First, the background:

On Friday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor (I guess it’s another way of saying “Ombudsman” or “Sacrificial Flak-Catcher”) of the New York Times published a now-famous piece, asking, Should the Times be a Truth Vigitlante?

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news
reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they
write about.

(snip)

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with
the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The
Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters
imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that
the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way
that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when
the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there
other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

The reaction has been pretty heated. MetaFilter pithily said “Duh.”  Jay Rosen wrote a post name-checking his longstanding criticism of the whole “View from Nowhere” approach adopted by the press. And Gawker snarked that the NYT should instead just make stuff up.

Here was my reaction, republished here:

It’s interesting to see this issue break out into the open like this. In retrospect, the only thing that’s surprising is that it’s taken this long. Consider: internet sites like Snopes & PolitiFact owe their very existence to the breakdown of trust in our existing news institutions on the part of the audience. We read stuff (often sent via e-mail from the semi-mythical disgruntled conspiracy theorist uncle). Checking our newspaper/TV/radio/whatever, there’s a he-said/she-said story. So we go elsewhere to figure out if what we were originally sent is true or not.

Steve Yelvington long ago identified this as the most crucial (but neglected) part of the media in a societal ecosystem: being the “Town Expert.” (The other two roles are of “Town Crier” and “Town Square” – which media orgs more or less have a handle on.)

Can’t tell you the number of proposed startups that came through the Knight News Challenge in the last two years aimed at resolving this basic issue – how can we trust what we read? Many of them are seeking to assign some kind of a numeric “reliability score” to the source of the information. Which is interesting in theory – a published climate scientist getting a 99 score, for example, while a Big Oil-funded hack gets a 12.

But in practice, systems like this would probably fall prey to the same phenomenon that plagues Digg or other sites that rely on crowdsourcing to determine importance/credibility — the efforts of a committed radical few to rig the results in their favor. Still, it would be interesting to see a major media outlet start to offer little links in superscript next to attribution, that lead back to a page describing where that quote came from, who the person is, and what their history/agenda is.

We’re all struggling with the effects of the disintermediation taking place because of web technology – that much is evident to just about anybody working in media, advertising or marketing. The problem is that this is taking place at the end of a long, slow movement toward the utter blandification of content. The reasons for that are complex – some of them have to do with the influence of “risk management” thinking at media organizations, where the litigiousness of modern American society has driven deep-pocketed news organizations to water down stories out of fear, in order to evade expensive libel suits. The rest do have to do with the drumbeat these past 40 years of accusations of “liberal bias” in the press, and the attempts to defuse such accusations by applying the aforementioned “he-said/she-said” construction to stories, so that we can say, “Well, at least we gave them a chance to reply.”

Truth Vigilantes, New York Times, OJR, Robert Niles, false equivalency, he-said/she-said, view from nowhere

I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working on producing “establishing shots” using whatever equipment is available to you at the time; in this case, it means holding the iPad up in front of your face and doing slow 360s, talking to the camera, so the audience can see for themselves what the landscape around you looks like.

They absolutely loved their brand-new iPad 2s. It was like seeing little kids getting handed Magic Mirrors. They were polite enough for most of the day, but about mid-afternoon, I just lost them in the wilds of the App Store. Also - I will never understand how the Ukrainian women manage to walk down these uneven, treacherous ancient cobblestone streets in stiletto heels.

I also taught them the basics of shot selection, framing, the Rule of Thirds, and some basic stuff about editing and shot sequencing as a means to create emotion. It was about a semester’s worth of material crammed into a one-day lecture, but at least I opened them up to what is possible, and where they can go to try to learn more on their own.

This is still a beautiful city, even if the sky in unrelenting slate gray, and the wind from Siberia knifes right through you after the sun goes down…

At night, the streets of Kiev are filled only with the rumble and clatter of Dr. Zhivago trolley cars, and the whistling north wind. The architecture here is like the people; kind of battered, but still full of character. Resilient.

I haven’t gotten to see as much of this city as I would like; I’ve always been working too hard, or pretty much exhausted & creaking from the demented flight schedule it takes to get here from Los Angeles. Still, the little I have been able to discover on my own has been delightful.

This time around, my students arrived in my classes with significant New Media skills. Some of them were already creating infographics, and this girl is already ghost-blogging for big financial companies. As you can see, she is quite determined; meanwhile, behind her, another of my more active and vocal students gasps in horror at the convoluted assignments I have inflicted on the class...

One of the greater joys of this class was seeing my students help each other out. When they got stuck with some of my more technically challenging exercises, they reached out to each other, and shouted advice back and forth across the classroom.

There is no better feeling for me. I am only here for such a very short time; I keep wishing that I had an entire semester to really reach deep into these young people, to help them draw out their skills & refine them. But seeing their willingness to follow me down these strange multimedia pathways, and to help each other out along the way … leads me to believe that they will continue to help each other out after I am gone.

It surprised me to find such an accurate depiction of the garb of the KKK in faraway Ethiopia. I guess movies or popular culture have exposed even the ordinary people around the world to our more sordid side...

Amongst all the funky art & tchotchkes, this painting caught my eye for obvious reasons.

What you can’t see, of course, are all the other exemplars of Obama’s presence here in East Africa. People walk around with Obama’s face on t-shirts, bumper stickers, hats … his face is pasted onto the clear glass shelves in the jewelry shops, and to the sides of the little “blue mule” micro-buses.

This is a good thing.

Invisible to just about everyone in the U.S., we are in a struggle for influence in Africa, which more and more people are calling “The Last Frontier.” China is spreading around the oceans of money (that we gave them in exchange for cheap plastic consumer goods, but that’s another story), and they are doing it in a very tricky, manipulative way. The U.S. and Western Europe have had decades of work, trying to figure out ways to actually benefit countries with their foreign aid. It has not been the easiest process.

However, we have figured out that nation-building takes time. Lots of it. And the investments tend to be gradual, building up infrastructure, institutions, ecosystems. The kinds of things that people really don’t see all at once – but if you take a snapshot of a country 10 or 20 years apart, you see the radical transformations. I know I did when I went back to both Colombia and Venezuela after 20 years absence in 2007-8.

In Addis Ababa, the modern struggles to catch up with the ancient.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are throwing up big, showy projects. Roads, bridges, dams, buildings. And slapping their branding all over them. Ordinary people see this and say, “Well look, the Chinese are actually doing something for us. What do the ferengi leave behind? They talk a lot, but what do we have to show for it all?”

In this kind of environment, having an African-American as President of these here United States is a definite advantage.

I’ve been in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the last week, training the local journalists and government information officers (aka PR flacks) on how best to take advantage of the way that “New Media” is creating new ways of connecting with each other, and the world at large. I’m here as part of the same US Embassy program that has sent me to places like Chile, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Costa Rica, etc., to try to bring people the benefits of experience (aka the way newspapers & TV news has imploded in the U.S.), so they can start planning for the Great Digital Migration.

This is my class of TV journalists at Addis Ababa University (AAU). I tried to cram as much about online video and sharing into my short sessions as I could. Here, I'm showing how to use both professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, as well as free alternatives like Windows Movie Maker.

The one thing that everyone here agrees on is that Ethiopia desperately wants to change its international image – c’mon, admit it. When you think of Ethiopia, what images come to mind? Deserts, starving people, vultures, Live Aid, right?

Well, it’s not like that any more. In fact, if you look around at the Addis Ababa skyline, you’ll mostly see cranes and highrise towers under construction. The real-estate bubble that burst and devastated the rest of the world never took hold here.

There are still many reminders that the ancient ways of living are still very much in existence here in Addis, but please also note all the other markers of modernity in this shot.

However, they are facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, at least when it comes to the emergence of the internet, and the struggles of newspapers, radio and TV stations to come to grips with social media, and the ability of anyone to become a publisher/broadcaster/internet troll.

The very first place I visited was Sheger FM, the one independent radio station in Ethiopia. This is the courageous owner, who is really struggling to walk the razor's edge here in Addis.

I’ve found many of the same behaviors and attitudes I’ve encountered in the other places that I’ve done web/online video/social media training sessions – stubborn insistence that things will never change, toxic skepticism, and even outright hostility.

After a bit of a rocky start, these guys really came around and appreciated the hands-on lessons I gave them on how to do live video stand-up reports and how to compress video into the best codec to upload to YouTube. The Nelson Mandela building is a challenge, though; between the thin air at this 8000-foot altitude, and having to haul my big carcass up 5 (five) steep flights of stairs, the first few minutes of every class were mostly spent huffing and puffing, and hoping that someone in the class had a particularly insightful comment.

Tbilisi Journalist Graduation, originally uploaded by Wordyeti.

These are the journalists from the smaller cities & towns outside of Tbilisi, Georgia. They’re all grinning happily, because they’ve managed to survive my intense one-week course, where I set them all up with their own blogs, and then sent them into the field to shoot, edit and post online news videos.

A crucial part of every learning process is making mistakes. They learned not to try to take on too ambitious a project when using makeshift multimedia tools. I learned not to use Adobe’s Premiere Elements 8. That has got to be the buggiest video editing system ever inflicted on an unsuspecting public. I use Premiere Pro all the time and love the rest of Adobe’s various iterations of the Creative Suites … but Elements is Satan on a CD. My students were throwing their headsets across the room in frustration as it crashed … lost work … necessitated a hard reboot of the system … crashed again … corrupted the footage … (rinse, repeat).

I finally installed Sony’s Vegas Video on their systems; not as user-friendly for beginners as the “Grandma-ware” that Elements is known as … but it at least would make a J-cut or an L-cut without locking up the system. Unfortunately, Vegas Video wouldn’t import the footage from the Flip cameras with the audio attached. So we had to export the audio tracks from Premiere, and then import them into Vegas and sync the audio with the visuals.

I was told that this was actually a quite valuable experience, because real-world conditions for indie journalists in Georgia are pretty much like this. Working on cobbled-together secondhand equipment in sweltering offices, where the electrical power is subject to sporadic outages. And when the wind shifts to blow in over the nearby market … well, you want to close the windows, no matter how hot & humid it is.

I just noticed – my arms look inordinately long in this photo.

The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family.

The song itself is kinda beside the point – it’s bubblegum synth-disco-pop, about as bland and processed as the stuff the taxi drivers in Moscow used to subject me to on the way back & forth from my gig there. Which may be why it’s getting so many views – this is the kind of stuff that works internationally, since the thumping beat and lyric structure make it sound pretty much interchangeable with everything else on the radio.

Can't wait until she starts marketing the exploding bustier shown here; Madonna's Wannabees all wore their undies over their shirts. Wonder if GaGaEttes are going to be lighting their smokes off their flaming boobs.

But the real action here is in the video to the song. Blew my mind. Didn’t think that people had budgets like this anymore. Costumes that would make Gaultier sick with envy — white latex with “Where the Wild Things Are” shiny plastic crowns, some kinda homage to LeeLoo’s orange strappy outfit in The Fifth Element and a Eastern European mobster/white sex-slave buyer with a steampunk-ish articulated brass chin. Looked to my eye like about a week in production, probably about $500K in total costs of models, locations, crews, lighting, post-production.

The plot seems to be that Lady GaGa wakes from her sleep the way normal people do – by sticking her hand out of a gleaming white Tylenol-shaped coffin – getting forced to drink high-end vodka and the gyrate for & be sold to a bunch of strange pervy dudes.I half expected to see Liam Neeson kicking someone’s ass in the backdrop and telling her, “Here’s the scary part. You’re going to be taken…”

Nobody does these kinds of elaborate music videos anymore, because there is no way to recoup that kinda cash from the moribund music industry.- at least, not until now.As Dan Neil points out in the LA Times

the “Bad Romance” video, which features placements for no less than 10 products: a black iPod; Philippe Starck Parrot wireless speakers; Nemiroff vodka; Gaga-designed Heartbeats earphones (via Dr. Dre); Carrera sunglasses; Nintendo Wii handsets; Hewlett-Packard Envy computers; a Burberry coat; those crazy, hobbling Alexander McQueen hyper-heels; and enough La Perla lingerie to choke an ox.

This isn’t a music video so much as the QVC Channel you can dance to.

I had thought that Madonna and Michael Jackson were about as sophisticated as you could get when it came to figuring out ways to build up a juicy public image, and then squeeze it until rivers of cash started running out. Not so. Lady GaGa has rightly recognized that selling CDs if for chumps; anyone can pirate them, and pretty much does.

No, you need to sell things that people can’t copy – or at least, if they do, it kinda defeats the purpose. So Lady GaGa’s come up with the list of high-end commercial goods to do “Hero Shots” of in the video and obviously done revenue deals with them.

As a business model, I have to say hats off to the Lady. She’s adapted to the draining of value from the content (i.e. nobody actually buys music anymore – at least, not like they used to), and migrated over to where the money still lies.

When advertising no longer works, when information is a commodity in which we all drown for free, then the only things that are left that have any value are physical objects that we can wear, eat, drive or plug in, as well as what cultural anthropologists call “fetish objects” that bestow special status because they signify that we hae enough disposable income so as to be able to waste a couple grand on some gaudy sunglasses.

I’m not sure if this is the way that all news & entertainment is going to have to go in the future. All of it sponsored, with big shout-outs to the guys footing the bills worked into the info-stream every 10 seconds or so.  I do know that if this works, we’re going to see a lot more of these “branded videos” online.

I didn't know the Russian phrase for "Group hug, people!" So I just stood in the back and spread out my arms.

I showed them some of the very basic tools to promote your content – the simplest being the blast e-mail alert to people you’ve signed up on a subscription list.  A couple of people in the class were already up on Twitter, and I sang that particular gospel, as well as the advantages of setting up Facebook groups or using the same functionality in the Russian equivalent, which is a Classmates.com-alike.

As always, the skill level in the audience was very uneven. Some people were way out in front of the pack, others seemed to be lost. I tried to deliver a wide variety of tools to hit everyone. I got just a couple of hours to do some very basic tourism after this session.  The scale of the construction going on here is truly awe-inspiring.

It's pretty chilly here; not snowing yet, but it's thinking about it - thus the heavy clothes. Also, behind me is the new Presidential Palace.

It’s late and I’ve got a lot more post-processing to do on the photos, so here’s just a couple of the images that I shot.  The video of the discussions can be found at This Week in Startups.

Before the lights were adjusted, standing on the platform over the audience made the speakers look like they were either making a dramatic entrance - or having their identities concealed in some "60 Minutes" tell-all segment.

The energy of the old VIC was certainly present – a little too much, as techies on the make back at the bar made it a little hard to hear the speakers at the time. This, despite the overt threat by organizers to find the yapping networkers and toss them out.

Anyway, here’s Calacanis discussing what the future of social media sites is going to look like, and what smart companies should do in the next couple of years to try to adapt to the increasing pace of innovation.

As I said in an email to Nye, Jason would probably be secretly pleased at the whole Citizen Kane-esque imagery here. And then, of course, he'd feel conflicted about it and make a self-deprecating joke.

One of the more interesting areas of discussion – particularly since I just got back from Costa Rica – centered around virtual currency as being “the next big thing.”  Certainly seems that way in places like Costa Rica, where you’re getting an increasingly large, tech-savvy and connected labor force.  A lot of people either work in the internet gambling industry there – or have relatives/friends that do.  The speed of internet connections in San Jose – and even out in the jungles on the Pacific side – stunned me. I’ve had much worse connections in the small town U.S.A.

One of the things that has stuck in my head the last week or so has been the stories coming out about how spammers are getting around the Captchas by simply hiring dirt-cheap human labor to fill in the blanks on the pages to stuff spam onto our hard-constructed sites.  I’m not sure what the next step in trying to get rid of the spam is going to be – Calacanis lamented how from the very first days of blogs, spam started becoming a problem, and it has kept pace with our attempts to try to get rid of it.  Now it’s starting to get into the social networking world (viz today’s Phishing attacks on Twitter), where the level of trust that we have for our social circle is going to make the impact of a malicious click that much heavier.

Page design at Rue89.com looks a little like what splatters on the side of the carny Tilt-a-Whirl after you load it up with a buncha 10-years olds who've spent the day eating cotton candy and mystery meat hotdogs. I think the boxes up & down the sides are supposed to be clickable ads, but they were inert when I tried them... (click for larger)

The illustration here is of a new French news site that is apparently taking off at Rue89; I can’t decide whether the chaotic design is totally off-putting, or intriguing because it basically violates every rule of page design.  Also, I can’t hear the word “Rue” in a title without flashing to “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Or some B-movie villain twirling a moustache and chortling, “You’ll rue the day, Rex Manly!”

As a bonus, this week I’ve broadened the focus a bit to include some big-picture thinking from some of the unusual suspects; Doc Searls has a post wherein it is posited that what we think of right now as the internet is just a finger pointing in the direction of what this thing is actually going to grow into.  Which should fuel a couple of late-night dorm-room debates, if nothing else…

Jeff Jarvis comes out in favor of doing the exact opposite of erecting paywalls, and dubs it “Hyperdistribution”  http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/08/25/hyperdistribution/ In a nutshell, it’s the idea that news organizations have to splash their content all over the web to try to make up for the lower ad rates by compensating with larger audiences. Nut graf: “I have stood in and before no end of conferences when I or someone else recalls what that student said in The New York Times said a year ago: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Waiting for her to come to our site won’t work – and it especially won’t work if, once a peer links her to our site, she finds a wall. No, we have to take news to her.”

PaidContent.org says that “The Future of News is Scarcity” http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-future-of-news-is-scarcity/ and that the mistake newspapers are making is that they are focusing on

A new take on the "trust/verification" function of news organizations.

the wrong problem. Instead of trying to come up with ways to preserve the content model that has worn out, he says that “every abundance creates new scarcities and this is where the news industry must go to make money in the 21st century. The scarcities created (and enabled) by abundant news are interesting stories, thought provoking analysis, conversation and community, and trust/verification. (snip) The successful news company of the future will have to take all this on board and deliver it with a radically lower cost base than this industry is used to.”

From the BBC, an article about what the music industry can teach television (and perhaps newspapers) about fighting with the internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/08/what_can_music_teach_telly.html Sample thoughts of what lessons to draw from the fight the RIAA has waged against its users: “Music biz teach TV? Greed, backwards thinking and lack of respect for the end consumer.” And “How to alienate its customers by treating them all as likely criminals.” One of the links will take you to this page, laying out the numbers of piracy of popular TV and movies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8224869.stm

Over at Media Bullseye, they reference Star Trek villains, in a piece entitled “The News Aggregator-Borg: Resistance is Futile”

Does this mean Arianna Huffington is going to start sporting external cyborg prosthetics? 'Cause that'd be cool...

http://mediabullseye.com/mb/2009/08/the-news-aggregator-borg-resis.html The author, Robert Quigley, is the social media editor for the Austin American-Statesman, and is considered one of the smarter New Media thinkers around.  He says that journalists should take the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to aggregating content in & around the web, pointing to the success CNN had in covering the attacks in Mumbai and unrest in Iran as examples of using the power of aggregation to shape & expand coverage.

Y Combinator, the startup incubator that has a heavy-duty track record, is calling out for business models to pave the way to “the Future of Journalism”: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html Y Combinator has a strong history of funding companies like Reddit, Omnisio and Zenter, and they are looking to dump money on anyone who thinks they have a realistic business model to support news production.  The RFS (“Request for Startups”) is being issued because, according to them, ” Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time. ”

Many people have pointed to the success of Amazon’s Kindle as proof that the future of news & newspapers lies in e-reader and portable devices like that. However, just as many people point out that Amazon demands 70% of the subscription revenues, which is spurring a lot of competitors.  Slate magazine has an article about how to compete with the Kindle http://slate.com/id/2226503 Basically, just look at what all the would-be competitors to the iPod did – and do the exact opposite. Key point: “The service matters more than the device itself. Every time I dismiss the Zune, Creative Zen, or some other MP3 player as an also-ran, I get letters from loyalists who insist that their gizmo far outshines the iPod. Sometimes they’re right-but what they miss is that the iPod isn’t a standalone device. It’s part of a music-delivery ecosystem, the most important feature of which is iTunes.”  Basically, the article lays out what publishers will have to do if they really want to deliver content to e-readers and make a profit.

In that vein, Editor & Publisher asks “Will E-readers Help Save Newspapers?” http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004007001 It appears that the

I tried to look at this on the Kindle. Not so good.

USA Today is hanging a great deal of hope on e-readers, along with a lot of other leading publishers. Nut grafs: “What’s interesting about e-readers is that they will most likely resemble the best aspects of print. The missing link, however, is the advertising model. (snip) Without advertising, newspapers stand very little chance of making any meaningful revenue from the e-reader platform.”  The article goes on at length to address many of the technological, social and business obstacles standing in the way of just eliminating the costs of paper distribution in favor of sending Quark page layouts to a Kindle-like device.  Oh yeah – and here’s a link to the announcement of the Sony device http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6685746.html

At the Knight Digital Media Center, the possibility of establishing “membership options” to charge for news is dissected: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/rather_than_a_pay_wall_consider_membership_options/ This borrowed somewhat from Mark Cuban’s suggestions (covered last week) to build a “News Junkie” membership which offers multiple services.  The ASNE chat that this comes out of is located here http://208.88.72.149/tabid/122/Default.aspx (you do need to be a member or paid subscriber to see this – and yes, I recognize the irony inherent in all that).

Speaking of Cuban, he’s off on another unlikely crusade – this week, he’s decided that the internet has been “dead and boring for a while now,” and that two new technologies WebHooks or PubSubHubBub are going to CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!! (emphasis his) http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/25/the-internet-is-about-to-change/ If you can get past the jargon (i.e. “Cloud-based distribution hub”), there might be something there. I’d be interested to see if he’s got any money invested in these, he’s banging the drum so hard. To me, it sounds like just another variation on “push”

Why do these wireframes look like the Tinkertoy stuff I made when I was 6?

technology, where a publisher crams information down the pipe to subscribers before it makes it available on the website. Me? I prefer the AP news alerts I’ve set up on my iPhone. For free. If you’re interested, Impact Media has a slightly more measured description of PubSubHubbub http://www.impactmedialtd.co.uk/blog/internet-news/what-is-pubsubhubbub/

If you’ve got the time for a “think piece” about what the long-term solutions to the revenue problems faced by companies trying to migrate their analog businesses to a digital platform, check out Doc Searls (one of the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”) in “Thinking outside the Internet box” http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/08/28/thinking-outside-the-internet-box/ Here’s the Keanu Reeves “Whoah!” moment: “I’ve written often about how hard it is to frame our understanding of the Net. Now I’m beginning to think we should admit that the Internet itself, as concept, is too limiting, and not much less antique than telecom or “power grid “The Internet” is not a thing. It’s a finger pointing in the direction of a thing that isn’t. It is the name we give to the sense of place we get when we go “on” a mesh of unseen connections to interact with other entitites.”

Another “deep thought” piece comes from Fast Company, setting out “Three Possible Economic Models” for the digital future: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/three-possible-economic-models-part-ii This is not directly related to the paid content debate, but it’s some interesting thinking on what kinds of companies are going to be viable in 10 years or so.

A piece on MinnPost talks about how the Journalism Online project launched by Steve Brill to such fanfare, perhaps … overstated … the number of newspapers that have signed on. http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2009/08/19/10972/star_tribune_not_part_of_online_fee_venture Apparently, the Star-Tribune and Pioneer-Press have not, in fact, signed up.

This is a post from last week that I’ve just gotten around to including – Alan Mutter writes “Why aren’t we paying for news?” http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-arent-we-paying-for-news.html Be sure the check out the comments section – there are notes there from some papers that recently either went behind, or emerged from paywalls. In the article, Mutter blames fear of change as the reason that everyone is talking about paid content, but very few people are actually doing it – yet. “Publishers can’t figure out how to charge for content without throttling their web traffic and the online advertising that comes along with it. (snip) Individual publishers are afraid to move unilaterally to begin charging for content but also unable to coalesce as a group around a common philosophy and platform for doing so.” Part 2 of Mutter’s epic trilogy is here: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-stops-publishers-from-charging-for.html And he winds it all up with: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-publishers-can-make-web-content-pay.html

Journalism.co.uk takes on the issue of free vs. paid content by stating that “Free is just another cover price” http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/08/

In the little time I've spent here, I actually quite like this scrappy little paper. Damn shame Rupert kicked it to the curb...

27/comment-free-is-just-another-cover-price/ They dissect the real reasons behind the demise of Murdoch’s thelondonpaper freesheet, and conclude that “thelondonpaper isn’t closing because the model

was flawed, but because News International either couldn’t make it work in the current economic climate or was unwilling to give a paper, still in its infancy, the time it needed to become commercially viable.”

The Newspaper Innovation blog writes at greater length about thelondonpaper, and whether this is really the death knell for the freesheet model http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/index.php/2009/08/24/freesheet-no-longer-viable-model-and-other-myths/

For readers interested in what’s happening with the whole “let’s regulate that crazy, dangerous internet” debate in Europe, the European Journalism Centre has a long post up about all the laws being debated around The Continent that might affect journalists http://www.ejc.net/about/blog/media_laws_spur_summer_debate_autumn_actions_likely/ The proliferation of laws designed to criminalize filesharing shows that RIAA and MPAA lobbyists are still very much on the job.

King Kaufman gets a little lathered up by the column in the LA Times that I linked to last week, writing that “We must kill press freedom to save it” http://open.salon.com/blog/future_of_journalism/2009/08/25/we_must_kill_press_freedom_to_save_it Somehow, I don’t think that managing editors are going to be going around holding up a Zippo to the printing presses anytime soon, but OK, he’s upset. In fact, about halfway through he gets into an imaginary conversation, which quickly turns into what the Brits call a slanging match. Viz: “Have you met the people, Tim? I hear they’re lovely once you get to know them. They’re the ones who have been saying for years, with their actions, “If you charge us for online news, we will abandon you. We do not support newspapers or anyone else charging for online news except for news that’s highly specialized.”  King’s basic point is that by trying to form a consortium to crush internet competition, the news industry is in fact acting against the public interest, rather than for it.

Trying to get users off their asses, to participate? Well, hot-button issues like the "Skank" blogger case are a good way to start...

In a slightly more constructive piece, Dan Gillmor, one of the authors of We the Media, announced that he is launching Mediactive, a site dedicated to getting the audience more involved in the news, but transforming them into “active users” rather than “passive consumers.”  The announcement piece is here http://mediactive.com/2009/08/24/moving-along-mediactive/

The Nieman site has a piece up on how the New York Times is monetizing its journalists by offering online courses in the Knowledge Network, to be taught by Times columnists http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/newspapers-find-a-new-way-to-monetize-their-journalists/

Two journalists are attempting to sell “kits” that would allow recently laid-off journalists to establish hyper-local news sites http://www.jiltedjournalists.com/News.html The effort is being called Dailytown.com, but the kits don’t seem to offer much beyond what a savvy online journalists could do with a custom WordPress install.

Interesting experiment – reminds me of WindyCitizen.com.

A couple of French startup web-only news sites called Rue89 and Demotix, are experimenting with multiple unconventional revenue streams,

but agree that “paid content is a dead end” http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/03/04/the-future-of-online-journalism-according-to-rue89-and-demotix/

And finally, just for reference, the Columbia Journalism Review sets out the difference in value between a print and an online reader – a print reader generates about $709 a year, while an online reader only generates $46 http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/post_11.php