New York Times: Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Blog! Starting today, The Local is an online news site for these communities. But if we build it right together, The Local will be something much more: a glorious if cacophonous chorus of your voices singing the song of life itself in these astoundingly varied and vibrant neighborhoods.

With your input, The Local will tell stories that matter: crime and politics and culture and civic life and everything else. Some stories will be snapshots, mere moments. Others will unfold over days or weeks or marking periods — the birth pangs of a food coop or a high school newspaper, the aftermath of a crime, and, as the unstoppable wave of local gentrification crashes into the unstoppable wave of global economic meltdown, an ever-growing tale of loss and struggle.

The Times’ move here is critically important. It’s long overdue, as such a thing would be at any newspaper, but at least it’s finally happening. I’ll be watching closely to see how this develops.

What I don’t see, so far, is any serious indication of the parallel media universe that exists outside the Times’ perception. If this “local” site doesn’t point widely to the community blogs and other media, it will simply reinforce the old-style media view of the past. I’m confident that the paper understands this.

One question, of course, is whether (a) this will make any money for the newspaper, and, if so, (b) whether the Times will share any wealth created by the community in this endeavor. Let’s wait for (a) before we worry too much about (b).

Hearst Corporation announced today that its San Francisco Chronicle newspaper is undertaking critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and nonunion employees. If these savings cannot be accomplished within weeks, Hearst said, the Company will be forced to sell or close the newspaper.

We’re approaching an end-game of the current leveraged newspaper business. It’s going to be seriously more ugly from now on at many big papers.

More on this in a post tomorrow…

Forbes: Boss Got Raise As Philly Papers Tanked. As the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News slid toward the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing it made over the weekend, one employee did well on the pay front: CEO Brian P. Tierney.

How disgusting is this?

The arrogance of the people like Tierney just compounds the woes of the newspaper business. He and his management team are facing the perfect storm when it comes to the revenue model for newspapers, but they don’t have to add to the damage with their greediness.

These are not small issues. The journalists and truck drivers and printers and salespeople at the Philadelphia have every right to feel betrayed.

UPDATE: The bosses have recognized reality and rolled back the raises. (Given that they did a leveraged buyout of the company, their salaries remain way too high, but that’s another issue.)

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.

There’s so much wrong with this essay that one scarcely knows where to start. In one critique, Alison Fine grasps a key reason the proposal lacks weight: Its “fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable” is absurd on its face.

The piece drew plenty of other attention from journalists and industry watchers including an interesting question from the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward, who wondered how much it would cost “to sustain every American newspaper in perpetuity as non-profit organizations” — and, after consulting with Alan Mutter came up with a guesstimate of $114 billion. Cough.

This is to save only the editorial staff, mind you. Journalists have an unfortunate habit of forgetting that other people also work in their organizations; and the logic here is that what we want to preserve is the jobs of the journalists who report the news — never mind that the people who still buy newspapers don’t do so entirely because of what fills the news columns, but also to see the ads and non-news features.

Seward reasonably points out that we’d be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

We’re unquestionably losing something important as the newspaper business model implodes. As a shareholder in three of those companies I’m unhappy about it, but I’m also not going to suggest that I blindly invested. Over the years I’ve made much, much more on my newspaper shares than I would lose now even if all of them (not a chance) were to fail tomorrow.

But we’re already seeing some models for the future emerge. One, just one, is nonprofit.

The idea that philanthropists should get into the community information business is not new, nor bad. It’s come up a number of times, most recently with the Knight Foundation’s funding support, along with community foundations, of local initiatives. (See also David Westphal’s recent Online Journalism Review piece on this larger topic.)

And not-for-profit media is hardly new. PBS, NPR and many other organizations don’t aim to make profits. But nonprofits are enterprises, too. They require business models as much as any for-profit enterprise.

Nonprofits generally exist, meanwhile, to ameliorate failures in the for-profit marketplace. Markets do fail, and they do so frequently. (I’m not talking here about the financial meltdown we’re experiencing, which is all about society’s failures in a much wider way.) Bill Gates’ worthy philanthropic efforts to rid the planet of diseases that aren’t profitable for the medical industry speaks specifically to this issue, as do countless other such enterprises.

The market failure most notable in the newspaper business of the past half-century was felt not by the journalists but by the buyers and sellers of products and services in communities. This was due to newspapers’ monopoly status, leading them to extract outrageously high profits from advertisers who essentially had no alternatives. Ask anyone who used the classifieds before eBay and craigslist and other better, cheaper competition came along — they’ll tell you what a failed marketplace looks like.

That era was good for the editorial staffs, which enjoyed long-term, stable employment and, in many cases, some distance from advertiser influence over the contents of the news pages. However excellent the journalists were, however — and many were truly superb — this was not a climate that bred risk-taking and innovation beyond imagining how to be better reporters. Improving the journalism was a great thing; but becoming conservative in other ways was not.

We’re seeing an explosion of innovation now. Some of it is coming from inside news organizations. But the majority is, from my perspective, coming from outside, from people inventing or adapting business models as well as journalism and information techniques. (Jonathan Weber at the wonderful New West Network is one of the people I’m counting on to help figure this out; do not fail to read his brilliant response to the NYT op-ed, probably the best of all the commentary on this issues.)

Do we need funding sources for these new and adaptive projects? You bet. Some has already been committed or is in the pipeline now. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

I’ll wager, with little fear of losing, that a great deal of the community information we’ll get in a few years will come from for-profit sources. But that will still leave vast territories for two other models: volunteers and nonprofits. Sometimes these will overlap.

The most essential role for nonprofits is almost certainly going to be in addressing the new market failure. This is the category I call “eat your spinach journalism,” the reporting that we all agree we need but which requires money and time to do. Certain kinds of investigations and watchdog reporting, including such basics as keeping an eye on what the City Council and local/state agencies are up to, may not support for-profit ventures, and we’ll desperately need other sources of funding for those.

That the New York Times used its valuable op-ed space to showcase such shallow thinking by the Yale financial guys is depressing. At least their essay sparked some conversation. But please, let’s move onto realistic possibilities.

Could we be reaching a bottom soon in the real estate market?

LA Observed has a post about how KRON TV in San Francisco disinvited the authors of a new book from a talk-show appearance after discovering that the book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle, takes shots at the crappy state of local TV news. My initial reaction was incredulity. I mean, how clueless is that kind of move?

Then I read the entire item, which includes an outraged email from the authors — Howard Rosenberg, formerly of the LA Times, and Charles Feldman — in which they write, among other things, the following line:

Government censorship is not nearly as bad as is corporate censorship–especially by a company that serves the public—or ought to.

I find myself hoping that the email by the authors is a fake. If it’s real, the authors need a refresher course in First Amendment 101, not to mention reality. The most likely explanation for the authors’ ridiculous statement is that a) they were pissed; b) they wrote their outraged note in haste; and c) they didn’t proofread it before they sent it along.

Why ridiculous? Journalists should understand that only governments can censor. Other entities can make it difficult to get heard by large numbers of people, but that is absolutely not the same thing as being forbidden to publish at all.

And surely the authors should understand something just as basic: Assume, for the sake of argument, that there is such as thing as “corporate censorship” (even though, as noted, the expression is a non sequitur). To say that it’s much worse than government censorship defies common sense, and makes you wonder about their sense of proportionality. When a local TV station obtusely rescinds an invitation to appear on a talk show, that’s not remotely in the ballpark of preventing the authors from exercising their right of free speech.

Is their book as sloppy as their logic here?

UPDATE: Howard Rosenberg sent me this email (and said I could post it here):

I read your blog about our KRON adventure and, after a bit of reflection, I take your point.

I am extremely concerned about the impact of corporate overgrowth in media. Speaking for myself, though, in no way do I equate corporate blacklisting (which I believe does occur) with the much bigger thumb of government censorship. Ask, say, ordinary Chinese or North Koreans which they would prefer.

Charles and I have speculated that the failure of our book to receive coverage from the 24-hour news networks is because it pretty well savages much of what they do. However, in no way can we document that. It’s a tough, competitive business, and there could be a myriad of other reasons why we haven’t made the cut.

KRON, of course, is another matter. Here we have a station rather belatedly canceling our interview because the news editor perceived (I can just see a10-watt light bulb clicking on in a thought balloon over his head) that our book attacks local news. It does not. The primary focus of our book is media speed and the dangers that we believe it poses for all of us. But even if the book did attack local news, so what?

The issue of our cancellation–news judgment driven totally by self-serving criteria–is much larger than the success or failure of our book. It’s an example of single-station TV news blacklisting, reflecting a lack of integrity that I found to be common among local newscasters when I covered them as TV critic for the L.A.Times. Arrrrgggggh! But censorship? Not at all. No one is silencing our voices.

And by the way, we did dash off our e-mail to KRON’s news director in anger and in haste. You might say we did it too fast to think.

All the best,

Howard Rosenberg

The distinction between blacklisting and censorship strikes me as precisely the correct one here. (I’ve changed the title of this post to remove the word “clueless” — plainly not correct at this point.)

NY Times: Consumers Union to Buy a Blog From Gawker. It will become part of a new division of Consumers Union, and the current editors will remain. No plans are under way to change the coverage or to begin charging for the site. “We don’t want to acquire the Consumerist and then squelch it in some way,” said Kevin McKean, vice president and editorial director of Consumers Union.

This is a smart move by Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, the online arm of which is one of Web publishing’s earliest and most important success stories. It broadens the brand, and it helps bring an organization that needed some updating into the 21st Century in other ways.

Gawker Media decided to get rid of Consumerist, part of a restructuring that the company’s founder and chief, Nick Denton, said was necessary to focus on what will be profitable in the face of what he predicted will be an advertising meltdown. There was an obvious fit with Consumers Union, an organization that has made its mistakes over the years but has stood up to enormous pressure from corporations that hated the organization’s independent ways.

Some critics of Consumer Reports have suggested that the wisdom of the consuming crowd is sufficient for learning about the kinds of products CR covers. It will be, someday, but I don’t think it’s there yet. CR’s relentless testing and usually sound editorial judgement are worth the price many of us (including me) pay for our subscriptions, online or offline. CR isn’t where I generally stop, but it’s often where I start looking for information on certain kinds of products.

Consumers Union hasn’t gone nearly far enough, however, in understanding the value of the crowd online. I hope the Consumerist purchase is a major step in that direction, but CU needs to recognize that the people who read its magazine and subscribe to the website are precisely the kinds of folks who could be much more helpful in creating the journalism that already stands apart from the competition. Reader surveys don’t even begin to do enough.

By the way, I don’t believe CU’s editorial director when he suggests that there will be no interference with the Consumerist’s edgy and sometimes over-the-top content. I’m guessing there will be subtle changes within a few months; note the wiggle room he left in that quote.

PS: I was amused, but shouldn’t have been, to see that Nick Denton gave the New York Times the scoop on this story. He’s is more old-media than people generally recognize.

One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, and this is not as simple as it looks on first glance.

A disclosure: I’m a New York Times shareholder. But if the facts are true as alleged in GateHouse’s complaint, I’m leaning toward taking GateHouse’s side on this — even though I think GateHouse is making a strategic mistake in the first place — for reasons I’ll explain below.

This is a copyright fight at heart, about Boston.com’s Your Town sites, local aggregations of information and news for surrounding communities. The Your Town project, which I believe is a good idea, has three towns up now and the Globe has plans for dozens more.

GateHouse, meanwhile, has been operating sites — before Your Town got started — called Wicked Local. Both of these sites aggregate from various sources, sending traffic to the sites they point to, which is part of why many of us consider aggregation generally positive for everyone involved. So far so good.

GateHouse doesn’t buy that when it comes to what Your Town is doing: copying some headlines and story ledes from Wicked Local and GateHouse news sites (a “lede” is the start of a story) onto the Your Town pages.

Now, this is exactly what Google does on Google News, at least in some respects, when it scrapes headlines and ledes from news sources around the world and presents them in aggregated context. Google doesn’t (yet) try to monetize these pages with advertising, and what it’s doing looks to most people like fair use (though a closer call than some; see below). Your Town and Wicked Local are very much in the business of monetizing their sites.

As Dan Kennedy notes in his extensive coverage of this case:

Yes, Boston.com gives credit to the GateHouse papers, and yes, you have to click through to read the stories. But in many cases you don’t have to read the stories to get the gist of it. This is not a novel proposition — earlier this year, the Associated Press went after bloggers for reproducing its headlines and ledes, arguing that represented most of the value of its news stories.

By offering what copyright lawyers refer to as the “substantiality” — that is, the best and most marketable part — of GateHouse’s stories, Boston.com, GateHouse charges, is not complying with the notion of “fair use,” which defines the circumstances under which a copyright-holder’s work can be re-used without permission.

I consider the AP’s actions the case above to be misguided, if understandable from a panicky traditional media operation. The news agency backed off, thankfully, under the ridicule it had earned.

And if the issue in the GateHouse-NYT case were solely about substantiality, I’d make a similar argument, although what Boston.com’s Your Town operation does seem closer to the edge of fair use than what Google and other aggregators do at this stage.

But the actual complaint (PDF) alleges something that, if true, makes me much more sympathetic to GateHouse. Specifically:

Lacking any cooperation from defendant, GateHouse implemented certain electronic security measures on Wicked Local, to prevent users with a certain Boston.com Internet Protocol (“IP”) address from scraping content from GateHouse’s website. Plaintiff’s security measures did not deter defendant in the least — defendant posted original content to the Infringing Website the very next day after they were installed.

In other cases of this sort, those of us who have argued that aggregation-via-scraping is fine have also tended to say that sites that don’t want to be crawled have a way of fixing the problem: blocking access to the software robots doing the crawling. What happens when your barrier is evaded?

Google and other search engines look for files in the HTML code that make clear whether or not the site wants to be indexed. If the “robots.txt” file say, effectively, “Leave me alone,” the robot obeys. It’s not the law, but it’s the custom — and it’s the right custom.

If Boston.com’s Your Town crawlers/scrapers are going around the technological blockades, that strikes me as — at the very least — poor behavior. I don’t know whether it’s legal, but it’s not honorable. Boston.com should take the hint and stop pointing to GateHouse.

Make no mistake: I believe that turning away page views that come from other sites is, in the end, a mistake. Even so, GateHouse should have the right to make that mistake.

UPDATE: Please read the comments, which are rich with ideas and observations.

Also, the Citizen Media Law Project (I’m a co-founder) has posted a detailed initial legal take on this case.

The New York Times’ David Barstow has an astonishing piece in today’s paper, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” about former “drug czar” and retired general Barry McCaffrey, one of many retired military people working as supposedly independent analysts for various news organizations but who are anything but independent.

The story’s biggest surprise — perhaps it should not be — is NBC News’ defense of its failure to require disclosure of McCaffrey’s rampant conflicts of interest. To call the network’s defense pathetic is to give it more weight than it deserves. Here’s the relevant quote, which is breathtaking in its arrogance:

The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an “independent voice” who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, “There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves.”

McCaffrey has been occasionally critical of Rumsfeld, yes. But that is absolutely not the point here. The issues are his wide-ranging, flagrant and undisclosed conflicts of interest and NBC’s indifference to integrity.

Here’s Spencer Ackerman’s appropriate characterization of this rancid system:

But the scope of McCaffrey’s hustle is really breathtaking. Barstow demonstrates that many, if not most, of the pronouncements he made on TV about the wars benefited one or another defense contractor who employed him. That’s the way the scheme worked: Company hires retired general to use his connections to its benefit. Retired general accepts special grants of access from the office of the secretary of defense that benefit both his TV career and his consulting career. Retired general proclaims on TV things that benefit both the secretary and the company — or, when circumstances necessitate, the company at the expense of the secretary. TV viewer, looking for informed analysis of confusing wars, is unaware of any of this. Welcome to the new military-media-industrial complex.

Bottom line: McCaffrey is venal, greedy and unethical. But as a news organization, NBC is downright corrupt.

MORE: Salon’s Glenn Greenwald notes NBC’s “ongoing disgrace,” citing reporting on these issue years ago in the Nation magazine, the NY Times’ expose from last spring and his own reporting. His characterization is entirely correct.

Final word to Matthew Yglesias:

But rather than focusing on McCaffrey and his issues, it’s worth contemplating the breathtaking lack of integrity on display from the television networks here. As I said, Barstow published a piece on this back in April. None of the TV networks addressed the issue he raised in anything resembling a serious manner. And, again, we now have NBC News caught flat-out in the midst of corruption, deceiving their viewers. And NBC News isn’t sorry. They’re not apologizing. They’re not ashamed. Because they’re beyond shame. They never had a reputation for honor, so they don’t even see this sort of thing as damaging.

I keep clicking the X in the corner indicating my lack of interest in participating in the survey, but to no avail. This thing won’t leave me alone.

So I guess I’ll stay off the Post’s website until this obnoxious ad goes away, which I hope will be soon.