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

This video streaming thing is getting really messy.

In the past week Netflix set the television networks on notice – original content doesn’t just belong to you because we’re going down that road, even if it is going to cost us $100 million to do so.

I am of course talking about the announcement that Netflix was sinking $100 million into creating an original content series based on the British drama called House of Cards. In the days following the announcement though it seems that the networks are more than a little upset by this news and have started pulling shows from Netflix.

This action was lead by Showtime who said that they will no longer be providing the older seasons of Dexter and Californication from streaming on Netflix. shortly after cable network Starz announced that they will be delaying the streaming of Camelot episodes by 90 days; and is tossing around the possibility of withholding other movies from Netflix streaming.

There is no doubt that Netflix entry into streaming original content can be seen as a threat to the networks and a real game-changer. It is also obvious that this move by Netflix is causing real concern for the established networks, a concern that is making them rethink their agreements with the company and signs of a possible backlash against Netflix.

As Jared Newman at Technologizer points out  this is going to get ugly:

Still, House of Cards is no panacea. Netflix still needs great content from other sources for its streaming service to grow, but Netflix’s growth is what makes Hollywood so nervous in the first place. This is going to get ugly.

Yes, this is going to get ugly but those same networks maybe missing out on a rather important point – the consumer.

While this whole streaming video is still pretty new, especially when it comes to companies like Netflix getting into original content, the consumer is climbing on the bandwagon in a big way. We are fed up with cable companies, television networks, and the Internet providers who are increasing their ownership in those areas, trying to dictate the extent of what we can watch online.

So while we might be worried about an entertainment industries backlash against things like Netflix I believe we are reaching a point where there will be a backlash against those very companies by the consumer. I am not sure how this backlash will happen or how it will look but you can be sure that like Jared says – it’s only started to get ugly.

A backlash against the Netflix backlash is a post from: The Inquisitr

Yet another “study” that has found out that kids these days would rather get their news online instead of from sitting in front of a television.

Yes folks yet again the Pew Research Center has released another incredible ground-breaking study about something we didn’t realize was happening to our children. It turns out that in 2010  65% of young people, under 30, have turned to getting their news from the big bad Internet. This is up from 37% from the previous year of 2009.

Of all 1,500 American adults surveyed, 41% say they get their national and international news from the Internet, up 17% from 2007. Sixty-six percent cite television — down from 74% — indicating the trend is spreading among other age groups.

Forty-eight percent of those ages 30 to 59 cite the Internet as their main news source, up from 32% in 2007, while television went down from 71% to 63%. Though the number of those in the 51 to 64 age group who consider television their main news source (71%) is about the same, those who turn to the Internet (34%) is nearly equal to the number who cite newspapers (38%). The amount of people 65 and older who get their news from the Internet has risen from 5% to 14%, but television remains the chief source for 79% of respondents.

via Yahoo!

Next up – children with cellphones have Facebook accounts.

image courtesy of New York Times (Florida, 1963” © Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)

Be prepared to be shocked – kids get their news online not TV is a post from: The Inquisitr

In what has to be one of the strangest, yet very interesting, match-ups of old and new media we get news that after Daily Beast and Newsweek joining forces the Newsweek site is going to be shut down. Now this is a site with 3.8 million monthly unique visitors while Daily Beast only manages 1.5 million which makes one kind of shake their head.

From MediaWeek we get this

The Beast is the survivor, said Stephen Colvin, the company’s new CEO, “Because the Daily Beast is a very credible and successful news and opinion Web site. And with great vitality and distinct voice.”

As expected, Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim (who, ironically, was brought on to pump up Newsweek digitally) is leaving the company.

The Newsweek and Daily Beast staffs will be combined under Tina Brown, the Beast founder who was named the company’s new chief editor. The combined staff will work out of the financial district, where Newsweek was already planning to relocate after its sale to Sidney Harman three months ago. The move is scheduled to take place in a few weeks.

A strange pairing of companies but an even stranger reasoning about which of the two sites to keep alive.

Daily Beast chews up Newsweek and wins the battle of sites is a post from: The Inquisitr

Demand Media, an online content mill that pays an army of work at home moms and the like notoriously low rates to churn out a huge amount of content based on search trends, has inked a deal with Hearst to provide articles for two of their properties- the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle. (As James predicted back in January.)

A leaked email published by BNET indicates that the company- which pays a rate of roughly $7-20 for 300-500 words- has contracted to provide content for the two mainstream news sites. BNET published a portion of the email Demand Media sent to contributors:

We have entered into a partnership with Hearst Newspapers to produce articles for two of their premium publications, San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle. Specifically, we are creating articles and videos for the Real Estate section of SFGate.com and the Small Business section of Chron.com.

We’re currently accepting applications for writers and editors. These articles come at a higher fee and your byline will be featured on these premium publications. Qualified applicants will not only be topical experts in their field, but also have relevant writing or editing experience in the subject. To apply, please email [email address omitted] with the subject line “Real Estate” or “Small Business.” Include a summary of your experience and attach any relevant clips. All interested CEs, please cc your copy chief with your application, and unfortunately we cannot consider your application if you have not yet had a review.

We are not currently able to disclose the partners publically and we ask that you keep their names confidential until further notice.

Some of Demand Media’s content- sometimes called “McContent” by journalists for the large volume of it and perceived low value- is already available on USA Today’s site in the Travel Tips section. Mediabistro calls the move “some convergence between the “content-factory” business model and the “real journalism” business model,” and says contributors that get picked up by the Hearst sites will get a slightly better rate and bylines. (Although improving on $7.50 a piece isn’t very difficult.) And while the trend is clearly not totally awesome for journalists, commenters on Gawker say that the pay is low but arrives more quickly and consistently than what they’re used to getting:

I write for Demand Media every once and awhile, and I can tell you right now why they’ll come out on top: they pay. If your work gets approved by the editors you get an transfer into your paypal account by the end of the next pay period, which are about every 3 days. So I can write a short dozen e-how articles at $15 a pop over a couple days and have the money by the end of the week. While that check for a story in a national print publication took four months to get to me.

Report: Demand Media bringing cheap content to Hearst 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

The Wall Street Journal, the daily broadsheet for financial types, is getting a tech savvy makeover with a correspondingly high price tag.

As we haven’t yet had time to acclimatize to and whine about iPad app pricing, no one seems quite sure what to make of the leaked WSJ iPad app pricing. On one hand, getting the actual physical paper delivered to you costs about $29 a month. (That version also leaves an unpleasant newspapery film on your hands and can get soggy in the rain- however, the iPad app can’t wrap glass for shipping, so there’s that.) On the other, the iPhone app for the WSJ tops out at $8 a month.

The WSJ app isn’t ad free either- Coke and FedEx have both purchased three month, $400K advertising packages for it. The new content delivery method is a boon to advertisers, too, because they can target the hell out of you based on your browsing habits. It will be interesting to see how this pans out both for the WSJ app itself and the influence it has on iPad content pricing.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few news providers that can really get away with setting the bar this high out of the gate. People who don’t get bored easily already willingly shell out for the paper online, and if they’re planning on getting iPads, this will be cost-effective and probably convenient. However, other iPad app purveyors who follow suit may see interest flag tremendously if they expect readers to drop $218 a year on their content. Remember what happened to Newsday when they put up a paywall?

WSJ on iPad will carry $18 monthly price tag 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Observer via Gawker]

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

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.

Will free e-books kill the book industry or save it? is a post from: The Inquisitr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

FTC admits celebrities can blog for freebies, no disclosure needed is a post from: The Inquisitr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Is the FTC being used to marginalize independent bloggers? is a post from: The Inquisitr

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’

Michael Moore: In 1 to 2 years we will not have daily newspapers [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Unlike their competitors the NPR rolls with change is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Would someone please give the AP the facepalm is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Newspapers really need to learn to share is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Myth: Reporting the news is what makes it news is a post from: The Inquisitr