the FTC- Rich Cleland, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s ad division, explains the spotty logic behind the favoritism:

The average consumer, Cleland said, might well be aware that celebrities of Paltrow’s stature often receive free clothing, trips and other swag. “It is one of the issues where celebrity endorsements are a little different than person-on-the-street endorsements,” he said. “Would consumers understand that celebrities are always getting free stuff? It’s a factual question.”

Back in October when the new rules became a blogging issue, Steve suggested celebrities might be in trouble considering the new guidelines, but we can all rest easy. People like Gwyneth Paltrow can continue trading their heavily weighted words for “ridiculously lavish” vacations. Sadly, it seems the regulations do only exist to marginalize independent bloggers. Because unfair advantages cannot be allowed to stand.

[via Gawker]

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.

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.

See that line in the sand?

The one that was drawn yesterday by the FTC and their new <gag> guidelines </gag> about bloggers having to disclose any and all interactions with advertisers, book publishers, movie companies that might result in a review being written about a product, a movie or a book. The result of failing to do this could result in a fine of up to $11,000 for the blogger and or provider of the item to be reviewed.

In effect the grassroots of blogging just got weed whacked all to hell. Not to mention that there is a shitload of FUD being spread around and some important questions being left either unanswered or obfuscated by enough legalese to choke a horse.

Yesterday I asked some of those questions in a post here as well as making a few comments on blogs that were talking about the subject. One in particular was a post by Daniel Tunkelang, a blogger who I hold in high regard, were he was comparing the points raised by posts made by Jeff Jarvis and Google’s own Matt Cutts. Now to be clear here – Matt Cutts has come out solidly on the side of the FTC rulings which he made clear in a comment on Jeff Jarvis’ post:

As a Google engineer who has seen the damage done by fake blogs, sock puppets, and endless scams on the internet, I’m happy to take the opposite position: I think the FTC guidelines will make the web more useful and more trustworthy for consumers. Consumers don’t want to be shilled and they don’t want payola; they want a web that they can trust. The FTC guidelines just say that material connections should be disclosed. From having dealt with these issues over several years, I believe that will be a good thing for the web.

You can read the complete comment stream at Daniel’s blog but when I posted my comment I also pointed to the inequity over the fact that bloggers are being held to FTC guidelines for exactly the same thing that newspapers (traditional media) has been doing for years but without any FTC oversight.

And thus began the FUD courtesy of Matt Cutts in his reply to me:

“If the FTC thinks that this is a problem then why are not those in traditional media having to play by the same rules”

The same rules do apply to traditional media, and that’s how traditional media interpreted the updated guidelines. For example, the WSJ said “The [FTC] move is an effort to apply the same rules that already cover broadcast stations, newspapers and magazines to the Wild West marketplace of the World Wide Web.”

As for David Pogue on neither his private page full of links to his books and other assorted stuff – not a disclosure to be found and the same goes for his posts on The New York Times. Walter Mossberg has a single blanket “Statement of Ethics” which seems to work for traditional news journalists/reviewers but from what the FTC says this wouldn’t fly for independent bloggers. Kara Swisher also sports almost the exact same “Ethics Statement” as Walter but again this wouldn’t fly for indie bloggers who are expected to have a disclosure with every post that the FTC deems needs to have one.

The problem is that there is no FTC guidelines like the ones that have been enforced on bloggers and there has never been any. I have spent the last three hours scouring the web for even the slightest proof that the FTC has any purview over traditional media in the same way that they now have over independent bloggers (this will become an important distinction shortly).

In fact these are some of the quotes I have found that suggest otherwise Mr. Cutts

Never mind that TV, radio, and print publications have never had any such disclosure requirement (and still won’t).

Source: Business Insider – FTC Issues Ludicrous Blogger Disclosure Policy

The problem here is that mainstream media journalists receive goods for free on a regular basis, and only rarely is any relationship disclosed. There may be a line (mostly) between directly paid content and editorial in newspapers, but there is a wealth of other ways companies court attention from the mainstream media. It also doesn’t have to be goods: how regularly are journalists offered free trips to conferences and events, and at such events they might receive free goods, accommodation, food and even entertainment? It doesn’t even have to be that extreme: a free lunch or drinks could all be counted as indirect compensation by this criteria.

Source:  Duncan Riley – The Inquisitr – FTC targets bloggers, ignores newspapers

These new guidelines have nothing to do at all with established traditional media, and to a certain extent with the new media conglomerates e.g.: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat. This was made abundantly clear in a quote from Michael Cleland, assistant director for the FTC’s division of advertising practices in a post by Robert Wenzel of the Economic Policy Journal blog where a telephone interview between Edward Champion and Cleland.

Cleland informed me that the FTC’s main criteria is the degree of relationship between the advertiser and the blogger.
“The primary situation is where there’s a link to the sponsoring seller and the blogger,” said Cleland. And if a blogger repeatedly reviewed similar products (say, books or smartphones), then the FTC would raise an eyebrow if the blogger either held onto the product or there was any link to an advertisement.

As to why newspapers don’t need to be regulated the same way that scummy bloggers do comes out in this quote

But why shouldn’t a newspaper have to disclose about the many free books that it receives? According to Cleland, it was because a newspaper, as an institution, retains the ownership of a book. The newspaper then decides to assign the book to somebody on staff and therefore maintains the “ownership” of the book until the reviewer dispenses with it….

To which Robert Wenzel quite rightly points out the following

Note: Cleland is completely clueless if he thinks reviewers’ copies from mainstream media don’t end up with reviewers and then sold. All he has to do is walk into Strand’s bookstore in NYC. They have half their basement devoted to current books that have been sold to them by reviewers.

Another good point that was brought up by Jane over at Dear Author – what are the trigger points that will spark the FTC to come down on you like a ton of bricks?

As it is the FTC is making Twitter a prime example of where disclosure is going to be watched for but what about affiliate links. After all how many people who have reviewed books add a link to Amazon or Barnes and Noble that include affiliate links so that they can make a few bucks. Are we going to have to disclose those and any other affiliate links we might use – say for advertisings?

So regardless of the FUD that people like Matt Cutts like to put forth the fact is that traditional news organizations are not being regulated by the FTC. In fact it would also seem that major blog networks like the ones mentioned about may even be exempt from this type of watchdog behavior.

In all that I have read so far everything to do with the new FTC guidelines have to do with independent bloggers, much like when I write over at Shooting at Bubbles or at WinExtra but maybe not so much for here at The Inquisitr since it seems there is a dividing line between being a paid writer and being a writer sucking up for freebies.

Other than the FUD being thrown around I still haven’t seen any solid answers to my original questions from yesterday

1. Will these same ‘guidelines’ be applied against “traditional media” and if not – why not?

2. What exact form do these disclosure need to take? Per post? Per page? Per comment?

3. Is this retroactive? Does this mean that sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, – well every single blog past and present will have to go through all their archives and add a disclaimer. Because we all know that posts that are even months or years old can resurface.

4.Will book publishers make signing a disclosure form a part of bloggers doing book reviews and is it really worth the effort at that point?

5. Does the country of origin of the writer matter as to whether a disclosure is included?

6. Does it matter the country of origin of where the blog served from come into play?

7 Does the country of origin of the product, service or book come into play at all?

No, all we are being left with is a threat to play nice by a totally different set of rules that either traditional media and possibly big blog networks or face the threat of being fined into oblivion.

Talk about stacking the deck.

You may not agree with Michael Moore regarding a lot of the things he makes films about but at a press event in Toronto for a film festival he said something that most people involved social media and Web 2.0 would be hard-pressed to disagree with.

During the conference that was primarily about his new film, Capitalism, Moore went off on a four minute tangent where he said that the Internet is what is responsible for the killing of newspapers. Moore suggests that it is greed, pure and simple, that has brought the newspaper industry to this point in time.

“These newspapers have slit their own throats,” he said. “Good riddance.”

Moore said that newspapers, bought up by corporations in the last generation, have pursued profits at the expense of news gathering. By basing their businesses on  advertising over circulation, newspaper owners have neglected their true economic base and core constituency, he said.

Source: The Wrap – Michael Moore Says U.S. Newspapers ‘Slit Their Own Throats’

Earlier today I wrote a post wondering if radio and newspapers joining forces could save them each from oblivion and now I just spotted this post at the New York Times about the NPR, the public radio network, moving to reboot its approach to the web. Unlike like much of their brethren in the business NPR is revamping its web site, NPR.org, to make navigating easier for their users as well as emphasizing written reports over audio reports.

The idea is to raise the level of their journalistic output and at the same time make public radio more widely available. Ms. Schiller, NPR’s president and chief executive, says “We are a news content organization, not just a radio organization”. As well these changes to their web site is intended to make finding NPR news reports easier on a less cluttered main page, or to easily jump to other areas of emphasis like Arts and Life as well as Music.

To make the site more of a news destination breaking news is being posted faster helped along by a merging of NPR’s radio and digital news desks. Further rounding out this change the searching for, sharing and commenting on NPR articles has been made simpler. As well for the first time there will be free transcripts made available.

The Web site changes are part of a strategy meant to increase NPR’s share of the midday audience, between its “Morning Edition” and the late afternoon “All Things Considered,” when listening to NPR stations drops considerably, said Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media.

Instead of short paragraphs that direct users to click on links to audio reports taken from NPR’s programs, the Web site will now offer fully reported text versions of articles, so users can click from their cubicles. “We think the midday experience is much more text-driven,” Mr. Wilson said.

The Web site will flip “from being a companion to radio to being a news destination in its own right,” Ms. Schiller said.

It will not be as comprehensive as some sites, like CNN’s, are, Mr. Wilson said, but will “concentrate on areas where we can be particularly authoritative.” He added, “We’re not in a battle for share with established players who’ve been doing this for 15 years.”

Source: New York Times – NPR Moves to Rewire Its Approach to the Web

Here is a screen shot of the new look for the NPR site, and I must say they sure have seems to have taken to the new “white” look we are seeing on a growing number of tech blog sites.

Even within archaic systems and services there are some that are even more out of touch with reality and do everything they can to perpetuate old and outdated ways of doing things. The Associated Press (AP) is one of those services and they have proven yet once again just how out of touch both they and management heavy news organizations are.

Rather than finding ways to make their content more useful, and as a result more valuable, they like much of the old media are struggling to find ways to keep everything within the existing status quo of where they control the dissemination of other people’s interpretation of the events happening around us – otherwise known as …. the news. Along those lines Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP Board of Director and vice chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group Inc (wow that’s a mouthful isn’t it), announced today that the AP would be creating a news registry that would allow them to tag and track all their content to make sure that those useless lying sacks of industry destroying bloggers everyone is in compliance of the AP “terms of use”.

The idea of course is that this way given their exclusive microformat the AP can control who can use their content and how much of that content they can use.

"The registry will employ a microformat for news developed by AP and which was endorsed two weeks ago by the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit research and development organization that has called on news organizations to adopt consistent news formats for online content," the announcement explained. "The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational ‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage."

The registry also will enable content owners and publishers to more effectively manage and control digital use of their content by providing detailed metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support. It will support a variety of payment models, including pay walls.

Source: Editor & Publisher :: AP To Create Registry to ‘Track’ and Protect Online Content

As PaidContent noted on their post this is going to piss off a whole lot of people

This is sure to raise a howl from people who a) don’t like efforts to manage content use, b) don’t like the idea of tracking and c) don’t like anything AP does when it comes to trying to protect content.  (We’ll also probably hear a lot about genies and bottles.) AP is trying to position it as not being about Google or bloggers, but about giving news orgs tools to enhance and protect revenue—and as an alternative to going completely behind a pay wall.

Dear Publishing Industry,

You’re screwed, and everyone knows it – especially since you whine and moan about it on what seems like a daily basis via the very pulpits you are trying to protect.  Crying over spilled milk doesn’t help anyone, and will likely only exacerbate the situation, regardless of Old World medium: newspapers, book publishers, and magazines.  For the sake of simplicity, the Internet is assumed to not exist.

Newspapers

Despite being a minimum of twelve hours behind other media outlets, you continue to claim to be the only source of “true journalism” – while devoting days of front page coverage to Michael Jackson, publishing barely-modified Press Releases as news, and taking an ever increasing number of stories from wire services.  Does that really sound like valuable, source-verified, original journalism?

Whining about personal problems (i.e. decline in sales) via the same journalistic channels that purportedly carry important, topical news pieces is not helping your argument.  The value of newspaper-based journalism is not in “Breaking News” stories, but rather in-depth investigative pieces or complex works that can take months of traveling and significant capital to produce.  The average, non-investigative article in a newspaper does not include enough room for a thoughtful analysis, and such works are better left to those with more time and space to do them properly.

Furthermore, the inexplicable coverage of nonsense over true news, such as celebrity drama instead of attempted healthcare reform, is disgusting.  You’re contributing to the dumbing-down of a culture that doesn’t need any extra help, when, only twenty years ago, newspapers were once revered for their intelligent and thought-provoking insights.

Book Publishers

You’re an industry rotting from the inside because of overreacting to your audience.  If you need proof of this, look into the saturation of the “Fantasy” market with hugely drawn-out “epic” multivolume series about people with swords and magic, most of which are the same book written by different authors – Lord of the Rings can only be reproduced so many times.  Or the rampant existence of softcore porn fiction masquerading as “Horror”, or occasionally even “Fantasy”, using vampires and werewolves to get unsuspecting readers to purchase such idiotic literary filth – the Twilight and Anita Blake series are perfect examples.

“Science Fiction” readers, who are some of the most devoted consumers, are currently being shunned for more trendy genres, with only a handful of actual “SciFi” novels being published each year – Tor-Forge, a major publisher, is an exception.  Even the best of “SciFi” is being labeled as “Thriller” or other more profit-friendly genres, based off of a core genre misconception.

Additionally, you continue to pump out cook books, celebrity novels, and other trend-hopping tomes.  The following of fads inevitably results in market over-saturation, excess stock, and, in the end, smaller profits than if books were published in an intelligent fashion.  Quotas for genres should be turned into an intelligent review process, where only interesting, smart, and original (or at least semi-original) material is published – does the world really need another Harry Potter clone?

Magazines

GQ?  Vogue?  Teen Girl?  Us Magazine?  These are magazines in only the vaguest sense of the word, and are more akin to tabloids than anything else.  TIME, Newsweek, and US Weekly are newspapers parading as magazines – while these publications are to be applauded for their significant, in-depth analysis and extreme feats of journalism, they largely chase the stories-of-the-moment which have already been covered elsewhere by faster outlets.  If these were to be instead published monthly, at four times the length with a wider range of interests, the value would increase significantly – as would subscribers.  Readers are not interested in the crazy-talk of extreme feminists or angry nonsensical “Tea Baggers”, but intelligent, coherent articles.

Other publications like WIRED and Popular Science have found a formula that works well:  discover/create a niche market, and cater to it endlessly.  Neither magazine deviates from this formula, and they typically stay within their audience parameters, although WIRED does occasionally produce some boring pieces.  If the rest of the magazine market were to follow the leads of Popular Science, instead of continuing to rely on now-failing Old World principles, they could potentially be rejuvenated in the eyes of the reading public.

Publishing Reform

As a dying industry with many faces, and many problems, you will need to reinvent yourself and some of your practices in order to survive.  Clinging to methods and ideologies that worked a decade ago is counter-productive – just ask the GOP how they’re doing at the moment.  The readers across the world do not wish to see you fade from existence, but rather adapt to a more modern existence, since there is a benefit to each platform from which you operate.

Sincerely,

Kyle Brady, avid magazine and book reader

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.

Generally when blogs talk condescendingly about the newspapers moving online we like to point out how they never link out to blogs that they mention or one’s that they quote. To a point I can understand the reasoning behind why they go this route, I don’t agree but I understand, however when it comes to other kinds of linking the policy is just stupid.

The reason I mention this is because I saw a mention of some music tagging software on Friendfeed and the link provided was to a Wall Street Journal Technology online post. The post by Geoffrey Fowler talked about two specific software packages that you could use with your MP3 files to help clean them up. The two programs were TuneUp Media and MusicBrainz Picard neither of which I had heard of before so I was interested in taking a look.

Except there was a problem with trying to do that – no links. The only link in the whole post was for Apple because iTunes was mentioned in relation to TuneUp Media and it only lead to a WSJ page for stock information for Apple. When it came to the two software packages though nada.Zip. Zero links.

The thing that gets me is that neither of of the products mentioned had anything to do with what WSJ could construe to be a competitor. They would have been links to products that maybe their readers would have appreciated being able to check out. This would have been an added value (although blogs would have linked out naturally) for the WSJ readers.

There was no ‘threat’ to WSJ losing readers. In fact they would have been helping their readers. It is this kind of attitude regarding linking that is only going to make people look for alternatives to these old media online efforts. It might seem like a simple thing to get bitchy about but sometimes consumers really appreciate those little things – especially when they don’t cost anything to give.

If journalists don’t write about it does that mean that news doesn’t happen and if they do does that mean they have some sort of copyright over the reporting of that news?

For as long as there has been a news industry what is considered important enough to take up so-called valuable space on a printed collection of paper or take up valuable airtime has been limited to a select few. It is the people in editorial boardroom or producer’s offices who decide what they think we need to see or read each day. The majority of the time it is the news that is most likely aimed to promote our most visceral responses – hence the popularity of “bad news” being the good news.

It’s good news for the news gatekeepers because it is almost guaranteed to bring in the most readers or viewers. The worst the disaster, the juicier the scandal, or the more heart-wrenching the story, the better. Sure we every once in a while go through our angst ridden worrying that the news is too negative and that there isn’t enough good news. The problem is good news isn’t profitable news and what is important to the news industry is the stuff that keeps the shareholders happy and the management bonuses flowing.

As Jeff Jarvis points out today

The realization of that myth – the myth of necessity – hit me head-on when I read an unselfconsciously narcissistic feature in The New York Times this week about the room where the 4 p.m. news meeting is held. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has likened that meeting to a “religious ceremony.” The Times feature certainly acted as if it were taking us inside the Pope’s chapel: “The table was formidable: oval and elegant, with curves of gleaming wood. The editors no less so: 11 men and 7 women with the power to decide what was important in the world.”

Behold the hubris of that: They decide what is important. Because we can’t. That’s what it says. That’s what they believe.

I was trained to accept that myth: that journalists decide what’s important, that it’s a skill with which they are imbued: news judgment. I worked hard to gain and exercise that judgment. The myth further holds that no judgment of importance is more important than The Times’; that’s why, every night, it sends out to the rest of newspaperdom its choices. News isn’t news until it’s reported and it’s not important until The Times says so.

Our supply of news is dictated to us minute by minute, day by day. That doesn’t mean though that it is the only news out there. An incredible amount of new worthy things are going on everyday – from the bad to the good. Just because the large majority of it doesn’t make it through the editorial “money” filter doesn’t change the fact that those events or information isn’t news.

The news isn’t about the reporting of it. It isn’t about the people writing about it. News is about the event, the happening, the information. It is about the people who were involved with the event. It is about the people who made the happening happen. It is about the people who created the information.

What the new media, blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook (to a lesser degree) did was to allow the people responsible for creating the news to be the ones that distributed the news. Or as Dave Winer put it – “The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman”. No longer is our flow of news being dictated to us by the select few and what they think is important. We are getting to make those decisions now.

However being entrenched as our sole providers of what is important in the world isn’t something that the news industry will give up without a fight. Rather than try and find their way in a new world of news and information distribution that doesn’t flow through their gates, the industry is trying to bend and manipulate this new media into their way of doing business.

The news industry of the past is locked into the believing that if they aren’t the ones reporting the ‘news’ then it doesn’t exist. It is because of this belief that they then turn around and try and claim ownership of the ‘news’. Because they are the ones that paid someone to write about something that happened the industry figures that they have an ownership – a copyright – over it all even right down to barring online linking to that news or information.

In their effort to bend this new media way of getting our news the only thing the news industry is doing is hastening the breaking of their stranglehold on the distribution of the news. They still have all the same abilities to reports the news and the people who are a part of that news. All they are losing is the exclusive rights to distribute it – as they should.

News isn’t distribution and who controls it, news is what is happening in and around our lives except now we are the ones who can distribute it – as it should be.

Last night saw a gathering of of radio and TV correspondents for their annual dinner. This year the big names invited to speak were John Hodgman – better known as Mr. PC, and Barak Obama – better known as Mr. President.

Here in sequence of appearance are the videos of their time at the mike making folks chuckle. First up – President Obama:

Followed by the indomitable Mr. John Hodgman

We hear a lot about the newspaper industry saying silly things about blogs and social media services like Twitter. From Associated Press wanting money for people using quotes of AP stories if the quotes are more than five words to John Kerry suggesting that democracy is threatened if newspapers fail the industry points to blogs and social media services as the big villains. As archaic and stupid as those assumptions are it would appear that the news industry isn’t alone in these delusions.

In a personal opinion post on the Newsarama blog Lucas Siegel lets us in on how major players in the comic publishing world have fallen into the same trap. According to Lucas three of these people; Tom Brevoort, Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, have been moaning about how their messages on Twitter have been republished on blogs like Newsarama as part of their reporting of the industry. It is their feeling that this shouldn’t be done without permission or payment to whoever originally made the tweet.

Not only that but he also goes onto talk about some sort of sense of entitlement that people have who repost this kind of stuff

Joe Quesada on the other hand comes right out asks where is his check for the use of his tweets which only goes to show how little these guys have been paying attention to the world around them

I hate to be the one to break it to these guys but this argument has already been hashed out and guess what – it’s called fair usage so no pennies for you. What they also seem to fail to realize, even though Brian Bendis just thinks we are all being lazy, is that at a time when promotion and publicity is hard to find all this talk could be working for them. Instead with attitudes like theirs all they are going to get is negative reactions and discussions that will do nothing to promote their brands.

It is kind of sad to see that this protectionist attitude isn’t just limited to your typical old media outlets.

As the newspaper world continues to crumble around itself it is amazing to read that a major provider of news thinks that its salvation lies in returning everything behind a paywall. Such is the case it would seem with the Associated Press whose CEO, Tom Curley, was quoted in a Business Week article as saying that this is something that has been talked about

"Can I imagine content going behind a pay wall?" asks Tom Curley, the CEO of the Associated Press. "Absolutely. And, yes, we are in conversations about that." These conversations with other content players are informal, he admits.

As Jim Fine points out in the article though this idea doesn’t account for a few roadblocks that already exist

And a gazillion issues arise. One is that the Associated Press has a licensing agreement with Google (GOOG), the particulars of which Curley would not detail, that won’t expire until December. (A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.) It’s also unclear how this would work for a newspaper or a TV operation that does not want to wholly destroy existing traffic. And this solution may not be one-size-fits-all: The Wall Street Journal gets away with charging; The New York Times might; a less illustrious paper a tenth as big may not.

What the AP and everyone else advocating a return to paywalls is as I said before here – news is free, it’s the packaging that isn’t. Until all these antiquated news empires grasp the fundamental fact that they need to make what they do a value added service that people are willing to pay for then they can erect all the paywalls they want – and go broke in the process.

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.

Hand wringing is almost becoming a watchable sport when it comes to the nose diving that was once the unshakeable world of old media. Every where we turn lately we are hearing dire prognostications of the death of newspapers. It is a subject that people on both sides of the old media – new media fence love to talk about. New media evangelists rub their hands together in glee over the potential changing of the guard while old media employees start worrying about how the mortgage is going to get paid.

Today saw a once member of old media – Tom Foremski; a former Fortune journalist now a blogger on Silicon Valley Watcher, post some thoughts about what is happening. While he agrees that old media is in a death spiral he doesn’t believe that the citizen journalists of social media are any real replacement for old media news.

This has left media companies in a very tough spot. As their traditional sources of revenue have been disappearing their new sources of revenue are unable to cover their costs. And the current economic crisis is magnifying this trend to an ever greater degree.

The media death spiral has become steeper and faster…

This is a huge problem because as a society, we need media professionals — citizen journalists cannot fill the breach.

He also doesn’t believe that this idea of news being free is sustainable regardless of which side of the argument you are on

News is not free, and it is not a commodity. News has been made available for free, and it has been made into a commodity but that is not its future because there is no future in that model. You will have to pay for it.

That means the end of the news aggregators. That means the end to arguments that the news aggregators send high volumes of traffic to the online publishers. What is the use of more traffic when it cannot be monetized to support the work of the news organizations?

I agree with him that the free model as being evangelized by Web 2.0 and social media mavens isn’t sustainable in the long run. As free flowing with money as advertising might be, even it has a finite limit especially with being able to provide reasonable livings for all parties involved. Just as Tom points out how sliding revenues from traditional advertising is cause failures of paper after paper the same thing could happen within social media.

Where I don’t agree with him – up to a point – is his assertion that citizen journalists can’t fill the void being left by the shrinking of newspapers. His argument is that traditional journalism is what helps maintain high quality standards, prevent misinformation or to counter the spin of corporations and governments. His insinuation is that these aren’t the type of things you will find with citizen journalism and I would definitely disagree with him on this.

Sure the big advantage of old media is that news was a centralized medium and as such was a lot easier to control out it was written, how is was researched and how it was disseminated. The problem with new media is that there is no centralized dissemination which makes it harder for people in general to do their one stop news shopping as it were. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some citizen journalists / bloggers out there writing well researched and quality news type posts.

There is also a problem of perception which isn’t helping the adoption of citizen journalism any easier as a real viable alternative. Old media is perceived as being a news source you can rely on whereas new media has been young kid on the block with no respect for tradition and run by people with mercurial temperaments. In other words new media is all about MTV sound bites of opinionated semi news.

Even though this is really far from the truth until the point where new media can over come these types of perceptions it will always be considered as substandard in relation to the real news.

It is one thing to hear about old media slashing budgets and tossing good people to the curb like yesterday’s garbage but it is another to watch as a major news organization seems to be dismantling itself before our eyes. For those of you that don’t really pay attention to the ins and outs of what old media does this probably won’t be of any interest. For those social media mavens who glibly trumpet every failing of old media this is probably old news.

But I have been watching a number of blogs since I first posted here at The Inquisitr about the departure of Miles O’Brien from CNN; and the dismantling of the science technology news section by the company. Since that report there has been a steady stream of news about journalists – excellent and reputable journalists either leaving or being dumped. Sure there has also been the regular staff type departures but when you start seeming names like Jamie McIntyre, Jennifer Eccleston and Kelli Arena to name just a few you have to wonder what the hell is going on.

When you look at any of the bio’s of those leaving and realize the depth of their contacts developed over years of building trust it makes one shake their head in amazement. Journalist’s like these people don’t just happen over night. Kelli Arena spent the better part of her career at CNN building a network of trust at the Justice Department. That isn’t something you can replace overnight. The same with Jamie McIntyre with his stint at the Pentagon or Miles with NASA and other science agencies.

In one brief period CNN has strip itself of its top tier of journalists leaving us with the likes of Nancy Grace; who’d I’d like to take out back and leave her there. Then there is Wolf Blitzer who hasn’t seen a politician yet whose ass he wouldn’t kiss for a story – if you can call his reports that. As Jackie Schechner; an ex-CNN’er, said in a post about Kellie Arena leaving

Put aside the fact there is no better-connected Justice Correspondent on the planet and you can kiss your early access to important national security news goodbye, no woman knows the ins and outs of CNN and the business of TV news like Kelli Arena.

Not one to mince words Greta Van Susteren; who got her TV start on CNN, had this to say on her blog Greta Wire

They did it again! CNN fires people just in time for Christmas!  Make you sick?

People often ask why I left CNN…..I didn’t like management.  I liked my colleagues in the news gathering but the corporate culture that seized management when AOL came in (Steve Case and Gerry Levin) was disgusting.  Everything changed.  Don’t get me wrong – I like corporate organization and a corporation should make money – what I don’t like is a mean spirited selfish management that, despite not doing its job of efficiently running the company, lines it pockets.  And then the topper? because the management didn’t run the company well,  CNN fires loyal people to meet some bottom line the management failed to meet.  Blame the little guy not the way the company is run?  Go figure! Well….CNN management did not disappoint me yesterday…meaning, it met my low expectations.

All this comes on the heels of Jonathan Klein being quoted in a article at the Observer as saying

"We can afford more people on our air and off our air. So, goddamn it, we’re going to have more people."

One has to ask at what cost though. CNN, while it likes to brand itself as the most reputable voice in news it is in many ways becoming a laughing stock of news. On either side of the political spectrum you will find pundits taking swipes at the organization that seems more interested in faux holograms than in keeping well respected journalists doing their jobs.

Old media across the board is having a harder and harder time staying relevant in the growing Internet and social media world. It doesn’t help itself when organizations like CNN keep allowing over paid incompetent executive like Mr. Klein keep shooting itself in the foot.