Tag: Associated Press

  • Paper Capers

    Almost 2 months since we last discussed newspapers, so I thought its a good time to update. Rumour is that Murdoch plans to sue Google and Yahoo over news services. Fact is that he’s going to charge for news, something he’s been doing for a while with WSJ, and the ‘experiment’ is going to start with The Sunday Times. Others are set to follow his example.  “Quality journalism is not cheap,” said Murdoch. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.“

    I, for one, am happy, because the keywords for me are ‘quality journalism’. Its perhaps a prelude to a shakedown, and the survival of only those who can adapt to a world with internet. With the width and depth of content available, the debate of ‘free vs paid’ has been going on for a while now. But perhaps the time has come to end it. Build the wall, and let’s see if people want to pay to enter. (that link is an excellent read, detailed and thought through, check it out) Opinions are bound to vary – and to be in extremes. Most people feel that it is flawed. Chris Anderson feels that at some point in the future, “maybe media will be a hobby rather than a job“,  Vivian Schiller, former senior vice president and general manager of the NYTimes.com, believes that “people will not in large numbers pay for news content online“, but there’s still space for an NYT to cut expenses and survive. Murdoch obviously believes he can get the audience to pay.

    Meanwhile, the Associated Press is planning to charge $2.50 per word if 5 words or more are quoted from its articles, with the help of a microformat. Not surprisingly, it has been widely criticised in several tones all over the web. Jeff Jarvis even has a post on ‘How (and why) to replace the AP‘, and illustrates the interesting concept of ‘reverse syndication’. Chris Ahearn, at Thomson Reuters, implores entities that are declaring war on the link economy to stop whining, and stands ready to help those who wish for an alternative to AP.

    Interestingly, Google had recently quadrupled its newspaper archives. (Locally, Dainik Jagran is now part of Google’s News Archive Partner Programme, and has a strategic deal with Google to help the group archive its bilingual daily, Inext) The average newspaper’s stance on Google is understandably ambivalent. On one hand, it is happy to get the traffic from Google, but its not happy that its only one among the websites shown, and the amount of content that Google shows. (that might prevent a reader from visiting the site) Sometime back, Google had posted its views and how, any publication can block search engines with a slight change in code.

    The reactions to this obvious ‘transition stage‘ for the newspaper industry has been taking many forms. Paywalls are boycotts are only one kind. Alternate methods of news collection like crowdsourcing+crowdfunding, public collaboration, (an interesting case, for more than this reason), nichepapers and ways in which journalists can use tools like Facebook and Twitter, are being discussed, as well as radical ideas like making the newspaper a gateway for particpative experiences, even as technological developments – touch screen ‘intelligent plastic’ roll up reader, and experiments from NYT (‘What we are reading‘) continue.

    While it would be easy to say that these are trends in the West, that are not very relevant to India at this stage, I’d still say that these are trends that media in India, especially newspapers, should be closely watching and learning from. A good read from Pradyuman Maheshwari at e4m on the same subject. While the Nielsen Online Global Survey on trust, value and engagement in advertising shows that newspapers are the most trusted form of paid advertising (in india), the TCS study on Indian urban school children show that they are extremely technology savvy and totally at ease with the web and social media.

    As stated in the TCS study “This societal trend has important implications for parents, educators, policy makers, as future employers as well as companies and brands that want to sell to tomorrow’s generation.” Some understand this, and have started experimenting with new forms of distribution. I just got  a mail asking me to check out Star Player!! The point is that one can never be sure whether the trends in the US will be replicated in India, though I’d say its more a ‘when’ question than an ‘if’, even though India’s version of the trends would be mutated, thanks to its own socio-cultural and economic pecularities. But it helps to be prepared. I read at Medianama, a few days back that the Hindu is taking Ergo, its 5 day a week publication aimed at young professionals in Chennai, online. Though the motive might have been cost saving, I’m sure it will be a great learning in understanding consumption patterns and figuring out revenue streams. I quite liked the site, powered by WordPress, with a very casual ‘About’ page, and covering some interesting stuff. It looks like an online news site, not the website of a newspaper.

    On hindsight, the collision was bound to happen. Newspapers, which subsidised news to the reading audience by making advertising pay for it. Google, which aggregated content, and served ads in context. They had to meet somewhere, and disagree on who makes how much. The concern areas for newspapers are manifold – news consumption has changed – quantitatively and qualitatively, modes of creation and distribution have changed, and Google has developed a much better advertising model. In essence, all entities in the publishing business have changed – producers, consumers, advertisers. Isn’t it inevitable that the publisher has to find a new business model? Newspapers in India still have some time on their hands, and some good tools too. With most publishing houses having multiple products that cater to specific audiences, they can actually experiment in different directions. It does cost money to create good content, the trick obviously is to figure out ways to minimise the cost and work out how much each stakeholder – reader and advertiser, is willing to pay for it. Now would definitely be a good time to start, unless you want to sound like the (as usual) hilarious Onion story – “Why did no one inform us of the imminent death of the American Newspaper industry” 🙂

    until next time, think about the link economy

  • Broken News models

    The Iran crisis once again brought the present day tools of news gathering into the limelight, even while highlighting the inadequacies of traditional media. From real time tools like PicBrk to spoof ads and stories, the tools became the focal point of the protests. It was as much about changes in news gathering as it was about the ability to share, both in real time, a skill that traditional is yet to pick up, in spite of ‘breaking news’ on television. The significance of Twitter’s contribution can be gauged from the fact that the US government asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance so as not to disrupt the flow of news from Iran. The inability of traditional news gathering and distribution systems to come to terms with real time media consumption, and their usage of social media as yet another broadcast medium was highlighted at the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf). All this makes me consider, yet again, the future of traditional media systems and conglomerates, especially newspapers.

    A few days back, I read about the Associated Press issuing social media guidelines to its staff – not to show political affiliations, or post views on contentious issues among other things. The ‘best’ part is that they also have to monitor their profile to ensure that comments by others do not violate AP standards!! Ahmadinejad Press? Here’s the policy in its awesome entirety.

    It’s been quite a fun week, with a speech by Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton – also the publisher of the WSJ, adding to the amazing show of perspective. He described Google as a giant vampire that was sucking the blood of the newspaper industry. Now, I have reasons enough of my own to be cross with the omnipotent Google, but  even assuming that it is a vampire, who showed them the “X – blood here” sign in the first place? While Google states that its mission is to give readers more perspective by aggregating news from different sources, and even directs clicks to the newspaper sites. Newspapers argue that these clicks are nowhere near to the visits (and revenue) that they’d have gained if people came directly to their websites. They also have a problem with ads appearing on the side when people search for news. (Source) I have actually not come across those, and Google News definitely doesnt have them anyway.

    That is context enough for an interesting article I saw on Adage – ” Why ‘Going Galt’ isn’t the solution for newspapers”. The article is in light of the digital startegy of The Newport Daily News in Rhode Island, that’s closing its ad supported site and selling digital subscription only. John Galt, meanwhile, doesn’t need introduction for Ayn Rand readers, but if you are asking “Who is John Galt”, catch up here. In this context, it means that newspapers stop creating content for aggregators to pick up and make money. As the article points out, its chances of success is only when it deals with news that’s not commodity – could be specific locality/genre where there aren’t competitors. Its quite easy for newspapers to stop Google from taking its content – a 2 line code, as has been pointed out regularly.

    Cody Brown has an excellent article which shows the inherent differences between print and online, in terms of how news is processed. To summarise, print uses batch processing, where news and rumours are sifted through, verified and reverified and the crux is the final output and the credibility of the publication. The web, uses real time processing, it works like a gigantic wiki, everyone contributes, the crowd corrects, and the final output is of relatively less importance. The flaws of one become the benefits of the other. Batch processing finds few takers in the age of real time, and as this article points out so correctly, Twitter is the fastest way to get informed, or misinformed. This explains why I see stuff on my networks, and immediately move to a rediff/Google News to immediately verify from a trusted source.

    So newspapers face a double whammy. On one hand, its news creation is facing obsolescence in the face of changing media consumption habits, and on the other hand, it cannot find ways to make enough revenue out of the content that it ‘painstakingly’ produces. There are of course, traditional players who are bucking this, but as this article makes a case for, there can only be one Apple, who is an un-Google. I am still trying to fit in this understanding with the David – Goliath model. Apple operates so differently from Google, that it would be easy to summarily dismiss them as non-competitors, but there’s more to it. That’s for later, but the idea seems to be not to be a better Goliath, but to be the best David and play by rules that would take Goliath enough time to figure out, for David to finish the game.

    A small note on the Indian scene.  We are perhaps a few years away from the mess that US newspapers are in,   But consider, a Galt stance would’ve been possible a few years back, but with players as diverse as Rediff and Instablogs having a mechanism of reporting, it would be a folly to even try now. Rediff has built services and business models that doesn’t leave them to the mercy of making money out of news. Instablogs is also figuring out revenue models, at obviously lesser costs. Technology and faster news delivery platforms will appear, its inevitable. Newspapers in india  need to replicate their real world credibility online very fast, understand ‘real time’ game rules, and evolve radically new business models if they don’t want to repeat the US scenario. For ““News doesn’t break, it tweets”, the TC article credits Paul Saffo as saying.

    until next time, notice how many newspapers have ‘Times’ in their name? Real time? 😉

  • Google noose?

    The A.P. will work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don’t. We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”

    That’s what Associated Press Chairman William Dean Singleton said, in what is obviously a salvo against news aggregating services like Google. The ‘misguided legal theories’ here refer to the ‘fair use’  legal doctrine that news aggregators and search services have been using to use snippets of articles. AP’s concern is that many of these services have been making revenues out of packaging these stories. Also, while AP does have deals with Google and several other engines for some of their content, apparently search throws up material not covered by these agreements.

    Interesting to note that AP had sued MoreOver (Verisign) for snippeting and linking to its news, and Google had signed a deal with AP 2 weeks prior to that. That case was settled, though I have not yet been able to get details. AP now has plans to launch own news site – a “new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news”.  It suggests a system to track content – one that would create, in effect, “fingerprints” of content that could track usage and links. Journalism Online is another entity that wants to help newspapers and magazines charge for their content online.You can read the interview with Steven Brill, who has started it with two others, here.

    Google’s contention is that they’re directing a lot of traffic to the news sites, and any newspaper that doesn’t want to be part of Google News can do just that. Scott Karp says at Publishing 2.0, Google has played to its strength and wrested control of the distribution of news. Interesting comments too. Google allowed users to find content that they wanted, and became the start page when people wanted to find something on the web. That’s something media companies still aren’t doing right, and in between, Google managed to push in the ads, and make a few dollars. Erick Schonfeld, at TechCrunch has an interesting take on this – he points out that (in the US) Google News is behind Yahoo News as well as the sites of the NYT, and Google is actually exposing news, and helping other sites make money too. He argues that while Google does play a part in getting traffic to sites, ultimately it is the content that gets readers and sets the price. Jackie Hai explains how the “The AP syndication model works in an economy of information scarcity, whereas the web represents an economy of abundance.” I recently read about Google Web Elements, which allows Google products to be added to any website. That includes Google News and takes distribution to a whole new level.

    Though the AP issue is mostly an American one, there are similar sentiments being echoed in Europe too. According to NYT, Belgian Danish and British newspapers want Google to reach agreements with them before using their content. Though each country will have its own dynamics as far as news distribution and maturity of media platform goes, these cases are sure to set precedents.

    The media landscape is changing. Its not just that old media is changing rules to figure out revenue models. Its about an airline becoming a content ‘publisher‘, individuals becoming advertising mediums, services like TwitterGrep popping up to utilise the instancy of Twitter… and so on. As Jackie Hai mentioned in his article, the participatory web has blurred the lines between content producer, distributor and consumer. We play all three at different times.

    The measures that newspapers have or are making to earn revenues on the web seem to be insufficient. That includes online advertising, micro payments etc. I increasingly feel that a repair might not be enough. Perhaps a complete overhaul is the ask. The fingerprinting does spark a thought about the role of individual journalists, and the importance they should have in the new system. The web is increasingly becoming a relationship based medium where personal equity and trust are currencies. Perhaps the corporate newspaper needs to be replaced with a more human and humane network, perhaps it should create a core competency on the web in specific news sections – these could be geography based, maybe there is an opportunity for an aggregator in the challenges of hyperlocal news.  Perhaps it can even be category or genre based. Traditional concepts, but built with a social web perspective. Perhaps they should build a legion of citizen reporters who are paid according to the quality of their contributions . After all there is always a need for quality driven and trustworthy news and analysis. The need remains, but the readers’ wants of delivery platform, timing etc have changed.

    The recent (and sometimes) drastic measures taken by Indian newspapers shows that its not as impervious as it was considered. That gives more reason to prepare for a changing landscape. To start figuring out consumption patterns ,  multimedia possibilities, cost implications, distribution dynamics and revenue streams on digital platforms. Maybe they’re all waiting for PTI to fight Google, or is it Yahoo Buzz 😐

    until next time, a new sprint