Slowly but surely, some U.S. media companies are giving blogs to their audiences. The latest I’ve seen is from MyFoxDC, a Washington, D.C., TV station. As you’ll notice, staff blogs on the right side of the page are complemented with the audience blogs on the left.
The quality, as always with such things, is extremely mixed. But the fact that the station is doing this is the real story.
Wall Street Journal: Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration. Twitter is one of several growing services, including Google Inc.-owned Dodgeball, that tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication. Twitter allows members to use their computers or cellphones to distribute short messages on what they’re doing. Each message is limited to 140 characters, but there are no limits on how many messages a user can send. Members specify whether they want to be alerted by a text message on their phones or an instant message on their PCs when friends post updates.
This story spends a lot of time worrying about the problem of message overload. I found it a problem, too, when I was signed up by an early user.
What about the journalistic potential of Twitter? It’s huge.
(I’m still baffled that Knight Ridder failed to use the domain headlines.com for stuff like this…)
Ad Age: TimesSelect Free for College Students — and Graduates? I assume that grads will do the honest thing and not abuse their .edu addresses, but I also wonder if this is a bit like Microsoft’s “Student & Teacher” editions of software that are way, way cheaper than the versions for everyone else — and which Microsoft doesn’t police at all.
Times Select was always a bad idea, not because the paper was trying to make some money off its Web version but because it essentially removed some of the most important writers from the global conversation place. The columnists deserved better, but more importantly the audience deserved to have those writers in the mix.
Contrast Times Select to the Wall Street Journal’s approach, which is to charge for the news (well, most of it) and put the opinions into the public arena. Guess which institution now has vastly greater reach in the marketplace of ideas?
Jay Rosen and his crew at NewAssignment.net have launched AssignmentZero:
How the Web makes it possible for the crowd to be the source of good ideas. But instead of one journalist reporting, we’ve created a site where many people can work on the story, with editors as guides.
It’s a great start to a project that stands to change journalism in an important way. Congrats to all — and the work is just beginning.
David Lazarus of the SF Chronicle, in “Pay-to-play is one way to help save newspapers,” says “it’s time for newspapers to start charging for — or at least controlling — use of our products online.”
Lazarus, normally an excellent columnist, gets things almost precisely wrong in this piece.
He raises the issue of charging and then pretty much dismisses it, noting (via a university professor, Phil Meyer) that it’s an impractical solution because almost no paper can get its readers to pay. I don’t necessarily agree, but let’s concede the point for the sake of argument and move on to the really zany stuff. Such as:
Just as Viacom is arguing that Google/YouTube shouldn’t have unfettered access to clips from “The Daily Show,” MTV and other copyrighted material, newspapers should insist that a licensing fee be paid for aggregators to have access to their content.
They can insist all they want, but they won’t have a legal case. And the comparison to Viacom’s lawsuit against Google is specious.
Second issue first: Viacom’s lawsuit is basically saying that Google has to police itself to ensure that copyrighted material on YouTube — beyond a fair-use clip (though Hollywood even denies the right of fair use with video) — not be there. The law is pretty clear that Viacom has to notify YouTube about infringements, not that YouTube has to be the cop on the beat. But never mind that: Clearly, YouTube boasts lots and lots of video that does infringe copyrights.
That has zero to do with what Google and other headline aggregators — Lazarus cites the Huffington Post and Drudge — do with newspaper stories. Zero.
The aggregators don’t begin to violate copyright. They take a headline and a small amount of text from the story in what to me is plainly a fair-use manner. The send readers back to the newspaper articles; YouTube sends no one anywhere else.
Incredibly, Lazarus gets a supportive quote on this from Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law from the University of Minnesota. I’m surprised by her support for this notion.
In any event, the papers have an easy way to “fix” this if they choose. They can block the aggregators from including them on those sites with technology.
They’d be idiots to do this, of course. Because then they’d lose even more readers. Whoops.
Lazarus also points out that newspapers would violate antitrust law if they did something like this (or started charging for their content) in concert — demanding royalties. Then he suggests an exemption from antitrust law, but observes that this is “no less problematical, not least because of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the press — you don’t want special treatment for a business that spends much of its time covering the very people who’d grant such a boon.”
He’s apparently forgotten that the industry already enjoys the odious Joint Operating Agreements law that lets two “competing” papers combine business operations in a city, creating a monopoly. His own paper was the beneficiary of such a deal until fairly recently. But he’s right about one thing: It’s not going to happen, not because it would look bad, but because it would stink to high heaven.
Does Lazarus realize how pathetically whiny he sounds — how he represents the industry’s worst tendencies these days? He’s complaining about reality and looking to law to protect a once-monopolistic, outdated business model.
I love what newspapers do, when they do it well. I wish we could preserve it.
This isn’t the way.
(Two notes: Lazarus neglects to credit Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition, who as far as I can tell was first to float the price-rigging idea (which I didn’t like then, either); I”m on the coalition board of directors. Also, Kirtley is a member of the board of advisors of the soon-to-launch Citizen Media Law Project, a joint project of this center and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.)
I’ll be sitting down in a public conversation with JD Lasica next week in Palo Alto, kicking off the Mid-Peninsula Media Center’s new Conversation Series. If you’re in the area, please stop by.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued its annual State of the News Media report. This year’s identifies seven major trends. (The report calls them new trends even though they are not new, but that’s a quibble.) The trends are:
The report is lengthy and detailed, a must-read for anyone who cares about the present and future of journalism. More later…
a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online.
I’ve met with several members of this team. These are serious, smart folks who have backing from a highly traditional organization — which produces the best English-language magazine on the planet, even if they call it a newspaper — to take risks for innovation. Excellent news, if overdue.
There’s even an Economist blog. Wow, it has semi-bylines. something you rarely see in the magazine.
What are innovative services in the works? An early one is an idea-gatherer: “a site to gather ideas from the outer world…”
We already have some ideas, of course. But as champions of free markets, we abhor the concept of a closed system. This is why we would like you to submit your idea (or ideas). Just think big – and we’ll do the rest.
OK, it’s great to see the Economist start drawing on the wisdom of the crowd. Given the quality of the people who subscribe to the magazine and other Economist Group services, this is one heck of a wise crowd.
But then come the Terms and Conditions, which state:
If you submit an idea or otherwise actively participate in Project Red Stripe, The Economist Group shall have the right to use this information in current or future products or services, without monetary reward or compensation. However, if we use your contribution then in exchange we will give you credit by acknowledging you as a contributor on ProjectRedStripe.com and we will also offer you a free six-month subscription to Economist.com. We will also further involve those who have made significant contributions.
Ideas are one thing, if they’re notions on how to do better journalism and make a truly interactive site. But given those terms, would you toss an idea that might turn into a real business advantage over the transom? You’d be cautious, if you were paying attention.
The Economist may have little choice in doing it this way — promising so little — possibly for legal reasons. Maybe the plan is to actually reward, in a serious way, the people who come up with ideas that could be genuinely transformative. I hope so.
There are hints of this in a posting by Ludwid Siegele, where he writes:
Still, we won’t just take an idea and run with it. We intend to give credit where credit is due — even if we don’t know yet exactly how. And, perhaps even more enticing, we will further involve those making significant contributions in Project Red Stripe.
But the early wording in the Terms and Conditions, from the self-professed champion of the free market, could encourage more derision than participation.
Doc Searls on Giant Zero journalism. Brilliant, illuminating.