Individuated News

Personalised yes

2010-07-05T06:25:00.000-07:00

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaks the world listens.
So here is the dawning of the inevitable, long-awaited new day:

In a 16 minute speech delivered at The Guardian's Activate 2010 summit, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google since 2001, was asked what he thought of the future of newspapers: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? . . . The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

Except for the fact that the British spell personalised with an "s" and I spell it with a "z" we are, and have been for a long time, in complete agreement. If you agree register to come to the Personalize Media conference next year.

Read the complete story from the Guardian, which by the way is in a direct fight with Murdoch's Times of London, that not coincidentally today went totally behind a paywall. Black and white reactions to the web.

Headline: Google CEO: the future of newspapers is online - and mobile

Posted by Colin Heilbut on July 2, 2010 at 1:47 PM
In a 16 minute speech delivered at The Guardian's Activate 2010 summit, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google since 2001, said that the experience of reading news will move to digital devices quite rapidly - and that it will involve personalized and local news which will be alert to your interests and existing knowledge. Among the numerous trends and shifts pointed about by Schmidt during his speech, one particularly relevant note for the newspaper industry was made in regards to mobile strategy. "Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology," Schmidt said. "The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them." Schmidt also addressed paywalls, News Corp. and the future of newspapers.
Asked what he thought of the future of newspapers, Schmidt said: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it's delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

When asked about paywalls, Schmidt refused to issue an outright condemnation. Rather, he said that "At Google we want to offer every publisher pieces for you to do with as you see fit," he said. "Murdoch's comment [Google is a "thief and a parasite" for its indexing operation of the Times site] was really about paywalls. There's a dispute in the [news] industry about subscriptions versus advertising. We want to enable both, and let users choose. But there are many publishers with large sites which have been offered the choice to go to a paywall, but don't, because they reckon they can make it work. Others want a subscription because that's the model they're used to."

But he said that newspapers faced real challenges because "they're replacing analogue dollars with digital cents, and a lot of people are losing their jobs as a result. It's much less bad here in Britain, perhaps because of the history of newspapers here, but in the US there are unhappy people who are losing audience at a faster and faster rate."

Instead, he said, organizations should build their strategies around the internet - and especially mobile. "The corollary of 'internet first' is 'mobile first'," he said. But he said that the improved targeting of news and information, possibly with more personalized services, "opens fundamental questions: news will become more personal, because we will be reading what we know we're interested in. But is that too narrow? How does serendipity occur? Does that personalization narrow our social view? If you follow the results of studies, it turns out that can lead to all sorts of biases. I don't know the answer, but to me this is a very fundamental question."

All things considered, Schmidt's intelligent commentary and analysis did not deliver any surprises nor hints about Google's news strategies or products. The emphasis on mobile technology should not come as a shock to anyone, but Schmidt did do an excellent job of arguing for exactly why resources need to be applied to mobile as the first priority, given the disproportionate adoption and growth rates for mobile devices and the close personal relationship consumers have with them.

Gone too far?

2010-06-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

For the most part, banks own large newspaper companies today. If the banks are owned by the government, the situation may have gone too far. Now comes a Federal Trade Commission one year study that is recommending law changes to reinvent journalism, in its own words. More than scary, here is the FTC report in its entirety.

FTC STAFF DISCUSSION DRAFT
FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION STAFF DISCUSSION DRAFT:1
POTENTIAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS TO SUPPORT THE REINVENTION OF JOURNALISM
Introduction and Brief Background
In May 2009, the Federal Trade Commission announced a project to consider the challenges faced by journalism in the Internet age. Now, one year later, staff responsible for this project present this draft for discussion of 1) the tentative conclusions outlined here about the current and likely future environments for news gathering and reporting, and 2) potential policy recommendations to address the issues raised during this proceeding. We note that this draft does not represent final conclusions or recommendations by the Commission or FTC staff; it is solely for purposes of discussion, in particular at FTC roundtable discussions to be held on June 15, 2010, at the National Press Club.
Journalism is moving through a significant transition in which business models are crumbling, innovative new forms of journalism are emerging, and consumer news habits are changing rapidly. We are greatly indebted to the many journalists, newspaper publishers and editors, creators of new online news organizations, economists, lawyers, academics, and others who have contributed their time and expertise to describe and analyze this transition, thus providing the foundation for this document. Many have already organized conferences and written reports that expertly aggregate and assess the vast majority of the relevant information. We are well aware that we are in no way writing on a clean slate.
Rather, through this document, we seek to prompt discussion of whether to recommend policy changes to support the ongoing “reinvention” of journalism, and, if so, which specific proposals appear most useful, feasible, platform-neutral, resistant to bias, and unlikely to cause unintended consequences in addressing emerging gaps in news coverage. The list of proposals in this document is no doubt incomplete, and we welcome additional proposals, which can be submitted at: http://public.commentworks.com/ftc/newsmediaworkshop. Members of the public also may submit comments on proposals in this document at the same web address.
We anticipate that different participants in the roundtables at which this document will be discussed will criticize some or all proposals, improve others, and
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add ideas of their own. The purpose of this document is precisely to encourage such additional analyses and brainstorming.
To provide background, staff’s key observations and conclusions to date are as follows.
The Current State of the News
1. Although many of the issues confronting journalism cut across different news media platforms, such as broadcast television and radio, most of the discussion in this document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole. Studies have shown that newspapers typically provide the largest quantity of original news to consumers over any given period of time. We include within the term “newspapers” online news websites run either by an existing newspaper or by an online-only news organization. Other sources of news are also important, of course, and proposals for action should not favor newspapers over other news platforms.
2. Advertising paid for the vast majority of the news produced in the twentieth century in the United States. For most newspapers, about 80% of revenues came from advertising and 20% came from subscribers. Advertisers paid newspapers (as well as radio and television broadcasters and cable) to bring together audiences to view advertisements. As an ancillary benefit, consumers received news about a wide variety of topics, including important public affairs.
3. Newspapers’ revenues from advertising have fallen approximately 45% since 2000. For example, classified advertising accounted for $19.6 billion in revenue for newspapers in 2000, $10.2 billion in 2008, and is estimated to be only $6.0 billion in 2009.2
4. With the advent of the Internet, advertisers have many more ways in which to reach consumers, including, for example, through a marketer’s own website or through topical websites that relate to the products that an advertiser wants to sell (e.g., a soccer blog for soccer equipment). Search engines also provide sites for advertising related to particular search queries.
5. Although some types of online advertising (e.g., advertising targeted to a consumer’s known interests) can generate greater revenue than other types (e.g., banner ads), the vast supply of online sites for advertising reduces the amount that an online
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news site can charge for advertising at its site. This means that online advertising typically generates much less revenue than print advertising (often described as “digital dimes” as compared to the dollars generated by print ads). It appears unlikely that online advertising revenues will ever be sufficient to replace the print advertising revenues that newspapers previously received.
6. Although newspapers’ print advertising revenues are significantly smaller than they were at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many newspapers still receive approximately 90% of their advertising revenues from print advertising, with somewhat less than 10% coming from online advertising. Print advertising revenues still account for more than half of newspapers’ revenues. Thus, even though, in theory, newspapers could move to online-only and save approximately 50% of their costs (due to printing and distribution), such a move would not make economic sense. Most newspapers’ circulation revenues now account for approximately 25% to 30% of total revenues.
7. Existing newspapers have responded to substantial declines in ad revenues by cutting staff. Financial problems due to the current recession and enormous debt loads from overleveraged transactions also have squeezed newspapers’ resources and contributed to staff downsizing.
8. Staff downsizing has caused significant losses of news coverage. For example, coverage of state houses and state perspectives on news from Washington, D.C. has declined, as has coverage of local government issues, foreign affairs, and specialty beats such as science and the arts.
9. Existing newspapers are struggling to find a sustainable business model for the future. Severe cuts in expenditures, especially staff cuts, permitted most newspapers to break even or better during 2009. Advertising revenues are likely to improve in 2010 as some businesses recover from the recession and increase their advertising expenditures again. But the trend toward online, rather than print, advertising is very likely to continue over time, forcing newspapers to look for other sources of revenue.
New Sources of Revenue and New Types of News Organizations
10. Newspapers are experimenting, and will continue to experiment, with new ways to generate revenue. Experiments include special websites for certain types of in-depth reporting for which people are willing to pay (e.g., sports coverage of the local team), requiring payment for the news in some circumstances (e.g., must pay after reading 5
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articles in a month), and developing ancillary services (e.g., research services). No one can be sure that any one of these or other similar strategies, even in combination, will generate sufficient revenues over the long run to maintain existing newspapers at their current (smaller) size.
11. Online-only news sites have emerged to fill some of the gaps in news coverage. The types of news they provide varies widely. For example, some cover hyper-local news; others do investigative reporting across the country; others focus on one community or region.
12. These “new” news sites typically have only a small staff (e.g., fewer than 15 journalists) and generally rely on a wide variety of funding sources, particularly foundations and other charitable sources. Even sites that earn advertising and other revenues typically must supplement those revenues with donations.
13. Although dozens of newly created online news sites have found sufficient funds to keep going through the early years of their existence, virtually no sites have yet found a sustainable business model that would allow them to survive without some form of funding from non-profit sources.
Will Experimentation Be Enough?
14. There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism. History in the United States shows that readers of the news have never paid anywhere close to the full cost of providing the news. Rather, journalism always has been subsidized to a large extent by, for example, the federal government, political parties, or advertising.
15. Economics provides insight into why this has been the case. The news is a “public good” in economic terms. That is, it is non-rivalrous (one person’s consumption of the news does not preclude another person’s consumption of the same news) and non-excludable (once the news producer supplies anyone, it cannot exclude anyone). Because free riding is usually easy in these circumstances, it is often difficult to ensure that producers of public goods are appropriately compensated.
16. In addition, the news can produce benefits that spread much beyond their readers. For example, investigative reporting that results in a staff shakeup in a local hospital can produce better health care for patients in the future, but the news organization that produced that story will receive, at best, limited compensation (perhaps through increased readership) related to having spurred those benefits.
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17. Finally, consumer demand for public affairs reporting in particular may be suboptimal, because citizens may decide their votes are unlikely to make a difference and therefore may choose to be “rationally ignorant” of public affairs.
18. In sum, newspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.
Proposed Policy Recommendations
The first two sections below (copyright and antitrust, and indirect and direct government funding) address ways in which to increase revenues to news organizations. The succeeding two sections (tax and corporate innovations, and taking advantage of technologies) address ways to innovate so that journalism is accomplished at lower costs. We seek discussion that compares and contrasts these proposals on a number of dimensions. For example: How well would the proposal address emerging gaps in news coverage? How costly and feasible would it be to achieve? To what extent would the proposal likely contribute to more and better journalism? How susceptible is the proposal to creating bias – in terms of news platforms or government interference? How likely is the proposal to create unintended consequences? What will journalism and the news media look like in the future if none of the policy proposals are implemented? If we take a wait and see approach, what are the likely effects, both short- and long-term? Is a “wait-and-see” approach preferable at this time, when experimentation to find new revenue sources is ongoing and the likely effects of some proposals may be difficult to gauge? Comparisons on other dimensions also are welcome.
I. Potential Revenue Sources from Changes in Law
A. Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators
Internet search engines and online news aggregators often use content from news organizations without paying for that use. Some news organizations have argued that existing intellectual property (IP) law does not sufficiently protect their news stories from free riding by news aggregators. They have suggested that expanded IP rights for news stories would better enable news organizations to obtain revenue from aggregators and search engines.
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Other stakeholders, however, have raised concerns, noting that news organizations – including legacy print organizations and established broadcast media – depend heavily on reported news for source information. Thus, expanded IP rights could restrict the current practices of the same news entities that seek to remedy free riding by aggregators. Moreover, news is gathered and reported to inform citizens and enable them to freely discuss the news of the day; expanded IP rights could restrict citizens’ access to this news, inhibit public discourse, and impinge upon free speech rights.
The policy proposals currently articulated lack sufficient specificity to fully assess their likely costs and benefits. For example, fundamental IP doctrines, such as the scope of copying aggregators are permitted under “fair use,” is unclear and not resolved by existing case law. As a result, the “need” for expanded IP rights also is unclear.
This section provides an overview of copyright issues that pertain to news. Part 1 provides an overview of the Copyright Act and some of the key case law, including the “fair use” defense to claims of copyright infringement. Part 2 discusses the “hot news” doctrine. Section 3 sets forth some of the IP policy proposals specific to the use of news reports.
1. Copyright and Fair Use
The Copyright Act of 1976 (Copyright Act) grants several exclusive rights to authors or other owners of copyright in “works of authorship,” including the rights to reproduce, display, or distribute copies of the work. 3 These rights, however, are subject to several significant limitations. For example, copyright protects an author’s particular expression of ideas or facts, but does not protect the facts or ideas underlying that expression.4 Thus, news stories as written and news images are protected by copyright, but the information reported in the news stories is not.
The “fair use” doctrine limits the scope of copyright protection by allowing third parties to reproduce, display, and distribute work protected by copyright, without authorization, if done for certain purposes, such as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . scholarship, or research,”5 and if the use strikes the appropriate balance under the four factors enumerated in Section 107 of the Copyright Act:
(1)the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
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(2)the nature of the copyrighted work; (3)the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted
work as a whole; and (4)the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted
work.6
There is no precise formula for the application of these broad factors to particular facts and circumstances. Rather, these are “various factors that enable a court to apply an ‘equitable rule of reason’ analysis to particular claims of infringement.”7
There are various views as to whether search engines and news aggregators infringe copyrights in news stories or fall within the fair use exception. One court of appeals has deemed search engine activity to be fair use. In Perfect 10, the 9th Circuit held that Google’s use of thumbnail images of, and headings from, copyrighted works to create an on-line index was fair use.8 Perfect 10, the plaintiff, maintained a subscription web site that displayed photographs. Thumbnail images of those pictures (small lower-resolution copies) could be found via Google’s search engine, along with links to high resolution copies of Perfect 10’s images that were stored on other computers. Perfect 10 filed suit for copyright infringement, alleging, among other things, that Google’s indexing of thumbnail images and links infringed Perfect 10’s copyrights by displaying, reproducing, and distributing the protected works. 9
Although the court considered all four “fair use” factors in reaching its decision,10 it emphasized the first factor. Google’s use of thumbnails and headings was deemed “highly transformative,” because “a search engine provides social benefit by incorporating an original work into a new work, namely, an electronic reference tool.”11 That transformative contribution was deemed to outweigh the commercial nature of Google’s search engine and AdSense program,12 as well as the potential for economic harm to Perfect 10.13
Some have suggested that the 9th Circuit’s application of fair use reaches too far.14 Other courts could decline to follow the 9th Circuit’s holdings,15 but so far, other courts have not squarely addressed these issues.16
News aggregators present an even less clear question of fair use, partly because aggregator conduct is so varied. As one workshop participant noted, “the word aggregator . . . is actually too broad a word in some ways. It covers a variety of sins, and it covers some things that aren't even close to being sins.”17 Existing case law does not provide definitive guidance as to how much or what type of news aggregation is
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too much to be considered fair use. A recent case, Gatehouse Media,18 raised important questions about the extent of news aggregator conduct that might be allowed as fair use, but the case was settled before decision.19
More recently, Dow Jones filed suit against Briefing.com, alleging that the defendant “systematically copies verbatim or nearly verbatim substantial portions of Dow Jones’ copyrighted articles . . . and distributes them in competition with Dow Jones . . . in some cases, within a minute or two after the article is published by Dow Jones.”20 That suit, and further litigation, may help to clarify some of the fair use issues, but a quick and clear resolution is unlikely.
2. “Hot news” Protection of Facts
Copyright protects an author’s articulation of facts, but not the facts themselves. State law versions of the “hot news” doctrine, however, can protect a news organization’s investment in fact gathering to a limited extent. In International News Service (INS),21 the AP challenged the use of its news wire stories by INS, which immediately rewrote the stories and distributed them to its own clients. Based on common law misappropriation principles, the Supreme Court recognized a “quasi property” right of very short duration in the facts that were gathered, digested, and disseminated at great expense by the AP.22
The INS holding in 1918 was based on federal common law that is no longer binding.23 Nonetheless, several cases have recognized the cause of action under state law. In doing so, these cases have held that federal copyright law’s refusal to protect the facts underlying a news story does not preempt a narrowly tailored state law misappropriation claim.24 For instance, in a recent case, Associated Press v. All Headline News, the AP alleged that All Headline News (AHN) had, among other things, misappropriated the AP’s news stories when AHN located news stories on the Internet, paraphrased some, digested some, and reproduced others whole, and then posted such news under its own banner at its own web site. The court denied the motion to dismiss the hot news misappropriation claim, holding that the claim remained valid under New York law and was not preempted by federal copyright law. 25
In the 1999 case, NBA v. Motorola, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit provided the seminal modern statement identifying the elements of a hot news claim as follows:
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(i) the plaintiff generates or collects information at some cost or expense, (ii) the value of the information is highly time-sensitive, (iii) the defendant's use of the information constitutes free-riding on the plaintiff's costly efforts to generate or collect it, (iv) the defendant's use of the information is in direct competition with a product or service offered by the plaintiff, [and] (v) the ability of other parties to free-ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened. 26
Beyond this statement of elements, the case law does not clearly delineate the scope of the hot news doctrine. Questions such as the length of time the doctrine would prohibit the use of news content and the degree of competition required to support a claim remain largely unanswered. One recent case, Barclays Capital Inc. v. TheFlyOnTheWall.com, does address those questions in the context of financial news. There, a federal district court enjoined FlyOnTheWall.com from re-publishing Barclays Capital’s stock recommendations until at least 10 a.m. and two hours after its release.27 Although the injunction applies specific time limits, they appear particularly tailored to the reporting of stock market analyses, and it is not clear whether courts would apply them to other types of news information. In addition, the Second Circuit recently stayed the district court’s order and agreed to hear the appeal of TheFlyOnTheWall.com on an expedited basis,28 so it is unclear whether the district court’s order will be upheld.
3. Policy Proposals
Proposal 1: Federal Hot News Legislation.
Some stakeholders have proposed amending the Copyright Act to specifically recognize hot news protection. Advocates argue “the copyright act allows parasitic aggregators to ‘free ride’ on others’ substantial journalistic investments,”29 by protecting only expression and not the underlying facts, which are often gathered at great expense. They define parasitic aggregators as those that, without permission, post enough material to render the original news stories redundant. This free-riding undercuts revenue for those who make investments in journalism and undermines their incentive to do so, according to advocates.30 They suggest that federal hot news legislation could help address revenue problems facing newspapers by preventing this free-riding.31
Hot news advocates are divided, however, on whether federal law should be revised to encourage state law development of hot news doctrine or to provide uniform,
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statutory federal hot news protection. Proponents of the first course recommend that Congress amend Section 301 of the Copyright Act to clarify that it does not preempt state law claims based on hot news misappropriation.32 They worry that the uncertainty surrounding the preemption issue discourages some news organizations from filing state law hot news claims. At the same time, they argue that specific statutory hot news protections would likely be too rigid to deal efficiently with the rapid evolution of news media and markets. State common law provides a more flexible tool for development of hot news doctrine, they assert.33
Others proponents of the hot news doctrine recommend that Congress amend the Copyright Act to provide express statutory federal protection of short duration and limited scope to the facts reported in news articles.34 They are concerned that state law evolution cannot provide the clarity or uniformity required for interstate news media. One author has criticized state-based hot news proposals as too variable and uncertain to be workable. 35
The likely effects of a more vigorous hot news doctrine are controversial. For example, one workshop participant noted that New York’s hot news doctrine was important to the AP’s efforts to protect its intellectual property,36 but recognized that any “federalization” of the doctrine would need to be very carefully drafted to avoid unintended costs.37 Federalization of the hot news doctrine would entail difficult line- drawing between proprietary facts and those in the public domain. Moreover, it is unclear how to draw the scope of hot news protection broadly enough to provide significant incentive for news gathering, but narrowly enough to permit competition in the news, as well as free public discourse.
Others also have argued that expanded IP protections for the news would be too costly.38 News organizations and writers, including print, broadcast, op-ed writers, and other commentators, routinely borrow from each other. One panelist suggested that “[m]uch of what is done by newspapers with each other is actually problematic under existing hot news doctrine.”39 Expanding hot news protection to limit unauthorized borrowing of facts from news sources could substantially raise the costs of the “second round” of content creators and thus impede the routine practice of journalism by all news organizations, not just aggregators.40 Such problems would likely be magnified under a federal hot news statute, especially as new competitors – less likely to have cooperative understandings with legacy news organizations – entered news and information markets.41 One academic also criticized the hot news doctrine, the initial
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INS decision, and the restrictions they impose on the communication of facts based on First Amendment grounds.42
Proposal 2: Statutory Limits to Fair Use
One panelist suggested amending the Copyright Act to limit the fair use doctrine that might otherwise protect from copyright infringement the activities of aggregators and search engines, such as the types of search engine activities blessed by the 9th Circuit in Perfect 10. In particular, he recommended legislation clarifying that the routine copying of original content done by a search engine in order to conduct a search (caching) is copyright infringement not protected by fair use.43 Others who did not necessarily support statutory amendments to fair use nonetheless suggested that clarification of how the doctrine applies to aggregators would be useful.44
Statutory amendment of fair use raises difficult questions about unintended consequences. News organizations themselves rely on fair use in multiple ways to support news reporting and commentary. Fair use also protects copying done for purposes other than news reporting, such as “criticism, comment, . . . teaching . . . scholarship, or research,” subject to the balancing of the four factors.45
The suggestion that an amendment be somehow tailored to reject Perfect 10’s attribution of fair use to search engines raises further practical questions. First is the concern about the public’s ability to find and access information on the web without comprehensive search engines.46 Second, as one federal district court observed, major search engines such as Google already follow instructions by copyright holders, in meta-tags and programs such as robots.txt, that, for example, can prohibit the search engines from searching or indexing web pages.47 Thus, some could argue that search engines, as well as some aggregators, have implicit permission from newspaper web site owners to copy and distribute content, which may negate the need for a fair use defense.48 Moreover, newspapers can stop search engines from copying their content by coding express instructions prohibiting it.
Proposal 3: Licensing the News
Finally, some suggest that some sort of industry-wide licensing arrangement be adopted, perhaps with the government’s help and support.49 Foreign governments have considered how to provide adequate incentives and funding for the news and are exploring, for example, the creation of government-fostered pilot programs to investigate new business models for IP and discourage free-riding.50 Such programs might enable newspapers and other content providers to experiment with
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“micropayments” and other means to monetize digital content.51 Such market and policy experiments may provide useful insight to continued IP policy discussions.
Licensing, including statutory licensing, has long been part of U.S. copyright law for certain industries. The Copyright Act provides a compulsory licensing scheme for “making and distributing phonorecords,”52 as well as one for “jukebox” operators.53 Standardized licensing arrangements offer the potential to reduce contracting and other transaction costs and may be especially useful for relatively simple, but frequent transactions.
One workshop participant presented a specific proposal to modify the copyright laws to create a licensing arrangement. The proposal appears to be based on two concerns. The first concern appears to be that the AP Registry or other licensing proposals might result in copyright payments to some content producers, but not all, and that any system adopted should create a level playing field among all content providers. Second, implicit in this proposal appears to be a concern that private, coordinated attempts to collect licensing fees may not be successful (and perhaps violate the antitrust laws) if initiated and enforced collectively by the content creators and publishers.
Thus, this speaker suggests amending the copyright laws to create a content license fee (perhaps $5.00 to $7.00) to be paid by every Internet Service Provider on each account it provides. He suggests creating a new division of the Copyright Office, which would operate under streamlined procedures and would collect and distribute these fees. Copyright owners who elect to participate would agree to periodically submit records of their digitized download records to the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office could verify these records by commissioning market-by-market sampling by organizations like Nielsen, ARB, and Comscore. He suggests these fees could provide a financial floor that allows publishers to leverage additional income, and would encourage, not discourage, the operation of market forces, and stimulate experimentation and innovation.54
Nonetheless, a compulsory license places an effective tax on certain conduct.55 In the context of the news, this raises numerous questions about what conduct, entities, or utilities to tax, at what rate, and on behalf of what entities. The particulars of such a scheme have not been specified for the news, and many have expressed concerns about the unintended consequences of mandatory licensing.56 Mandatory licensing fees for news content raise complex issues related to the hot news and fair use doctrines, and the extent to which access to information about the news should be constrained by
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proprietary rights or fees. Moreover, licensing raises complicated questions about how to calibrate fees to properly balance the interests of copyright holders and fair use by others.57
B. Collaborative Actions and Antitrust Exemptions
Representative Waxman noted at the FTC’s December 2, 2009 workshop that an “examination of the antitrust laws and whether changes there might be of assistance” had been raised as a possible response to the current difficulties facing the press and journalism.58 This is not the first time an examination of the antitrust laws has been suggested in the context of the newspaper industry. The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 (NPA) provides limited antitrust immunity for some joint operating agreements (JOA) between newspapers that combine certain business operations.59 The NPA, however, also requires that the newspapers in the JOA remain separately owned or controlled, that they maintain separate newsroom staffs, and that their editorial policies be “independently determined.” Congress’s goal in enacting the NPA was to assist two newspapers in the same city to survive by allowing them to combine their business operations to reduce overhead costs and at the same time to maintain competition in reporting and other editorial policies. Discussed below are two closely related proposals for antitrust exemptions and the arguments for and against these proposals.
Proposals:
 Allow news organizations to agree jointly to erect pay walls so that consumers must pay for access to online content.
 Allow news organizations to agree jointly on a mechanism to require news aggregators and others to pay for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses.
Some in the news industry have suggested that an antitrust exemption is necessary to the survival of news organizations and point to the NPA as precedent for Congress to enact additional protections from the antitrust laws for newspapers. For example, one public comment recommended “the passage of a temporary antitrust exemption to permit media companies to collaborate in the public interest,” noting that “Congress first came to journalism’s defense in 1970 when it granted [a] limited antitrust immunity.” This commenter noted that: “Publishers are rightly fearful that erecting pay walls will only be effective if it can be accomplished industry-wide, and they need an exemption to accomplish these reasonable policies.”60 Similarly, a
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newspaper publisher and member of the executive committee of the Newspaper Association of American (NAA) testified in May 2009 at a U.S. Senate Hearing that “Congress should act quickly on legislation that would provide newspapers with a limited antitrust exemption to experiment with innovative content distribution and cost saving arrangements.”61 More recently, it appears that industry requests for an antitrust exemption have abated.62
Others have suggested that the NPA was not successful in achieving its goals, and additional antitrust exemptions are ill-advised. According to one report, the NPA “did not work as intended, and most joint operating agreements ended with just one of the newspapers surviving.”63 One workshop participant asserted that the NPA “failed to save papers in the long run, harmed consumers by increasing circulation and advertising prices between 15-25 percent, and was misused in a variety of ways [for] corporate benefit that were not intended when the law was enacted.”64
Other speakers and commenters also have opposed any additional antitrust exemptions.65 For example, one public comment contended that many of the current problems facing newspapers stem from recent consolidation, and that easing antitrust laws could put “smaller, emerging media companies at a distinct competitive disadvantage.”66 Another participant noted: “It has been suggested that newspapers should receive an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude in charging for online news. . . . [T]here is no evidence that providing the exemption would actually create demand and willingness to pay.”67 Moreover, “The question facing us is not whether newspapers might benefit from an antitrust exemption, but if there is anything about the online setting that actually warrants it in economic terms. They never were allowed to collude on prices and payment systems in print. Why is it warranted online?”68 Yet another participant noted he was “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower . . . But what we do need is a level playing field.”69
Several new types of collaborations among news organizations are emerging. These collaborations appear to pass muster under the antitrust laws, which brings further into question the need for an antitrust exemption. At least two proposed collaborations for tracking online content and creating platforms potentially to allow individual content holders to monetize the use of content have received business review letters from the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division indicating that DOJ “has no present intention to challenge the development or operation” of the specific arrangements.70 Other collaborations include online news organizations partnering
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with traditional print newspapers to provide investigative journalism reports for publication and collaborations to share other types of content as well.71
II. Potential Revenues from Indirect and Direct Government Support
Many people, including journalists, recoil at the thought of government assistance to sustain journalism. This is understandable, given the vital importance of avoiding government interference with truthful news reporting. Nonetheless, in assessing whether government funds ever could or should be used to support journalism, a historical perspective is crucial. The federal government has supported journalism through indirect means since the founding of this Republic. State governments also have provided indirect support for journalism. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has received direct support for over 40 years. This section first reviews the history of government subsidies and then presents proposals that have emerged to date to provide additional government funds to sustain journalism.
A. History of Government Subsidies
Postal Subsidies. The Post Office Act of 1792 provided the first postal subsidies by charging less to recipients of newspapers than that charged to the recipients of letters.72 At this time, newspapers were viewed as a “means to provide information to the geographically dispersed public so they might ably discharge their duties as citizens.”73 Throughout the 1800’s and the first half of the 1900’s, reduced rates remained in place.
During the 1960’s, the Post Office’s deficit, created in large part by subsidizing the rates for periodicals, became an issue.74 Since that time, the amount of subsidies for newspapers and periodicals has substantially decreased. According to some, if the federal government in 2008 had “devoted the same percentage of the Gross Domestic Product to press subsidies as it did in the early 1840s, it would have spent some $30 billion to spawn journalism.”75
Public and Legal Notices. Newspapers also receive financial support from government public and legal notice requirements.76 “Public agencies have required paid publication of this kind of information for decades as a way to ensure that citizens are informed of critical actions.”77 Although smaller newspapers benefit more than larger newspapers from the publication of public notices, most newspapers receive some revenue through this source.78 As federal and state governmental entities push to
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save costs by publishing legal and public notices online, however, this revenue source is likely to decline substantially.79
Tax Breaks. Federal tax law allows newspapers to deduct their expenditures to “maintain, establish or increase circulation” in the year these expenditures are made, thereby providing beneficial treatment of circulation revenues. Print publications’ ability to deduct these costs as a current expense increases cash flow and provides approximately $100 million in tax subsidies to newspapers and magazines. 80
Two tax breaks are commonly available at the state level. The first is an exemption from sales and use taxes of revenues from the sale of newspapers and magazines, and in some cases from the sale of advertising services. This tax subsidy was worth about $625 million in 2008. The second tax break, worth about $165 million in 2008, is an exemption from sales and use taxes on items such as newsprint, ink, machinery, and other equipment used in the production of newspapers. Not all states report industry-specific tax data, however, so the tax breaks could be significantly more than the nearly $800 million reported by 37 states.81
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 created and provided funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which oversees both the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). President Lyndon B. Johnson summarized the reasons behind the act: “We must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge – not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use. “82 According to CPB, “the fundamental purpose of public service media is to provide programs and services that inform, enlighten and enrich the public... CPB invests in programs and services that are educational, innovative, locally relevant and reflect America’s common values and cultural diversity.”83
According to a recent national poll, CPB has succeeded in its mission – more than 75 percent of the public believe PBS addresses key news, public affairs, and social issues “very/moderately” well. This poll also named PBS the most trusted and unbiased institution among nationally known news organizations.84
The 2009 federal budget included $409 million for the CPB. The U.S. government’s support for public broadcasting is very small compared to other democratic countries. For example, “if the United States spent at the same per capita level as Canada, our federal commitment would be $7.5 billion.”85 Per capita spending by Finland and Denmark is approximately 75 times greater.
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B. ProposalsforIncreasedGovernmentSubsidies,IndirectandDirect
A variety of proposals have emerged to allow further government support for journalism through either indirect or direct means. Whatever the means, care must be taken to ensure that government support does not result in biased and politicized news coverage.86
Increase Government Funding
 Establish a “journalism” division of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is the federal program that places young people with nonprofits to get training and do public service work.87 According to proponents, this proposal would help to ensure that young people who love journalism will stay in the field. “It strikes us as a win-win; we get more journalists covering our communities, and young journalists have a chance to gain valuable experience – even at a time when the small dailies where they might have started are laying reporters off.”88
 Increase funding for the CPB. According to one report:
Public radio and television should be substantially reoriented to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites. This requires urgent action by and reform of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, increased congressional funding and support for public media news reporting, and changes in mission and leadership for many public stations across the country.89
Various commentators agree that CPB funding needs to be increased,90 and many believe that NPR and PBS stations need to build and maintain strong newsrooms at the state and local levels.91 NPR announced in October 2009 that it would launch a new journalism project to develop in-depth, local coverage on topics critical to communities and the nation. The project is being funded with $2 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1 million from the Knight Foundation. One speaker suggested that with additional federal funding, this initiative could be expanded.92 The president and CEO of NPR explained that this project will “beef up local online content at the station level” and will be done in “partnership with other public media players [and] new not-for-profits.”93 Similarly, one public comment noted that “Congress should adopt legislation that would provide substantial additional resources to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the purpose of supporting local newsgathering by public service media. These resources would be directed toward
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public broadcasting stations and other nonprofit or low-profit local news organizations.”94
 Establish a National Fund for Local News. One report recommends that: “A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and which would be administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.” The report notes that the FCC currently uses surcharges and other fees to underwrite telecom services for rural areas and the multimedia wiring of schools and libraries, among other things. These fees support the public circulation of information in places the market has failed to serve. If such a “Fund for Local News” were created, measures would need to be in place to reduce the potential for political pressures and interference as to how the money is distributed.95
 Provide a tax credit to news organizations for every journalist they employ. This could help pay the salary of every journalist. Although the proponent of this idea died before it had been fully developed, one speaker noted it is one way to subsidize journalists without the government picking one paper over another.96
 Establish Citizenship News Vouchers. Citizenship news vouchers would allow every American tax payer to allocate some amount of government funds to the non- profit media organization of their choice. People could indicate on their tax return whether and to which nonprofit organization they want a specific amount (perhaps up to $200) to be donated, but they would not be required to designate a donation. They could split their “federal funds” donation among several different qualifying nonprofit media. Proponents of this approach suggest it would create a funding mechanism to encourage viable independent Internet journalism while avoiding government control or the creation of a bureaucracy that could influence the recipients of the money based on politics. This proposal also could give foundations a role to play. Foundations could provide start-up funding for 3 to 5 years to help new ventures, “and then see if there is popular support for the venture in the form of Citizenship News Vouchers.”97 If desired, this proposal could be structured to apply to commercial, as well as non-profit, news entities.98
 Provide grants to universities to conduct investigative journalism. According to one speaker, “if the nation’s 200,000 journalism and mass communications students spent 10 percent of their time doing actual journalism, that would more than make
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up for all the traditional media jobs that have been lost in the past 10 years.” Such grants also could encourage training journalists to use digital technologies to conduct investigative journalism.99
If students are to conduct such journalism, however, they will need the same protection as professional journalists with respect to confidential sources. Many of the shield laws do not protect the nation’s 200,000 journalism and mass communications students because they are not considered “journalists” under such laws.100
Use Current Government Funding More Productively
 Allow the Small Business Administration to insure loans to fund new nonprofit journalism organizations. The Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953101 to aid, counsel, assist, and protect the interests of small business concerns. The SBA defines a business concern, among other things, as “one that is organized for profit.”102 Expanding the SBA program to include non-profit news start-ups could provide significant help in spurring innovative online news sites.
 Allow content developed for international broadcasting to be used domestically. Almost $700 million of taxpayers’ money is spent on content generated for use by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for international dissemination. This news would be valuable to U.S. citizens as well. A 60-year old law, however, prohibits the rebroadcast of this government-funded international news to U.S. consumers and taxpayers.103
 Increase postal subsidies for newspapers and periodicals. Postal subsidies have gone from covering about 75 percent of the cost of mailing in 1970 to approximately 25 percent in 2010. This represents a decrease from approximately $4 billion to $500- $600 million.104 Thus, some suggest increasing these subsidies.105 The Chairman of the Postal Rate Commission explained some of the concerns with having non- periodical mail cross-subsidize the mailing costs of periodicals. She noted that the current subsidy is approximately $641 million and that letter mailers have been complaining about the cross-subsidization and want it addressed.106 Nonetheless, she stated that it might be appropriate:
for both the periodical community and the Postal community to approach Congress with the notion that there is this symbiotic relationship and support for both parts of this communications network that supports democracy are
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necessary, and I think if the Congress understands this unique relationship, arguments can be made for finding financial support in one way or another that may address both of our concerns.107
C. Proposals to Pay for Increased Public Funding
Representative Waxman noted in remarks to the FTC workshop on December 2, 2009, that those advocating for public funding “need to articulate the scope of such support, in terms of the activities to be supported and the dollars required. They need to respond to the concern that government support of journalism would lead to government control of content. And they need to explain the source of revenues.”108
Two authors estimate that the various subsidies they propose – “postal subsidies; journalist tax credits; News AmeriCorps; student media; public media; and especially Citizenship News Vouchers – could run as high as $35 billion annually.”109 Although they recognize that convincing the government to allocate this amount of money to journalism and the news media would be extremely difficult, they argue “this level of spending would be similar to the U.S. government’s commitment to subsidizing journalism in the first half of the 19th century,” and the government should be willing to allocate funds to journalism as a public good.110 They recognize that suggestions for funding sources, especially apart from federal income taxes, are helpful and suggest the government establish a distinct “Citizenship Media Fund.” Funding sources could include the following suggestions.111
 Tax on broadcast spectrum. They argue “commercial radio and television broadcasters are given monopoly rights to extremely lucrative spectrum at no charge,” and this is a massive public subsidy. They therefore suggest the revenues generated by that spectrum be taxed at a rate of 7 percent, which should result in a fund of between $3 and $6 billion. In exchange, commercial broadcasters would be relieved of any obligations to engage in “public-interest programming,” which the broadcasters claim costs them $10 billion annually.
 Tax on consumer electronics. A 5 percent tax on consumer electronics would generate approximately $4 billion annually.
 Spectrum auction tax. They suggest there be a tax on the auction sales prices for commercial communication spectrum, with the proceeds going to the public-media fund.
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 Advertising taxes. They note a considerable amount of our broadcast spectrum has been turned over to disseminating commercial advertisements, and a 2 percent sales tax on advertising would generate approximately $5 to $6 billion annually. In addition, they suggest that changing the tax write-off of all advertising as a business expense in a single year to a write-off over a 5-year period would generate an additional $2 billion per year.
 ISP-cell phone tax. They suggest consumers could pay a small tax on their monthly ISP-cell phone bills to fund content they access on their digital services. A tax of 3 percent on the monthly fees would generate $6 billion annually. They note, however, this is the least desirable approach because demand for these services is “elastic” and even a slight rise in price could result in people dropping the service.
III. LegalChangestoEncourageNewNewsOrganizations
Businesses and non-profits in a number of different areas of the economy are exploring how best to organize their efforts to blend for-profit business activities with one or more social purposes, such as economic redevelopment or environmental protection. To find organizational structures within which both to make profits and achieve a social purpose requires consideration of complex federal and state legal issues. In some cases, efforts have begun to change or clarify federal and state laws to permit a transition to new, hybrid business models.
Some experts see an opportunity for news organizations to think creatively about the optimal organizational design(s) for news entities in the future and then to seek legislative changes as needed to implement that design. For example, some news entities may wish to explore hybrid organizational structures that integrate the pursuit of social purposes with business activities.112 These organizational designs include, among others, “Flexible Purpose” and “Benefit” corporations and low-profit limited liability companies (L3Cs). These hybrid designs may make sense for news entities, because journalism can fit a “social purpose” paradigm – that is, good journalism improves social welfare by educating the public through truthful and insightful reporting.
In addition, some “new” news organizations, especially new online sites, have chosen non-profit status to encourage a variety of funding sources and because they do not anticipate profitability any time soon. Such non-profits may confront some uncertainties in assessing their tax-exempt status, however, which could deter innovation in this area.
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This section identifies and examines some issues that could be clarified to encourage the growth of news entities that would like to use tax-exempt, non-profit or hybrid organizational models.
A. Tax-Exempt News Organizations 1. Issues Regarding News Organizations and Tax-Exempt Status
For a news organization to qualify for tax-exempt status, it must be organized for one of the exempt purposes listed under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code: charitable, educational, religious, scientific, or literary purposes, to foster national or international sports competition, to prevent cruelty to animals or children, or to test for public safety. News gathering and reporting is not specifically listed as a tax-exempt purpose, but it may be considered to have educational or literary purposes.
In addition, for tax-exempt status, a news organization (like any other organization) must operate primarily to serve its tax-exempt purpose in a non- commercial capacity -- that is, it must insure that earnings do not inure to the benefit of a private shareholder or individual, and it must not operate a trade or business that is not related to the exempt purpose. Moreover, it must not engage in forbidden political discourse (even though it may report on political matters).113
Non-profit news entities have suggested that tax uncertainty exists in the following three key areas.
a. Qualifying for Tax Exempt Status
News organizations are unsure whether providing general news reporting (as opposed to, e.g., religious news) qualifies as a tax-exempt purpose, and if not, what types of news reporting do qualify for tax-exempt status. To qualify for tax-exempt status, a news organization must be established for at least one of the exempt purposes defined in the tax code.114 Although the IRS has explicitly granted tax-exempt status to a few specific news organizations, those news entities provided religious news, and the tax-exempt status of other types of news organizations has not been clarified. The tax- exempt purpose must be central to the operations of the news organization and not ancillary to other non-exempt business purposes.
The application of IRS requirements has been explained through case-by-case IRS Revenue Rulings. For example, IRS Rev. Rul. 68-306 (published in 1968) found that a non-profit organization that “published a newspaper primarily devoted to news,
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articles and editorials relating to church and religious matters” could qualify for tax- exempt status by “accomplishing a charitable purpose by contributing to the advancement of religion.”115 In Rev. Rul. 67-4, the IRS concluded:
An organization engaged in publishing scientific and medical literature may qualify for tax-exemption under Section 501(c)(3) if (1) the content of the publication is educational, (2) the preparation of material follows methods generally accepted as “educational” in character, (3) the distribution of the material is necessary or valuable in achieving the organization’s educational and scientific purposes, and (4) the manner in which the distribution is accomplished is distinguishable from ordinary commercial practices.116
Conversely, there are revenue rulings that suggest a non-profit corporation whose only activity was the publication and distribution of a weekly newspaper with an ethnic emphasis did not qualify for tax-exempt status. The IRS also asks whether the news provided is “useful to individuals and beneficial to the community,”117 and whether any position advocacy is done in such a way “that there is a sufficiently full and fair exposition of pertinent facts to permit an individual or the public to form an independent opinion or conclusion.”118
These revenue rulings provide very limited guidance, however, because they are very fact-specific and were published decades ago. The same is true of the revenue rulings discussed in the next two sections.
b. Business Organization and Operation Issues
News organizations are unsure how to structure their activity adequately to fulfill the tax-exempt purpose and avoid operating in the ordinary commercial course of business. In addition, news organizations are unsure, logistically, how much space may be devoted to otherwise non-exempt content and how that “space” is measured.
Setting up a tax-exempt news entity requires an organization to assess its tax- exempt purpose and its methods for achieving the tax-exempt purpose. When deciding if operations are pursuant to an exempt purpose, the IRS and courts will look at several factors, including the price of the publication relative to costs.119 For example, under Rev. Rul. 68-306 the IRS granted tax-exempt status to a religious publication because the organization knowingly priced its publication below costs, and the organization did not operate as an ordinary business.120
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By contrast, IRS Rev. Rul. 60-351 denied tax-exempt status to a non-profit corporation that published a foreign language magazine. Although the corporation’s stated purpose was charitable, the activities of the corporation were “devoted solely to publishing the magazine.”121 The IRS concluded that the corporation was organized for the primary purpose of publishing a magazine, a “per se business activity,”122 and was therefore not a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3). The magazine at issue in Rev. Rul. 60-351, however, was published “regardless of charitable, educational or literary purposes,”123 and several other magazines, with a more literary focus, have successfully operated as tax-exempt non-profits for many years.
Again, these revenue rulings provide little guidance. Clarifying operational rules would give news organizations a better indication of what conduct is exempt, what conduct must be avoided, and how an organization can better determine whether a change in its operations might lead to a loss of its tax-exempt status. Otherwise, operational uncertainty may restrict investment in non-profit news start-ups.
c. Political Endorsements and Analysis
News organizations are unsure what types of content and speech will constitute political endorsements.124 Thus, political content restrictions create another uncertainty for news organizations seeking tax-exempt status, especially those that have historically taken positions on candidates and other political issues. To adhere to the legislative policy for tax-exempt organizations, news organizations must “refrain from participating in political campaigns and lobbying activities.”125
The IRS has explained that, “The fundamental distinction here is between what is news coverage and what is an attempt through editorial policy to promote or oppose a particular candidate.”126 One panelist noted that political endorsements are “an absolute no, no for 501(c) (3). It’s not even a gray area.”127
Under §1.501(c)(3)-1(d)(3)(i), tax-exempt news organizations that provide political information must do so in a “sufficiently full and fair” manner, so as to avoid “participating in, or intervening in (including the publishing or distributing of statements) any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.” Thus, the reporting must provide an exposition of pertinent facts that allow the reader to form an independent opinion.
When determining if an organization is participating or intervening in any political campaign, the courts and IRS consider various factors in their “facts and
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circumstances” analysis, including: (1) the organization’s preexisting commitment to promoting the issues outside of the election, (2) statements by the officers about the issues outside the context of the election, (3) research and analysis about the issue outside the context of the election, and (4) appropriate disclaimers of any endorsement of candidates.128 The analysis also includes an inquiry into whether the news entity expressly or even tacitly endorsed a candidate, which involves examining the totality of the evidence to reach a conclusion.
Rev. Rul. 78-248 provides hypothetical situations illustrating instances when a previously qualified tax-exempt organization may lose this status because of its political activities. For example, a tax-exempt organization that “annually prepares and makes generally available to the public a compilation of voting records of all Members of Congress on major legislative issues involving a wide ranges of subjects,” which contains no bias or slant, would not be engaging in prohibited political activity. Furthermore, a tax-exempt organization that publishes a “brief statement of each candidate’s position on a wide variety of issues” with no bias or preference would also not be engaging in prohibited political activity. Conversely, a tax-exempt organization that “publishes a voter guide that is a compilation of incumbents’ voting records on selected land conservation issues of importance to the organization” would be engaging in prohibited political activity because it concentrated on a narrow range of issues and therefore indicated bias.129
2. Potential Tax Policy Recommendations
1.The IRS should change its regulations to clarify when news gathering and reporting may be a tax-exempt purpose under Section 501(c) (3). Alternatively, Congress should amend the statute to add a separate subsection to Section 501(c) specifically exempting qualifying news organizations.
2. The IRS should issue guidance to clarify which business operations, such as an increase in profits or advertising space, will cause a news organization to lose its tax- exempt status.130
3. The IRS should issue guidance on how a news organization can avoid prohibited political activity.
Each of these potential recommendations involves some challenges. For example, how should a “qualifying news organization” be defined? At what point would an increase in advertising space tip the balance of the operation away from a tax-
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exempt purpose? Nonetheless, answering these questions could encourage more entry into the news business by non-profit start-ups that could fill some of the emerging gaps in news coverage.
B. Hybrid Corporations
Hybrid organizations that blend social purposes with business methods are emerging at the intersection of the three traditional sectors (for-profit business, non- profit, and government). Some for-profit corporations are looking to pursue socially beneficial goals in addition to profits. Similarly, some socially-oriented non-profits and government entities are incorporating traditional business practices and principles. Collectively, all of these changes are culminating in the formalization of a “Fourth Sector” of organizations, with an archetype sometimes referred to as a for benefit corporation.131
1. “Benefit” and “Flexible Purpose” Corporations
The development of “benefit” corporations has been stymied by restrictions in the law, including business judgment laws. Most state laws establish that an officer’s fiduciary duty is to maximize a business’s profits.132 This business judgment rule requires officers and directors to prefer business conduct that improves profitability over conduct directed toward a particular socially beneficial purpose.133
In April 2010, the state of Maryland passed a statute to create a new corporate form known as a “benefit corporation.”134 Under this law, a corporation may qualify as a “benefit corporation” if it establishes that its mission provides a “general public benefit.”135 “General public benefit” means that the corporation must make a positive impact on society and the environment, “as measured by a third-party standard, through activities that promote a combination of specific benefits.” The law makes clear that to qualify for “benefit” status, a corporation must be evaluated by the approved third-party entity, which must measure its social and environmental impact.
Similar initiatives are underway in several states.136 For example, a proposed bill in California would enable more entrepreneurs to pursue social-purpose-oriented activities through business means. Under the proposed bill, a corporation may qualify as a “Flexible Purpose Corporation” if it establishes that its mission is one that a non- profit or public purpose corporation would be qualified to carry out.137 A flexible purpose corporation may operate as a for-profit business, but it must establish ways to
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measure success in accomplishing its public or charitable purpose,138 and comply with additional transparency and reporting requirements.
The Maryland statute and proposed bills elsewhere provide some flexibility for officers and directors who make decisions involving trade-offs between profitability and the charitable purpose. For example, the Maryland statute delineates several factors to be considered when evaluating decisions by officers, including choices made regarding the designated public benefit.139
As news organizations shift from their traditional ad-revenue based models, and focus more on other sources of revenue, their businesses may fit within the paradigm of the “benefit” or “flexible purpose” corporation. This model could allow news organizations to choose higher standards of journalism over greater profitability. For example, local community lenders for whom a modest profit would suffice might be willing to invest in a “Flexible Purpose” news organization that would provide high- quality journalism for the community.
2. L3Cs
Like “benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations, an L3C is a for-profit business entity established to advance a charitable or educational purpose as well.140 Under the Vermont statutory model, which has been adopted in several other states, an L3C must be established pursuant to state laws governing limited liability companies (LLCs) and incorporate a charitable purpose (as defined under the federal IRS Code) as a primary goal in its mission.141 Unlike California’s proposed “Flexible Purpose Corporation” law, Vermont’s L3C law does not require that L3Cs establish metrics to measure achievement of the charitable mission or report its success in achieving its mission.
The L3C is designed to spur a particular type of investment from private foundations – a “program-related investment” (“PRI”).142 A private foundation may make a PRI if it furthers the foundation’s charitable purpose and has “no significant purpose” to achieve “the production of income or the appreciation of property.”143 Both private foundations and their managers can be fined a percentage of the amount invested if the investment is inconsistent with the foundation’s exempt purpose.144
Some have misunderstood L3Cs as automatically complying with IRS regulations that govern PRIs, because under state law, L3Cs must incorporate those regulations into their operating documents.145 However, this is not accurate. First, each
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foundation must assess whether its particular charitable purpose will be advanced by the PRI. Second, L3Cs are a relatively recent development and their status for purposes of accepting PRIs has not been tested under federal tax law. Because the foundation and its manager face potential penalties if they wrongly assess the legality of a PRI, foundations typically seek advice of counsel and letter rulings from the IRS before making PRIs. The letter ruling process is costly, cumbersome, and takes a long time to complete, which has deterred PRIs, according to some.
L3Cs are designed to accept contributions from both for-profit investors and non-profit foundation investors. Such side-by-side investors, however, can create concerns about a PRI. First, Treasury Department regulations limit PRIs to investments that “would not have been made but for such relationship between the investment and the accomplishment of the foundation's exempt activities.”146 In determining if the PRI is primarily for the foundation’s exempt purpose, it is relevant (but not conclusive) whether for-profit investors would make the investment on the same terms as the private foundation.147 Because L3C’s can invite side-by-side investments, critics suggest that this broad invitation may undermine the charitable purpose as the primary purpose of the investment. Second, side-by-side L3C investors can create concerns over how profits are assessed and attributed back to specific investors. For example, an equal division of profits among dissimilar investors may signal that the primary purpose of the investment is not necessarily the charitable purpose. Third, if the L3C’s operations result in the “production of income” or the “appreciation of property,” profits attributed to the investing foundation must be re-directed to further the foundation’s charitable purpose. Thus, the foundation may incur added costs to assess and monitor the L3C up front, and must make judgment calls to ensure that the investment remains a legitimate PRI to guard against potential IRS penalties.
Despite these issues, several states have adopted L3C laws to encourage organizations to pursue socially beneficial enterprises. Greater clarity in the tax code as to the types of news organizations that qualify for a tax-exempt purpose could help encourage investment, as could a speedier private letter ruling process to help foundations determine whether they can make a proposed PRI. Finally, L3C news organizations likely will benefit if they make it easy to identify funding sources and track revenues back to their source for tax purposes. Such policies may invite greater investment in this model.
3. Potential Policy Recommendations
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1. Identify news organizations as an example for program-related investments under IRS regulations. In March 2010, the ABA’s Section on Taxation filed comments with the IRS proposing examples to supplement existing guidance in Regulation §53.4994-3(b) related to PRIs. Example 16 highlights how a foundation could use a PRI to support a for-profit news organization’s foreign affairs coverage, which could serve as an educational resource for the public in general. According to the Section, the example “highlights the need to support for-profit newspapers struggling to exist in the age of digital media.”148
2. Promote the Consideration of News Entities as Flexible Purpose or Benefit Corporations. Promoting benefit and flexible purpose corporate designs might encourage greater investment in news organizations. The IRS could facilitate this process by specifying that news organizations have a tax-exempt purpose. In addition, news organizations would need to design measurements to evaluate their success in achieving their tax-exempt purpose. This approach could entail costs to achieve the necessary legal changes to promote the use of this business model.
3. Promote federal and state partnerships to resolve regulatory hurdles that prevent development and investment in socially oriented LLCs, including L3Cs, seeking tax-exempt and non-tax-exempt funding. LLCs, including L3C entities, would benefit from a “safe harbor” that would specify actions an L3C and foundation could take to qualify for a presumption that the PRI qualifies under federal tax law. Similarly, foundation investors in L3Cs would benefit from greater clarity as to how their investments will be evaluated by the IRS. Furthermore, new models such as the L3C may require changes to IRS standards that regulate tax- exempt investments, which are already calibrated to guard against fraud and other risks.149
IV. Innovations to Accomplish Journalism with Lower Costs
The Internet and related digital technologies have unleashed many changes in the media, including changes that enable journalists to collect, aggregate, and analyze information in new ways. Journalists and interested citizens now can quickly search and locate large amounts of publicly available information using Internet search engines, compile and analyze information using widely available spreadsheet and database software, and inexpensively publish and distribute stories online. These technologies can help journalists find and investigate stories more efficiently.
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Nonetheless, people still must read and interpret much digital information manually. Most digital documents historically have been created in a plain-text format with limited search capability, such as searching for certain keywords. Thus, even when information is made available digitally, searching documents and extracting and analyzing particular information can be time consuming.
In addition, obtaining some government records via FOIA can be costly and time consuming. For example, the Center for Public Integrity noted that the government told the Center it would cost $90,000 to process a FOIA request for certain Medicare data, because the data required some difficult work to clean it up and eliminate non- public data. After one year, the Center did receive 10 years worth of Medicare data containing 1.5 billion records.150 Government development of software programs that would enable non-public data to be easily segregated from public data could reduce or eliminate such costs. An improved FOIA process also might obviate the need for private parties to resort to costly and time-consuming litigation, which could conserve the scarce legal resources of both news organizations and government entities.
A.Proposals to Maximize Easy Accessibility of Government Information
 Federal, state, and local government entities should maximize the amount of information online and establish the routine release of common records used to monitor the activities of government entities.151 Such information should be in a text-searchable format at public websites.152
 Government policies should mandate that government software be written so that personally identifiable and other non-public information can quickly and easily be extracted from any government database.153
 The federal government should liberalize and clarify eligibility for public interest fee waivers and reductions under FOIA.154
 States should adopt FOIA-type laws applicable to both the state and localities within the state, and apply the above suggestions to those laws.155
 Government entities should webcast and subsequently archive online all public government meetings, hearings, and town hall events. If webcasting is not practical or available, government entities, including courts, should archive online audio recordings of public proceedings, as well as transcripts and other related
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materials.156 Currently, every state legislature and the District of Columbia provide either a live audio or video webcast of floor proceedings. However, only about 60 percent of states archive such proceedings for later review online. Similarly, only about half provide a live audio or video webcast of committee hearings and only about 40 percent archive them for later review.157 Thus, there appears to be significant room for improvement in this regard.
The proactive production of government documents in an easy-to-access format could reduce the amount of resources the government devotes to complying with Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests.158 It also should enable journalists to acquire more quickly and inexpensively information related to potential stories, thereby reducing the time and cost of developing news items.159 Many issues could be researched online, instead of requiring the physical production of hard-copy documents.160 Reducing the costs of developing stories might help sustain journalism as news organizations adjust to reduced revenues and leaner cost structures. Making government information more accessible can help in creating journalism that facilitates transparency and accountability in government.161
On the other hand, implementing all of these technology proposals would require federal, state, and local governments to make a wide variety of investments, some of which likely would entail significant costs. For example, institutionalizing the general release of commonly requested documents could entail a significant labor cost to identify the appropriate documents, develop software programs to separate non- public from public information, and maintain the databases. Improving FOIA web pages and building openness into information systems also likely would require significant information technology expenditures. Clarifying eligibility for newsgathering entities, liberalizing fee waivers, and streamlining the FOIA process would require legislative action. Establishing additional mechanisms to monitor or coordinate FOIA practices might potentially complicate current FOIA administration.
Nevertheless, once a government entity has created an appropriate web platform and relevant information is in an appropriate digital format, government-related content can be posted on official web pages for a relatively low cost. The New York State Senate provides one relevant example. It overhauled its public website from January to May of 2009 to make the Senate's activities and related information easier to access by the public.162 The deployment and training for this initial overhaul was done primarily by an outside consulting firm at a cost of less than $100,000. The new public website uses open-source software that does not require licensing fees. Ongoing
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operation and maintenance has entailed the work of two full-time technical staff, as well as some ongoing work by training and quality assurance staff. Ongoing website costs include approximately $1,000 per month in external hosting fees, and several hundred dollars per month in fees for live webcast bandwidth. In addition, the IT staff has trained over one hundred non-technical Senate staff to post on the site content that they create in the ordinary course of their work. This training enables staff to quickly post content ranging from bills and other documents, data, and reports related to the processes of the New York State Senate to content created for the personal home pages, social media pages, and news feeds of individual Senators. Official Senate activities, such as floor votes and debates and committee meetings, are webcast live with the help of the Senate's media services staff and archived at the New York State Senate's official YouTube channel. Senate content is made available for use by the public under a Creative Commons license. Notably, the New York State Senate Office of the Chief Information Officer indicates that the template and all the software code for its overhauled web site is available to be used and leveraged by other government entities, allowing others to benefit from its effort.163
Thus, it appears that at least some public-facing government websites can be launched or overhauled in under one year for an initial up-front cost of significantly less than one million dollars and, if necessary, scaled-up over time. In some cases, existing information technology resources can be leveraged incrementally to make significant improvements. For example, some government hearings could be webcast using license-free software and subsequently archived at free video hosting sites for an incremental cost.
The federal government also has launched public-facing websites such as: USASpending.gov in 2007 to track how federal dollars are spent; Data.gov in 2009 to make available government data sets; and Recovery.gov in 2009 to track funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Some sites can be started for relatively little money and scaled up over time. For example, in order to create USASpending.gov, the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) spent $600,000 to purchase existing software on which the watchdog group OMB Watch’s FedSpending.org site was based.164 According to OMB, even with other support costs, the total initial cost of the site was less than $1 million.165 Seven staff members working under the Federal Chief Information Officer initially launched Data.gov via the White House website with forty-seven federal data sets. 166
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In other cases, making available information that previously had not been collected may be more costly. For example, after its initial launch, a re-design of the Recovery.gov website is expected to cost between $9.5 and $18 million through 2014 to track funds from the recovery act.167

B. ImplementInteractiveData
Federal, state, and local government entities and other public stakeholders should collaborate to develop a common taxonomy of metadata tags for government- related information and then implement machine-readable interactive data for the information that they make publicly available in electronic format.168
Over the last decade, some interactive “semantic web” technologies that make information posted on the World Wide Web readable by machines have been developed. This interactive data is created by adding special informational data “tags” to electronic documents. Interactive data should significantly reduce the costs of finding information online because interactive metadata tags can be quickly searched, read, and analyzed by computers, not just by people.169 Interactive data should enable journalists and others to quickly pinpoint facts and figures within otherwise dense documents, data sets, or other types of information using an appropriate software application interface. Thus, widespread implementation of interactive data by government should facilitate less expensive and more in-depth reviews of information, some of which might lead to investigative or accountability journalism.170
Although at least twenty states are using Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) in some manner to add metadata to their bill drafting or legislative process,171 widespread implementation of interactive data across all levels of government will require the creation and maintenance of a commonly agreed-upon taxonomy for relevant data tags. Currently, such a harmonized taxonomy does not exist, at least in the U.S.172 A wide array of government representatives engaged in a substantial and coordinated effort likely would be required to develop and periodically update a commonly agreed-upon framework of terms.
Nonetheless, some government entities have made significant progress in implementing interactive data. In 2003 the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (“FFIEC”) announced it would spend $39 million over ten years to use eXtensible Business Reporting Language (“XBRL”) and other technologies to modernize and streamline how federal bank regulators collect, process, and distribute quarterly
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C. Leverage Other Government-Funded Information Technology Investments
The federal and state governments should make excess capacity in federal and state funded computing centers available to journalists to conduct resource-intensive activities, such as optical character recognition (“OCR”) scans of large document collections or other computational journalism activities.178
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bank financial reports. The XBRL standard uses interactive data tags based on standardized accounting terminology to make financial data more consistent and searchable. The resulting FFIEC Central Data Repository for filing and storage of such call report data for more than 8,000 reporting entities was implemented in 2005 as the first mandatory electronic filing system for financial data in the United States.173
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) currently is in the midst of a multi-year process to implement interactive data technologies for financial filings. In contrast to the federal banking agencies, which generally work with structured data, most of the data contained in over 350 unique SEC forms was unstructured and presented a complex challenge. In 2006 the SEC announced contracts totaling $54 million to transform its Electronic Data-Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system (“EDGAR”) into a dynamic real-time search tool with interactive capabilities. In 2007, the SEC established the Office of Interactive Disclosure to help develop rules to formalize the XBRL reporting requirements, formalize a comprehensive taxonomy based on U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (“GAAP”), and create a technological infrastructure for interactive data formats. In 2009, the SEC published final rules that require large public companies, mutual funds, and credit rating agencies to report certain information in XBRL. The SEC plans to expand these interactive XBRL filing requirements to cover additional entities and more in-depth information.174
According to the SEC, interactive data in SEC filings will enable investors and others to quickly identify facts and figures within lengthy disclosure documents.175 This capacity allows quick comparison of specific information among companies, such as past performance and industry averages. The availability of such data could help to level the playing field between large institutions, small institutions, and individual investors.176 The SEC hopes that as more filings include interactive data, sophisticated analysis tools now used by financial professionals could become available to the general public, making analyzing and reporting on financial data less expensive and easier.177
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 The federal government should increase the research and development funding and availability of electronic tools that traditionally have been used by other professionals, but which might be used by journalists as well. Such tools could include: text analysis tools for analyzing original source documents and large document collections, digital speech recognition tools, the computerized analysis of complex networks, and improved electronic note-taking.179
The prospective benefits of these various proposals are difficult to measure with precision. Improving government information technology and making it available to journalists have the potential to reduce the cost of researching certain stories and, in some cases, also might enable journalists to research stories in ways not previously possible.180
Leveraging government-funded information technology investments likely would involve varying costs. Making existing facilities and tools available to journalists might entail relatively low costs in some circumstance, but greater costs in others. For example, allowing journalists access to government technology and computer capacity might involve costs to create firewalls and secure data to prevent unauthorized persons from accessing confidential, nonpublic information.
1 This document does not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission or of any individual Commissioner. It reflects only the tentative analyses and possible policy recommendations assembled by FTC staff in the Office of Policy Planning. 2 PEW PROJECT FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM, THE STATE OF THE NEWS MEDIA: AN ANNUAL REPORT CH. Newspapers (2010) (citing Newspaper Association of America, Trends and Numbers, and for fourth quarter 2009, estimates by Rick Edmonds), available at http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/printable_newspaper_chapter.htm). [Hereinafter 2010 PEW REPORT]. 3 17 USC § 101, et seq. 4 See 17 USC at § 102(b) (“In no case does copyright protection ... extend to any idea . . . concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.”) 5 17 U.S.C. at § 107. 6 Id. 7 Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 449 (1984) (citing the House Report accompanying the 1976 Copyright Act, H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Cong., 2d Sess., 51, 65-66 (1976)). 8 Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146, 1168 (9th Cir. 2007). Perfect 10 initially sued Google for infringement for thumbnails and linking, Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., 416 F. Supp. 2d 828 (C.D. Cal. 2006), and subsequently brought similar claims against Amazon.com and its subsidiary A9.com. Although
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consolidated by the district court, much of the 9th Circuit’s discussion focuses on the nature of Google’s search engine activities. 9 Perfect 10, 508 F.3d at 1157 (photographs of nude models sold commercially and available at plaintiff’s subscription web site).
10 Id. at 1168. According to the 9th Circuit, Google’s caching of Perfect 10 images and its linking to and framing of third-party copies of those images were probably not even prima facie infringement and, as such, would not require a fair use defense. Id. at 1160-1162 (upholding district court view that display and distribution rights not infringed); see also Field v. Google Inc., 412 F. Supp. 2d 1106, 1115 (D. Nev. 2006) (“when a user requests a Web page contained in the Google cache by clicking on a ‘Cached’ link, it is the user, not Google, who creates and downloads a copy of the cached Web page”).
11 Perfect 10, 508 F.3d at 1165 (“Google’s use of thumbnails is highly transformative”; certain other factors also in favor of fair use); see also Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 336 F.3d at 820 (search engine’s use of images protected by copyright “promotes the goals of the Copyright Act and the fair use exception”); Field v. Google, 412 F. Supp. 2d at 1118 (allowing access to copyrighted works through cached links fair use, to extent Google itself copied or distributed works).
12 Perfect 10, 508 F.3d at 1166-1167 (outweighed commercial and superseding use for first factor). 13 Id. at 1166. In Perfect 10, the court found insufficient evidence of actual harm to Perfect 10’s ability to market its full size images or, for cell phone use, its reduced size images. The nature of the copyrighted work did favor Perfect 10 in that the images were expressive photographs protected by copyright, although lessened because Perfect 10 had enjoyed the right to first publication. 14 Bruce W. Sanford & Bruce D. Brown, Opinion, Google and the Copyright Wars: The Reach of Search Engines Should Be Regulated by Congress, Not the Courts, WALL ST. J., Nov. 12, 2009. 15 Other courts could distinguish or reject Perfect 10 in whole or in part, as the 9th Circuit addressed caching, indexing, and linking by search engines. Courts also could take a different view of the significance of web instructions in, e.g., robots.txt or meta-tags to questions of implied licenses or estoppel than the one articulated by a federal district court in the 9th Circuit decided prior to the Perfect 10 decision, but generally consistent with its fair use holdings regarding Google’s search engine. See Field v. Google, 412 F. Supp. 2d at 1116-1117. 16 Federal courts outside the 9th Circuit have cited aspects of Perfect 10’s fair use analysis. See, e.g., U.S. v. American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, 599 F. Supp. 2d 415, 426 and n. 10 ((S.D.N.Y. 2009) (citing Perfect 10 and Kelly approvingly on the question whether search engines provide public benefits under fair use factor one, but distinguishing that benefit from ASCAP’s use in the matter before the court); London-Sire Records, Inc. v. Doe, 542 F. Supp. 2d 153, 168 (2008) (citing Perfect 10’s distinction between indexing images and proving thumbnails but distinguishing defendant’s conduct indexing music files as not necessarily “distribution” of protected works); A.V. v. IPARADIGMS, LLC, 562 F.3d 630, 639-640 (4th Cir. 2009) (citing Perfect 10’s first factor analysis on behalf of proposition that underlying works need not be altered for archiving of works to be deemed “transformative” on behalf of fair use determination for plagiarism detection program). However, we are not aware of cases outside the 9th Circuit that have squarely addressed the questions whether search engines, or search engine linking, indexing, or caching activities, are or are not properly regarded as fair use under the Copyright Act. 17 Richieri, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 63. 18 Gatehouse Media Mass., I, Inc. v. New York Times Co., Civ. Action No. 08-12114-WGY (Jan. 2009) (D. Ma.). An expert report prepared for the case, although suggesting infringement, recognized that headlines and ledes might be especially susceptible to a fair use defense because they are not paradigmatically expressive: “all else held equal, a court would be more willing to recognize fair use as applied to news headlines and ledes than it would be to recognize a comparable fair use defense as applied to pure fantasy or science fiction.” Expert Report of Douglas Gary Lichtman, Gatehouse Media Mass., I, Inc. v. New York Times Co., Civ. Action No. 08-12114-WGY, 17 (Jan. 2009) (D. Ma.). 19 At issue were both the copying of individual headlines and ledes to news stories and the copying of the larger arrangement of stories on Gatehouse web pages. Gatehouse argued that the nature and extent of
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the copying made the defendant’s news pages perfect substitutes for its own to the limited pool of local advertisers. Plaintiff’s argument was supported by an expert report, which saw nothing transformative in the defendant’s competing commercial use: “Bluntly, these are look-alike businesses and they are producing look-alike output from a copyright perspective.” Expert Report of Douglas Gary Lichtman, In the matter of Gatehouse Media Mass., I, Inc., at 15. Copying a headline plus a lede might involve relatively few words, but under present law, copying only a few words or a small percentage of a work is not necessarily permitted if the heart of a story is copied for competing commercial purposes. See Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 549 (1985) (verbatim quotes – 300 words or 13% – were not fair use within meaning of Copyright Act).
20 Dow Jones & Co., Inc. v. Briefing.com, Inc., Case 1:10-cv-03321-VM (S.D.N.Y.) (complaint filed 04/20/10) (alleging copyright infringement and hot news misappropriation, among other things).
21 See International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918). The INS Court did not settle the question of the time scale pertinent to a hot news claim and more recent cases generally have not resolved the question how much protection is appropriate and how much might run afoul of copyright preemption or other limitations on state law IP (“quasi” or otherwise). 22 See id. at 245-246 (affirming injunction against immediate copying of news wire articles based on misappropriation and “quasi property” rights in news). 23 See, e.g., Alcatel USA, Inc. v. DGI Techs., Inc., 166 F.3d 772, 788 n. 59 (5th Cir. Tex 1999) (“International News was decided pre-Erie as a matter of federal common law, and thus nowhere is binding precedent.”) 24 Nat'l Basketball Ass'n v. Motorola, Inc., 105 F.3d 841, 845 (2d Cir. 1997) (claim for misappropriation of hot news is valid under New York law and not preempted by the federal Copyright Act); X17, Inc. v. Lavandeira, 563 F. Supp. 2d 1102, 1103 (C.D. Cal. 2007) (California law recognizes hot news misappropriation claims and 2d Circuit reasoning that “hot news” claims are not preempted by Copyright Act persuasive.). The Copyright Act expressly preempts state law provisions “that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright.” 17 U.S.C. § 302(a). 25 Associated Press v. All Headline News Corp., 608 F. Supp. 2d 454, 459 (S.D.N.Y. 2009) (citing NBA). 26 NBA, 105 F.3d 841, 852. The court concluded that “only a narrow ‘hot news’ misappropriate claim survives preemption for actions concerning material within the realm of copyright.” Id. 27 06 Civ. 4908 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 18, 2010). . 28 See Chad Bray, Update: Court Grants Stay of Order Restricting Theflyonthewall.com, Dow Jones Newswires (May 20, 2010) (reporting that the “Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear an appeal by the website on an expedited basis and granted a stay pending appeal of a prior order that placed time restrictions on how quickly Flyonthewall.com can publish ratings after they are released to investment bank clients”), available at http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100520- 709763.html?mod=WSJ_World_MIDDLEHeadlinesEurope 29 David Marburger & Daniel Marburger, Reviving the Economic Viability of Newspapers and Other Content Originators of Daily News Content, 19 (2009), available at http://www.bakerlaw.com/files/Uploads/Documents/News/Articles/MainAnalysis.pdf; see also Richard Posner, The Future of Newspapers, the Becker-Posner Blog (Jun. 23, 2009), available at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2009/06/. 30 Marburger & Marburger, supra note 28, at 41, 48-49; see also Posner, supra note 28; Arthur R. Miller, Common Law Protection for Products of the Mind: an “Idea” Whose Time Has Come, 119 HARV. L. REV. 703 (2006) (defending expansion of state-law-based protection of ideas because current protections are inadequate for an “information economy”). 31 Sanford, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 90. 32 Marburger & Marburger, supra note 28 at 44 (recommending that law permit such claims under state common law unfair competition theories or some analogous, but yet to be developed, statutory provision). 33 Id. at 46-47.
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34 See, e.g., Bruce W. Sanford & Bruce D. Brown, Op-Ed., Laws that Could Save Journalism, WASH. POST, May 16, 2009; Ryan T. Holte, Restricting Fair Use to Save the News: a Proposed Change in Copyright Law to Bring More Profit to News Reporting, 13 J. TECH. LAW & POL’Y 1 (2008). The precise scope of protection and its interaction with fair use law have not generally been spelled out in these proposals, although some specify the duration of protection. Compare, e.g., Holte (federal 24-hour hot news protection) with Brown & Sanford (advocating federal hot news protection without specifying scope or duration). See also Jane C. Ginsburg, No “Sweat”? Copyright and Other Protection of Works of Information after Feist v. Rural Telephone, 92 COLUM. L. REV. 338, 341-42, 388 (1992) (suggesting Congress has the power to adopt limited, tailored property rights for “information compilers” (such as authors of news stories)).
35 See Jane C. Ginsburg, Replying to Arthur R. Miller, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come” – But Where Will It Go? 119 HARV. L. REV. 703 (2006). 36 Malone, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 81. 37 Id. at 82; see also Boyle, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 93-94 (federalization of hot news doctrine likely to have serious unintended results).
38 Benkler, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 60 (recognizing incentive problems facing journalism, but taking a dim view of the available policy proposals, stating that he did not “think the solution is a government created new right”). 39 Boyle, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 92; see also Benkler, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 57 (noting “[t]here's always a trade-off between providing some revenue to one round of information creators in exchange for increasing the costs of others. Information and opinion are made from information and opinion.”).
40 Boyle, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 69-70; see also Benkler, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 77 (asking, “Permissions for who? When a New York Times reporter who knows Spanish reads three newspapers from Chile and puts together insight about what is going on in the earthquake and how people think, permissions?”). 41 Boyle, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 92-94.
42 Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 N.Y.U.L. REV. 354 (1999) (criticizing, e.g., attempts by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to use copyright to suppress the use of their newspaper articles by on-line policy discussion groups). See also Larry Ribstein, From Bricks to Pajamas: the Law and Economics of Amateur Journalism, 48 WM. & MARY L. REV. 185 (2006) (suggesting open access IP policies present both costs and benefits, but these generally come out in favor of amateur journalism (bloggers) and open access); Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 556 (1985) (the idea/expression “dichotomy ‘[strikes] a definitional balance between the First Amendment and the Copyright Act by permitting free communication of facts while still protecting an author’s expression.’”)
43 Statement of Bruce W. Sanford, Baker & Hostetler LLP Before the Federal Trade Commission “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” March 9, 2010, at 4, available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/544505-00041.pdf. Bruce W. Sanford & Bruce D. Brown, Opinion, Google and the Copyright Wars: The Reach of Search Engines Should Be Regulated by Congress, Not the Courts, WALL ST. J., Nov. 12, 2009.
44 See “Newspapers and Copyright in the Digital Era,” Newspaper Association of America, at 10 (August 1, 2009) (calling for “fair use guidelines”); Ariel Fox, “Copyright, Competition and Publishers’ Pursuit of Online Compensation,” at 14 (Nov. 5, 2009) (“the law would benefit from clarification”). 45 17 U.S.C. § 107.
46 See Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003) (search and information gathering purposes facilitated by search engine consistent with purposes of copyright act and fair use). 47 Field v. Google, 412 F. Supp. 2d at 1116-1117. 48 This point does not depend on determinations, following Field v. Google, that newspapers necessarily have issued implied licenses or are subject to estoppel, having done so. In Field v. Google, the court granted Google’s motion that it was entitled to the defense of implied license because it reasonably interpreted the absence of meta-tags as implied permission. Id. The court also granted Google’s motion for summary judgment on estoppel, because Field was aware of his ability to warn Google against, e.g.,
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caching and aware of Google’s likely conduct absent such instructions, but chose not to provide limiting instructions to Google. Id. Our point about implicit permission is intended as a practical one, not a definitive legal analysis. We note simply that both major newspaper web sites – like the plaintiff author, Field – and major search engines are aware of certain standard instructions that the papers could issue against the searching and caching of web content. The newspapers could issue such instructions explicitly, but many knowingly refrain.
49 See Statement of Bruce W. Sanford, supra note 43, at 3. 50 See UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Digital Britain: Final Report (June 2009), esp. C. 5, “Public Service Content in Digital Britain.” 51 Id. at chapter 4, which considers copyright policies and other issues raised by “Creative Industries in the Digital World.” 52 17 USC § 115. 53 Id. at § 116. 54 See Stephen Nevas, “An Income Model for Digital Journalism: Back to the Future,” Presented at the FTC’s News Media Workshop on March 10, 2010, available at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/mar9/docs/nevas.pdf; Nevas, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 186-97. 55 Benkler, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 57. 56 See Boyle, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 70; Benkler, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 57. 57 See, e.g., Hannibal Travis, Opting Out of the Internet in the United States and the European Union: Copyright, Safe Harbors, and International Law, 84 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 331 (2008) (considering costs and benefits of, for example, opt-in versus opt-out regimes for “copyright disputes on Google, YouTube, ebay, Wikipedia, and other on-line services,” arguing balance favors permissive “opt-out” system); JAMES BOYLE, THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: ENCLOSING THE COMMONS OF THE MIND (2008), esp. C. 4 (arguing that many productive activities, technologies, and industries depend on access to information that could be restricted by new applications of copyright restrictions on information). 58 REMARKS OF REPRESENTATIVE WAXMAN at 3. Waxman, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 27-28. 59 Newspaper Preservation Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1802(2). 60 Statement of Bruce W. Sanford, Baker & Hostetler LLP, Before the Federal Trade Commission: “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” at 5-6 (Mar. 9, 2010). See also Bruce W. Sanford & Bruce D. Brown, Laws That Could Save Journalism, THE WASH. POST (May 16, 2009), available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503000.html. 61 Testimony of James M. Moroney III, Publisher & CEO of The Dallas Morning News, Before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet (May 6, 2009). 62 See Newspaper Association of America, Public Comment to the FTC (Nov. 6, 2009) (the comment did not discuss the industry request or need for such an exemption); see generally Baer, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 180-85 (panel on competitor collaborations; Mr. Baer is counsel to the NAA and the Associated Press and similarly did not raise the need for an antitrust exemption, although he did note that he was not necessarily representing the views of his clients at the workshop). 63 Leonard Downie, Jr., & Michael Schudson, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, COL. JOURNALISM REV. at 28-29 (Oct. 19, 20009), http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php?page=all&print=true. [Hereinafter the DOWNIE REPORT]. See also Stucke, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 172 (noting that in 1970 there were 22 JOAs, in 2003 there were 12, and in March 2010 there were “five JOAs that still publish two newspapers”); see also id. at 170-73, 197-99 (discussing more generally concerns with the NPA and antitrust exemptions); Grunes, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 199 (noting that JOAs under the NPA “were a sort of Faustian bargain where the circulation and advertising functions could be combined, but the editorials and reportorial functions would be kept separate and would continue to compete”). 64 Robert G. Picard, Ph.D., Tremors, Structural Damage and Some Casualties, but No Cataclysm: The News about News Provision, Background Paper to the Presentation by Mr. Picard submitted to the FTC
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at 11 (Nov. 7, 2009), available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/544505- 00029.pdf; see also Picard, Dec. 1, 2009 Tr. at 79-80 (noting that an antitrust exemption “will do substantial harm to consumers and advertisers”). 65 See Funk, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 176 (noting that an antitrust exemption would not save the media and instead “would likely temporarily prolong an outdated business model”); Brouillette & Partners LLP, Public Comment to the FTC at 6 (Nov. 5, 2009), available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/544505-00014.pdf (noting that the “existing antitrust exemption [1970 Act] together with the latitude granted businesses and individuals by the rule of reason under Sherman Act § 1 are two elements that should be given serious consideration regarding the advisability to grant further antitrust exemption to news organizations”). 66 Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Public Comment to the FTC at 3 (Nov. 6, 2009), available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/index.shtm. 67 Robert G. Picard, Ph.D., Tremors, Structural Damage and Some Casualties, but No Cataclysm: The News about News Provision, Background Paper to the Presentation by Mr. Picard submitted to the FTC at 10-11 (Nov. 7, 2009) (further noting that “Even if one excludes users who do not pay, the measure would be largely ineffective because the majority of news in most papers comes from news agencies and syndicates and is widely available elsewhere—notably at portals such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo!, which pay the agencies and providers significant amounts of money and provide it free to their users in exchange for exposure to advertising”). 68 Id. at 11. 69 Jarvis, Dec. 1, 2009 Tr. at 238-39 (further noting that “If you’re talking about surviving, you’re talking about the perspective of the old legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn’t. The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.”). 70 See Mar. 31, 2010 Letter from Christine A. Varney, Assistant Attorney General, Dept. of Justice Antitrust Division, to William J. Baer, Esq., Arnold & Porter, LLP, concerning the Associated Press’s proposed News Registry; Feb. 24, 2010 Letter from Christine A. Varney, Assistant Attorney General, Dept. of Justice Antitrust Division, to Charles E. Biggio, Esq., Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati concerning MyWire’s proposal to develop and operate an Internet media subscription news aggregation service. 71 See, e.g., Downie, Dec. 1, 2009 Tr. at 158 (discussing collaborations, including the New York Times with ProPublica, a large, nonprofit investigative reporting organization). 72 See Goldway, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 106 (noting that in 1792 postage for letters ranged from 6 cents to 25 cents; postage for newspapers ranged from 1 cent up to a 100 miles to 1 and a half cents over 100 miles); Cowan, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 122; DOWNIE REPORT at 27-28. When the US postal system was established, senders of mail were not charged – instead, fees were collected from the recipients of the mail. This system changed in 1874, but the reduced rate remained intact for publishers delivering newspapers and periodicals. 73 Kevin R. Kosar, Postage Subsidies for Periodicals: History and Recent Developments, Congressional Research Service Report R40162, January 22, 2009, at 3. 74 Id. at 6 (noting the postage on periodicals covered only about a quarter of its delivery costs). 75 See Robert McChesney & John Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM: THE MEDIA REVOLUTION THAT WILL BEGIN THE WORLD AGAIN 207 (Nation Books 2009) [Emphasis in original]. [Hereinafter referred to as McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM]; McChesney, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 145. 76 Public notices include notice of public budgets, public hearings, government contracts open for bidding, unclaimed property, and court notices, such as the probating of wills or notifying unknown creditors. See Weber, Public Notices at 3-4. 77 Geoffrey Cowan & David Westphal, Public Policy and Funding the News, USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy Research Series, January, 2010, at 10.
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78 See Cowan & Westphal at 10 (noting that in a four-week study, the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy found that public notices accounted for the largest amount of advertising space, “by column inches,” in The Wall Street Journal). 79 Ed O’Keefe, Trimming the Federal Fat: Part One, Wash. Post, Apr. 20, 2009 (noting that the Justice Department announced the “U.S. Attorneys and the U.S. Marshals Offices’ Asset Forfeiture program is converting publication of judicial forfeiture notices from newspapers to the Internet,” saving $6.7 million over five years), http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal- eye/2009/04/trimming_the_federal_fat_part.html; see also Cowan & Westphal at 10.
80Tax Expenditures: Compendium of Background Material on Individual Provisions, S. Prt. No. 110-667, at 443- 44 (2008). See also Cowan & Westphal at 10. 81 See Cowan & Westphal at 10-11. 82 Remarks of President Lyndon B. Johnson Upon Signing the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, http://www.cpb.org/aboutpb/act/remarks.html.
83 CPB’s Goals and Objectives, 2009, http://www.cpb.org/aboutcpb/goals/goalsandobjectives/. 84 New Research Confirms PBS the Most Trusted and Unbiased Source for News Ahead of Fox News Channel, CNN and Other Commercial Networks, 2010, http://www.pbs.org/roperpoll2010/. 85 Derek Turner, Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age, Free Press, 2009 at 267; see also McChesney, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 147. 86 See, e.g., Murdoch, Dec. 1, 2009 Tr. at 54 (arguing the “prospect of the U.S. Government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling for anyone who cares about freedom of speech” and that government help “props up those who are producing things that customers do not want”). 87 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 169-70. See also Victor Pickard, Josh Sterns & Craig Aaron, Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy 27, Free Press, (noting that such a program could help train future journalists, and some funds might be used to provide multi-media training for laid-off journalists), available at www.freepress.net. 88 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 170. 89 DOWNIE REPORT at 33; Downie, Dec. 1, 2009 Tr. at 161. 90 See, e.g., Writers Guild of America, East, Public Comment to FTC (“There is a different, workable model for presenting carefully-investigated, thoughtful news and public affairs programming – public broadcasting (or “public media” in the digital age). Unfortunately, public television and public radio have been systematically underfunded for many years, so a very large infusion of capital would be required to make this a viable alternative to the existing large newsgathering companies.”), available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/index.shtm. See also McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 198-99 (recommending that public broadcasting be guaranteed an annual appropriation from the federal government of $3.75 billion in 2009 dollars); Cowan, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 132-33; Cowan & Westphal at 14; MacCarthy, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 78-79. 91 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 197; Downie, Dec. 1, 2009 Tr. at 154, 161-62. 92 Mark MacCarthy, Georgetown University, Public Comment, available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/index.shtm; MacCarthy, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 79. 93 Schiller, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 61. 94 Mark MacCarthy, Public Comment supra n.105. 95 See DOWNIE REPORT at 36 (further noting that “Local news reporting, whose market model has faltered, is in need of similar support”); see also id. at 6-8 (discussing decline in local journalism); id. at 27 (noting that “any use of government money to help support news reporting would require mechanisms, besides the protections of the First Amendment, to insulate the resulting journalism as much as possible from pressure, interference, or censorship”). 96 McChesney, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 154 (referring to an idea of the late Professor Edwin Baker).
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97 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 204; McChesney, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 159-60. 98 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 201-206 (also noting that the core concept of this proposal was developed by economist Dean Baker and his brother, Randy Baker, but they embellished upon it); McChesney & Nichols at 202 (further suggesting that qualifying media should not be permitted to accept advertising); McChesney, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 155-57 (noting that others think commercial interests, including those with advertising, should be eligible for the voucher). 99 See generally Victor Pickard, Josh Sterns & Craig Aaron, Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy 27, Free Press. 100 Newton, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 72; Eric Newton, Vice President, Journalism Program John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Public Comment at 4, available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/544505-00039.pdf. 101 15 U.S.C. §631 (1953). 102 http://www.sba.gov/contractingopportunities/officials/size/index.html. See also McChesney, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 150-51 (noting that perhaps the SBA could help newspapers transition to viable, locally- owned entities). 103 See Cowan, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 133; Cowan & Westphal at 14. 104 Cowan, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 130. 105 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 168. 106 See Goldway, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 108-114 (describing the history of subsidies for periodicals, the changes in law with respect to subsidies, and the political and social concerns with other postal customers cross-subsidizing periodicals). 107 Goldway, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 118. 108 REMARKS OF REPRESENTATIVE WAXMAN at 4. 109 McChesney & Nichols, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM at 206. 110 Id. at 207. 111 Id. at 209-11. 112 See generally Sabeti, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 164-69 (discussing emergence of mixed purpose businesses); Lang, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 131-32 (focusing on L3Cs, but recognizing the benefit and flexible purpose corporation models as well). 113 See Wellenfelsz and Carman, Will Exempt Newspapers Be a New Page in Journalism, Taxation of Exempts, at 27-31 (Nov./Dec. 2009). 114 An organization may be tax exempt for many reasons. For example, an organization established under an act of Congress may be exempt under §501(c)(1), a social welfare organization is exempt under §501(c)(4), a business league or chamber of commerce is exempt under §501(c)(6), social clubs are exempt §501(c)(7), and qualifying cooperative and hospital service organizations are exempt under §501((e). Even though there is no specific exemption for newspapers and journalism, some news organizations have formed as tax exempt organizations under §501(c)(3). 115 Rev. Rul. 68-306. 116 Rev. Rul. 67-4. 117 See Department of Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Publication 557: Tax Exempt Status of Your Organization, at 23 (June 2008). 118 Id. 119 See Wallenfelsz and Carman at 29-30. 120 Id. See also Rev. Rul. 67-4 (same). But see Rev. Rul. 60-351 (ruling non-exempt a foreign literacy magazine because the charter allowed for operations in an ordinary commercial fashion); and Rev. Rul. 77-4 (same). 121 Rev. Rul. 60-351. 122 Id. 123 Id.
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124 Issues of IRS determinations of exempt purpose and political endorsements also impact flexible purpose and benefit corporations, as well as L3C organizations, discussed infra. 125 Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Publication 557: Tax Exempt Status of Your Organization, at 20 (June 2008).
126 Kindell and Reilly, “Election Year Issues,” Exempt Organizations Continuing Professional Education Technical Instruction Program for FY 2002 at 369 (2001) available at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- tege/eotopici02.pdf. 127 Bromberger, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 188.
128 Kindell and Reilly, “Election Year Issues,” supra note 125, at 376-77. 129 Rev. Rul. 78-248 130 Cf. Bromberger, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 186 (noting that advertising revenues in periodicals and newspapers is subject to the “unrelated business income tax” regardless of the tax exempt status of the news entity and whether the advertising content is related to what the charity does). 131 See Sabeti, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 166-67 (noting “for benefit is basically a reference to the archetype” and the “[t]wo criteria that consistently emerge are social purpose and business method”). 132 See, e.g., Revlon v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, 506 A.2d 173 (Del. 1985) (ruling that a director violated his duty by making a decision based upon, “considerations other than the maximization of shareholder profits to affect their judgment.”) 133 See Clark, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 156 (noting that one goal of his organization is to move from a “shareholder capitalist” to a “stakeholder capitalist, where business has a broader view of its mission and what it’s about and a focus on accomplishing more than simply the profit for its owners”). 134 See Maryland HB 1009, available at http://mlis.state.md.us/2010rs/chapters_noln/Ch_98_hb1009T.pdf. 135 Id. 136 Other states considering similar legislation include Colorado, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington. 137 Proposed California Senate Bill 1463 requires that flexible purpose corporations establish in their charter that the organization will engage in, “one or more charitable or public purpose activities that a nonprofit or public benefit corporation is authorized to carry out” §2602(b)(2)(A). Proposed SB 1463 is available at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/sen/sb_1451-1500/sb_1463_bill_20100405_ amended_sen_v98.pdf. Under §23701(d) of the California code, corporations are exempt from taxes if they comport to mission and operational standards nearly identical to those contained in the IRS Code governing non-profit organizations. 138 California SB 1463, §3500(b)(4) requires that flexible purpose corporations provide, “A description of the process for selecting, and an identification and description of, the financial, operating, and other measures used by the flexible purpose corporation during the fiscal year for evaluating its performance in achieving its special purpose objectives, including an explanation of why the flexible purpose corporation selected those measures and identification and discussion of the nature and rationale for any material changes in those measures made during the fiscal year.” 139 The initiatives also differ in some key aspects: the California model links the social purpose designation to existing state laws relative to charitable organizations, and allows corporations to design their own social impact metrics. By comparison, the Maryland statute requires that benefit corporations obtain benefit designations and social impact measurements only through third-party assessments. 140 See, e.g., 11 V.S.A. §§3001(27) (“The Vermont Statute”):
‘L3C’ or ‘Low-profit limited liability company’ means a person organized under this chapter that is organized for a business purpose that satisfies and is at all times operated to satisfy each of the following requirements: (A) The Company significantly furthers the accomplishment of one or more charitable or educational purposes within the meaning of Section 170(c)(2)(B) of the IRS Code of 1986, 26 U.S.C. Section 170 (c)(2)(B); and (ii) would not have been formed but for the company's
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relationship to the accomplishment of charitable or educational purposes. (B) No significant purpose of the company is the production of income or the appreciation of property; provided, however, that the fact that a person produces significant income or capital appreciation shall not, in the absence of other factors, be conclusive evidence of a significant purpose involving the production of income or the appreciation of property. (C) No purpose of the company is to accomplish one or more political or legislative purposes within the meaning of Section 170(c)(2)(D) of the IRS code of 1986, 26 U.S.C. Section 170(c)(2)(D). (D) If a company that met the definition of this subdivision (27) at its formation at any time ceases to satisfy any one of the requirements, it shall immediately cease to be a low-profit LLC, but by continuing to meet all the other requirements of this chapter, will continue to exist as a limited liability company. The name of the company must be changed to be in conformance with subsection 3005(a)
available at http://www.leg.state.vt.us/statutes/fullsection.cfm?Title=11&Chapter=021&Section=03001. Nearly identical legislation has passed in Illinois, Michigan, Utah, and Wyoming. 141 For example, under 11 V.S.A. §3001(27)A), the L3C’s purpose must comport with the IRS Code, 26 U.S.C. §170(c)(2)(B), which describes an organization, trustee, community chest, fund or foundation, “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”
142 See Lang, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 137-39. 143 See 26 C.F.R. §53-4944-3 (Treas. Reg.) (“Exception for Program Related Investment. For purposes of this Section, investments, the primary purpose of which is to accomplish one or more of the purposes described in section 170(c)(2)(B), and no significant portion of which is the production of income or the appreciation of property, shall not be considered as investments which jeopardize the carrying out of exempt purposes.”); available at http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text- idx?c=ecfr&sid=bd7f0d39513a311d517d1e6721bf8ca1&rgn=div8&view=text&node=26:17.0.1.1.3.5.1.3&id no=26; Phaup, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 189; Lang, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 141. 144 See 26 U.S.C. §4944(a) (Private tax-exempt foundations are prohibited from making investments that “jeopardize the carrying out of [the foundation’s] exempt purpose.”). As a further deterrent, under 26 U.S.C. §4944(b), the foundation and manager can each face additional fines of up to 25% of the jeopardizing investment if such funds are not removed from the investment during the relevant taxable period. 145 See Keatinge, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 229-30 (noting that LLCs “can be organized for any lawful activity,” including for-profit or non-profit, and thus L3Cs are “neither necessary nor sufficient for a vehicle” for PRIs). But see Lang, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 130-44 (explaining the L3C concept) and id. at 230-31 (disagreeing with Keatinge’s views on L3Cs). 146 See 26 C.F.R. §53-4944-3 (A)(2)(i) (“An investment shall be considered as made primarily to accomplish one or more of the purposes described in section 170(c)(2)(B) if it significantly furthers the accomplishment of the private foundation's exempt activities and if the investment would not have been made but for such relationship between the investment and the accomplishment of the foundation's exempt activities.”). 147 See 26 C.F.R. §53-4944-3(A)(2)(iii) (“In determining whether a significant purpose of an investment is the production of income or the appreciation of property, it shall be relevant whether investors solely engaged in the investment for profit would be likely to make the investment on the same terms as the private foundation. However, the fact that an investment produces significant income or capital appreciation shall not, in the absence of other factors, be conclusive evidence of a significant purpose involving the production of income or the appreciation of property.”). 148 Stuart M. Lewis, Chair, American Bar Association Section of Taxation, Comments Concerning Proposed Additional Examples on Program-Related Investments, submitted to Commissioner Shulman, Internal Revenue Service at 24-25 (Mar. 3, 2010), available at
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http://www.abanet.org/tax/pubpolicy/2010/Comments_Concerning_Proposed_Additional_Examples _on_Program_Related_Investments.pdf. See also Lang, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 184 (discussing ABA comments). 149 See Bromberger, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 223; id. at 224-25 (also recommending more outreach from the IRS to hybrids to understand what they are trying to accomplish and to then help clarify how to accomplish those goals).
150 Buzenberg, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 161-62; April 30, 2010 FCC workshop on Public and Other Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era, Buzenberg remarks at 3:15:56 – 3:16:25, available at http://reboot.fcc.gov/futureofmedia/public-and-other-noncommercial-media-in-the-digital-era. But see Chopra, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 163-164 (noting that this request required some difficult work to cleanse the data and de-identify it).
151 See Cohen, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 109; Comments From Professor Sarah Cohen, Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, Duke University Regarding FTC Workshop From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? at 1 (Mar. 2010), available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/newsmediaworkshop/544505-00045.pdf. [Hereinafter Cohen Comments].
152 A related recommendation is to require federal, state, and local governments to update guidance on the publication of government information, such as the Data Quality Act, to mandate reconsideration of how and how much information must be published in light of new technologies. See generally FCC, CONNECTING AMERICA: THE NATIONAL BROADBAND PLAN 320 (2010).
153 See Cohen, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 109, 111 (noting that government data collection often comingles private and public information in ways that impede the release of data due to privacy and other concerns); Cohen Comments at 2; see also Aliya Sternstein, White House Bars Agencies From Posting Some Statistics, NEXTGOV, Jan. 27, 2010, available at http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100127_9912.php.
154 The Information Society Project, Yale Law School, Written Comments Filed in Regard to FTC Public Workshops From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? at 5-7 (Nov. 12, 2009), [hereinafter Yale Comments] (also suggesting the government coordinate a standardized application of the fee waiver provision or use a rebuttable presumption that, when a member of the public solicits government information, such a disclosure has a significant tendency to inform the public about the operations of government and, therefore, is eligible for a fee waiver, thus putting the burden on the government to demonstrate that the requested information is not likely to contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of government activities). Currently, under the FOIA statute “[d]ocuments shall be furnished without any charge or at a charge reduced . . . if disclosure of the information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii).
155 See generally Cohen Comments at 3; Cohen, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 113 (recommending the federal government include transparency requirements in federal grants to state and local governments to require that they release records having federal implications in conformance with the federal FOIA statute).
156 See generally FCC Broadband Plan at 322 (noting that “The federal government should create and fund Video.gov to publish its digital video archival material and facilitate the creation of a federated national digital archive to house public interest digital content”). 157 See generally Nat’l Conference of State Legislatures, Broadcasts and Webcasts of Legislative Floor Proceedings and Committee Hearings (Feb. 18, 2010), available at http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=1347. According to the NCSL, 49 states plus the District of Columbia webcast floor proceedings live. However, only 30 states and the District of Columbia archive them. According to NCSL, only 27 states and the District of Columbia webcast committee hearings live and only 19 states and the District of Columbia archive them for later review. Id.
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158 Cohen Comments at 1-2 (also suggesting that the government could make commonly requested documents available online regardless of whether there is a specific FOIA request); Allison, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 135 (noting that if “a government record is public, whether it’s data or a document or some kind of disclosure, it should be put online in a searchable and downloadable form as soon as possible”). See also 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(3)(A)(C) (statute states that: “[i]n responding under this paragraph to a request for records, an agency shall make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format, except when such efforts would significantly interfere with the operation of the agency’s automated information system”). 159 Cohen, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 112; see also Cohen Comments at 1 (noting “the effort, time and often cost involved in obtaining public records remains one of the highest barriers to public affairs journalism”). 160 See Umansky, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 174 (noting that “databases are a way in which you can reduce costs for journalists”); Allison, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 176-77 (noting that in the mid-1990s journalists would have to come to Washington and spend days going to different government entities, and having the government information online is “a huge savings that just didn’t exist ten years ago”). Although technology and more readily accessible information online is helpful, it likely does not entirely replace the types of contacts and understanding that journalists acquire by talking to people in the halls before and after governmental meetings. 161 See Chopra, Dec. 2, 2009 Tr. at 128-132 (discussing President Obama’s commitment to making government more transparent by creating public websites and proactively making information publicly available). 162 http://nysenate.gov. 163 See http:/drupal.org/project/nyss. See also Telephone interview with Andrew Hoppin, New York State Senate Chief Information Officer (Apr. 12, 2010); e-mail from Andrew Hoppin to Christopher Grengs (Apr. 26, 2010); Hidalgo, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 67-81; Hidalgo, Mar. 10, 2010 Presentation, available at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/mar9/docs/hidalgo.pdf. 164 OMB utilized that software because that site already had features similar to those required by USASpending.gov’s enabling legislation. 165 Gautham Nagesh, Web Site on Federal Grants, Loans and Contracts Debuts, GOVEXEC.COM, Dec. 14, 2007, available at http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1207/121407n1.htm. 166 Data.gov Heads for Overhaul, COMMWEB NEWS (Dec. 9, 2009) (the effort has been expanded to more than 200 contacts throughout the federal government and the posting of over 168,000 data sets); Vivek Kundra, They Gave Us the Beatles, We Gave Them Data.gov, Federal IT Dashboard Blog, Jan. 21, 2010, at http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/blog. 167 Press Release, U.S. General Services Administration, Recovery.gov Version 2.0 $18 Million Contract Awarded (Jul. 8, 2009). 168 FCC Broadband Plan at 319. 169 See Snider, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 81 -102 (explaining the semantic web and meta-data and how it can be used); Snider Mar. 10, 2010 Presentation, available at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/mar9/docs/snider.pdf. 170 See Snider, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 85 - 86; Snider Mar. 10, 2010 Presentation. 171 Minnesota Historical Society, Preserving State Government Digital Information, Comparison Chart of State Use of XML Bill Drafting Systems (Feb. 2009), available at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/states_mn/high/mn_xml_use_report0209.pdf. 172 See Snider, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 89 – 90. 173 Ivan Schneider, Banking Regulators to Launch XBRL-Powered Call Report Database, INFORMATION WEEK (May 10, 2005). 174 See Press Release, SEC, SEC to Rebuild Public Disclosure System to Make it ‘Interactive’ (Sep. 25, 2006) (SEC Press Release 2006-158), available at http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2006/2006-158.htm; SEC, Office of Interactive Disclosure, http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/xbrl.shtml; Blaszkowksy, Mar. 10, 2010
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Tr. at 54-66 (discussing the SEC’s efforts); Blaszkowsky Mar. 10, 2010 Presentation, available at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/mar9/docs/blaszowsky.pdf. 175 Blaszkowksy, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 54, 61-66. 176 Blaszkowksy, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 61-62, 65.
177 See Blaszkowksy, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 61-62, 65; Snider, Mar. 10, 2010 Tr. at 89 (noting that “Basically every advanced country in the world is rolling out XBRL”). 178 Cohen Comments at 4; Cohen, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 114. 179 Cohen Comments at 4; Cohen, Mar. 9, 2010 Tr. at 115-16.
180 Cohen Comments at 4 (explaining that “some federally funded research projects result in software and tools that are provided back to the federal government or are used in academia, but are sometimes not freely available”).
47

No-clothes emperor?

2010-05-18T04:50:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch may be the emperor without clothes?
A loyal reader turns him in: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2010/05/sneaking-around-the-wsjcom-paywall.html

GETTING AROUND THE WSJ PAYWALL
Posted by Mark Potts at 11:14 PM | Permalink

The Wall Street Journal online edition is the poster child for the argument in favor of paid subscriptions for news Web sites. WSJ.com has 400,000 paid online subscribers (hundreds of thousands more get the site along with their print subscription), giving other publishers hope that some way, somehow, someday, they can charge for online content.

Well, I ditched my WSJ.com subscription last month, after almost 15 years (I was a charter subscriber, in fact). Why? At $155 a year, it was just too expensive—even as a business-expense writeoff, which btw is a major reason why WSJ.com is an outlier in the online-subscription argument.

Insanely, I could only reduce the cost of the annual subscription if I agreed to receive the printed Journal, as well. (Yes, you read that right.) Then I'd just pay $99 a year. The wacky logic of this continues to escape me, and I just don't want that newsprint piling up in the recycling bin, untouched. So I canceled.

And I haven't missed a thing.

This is the dark secret, and the Achilles heel, of the Journal's—and Rupert Murdoch's—paid-content business model aspirations. It turns out that most of the key content of the supposedly for-pay Journal is available online for, um, free. And it's not hard to find. No, Google isn't stealing it, nor is some aggregator. It's all sitting right there on the WSJ.com site, if you know where to find it. Hiding in plain sight (or site), as it were.

This isn't rocket science. Basically, I just had to change a couple of my longstanding Journal URLs. It turns out that about half the paper—especially the excellent "soft" features in Personal Journal and Weekend Journal, among the WSJ's best content—is readily available on the WSJ site, unprotected by the paywall, for some reason. (You'd think that's the kind of unique stuff they'd want to charge for.) The best of the Journal's technology coverage, including Walt Mossberg's computer column, is free on Mossberg's affiliated site, AllThingsD.

My most personalized use of WSJ.com, the stock portfolio (and related news coverage of specific companies) is on the "free" side of the WSJ.com paywall, though it's easily replaceable elsewhere. Even the legendary Wall Street Journal a-heds—the quirky, eminently readable front-page features that have been sadly diminished under Murdoch—are on the free side of the WSJ.com paywall.

And just about everything else—even breaking stories—can be found...well, I won't give it away. But it involves using Google in a quite obvious way. OK, I've lost access to the WSJ archives—but I rarely used that feature anyway.

In sum, life without a paid subscription to the Wall Street Journal turns out to be not much different than it was when Dow Jones was dinging my credit card for ever larger dollar amounts every year. And I've now got a spare $155 to blow on iPad apps (though not the Journal's!).

All of this, of course, assumes that the financial and business coverage that the Journal provides is so unique that anyone should be paying for it. Sometimes, that's true—when the Journal is at its best on business stories, there's little better. But huge amounts of what the Journal covers—the daily flotsam and jetsam of corporate news, numbers, reports, etc., is available all over the Web, on sites like Yahoo Finance, or from CNBC's excellent—and free—iPhone app.

Besides, the Journal feels less and less like the Journal anymore, anyway. Increasingly, as Murdoch pursues his war of attrition with The New York Times, the Journal is devoting more and more attention and space to non-business national and international stories that are widely available elsewhere. Problem is, there's really nothing that unique about the Journal's coverage of the oil spill, or the Kagan nomination, or the British election (or New York City). There are countless free sources to replace or substitute for them.

This, of course, is the deepest flaw in any online-subscription theory: that equivalent coverage is available for free, a click or two away. Even the Journal can't enforce the kind of exclusivity that would make it worth paying for—it's too easy to look elsewhere. And by pursuing his Times-killing strategy—which is nonetheless fascinating in its own right—Murdoch is watering down the product that I previously was happy to pay for.

So I'm no longer a subscriber to WSJ.com. But I'm still a reader. That will make the advertisers happy, I suppose. But somehow it shouldn't be so easy.

One last thing: When I called Dow Jones customer service to cancel my WSJ.com subscription, the response was, simply, "OK, thanks." HUH? You're losing a paying customer, people. At minimum you should ask why—and try to convince me to stay on. But nope, there was zero objection. Nada. Nothing. Same thing happened when I canceled my print subscription to The Washington Post a few years back (and I've encountered other folks who've had the same experience canceling The Post and other papers).

Memo to newspapers: When losing customers is a critical problem, you might want to try a little harder to keep them from simply leaving, OK? You shouldn't let them go without a fight—or at least a discount offer. Then again, I'd assumed that I'd allow myself to be lured back to WSJ.com by an inevitable (I think) discount pitch after a few months as a non-subscriber. Now, after seeing what I can get without paying for it, I'm not so sure.

Church and state of Media

2010-05-17T13:22:00.001-07:00

So platform is the newest battleground for content brand. Except that the traditional brand players are chopped liver. Check out this explanation on SLATE. The address is http://www.slate.com/id/2253821/.

Apple's Way
Why publishers should beware the App Store
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted on SLATE, Friday, May 14, 2010, at 3:32 PM ET
In a brilliant column published 16 years ago, the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco explained the difference between Apple and Microsoft in terms of the divide between Catholics and Protestants. In the DOS-based universe, he noted, there are many alternative paths to salvation. The One True Church of Macintosh, by contrast, "tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach—if not the kingdom of Heaven—the moment in which their document is printed."

With the ascendance of the iPad, aka "The Jesus Tablet," Apple's Lateran tendencies have grown ever more baroque. The arrival of the new device was shrouded in something better described as religious mystery than mere corporate secrecy. The spiritual leader, recently returned from near death, celebrated the birth of his "magical and revolutionary" gadget at a ceremony akin to a high mass, beneath a glowing Apple icon that must be approaching the crucifix as a universally recognized symbol.
In this metaphor, content publishers are like the halt and the lame who flock to Lourdes in search of a miraculous cure. The pilgrims' desperate hope is that Steve Jobs will restore their businesses to health by blessing them with "apps"—a new way for them to charge readers for content and revive full-page advertisements in electronic form. Burn me for saying so, but they're dreaming.

The first problem with the publishers' fantasy, which I only realized when I spent some serious time with my new 3G iPad this past week, is that you don't need those cute little apps to read newspapers and magazines. On the iPhone, apps bring real advantages—it's no fun navigating a complex Web page through that 3.5-inch window. The iPad, by contrast, has a 9.7-inch display that is big, bright, and beautiful. The Safari browser is a great way to read any publication on the device, so long as you have a good WiFi connection.

The iPad might not be the boon that publishers had hoped
On the big screen, those exorbitantly priced first-gen iPad apps offered by magazines like Vanity Fair ($4.99 a month) and Time ($4.95 a week!) are attempts to revive the anachronism of … turning pages. They're claustrophobic walled gardens within Apple's walled garden, lacking the basic functionality we now expect with electronic journalism: the opportunity to comment, the integration of social media, the ability to select text and paste it elsewhere, and finally the most basic function of all: links to other sources. Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, brutally describes them as "a step back to the era of CD-ROMS." A few, like the New York Times Editors' Choice app, are beautifully designed, and I have high hopes for the iPad app that Slate is working on. But it's hard to see readers paying much of a premium for pretty, at least so long as these apps do less than the Web versions of the same publications.
The bigger mistake some publishers seem only too eager to make is embracing an Apple-controlled marketplace. The 30 percent revenue share Amazon originally offered newspaper and magazine publishers on the Kindle was so awful that it makes anything else look good by comparison. But Jobs is an even more ornery gatekeeper than Jeff Bezos. If you want to play in Apple's playground, it decides what apps it deems acceptable and then takes a 30 percent cut. It collects the data about users and decides what it is willing to share with publishers (so far, none of it). It intends to sell the advertising though a platform called iAd, controlling the standards and taking what sounds to be a 40 percent cut. If Apple succeeds in taking over the relationship with their customers, it will be no less of a disaster for print publishers than it was for the music industry.
But the most alarming aspect of Apple's vision is its censorious instinct when it comes to content. Where Google operates from a deep commitment to free expression—as evidenced by its heroic decision to challenge China's Great Firewall—Jobs detests an open orifice. There couldn't be a starker incident than Apple denying permission to the editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore to launch an app on the grounds that it violated section 3.3.14 of Apple's (private) iPhone Developer Program License Agreement—which lets it block any content it believes "may be found objectionable." Apple's specific complaint was that Fiore's work "ridicules public figures."
Apple reversed itself after Fiore fortuitously won a Pulitzer Prize, but it doesn't deign to defend its policies and remains closed to legitimate media inquiry. It is notoriously vindictive about those who … ridicule Steve Jobs. And Cupertino is more puritanical about nudity and mild sexual content than the Vatican itself, banning the display of nipples. Editors at one edgy fashion magazine reportedly refer to their app in development as "the Iran edition."
I don't say that all of this spells doom for Apple. Just because Jobs' beautiful closed system was crushed by Microsoft's more open model in the 1990s doesn't mean the same thing will happen again—though it might. The iPad is a gorgeous appliance and I wouldn't bet against it, or be without one, in the short term. But content creators ought not to delude themselves about Jobs' efforts to replace the chaos of the Web with his own velvet prison. The Catholic Church wins on aesthetics every time. It loses on innovation and independent thought. And it's not very good about sharing the wealth, either.

Another one bites the dust

2010-05-04T13:11:00.001-07:00

With the annoucement of the availability for sale of The Washington Times, another one bites the dust. How much dust do we have to eat before we realize that readers now pick their news, and thus can only satisfy their needs with the new media tools like Facebook, Twitter, MyYahoo, IGoogle, DailyMe, ICurrent, Kibboko, to name a few.
Individuated news and advertising -- self-chosen content -- either by taxonomy/key words, peers, friends, affinity groups or whatever new media tool will be invented -- is all the whole dynamic now.
Of course that doesn't restrict platform: PC, smartphone, I-Pad, shower curtain, etc.

Read the whole story here:

By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Washington Times executives are negotiating to sell the newspaper, after the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's family cut off most of the annual subsidy of about $35 million that has kept the Unification Church-backed paper afloat, company officials said.

Nicholas Chiaia, a member of the paper's two-man board of directors and president of the church-supported United Press International wire service, confirmed that the paper is actively on the market: "We recently entered into discussions with a number of parties interested in either purchasing or partnering with the Washington Times," he said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Current and former Times officials said one suitor has been the paper's former executive editor, John Solomon, who resigned in November 2009. Soon thereafter, they said, Solomon organized a group of investors to purchase the Times or launch a new multimedia outlet called The Washington Guardian. Times company officials said they are also in discussions with other potential investors.

Solomon, a former Washington Post reporter, declined to comment.

The negotiations follow months of turmoil at both the 28-year-old conservative daily and the business empire founded by Moon, 90, whose children are jostling for control over the church's myriad enterprises, which range from fisheries to arms manufacturing.

One of Moon's children, Justin Moon, who was chosen by his father to run many of the church's Asian businesses, has slashed the newspaper's annual subsidy, forcing the paper's executives, led by Moon's eldest son, Preston Moon, to search for deep pockets elsewhere. Meanwhile, the newspaper has hacked its newsroom staff by more than half, from 225 in 2002 down to about 70 people, raised the paper's price and deliberately shrunk its circulation to cut costs, shed its metro and sports sections, and fired or pushed out several top executives, including its publisher earlier this week. Several reporters said most of the staffers are seeking to leave.

The finances are so tight that the newspaper hasn't paid some of its bills or tended to basic maintenance issues -- such as hiring an exterminator to deal with mice and snakes sneaking into the building on New York Avenue in Northeast.

"The feeling everyone feels is that it's a totally rudderless ship," said Julia Duin, the paper's longtime religion reporter. "Nobody knows who's running it. Is it the board of directors? We don't know. There was a three-foot-long black snake in the main conference room the other day. We have snakes in the newsroom -- the real live variety, at least. One of the security people gallantly removed it."

Times editor Sam Dealey declined comment. Chiaia said he could not be interviewed until next week. (The paper's other director, Richard Wojcik, did not return a call.) In a written statement, Chiaia said the effort to sell the Times is "part of a strategic effort to ensure that the newspaper remains sustainable." He argued that the paper's struggles are no different from those of other news organizations and the Times "has improved its bottom line, compared to its position in November 2009, by around 50 percent."

The paper, however, has been struggling to pay off millions of dollars in debt, according to current and former Times executives who asked not to be named because they feared lawsuits or retaliation from their bosses.

The Times' circulation is also unclear. The paper stopped reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulation in 2008, when the paper had circulation of 86,710 copies on weekdays and 37,259 on Sundays. (Chiaia said the Times, now published only on weekdays, has a circulation of 50,000, but Times executives said it's about 42,000, with fewer than 25,000 home subscribers.)

Justin Moon's move last July to slash the family's subsidy to the Times -- Rev. Moon has pumped about $2 billion into the paper since its founding in 1982, according to current and former employees -- occurred as part of a feud among the church founder's children. Last year, Preston and his younger brother Sean Moon issued memos claiming power over various portions of their father's global business empire.

Sapped of its major funding, Preston Moon last year ordered Times executives, led by then-president and publisher Thomas McDevitt, to make massive cuts. In November, McDevitt and two other executives were ousted. McDevitt declined to comment.

Since leaving the Times, Solomon, who helps produce Energy Guardian, a news service that reports on environmental and energy issues, has sought to buy the Times or start his own paper, according to Times officials.

Solomon tried to team with McDevitt and a group of investors to buy the Times, according to a senior-level Times official. But that group collapsed.

Solomon found another group of investors and approached the Times late last year about buying the paper, a senior Times official said. The offer was rejected as insufficient; Preston Moon told associates he would likely accept a bid between $10 million and $15 million, the official said. A Unification Church spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Over-abundance; over-complexity

2010-04-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirkey argues that our media companies are over-evolved, referring to precedents such as the Romans and the Mayans in "The Collapse of Complex Business Models." and he includes these graphs to refer to the additional over-abundance problem of media today:

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

No protection; no pay

2010-04-06T16:43:00.001-07:00

In all of the discussions about the right way to put up paywalls online, the fundamental truth that without protection there can be no pay has been passed over, for the most part.
Here's what happens when a procedure such as metering is put forward as a paywall model, when in fact it's quite susceptible to workaround.
Web developers have made BREAKTHEPAYWALL, which erases the cookies that keep track of reading habits to validate when payment would kick in for a reader.

Here's the story from PaidContent.co.uk:

Remember BugMeNot.com? The site was started in 2003 to let users, peeved by a growing crop of news site registration walls, borrow someone else’s login.

Seven years on - for registration wall workaround, read pay wall hack. Web developers have made BreakThePayWall, a browser extension that helps users overcome part of news publishers’ subscription strategy.

Available for Internet Explorer and soon, Firefox, BreakThePayWall works mainly by deleting cookies sites use to limit the number of stories users can read before having to subscribe. Deleting the cookies means the publisher’s site forgets how close the reader is to the “pay up” threshold.

In theory, it could be a challenge to those that use Google’s First-Click-Free scheme, which publishers can use to let searchers read only up to five articles per month before subscribing. No BreakThePayWall user numbers are available and the hack seems unlikely to severely impact publishers’ strategies because it has not gained widespread attention on the web.

But it is a clear response to the recent re-emergence of paywalls and may prompt proprietors to think of new techniques. It’s basically a sign of the times.

Web users can already employ the same technique by manually deleting cookies in their browser; BreakThePayWall just tries to make it easier.

“The paywall thing came about because of our annoyance at how easy it is to get around them,” BreakThePayWall’s developer, who did not give his name, told me. “Lots of compromises are made and basic security not adhered to. The utility currently uses cookie and referrer techniques - we have not come across any other techniques… yet.”

BreakThePayWall is thought to have piqued the interest of FT.com, which uses First-Click-Free to give five free articles per month to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) searchers.

The developer is also working on a hack that lets users more easily claim compensation for train delays.

Copy rite

2010-04-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

The rite of copyright must change to be fair to everyone who isn't digital. I believe as this New York Times Oped contributor points out. that you can reprint and link to sites on line, that are impossible to quote in print. I am in the process of publishing a book from my blogs and although I have quoted at length from many media sources online, I can't reprint them in print without paying, including reprints from The New York Times. So obviously I won't be able to reprint this blog in print. You'll only be able to read it here.

Here's the full story as it appeared in The New York times on April 3, 2010 by Marc Aronson:

TODAY, Apple’s iPad goes on sale, and many see this as a Gutenberg moment, with digital multimedia moving one step closer toward replacing old-fashioned books.

Speaking as an author and editor of illustrated nonfiction, I agree that important change is afoot, but not in the way most people see it. In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

Unless we nonfiction writers are lucky and hit a public-domain mother lode, we have to pay for the right to use just about anything — from a single line of a song to any part of a poem; from the vast archives of the world’s art (now managed by gimlet-eyed venture capitalists) to the historical images that serve as profit centers for museums and academic libraries.

The amount we pay depends on where and how the material is used. In fact, the very first question a rights holder asks is “What are you going to do with my baby?” Which countries do you plan to sell in? What languages? Over what period of time? How large will the image be in your book?

Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print, it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books. After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated. We’ve all heard about the multimedia potential of the iPad, but how much will writers be charged for film clips and audio? Rights holders will demand a hefty premium for use in digital books — if they make their materials available in that format at all.

Seeing the clouds on the horizon, publishers painstakingly remove photos and even text extracts from print books as they are converted to e-books. So instead of providing a dazzling future, the e-world is forcing nonfiction to become drier, blander and denser.

Still, this logjam between technological potential and copyright hell could turn into a great opportunity — if it leads to a new model for how permission costs are calculated in e-books and even in print.

For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads. Right now, fees are laid out on a set schedule whose minimum rates are often higher than a modest book can support. The costs may be fine for textbooks or advertisers, but they punish individual authors. Since publishers can’t afford to fully cover permissions fees for print books, and cannot yet predict what they will earn from e-books, the writer has to choose between taking a loss on permissions fees or short-changing readers on content.

But if rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid. The challenge of this model is accurate accounting — but in the age of iTunes micropayments surely someone can figure out a way.

Before we even get to downloads, though, we need to fix the problem for print books. As a starting point, authors and publishers — perhaps through a joint committee of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers — should create a grid of standard rates and images and text extracts keyed to print runs and prices.

Since authors and publishers have stakes on both sides of this issue, they ought to be able to come up with suggested fees that would allow creators to set reasonable budgets, and compel rights holders to conform to industry norms.

A good starting point might be a suggested scale based on the total number of images used in a book; an image that was one one-hundredth of a story would cost less than an image that was a tenth of it. Such a plan would encourage authors to use more art, which is precisely what we all want.

If rights remain as tightly controlled and as expensive as they are now, nonfiction will be the province of the entirely new or the overly familiar. Dazzling books with newly created art, text and multimedia will far outnumber works filled with historical materials. Only a few well-heeled companies will have the wherewithal to create gee-whiz multimedia book-like products that require permissions, and these projects will most likely focus on highly popular subjects. History’s outsiders and untold stories will be left behind.

We treat copyrights as individual possessions, jewels that exist entirely by themselves. I’m obviously sympathetic to that point of view. But source material also takes on another life when it’s repurposed. It becomes part of the flow, the narration, the interweaving of text and art in books and e-books. It’s essential that we take this into account as we re-imagine permissions in a digital age.

When we have a new model for permissions, we will have new media. Then all of us — authors, readers, new-media innovators, rights holders — will really see the stories that words and images can tell.

Marc Aronson is the author, most recently, of “If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge.”

Here we go

2010-03-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

From Rupert by way of PaidContent.org:

After months of silence, News Corp.‘s UK wing News International has put some details on its plans to turn Times Online paid-only, in a big flagship announcement. We’ll run it in full because it’s so significant.

Update: See exclusive preview of the forthcoming websites.

The key points…
—£1 a day, £2 for a week’s subscription - a compelling argument to go for a week.
—Coincidence? The £1 cost is the same as the daily print paper.
—Customers get access to both sites. Print subscribers get free web access.
—Premium mobile? “New applications” including iPhone apps will also be paid-for. There will also be tablet editions.
—Rebrand? Note, Brooks is calling the new daily site “TheTimes.co.uk”, not “Times Online”.

News International is using the “all for the price of a cup of coffee” comparison. Matching the £1-a-day print price will fuel the fire of those who suspect the aim here is really to drive people back to paper. But the Times is promising plenty of online-native innovation, too.

Guardian.co.uk: “Assuming that only five percent of daily users convert to the paywall system – a standard metric for paywalls – that would bring in £1.83 million if they each buy a £1 daily pass. At a 10 percent conversion, it would net £3.66 million per month for the two papers. If more people of those choose to buy the weekly pass, the revenues would be lower.”

Next stop: a pay-for Sun Online? Surely not? But Brooks says: “This is just the start. The Times and The Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the UK to move to this new approach. We will continue to develop our digital products and to invest and innovate for our customers.”

The announcement…

London, 26 March 2010 – News International today announces that The Times and The Sunday Times will start charging for access to their digital journalism in June using a pricing model that is simple and affordable.

Both titles will launch new websites in early May, separating their digital presence for the first time and replacing the existing, combined site, Times Online. The two new sites will be available for a free trial period to registered customers.

From June, the new sites, www.thetimes.co.uk and http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk, will be available for a charge of £1 for a day’s access or £2 for a week’s subscription. Payment will give customers access to both sites. The weekly subscription will also give access to the e- paper and certain new applications. Access to the digital services will be included in the seven-day subscriptions of print customers to The Times and The Sunday Times.

Rebekah Brooks, Chief Executive, News International, said: “These new sites, and the apps that will enhance the experience, reflect the identity of our titles and deliver a terrific experience for readers. We expect to attract a growing base of loyal customers that are committed and engaged with our titles. We are building on the excellence of our newspapers and offering digital access to our journalism at a price that everyone can afford.

“At a defining moment for journalism, this is a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition. We are proud of our journalism and unashamed to say that we believe it has value.

“This is just the start. The Times and The Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the UK to move to this new approach. We will continue to develop our digital products and to invest and innovate for our customers.”

John Witherow, Editor of The Sunday Times, said: “The launch of a dedicated Sunday Times website is a hugely significant moment for the paper. It will enable us to showcase our strengths in areas such as news, sport, business, style, travel and culture and display the breadth of Britain’s biggest-selling quality newspaper.

“For the first time, readers will have access to all their favourite sections and writers. We will be introducing new digital features to enhance our coverage and encourage interactivity. Every day, readers will be able to talk to our writers and experts and view stunning photographs and graphics. Subscribers will be able to get this brand new site, plus the enhanced Times site, seven days of the week, all for the price of a cup of coffee.”

James Harding, Editor of The Times, said: “The Times was founded to take advantage of new technology. Now, we are leading the way again. Our new website – with a strong, clean design – will have all the values of the printed paper and all the versatility of digital media. We want people to do more than just read it – to be part of it.

“We continue to invest in frontline journalism. We have more foreign correspondents than our rivals and continue to put reporters on new beats – last year we added an Ocean Correspondent and we just became the only British paper to have a Pentagon Correspondent. And we want to match that with investment in innovation.

“TheTimes.co.uk will make the most of moving images, dynamic infographics, interactive comment and personalised news feeds. The coming editions of The Times on phones, e- readers, tablets and mobile devices will tell the most important and interesting stories in the newest ways. Our aim is to keep delivering The Times, but better.”

Fundamental shifts

2010-03-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

At the very core of all discussions about reporting, distribution, technology, even design, of news, is the fundamental question of what has news become. A well-respected professor of journalism in England believes there are fundamental shifts afoot in the nature of news.

Here's the story:
Is news over? – George Brock tackles journalism's biggest question
SharePosted: 18/03/10 By: Alexander Walters

Journalism has become "a word wandering around in search of a definition" according to George Brock, the head of journalism at City University London.

In a speech last night entitled 'Is news over?', the former Times international editor questioned the role of journalists and the very nature of journalism in the digital world. He told the audience of students and media professionals gathered at City University that the rapid development of technology had prised the concept of news out of the hands of traditional media.

"The ability for anyone to produce something called news, circulate it, discuss it and edit it brings an oligopoly to a brutal end," he said.

"Until recently journalists could rest secure in the knowledge that it wasn't easy for anyone to claim to be a journalist unless they were in a position to use the capital-intensive equipment to publish or broadcast. That barrier to entry has of course gone."

Brock told how news, once the binding factor in so many communities in the form of a local paper, was now created by online communities which "form, congeal, dissolve and disperse" at a speed unimaginable to previous generations.

On the inevitable question of how to fund journalism, Brock was candid. "There is no law of economics which guarantees that when one business model fails, a replacement one is immediately available," he said.

Yet he went on to suggest that we should be grateful for "ever cheaper, ever lighter" multimedia devices, which allow stories to be told in the broadest possible form, with both audio and visual dimensions. With the decline of newspapers, however, he stressed the importance of maintaining the role of the written word.

"We have to find a way to make sure that words survive in the equation. Each technology tends to affect the way news is reported on that particular platform and some of the most successful ways of telling stories seem to weave words, video and sound together. I only plead that words, so beautiful and so useful, don’t get squeezed out."

Throughout his address, Brock insisted that journalists, if they are to survive, must begin reassessing how they regard themselves and their place in the new structures of the digital world.

"If journalism is to be valued, and perhaps even paid for, that worth has to be clear to people who are not journalists. Journalists have to start by accepting that they don't automatically hold the powerful place in the new information system that they held in the old," he said.

He concluded by telling the audience that journalism is indeed valuable, but reminded those present that challenging times lie ahead.

"We're entering a new communications age and making the argument for journalism all over again needs a little more critical self-appraisal than we have been used to doing. The worth of journalism is real, and its case will need to be made often in the next few years."

Doctor, doctor.

2010-03-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

Newspapers are in the midst of a shift that has transformed them from a mass medium to a niche product, and the advent of more sophisticated e-readers will further accelerate that migration.
Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst with Outsell Inc. and author of the book “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get,” told News & Tech columnist Doug Page in a Press Room podcast posted March 6, 2010, “Publishers are fully embracing the idea that it’s digital first and that print is now a niche.
“Newspapers have always been a mass medium even though there might have been some niches. Now newspapers are the niche, the Starbucks buy. If you are a baby boomer and are willing to spend twice as much as you did even two years ago (to buy a paper) you can still read your paper.”
Doctor, a former editor at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press and a Knight Ridder Digital executive, said the emergence of Apple Computer Inc.’s iPad “has the potential of changing the news reading experience exponentially and could further move people away from print.”
“It may return the day of the pleasurable reading experience,” Doctor said of the gadget. “We all use desktops and laptops, but they are essentially work devices. You can find news from anywhere in the world, but that is a (version) 1.0 experience. With the iPad, you control the experience, so it returns the notion of reading for pleasure, and that’s one of the main reasons people like reading newspapers.”

Forrester Research presentation at paidContent 2010

2010-03-04T11:44:00.001-08:00

Here's the fascinating interpretation of this theorem that people don't -- and never have -- paid for content, they will pay -- and always have -- for access. So the subscription to the newspaper used to be what people paid for access, in my opinion. So that puts into a stranger-than-ever context the experiment of charging for content that paywalls online are contemplating.
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Forrester Research presentation at paidContent 2010

View more presentations from Christian Santiago.

INMA in tune

2010-02-12T14:56:00.000-08:00

Richard Hall of Digital Technology International gave a presentation at the International Newspaper Marketing Association convention in Copenhagen which is pure individuated news, down to the estimate that individuated content would have a $.05 per person per ad value, which of course is a $50 CPM. Check the powerpoint out and enjoy.

If that link doesn't work here is the URL: http://www.slideshare.net/TomCorbett/richard-hall-3102448

How do you build a wall?

2010-02-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

For many newspapers that are stymied with how to charge for online there is Journalism Online, founded by a well-known media celebrity Stephen Brill.

Here reprinted:
Published: February 2, 2010, New York Times

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Extracting payment from online readers has been called everything from the next great folly of print journalism to its salvation, but to get a glimpse of how it really looks, head to Lancaster, Pa.

Specifically, head to the offices of The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, one of the first handful of news outlets to acknowledge in interviews that it intends, in the next few months, to start using a software system developed by the entrepreneurs Steven Brill, L. Gordon Crovitz and their partners, which they are calling Press+. Others interested include The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina and GlobalPost, a news site based in Boston.

A very small number of news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Newsday, already charge online readers, each with a system developed largely in-house, and The New York Times announced recently that it planned to do the same. But with advertising plummeting, many other publishers eager for a new source of revenue are considering making the switch, despite the risk of losing audience and advertising.

Last year, Mr. Brill and company seized on that interest, founding their operation, Journalism Online, with the aim of developing a highly flexible system that would become the industry standard, and keeping 20 percent of their client’s online revenue as their fee.

They say they have worked with potential clients from around the world, most of whom they will not name, who operate more than 1,300 news sites. The News Corporation, owner of The Wall Street Journal, is also marketing an online pay system to publishers, but industry executives say that it has made little headway.

So if it turns out that Lancaster is in the vanguard of a mass movement — and there are plenty of skeptics who say that charging could be a short-lived experiment — then Press+, if it works well, could be the movement’s chief organizer.

But in their first extended interview in months, Mr. Crovitz and Mr. Brill, while offering a look at how the system works, also cautioned against high expectations and said they had urged their clients to take small steps. It will take years before charging Internet users significantly changes the economics of a deeply troubled industry, they said.

As newsprint becomes a smaller part of the business, “you want to establish the notion that it’s worth something online,” Mr. Brill said. “What we have convinced people of is they don’t have to make a drastic decision. You can experiment.”

For those who have signed on, such lowered expectations are part of the appeal.

“We’re starting small, so if this really turns people off, we’re not playing with a huge chunk of our readership,” said Ernest J. Schreiber, editor of the Lancaster paper’s Web site, LancasterOnline.com. The site has been using and adapting the Press+ software for a while. He said it would go into effect in a month or two.

At the outset, the paper, owned by a local company, Steinman Enterprises, will charge only readers outside its immediate area and only for reading obituaries, with a little green Press+ logo next to each headline covered by the system. It will allow a reader to see a certain number of obituaries free before a box pops onto the screen demanding a flat fee to keep reading, but the paper has not yet decided what that number will be, or how much it will charge.

“We have news that no one else has, like these obituaries,” Mr. Schreiber said. “We would eventually take other sections of our online content into the system. I’m thinking local sports, perhaps.”

The system may generate only a few hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue, he said, but “that’s enough to pay for a few reporters.”

Philip S. Balboni, president and chief executive of GlobalPost, a year-old site that focuses on international news, said it would take a different approach to using Press+. Frequent users will see messages urging them to join and pay, but it will be voluntary; there will be levels of membership with different prices, and those who do pay will be able to suggest topics for articles and have access to premium content. Those who do not join will still have access to most of the site.

“We anticipate rolling it out by the end of March,” and hope to have tens of thousands of paying readers by year’s end, he said. “By Year 2, it would become a very significant contributor to our total funding, but advertising I anticipate would still be No. 1.”

Mr. Crovitz is a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw its online pay system, and began to develop a new version of that system.

Mr. Brill has a long record of starting ventures in untested waters, some more successful than others. He founded The American Lawyer magazine and the Court TV channel, which succeeded, and Brill’s Content, a magazine about media, which did not. He also founded Verified Identity Pass, whose system, called Clear, allowed frequent travelers to speed through airport security, but he severed ties with the company before it ceased operation last year.

Their partners in Journalism Online include Leo Hindery Jr., a former top executive at Tele-Communications Inc. and the YES Network, and Ken Ficara, who helped develop and run The Journal’s Web site.

I-Pad-dy pat pat

2010-01-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

No matter which end of the spectrum the new I-Pad falls -- on the laptop or smartphone extremes -- is a moot point. Platform is not the decisive factor for people. Everyone will have their favorite platform. It's getting the news and advertising that you want on that platform you've chosen that's important. The corollary, individuated media (news and advertising you've chosen) must be available on all platforms. That's today's digital liberation.

(full text from NY Times)
SAN FRANCISCO — After months of feverish speculation, Steven P. Jobs introduced Wednesday what Apple hopes will be the coolest device on the planet: a slender tablet computer called the iPad.

The Takeaway With Nick BiltonFor all the hoopla surrounding it, however, the question is whether the iPad can achieve anything close to the success of the iPhone, which transformed the cellphone and forced the industry to race to catch up.

Apple is positioning the device, some versions of which will be available in March, as a pioneer in a new genre of computing, somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone. “The bar is pretty high,” Mr. Jobs acknowledged. “It has to be far better at doing some key things.”

Half an inch thick and weighing 1 1/2 pounds, the device will vividly display books, newspapers, Web sites and videos on a 9.7-inch glass touch screen. Giving media companies another way to sell content, it may herald a new era for publishing.

But the iPad, costing $499 to $829, also lacks some features common in laptops and phones, as technology enthusiasts were quick to point out. To its instant critics, it was little more than an oversize iPod Touch. A camera is notably absent, and Flash, the ubiquitous software that handles video and animation on the Web, does not work on the device.

Another thing missing is an alternative to the AT&T data network, which is already buckling under the strain of traffic to and from iPhones. Some versions of the iPad can, for a monthly fee, use a 3G data connection like cellphones, but the only carrier mentioned was AT&T.

The event, in typical Apple style, was tightly scripted and heavy on theatrics and hyperbole. But the success of the iPhone, and the hive of rumors and leaks surrounding the iPad, raised expectations and made this perhaps Mr. Jobs’s most highly anticipated product unveiling yet.

It was one that he clearly cared deeply about. Mr. Jobs, a consummate showman, presented the iPad to an enthusiastic crowd of around 800 employees, business partners and journalists, some of whom shoved their way in when the doors opened to grab the best seats. It was only his second public appearance since a leave of absence for health reasons last year.

Mr. Jobs posited that the iPad was the best device for certain kinds of computing, like browsing the Web, reading e-books and playing video.

The iPad “is so much more intimate than a laptop, and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen,” he said in presenting the device to a crowd of journalists and Apple employees here. “It’s phenomenal to hold the Internet in your hands.”

One question Apple faces is whether there is enough room for another device in the cluttered lives of consumers.

“I think this will appeal to the Apple acolytes, but this is essentially just a really big iPod Touch,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research, adding that he expected the iPad to mostly cannibalize the sales of other Apple products.

Mr. Golvin said book lovers would continue to opt for lighter, cheaper e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, while people looking for a small Web-ready computer would gravitate toward the budget laptops known as netbooks.

But other analysts say they have heard similar criticism before — once aimed at the iPhone, which has now been bought by more than 42 million people around the world. These believers say Apple’s judgment on the market is nearly infallible.

“The target audience is everyone,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president for strategy and analysis at Interpret, a market research firm. “Apple does not build products for just the enthusiasts. It doesn’t build for the tens of thousands; it builds for the tens of millions.”

Apple says the iPad will run the 140,000 applications developed for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, but the company expects a new wave of programs tailored to the iPad.

One of the most significant applications for the iPad may be Apple’s own creation, called iBooks, an e-reading program that will connect to Apple’s new online e-bookstore.

Mr. Jobs said Apple so far had relationships with five major publishers — Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan — and was eager to make deals with others. Publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction books.

Apple’s announcement that it was diving into the growing e-book business put the company on a collision course with Amazon. Mr. Jobs credited Amazon with pioneering e-readers with the Kindle but said “we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.”

John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who serves on Amazon’s board and is also an adviser to Apple, said there could be room for both companies, noting that Amazon sells many books to iPhone owners who use its Kindle application, which will also work on the iPad.

“I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to leave the e-book business,” he said, referring to Amazon’s chief executive, “and I don’t think it will be confined to the Kindle.”

Three models of the iPad, $499 to $699, will connect to the Internet only via a local Wi-Fi connection. Three other versions will include 3G wireless access and will be available later in the spring, costing an additional $130 and requiring a data plan from AT&T. Owners of the iPhone who already pay at least $70 a month to AT&T will not be getting any breaks.

Other companies have sold tablet computers for years, but they never caught on with consumers. In 2001, Bill Gates predicted at an industry trade show that tablets would be the most popular form of PC sold in America within five years.

“The fact that he and Microsoft didn’t deliver is surprising,” said Tim Bajarin, a longtime industry analyst. “It has taken Apple to bring this to consumers and make it work.”

Apple has been working on a tablet computer for more than a decade, according to several former employees. Improved technology has helped the company to finally bring a model to market, as has the ubiquity of wireless networks.

The success of the iPhone and its cousin, the iPod Touch, have shown a path for tablets. People have been willing to pay to customize those devices with applications, turning them into video game machines, compasses, city guides and e-book readers.

The iPad will be a big opportunity for software developers, said Raven Zachary, president of Small Society, an iPhone development company based in Portland, Ore. “Although I think some of us were a bit surprised we only have 60 days until it launches to develop for it.”

So the numbers don't "ad" up

2010-01-25T21:19:00.000-08:00

Since when do numbers point the way?
The New York Times would sacrifice traffic and clout for a charge for content that won't replace the loss of advertising revenue caused by the fall-off in traffic and clout. That's what the numbers say, according to several reports.
But no one is talking about the value of choosing your news -- of Individuated Media -- which is a part of this equation. Through metering you are helping people choose their news and only charging them as they gain momentum. Ingenious.

Running the numbers on the NYT paywall
Jan 20, 2010 21:54 EST
By Felix Salmon, Reuters
Apologies for being something of a one-trick pony today, but reading John Gapper’s column on the NYT paywall makes me realize that a lot of people fail to appreciate exactly what’s at stake here. Gapper seems to think that online subscription revenues can make newspapers profitable again; they can’t. In fact, insofar as the paywall makes any sense at all, it does so only as a tool to boost print subscriptions.

Gapper notes that the Guardian’s parent company lost $93 million in the last fiscal year, despite having a website attracting 35 million unique visitors globally, and 13 million domestically. He reckons that charging some of those subscribers could make the Guardian’s problems disappear:

Outsell, a research group, reported this week that only 6 per cent of US online readers say they would pay online news sites if they charged.

If we are to take the figure at face value (which I don’t think we should), then The Guardian could get 2.1m people to subscribe to it online, making it highly profitable at a stroke.

The logical flaws here are huge. Let’s just count a few:

•Gapper is assuming that if 6% of online readers would end up subscribing to some site or other, that’s the same as saying that any given site can persuade 6% of its readers to subscribe. But that’s not the same thing at all.
•Gapper is taking a poll of US internet users, who are more likely to pay for things online than other nationalities, and extrapolating the numbers globally.
•Gapper is assuming that foreign readers (say, Guardian readers in India) are just as likely to subscribe as domestic readers (Guardian readers in the UK).
•Gapper is assuming no overlap at all between the 6% of readers who would pay online, and the percentage of readers who already pay for a newspaper subscription in print form. The NYT has already said that its print subscribers will get an online subscription for free, and I’m sure the Guardian would do likewise.
•Gapper is ignoring that putting up a paywall will always reduce advertising revenue, which means that in order for the new subscription revenue to make the newspaper “highly profitable at a stroke”, it would have to not only make up existing losses but also cover the drop in online advertising revenue.
Once you understand what Gapper can do to statistics like these, then, it becomes a bit easier to make sense of something like this:

Rates for online display ads have been falling steadily as competition has proliferated, with most sites now finding it hard to get more than $4 per 1,000 impressions on their pages (or $14m for the 3.5bn hits on all US newspaper sites monthly).

I have no idea where Gapper’s getting his $4 CPM figure from, but it’s clearly much closer to being a minimum than an average. Papers might find it hard to get more than that, but you can be sure that the NYT, for one, is succeeding all the same. In fact, the WSJ reports today that nytimes.com is pulling in $100 million in revenues annually — more than you might think the US newspaper industry as a whole was making, if you read Gapper too literally. Indeed, in the third quarter of 2009, the New York Times Company made $79 million from its internet businesses, of which $68 million came in advertising revenues. Newspaper advertising was $39 million — and that was in a very weak quarter. On an annual basis, I’d be surprised if nytimes.com didn’t make significantly more than the $100 million that the WSJ is talking about.

It’s also worth noting that Gapper has managed to confuse CPMs — the amount of money that an advertiser pays per 1,000 pageviews — with RPMs, or the amount of revenue that a publisher receives per 1,000 pageviews. There’s nearly always more than one ad unit per page, which means that RPMs are some multiple of CPMs, depending on how much of a newspaper’s inventory is sold.

Gapper, then, is systematically overestimating the upside of subscription revenues, while underestimating the magnitude of advertising revenues. Erick Schonfeld, by contrast, is much more realistic, concluding that total subscription revenues from nytimes.com would optimistically reach only $9 million per quarter, or $36 million per year. With the New York Times Company making the best part of $300 million a year from online advertising, it’s hard to see that the extra revenue boost would really be worth it.

The point here is that with the powerhouse nytimes.com site front and center, the New York Times Company as a whole is a major online media player, serving up billions of high-prestige pageviews and building strong relationships with every major online advertiser and media buyer in the country. Even under the most optimistic scenario, a majority of the NYT’s loyal readers will desert it when it moves to a paywall. And with those readers gone, media buyers are by no means guaranteed to stick around.

Gapper makes great play of the fact that websites can target ads more accurately when readers are registered, but you can’t target ads at readers who no longer exist. And the NYT is a mass-market general news publication: it’s not the kind of place where high-end business-to-business advertisers will pay $90 CPMs to reach C-suite executives. Or if it is, the numbers involved would be so small that they wouldn’t make a visible dent in its overall online advertising revenues.

What’s a realistic number for how many people will pay to subscribe to nytimes.com? David Carr says that the NYT wants to target “10 percent or so” of the 17 million current readers of nytimes.com. That’s 1.7 million people. Subtract the print subscribers who will get nytimes.com for free, and you’re left with 1 million, more or less. How many of those could you dare hope to persuade to subscribe? One third? Once again, just as Schonfeld did, we get to somewhere in the region of $35 million a year, assuming a subscription price of $100 each per year. For a company with annual revenues in the billions, the hit to the value of the brand alone has to be bigger than that.

There is one other dynamic at work, here, however, and that’s the price of the print subscription, which has proved to be surprisingly inelastic: David Carr in fact lauds the way in which “The Times has shown a great ability to leverage prices once they have custody of a consumer”. But pushing existing consumers to the limit of what they can pay only makes it that much harder to attract new ones.

The NYT aspires to be a national paper, which makes sense, since it either already has or is never going to get most New Yorkers as print subscribers. But the annual subscription rate, if you live at say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is $769.60, and it’s really hard to get people to pay that kind of money, in the middle of a recession, for a newspaper they’ve lived happily without for all their lives, and which they can get online for free.

So I see the decision to implement a paywall not as an attempt to build a significant revenue stream for the website alongside ad revenues, but rather as an attempt to shore up — and maybe even increase — the print subscriber base. Even a Monday-Friday subscription, at $384.80 a year, brings in much more money than any online subscription ever will. Yes, it probably costs more than that to print and deliver the paper. But for the time being at least, print advertisers are still willing to pay top dollar for a full page in the physical New York Times. And so long as that’s the case, the NYT will do anything to keep its physical circulation numbers as high as it can — even, it seems, if that means dealing a serious blow to nytimes.com.

Print growth

2010-01-25T06:34:00.000-08:00

Yes, Virginia, there is print growth.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004061230

While Newspaper Ad Revenue Plunged, FSI Coupons Hit Record Levels in 2009

By Mark Fitzgerald

Published: January 22, 2010

CHICAGO Even as newspaper advertising revenue was falling off the cliff in 2009, retailers were ramping up their use of free standing insert (FSI) coupon by eye-popping rates, according to the best-known FSI measuring organization, Marx Promotion Intelligence.

In a year when consumers looked for every shopping advantage and traded down in brands and stores, discount retailers greatly increased their buy of FSI pages with coupons.

Dollar General, for instance, increased its number of pages by 386.2% with more than 885 million pages. It was third among the top ten retailers measured by FSI "pages circulated," up from 10th place in 2008.

Family Dollar, which ranked just 17th among retailers in 2008, took sixth place last year with a 227.4% increase in FSI pages.

Target remained the top retailer using FSI coupons, with more than 1.8 billion pages -- up 43.9% from 2008. It was followed by PetsMart,
Dollar General, Walgreens, CVS/pharmacy, Family Dollar, Kroger, Publix, Safeway Food & Drug and Rite Aid.

Overall FSI "coupon activity" measured by the number of coupons dropped grew 8% during 2009 to more than 272 billion, said Marx, a division of TNS Media Intelligence. The 2009 level of activity surpassed the second-highest annual drop of 257 billion in 2007.

Retailer promotion pages also jumped 37.7% to 9 billion pages in 2009, continuing what Marx said has been a pattern of substantial annual growth rates begun in 2007.

"As consumers adapt to new economic realities, marketers are increasing their use of FSI coupons within their marketing mix to deliver advertising impact, influence consumer behavior, and secure retailer distribution and merchandising," TNS Media President Mark Nesbitt said in a statement. "Leading retailers are also increasing their use of FSI vehicles to drive planned shopping trips and build shopper loyalty."

All those coupons in 2009 amounted to consumer incentives delivered by FSI totaling more than $385 billion, a 15% increase from the year before.

The average face value of an FSI coupon increased 6.5% from 2008 to $1.45. But shoppers were hurried to use the coupons, which on average expired in 9.3 weeks, down about 4% from 2008.

This higher face value with a shortened expiration period -- known as the Fuse in the industry -- shows manufacturers are delivering more coupons with higher value, "but are managing their financial exposure by reducing the length of time that these offers are available in the market," Marx said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.

Fingers crossed

2010-01-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

I wonder what we will think about this New Year's eve 2011 from Paidcontent.org today:

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) has a year to sell the public on its plans to start charging frequent NYTimes.com users for access but first execs have to sell the segment of its own staff that wanted to stay free. A year of constant carping about how awful it will be—whether anonymous or out front—will be damaging, if not lethal. It helps that Executive Editor Bill Keller is behind the idea of a metered service. Without support at the very top of the newsroom, it would be even harder. But as one newsroom insider told me the other day, during the year-long discussions about whether to charge or not, few, if any, people changed their stance. Those who favored free stuck with it; those who thought pay was the way to go may have shifted on the how. That means a lot of people who don’t like like it will have to work to make it happen. The sell job started this morning with a memo to the staff from the very top, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Janet Robinson, posted here in full. (The added emphasis is mine.)

———————————————————————————
On the Record . . . From Arthur + Janet
Vol. 1 2010: An Important Decision about Our Future

Today we are announcing that we will be introducing a paid model for NYTimes.com at the beginning of 2011. As you will see in the press release, we have chosen a metered approach that will offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.

The metered model implementation is an integral part of our comprehensive plan for enhancing NYTimes.com. In 2010 we will continue initiatives such as Times Open, Times Topics and our work to develop more active communities and more fully integrate the real-time Web. We will continue to develop new online products and offerings as part of our effort to enhance the user experience for our readers and advertisers.

Our strategy is to build the metered model while we remain focused on making NYTimes.com more compelling, interactive and entertaining, providing many more reasons for online audiences to visit our site and stay longer. In the weeks ahead, we will be adding resources to achieve these critically important goals.

Since NYTimes.com is, by a variety of standards, one of the world’s most popular and successful news Web sites, why are we changing our model at all?

We are doing so because we believe that a second revenue stream will be an important part of our future. While digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web, we expect that online subscription revenue will improve our ability to grow an important part of this business.

Fundamentally, this is an important step in our effort to support The New York Times’s high-quality, professional journalism. Our readers know that The Times brings them the most authoritative news and opinion to be found anywhere. We believe that they are willing to pay for it online, just as they are already paying a significant price for it in print.

We greatly appreciate this loyalty and dedication to what we have to offer. Once the metered model infrastructure is completed, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com.

We also selected the metered model because it offers a number of important virtues from a financial and growth perspective. It allows NYTimes.com to remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web, which has proven to be an integral reason for why we have become an industry leader in display advertising. This flexibility enables us to create a proper ratio between free and paid content and to aggressively build on our very successful digital advertising business.

As you have already seen over the past few days, there are those who think that such an action is critical to our future success and those who see it as a serious mistake. This comes as no surprise. We know from long experience that significant change invariably breeds controversy; that there will be an ongoing public conversation about what we are doing, and we expect that many of the comments will prove to be helpful.

We know these arguments well because our metered model decision is a product of months of vigorous analysis and debate. There was much we wanted to learn and know. We wanted to get a far better sense of NYTimes.com’s potential over the next decade. We also wanted to understand where the Web may be heading and how new technologies will affect customer online usage. We believed that only by carefully pursuing these and other important issues could we arrive at the best possible answer.

Ultimately, we recognize that the success of our ideas will be judged by how well we execute this effort in the months to come. That is why we are waiting until 2011 to introduce this new system. To pursue this new approach requires that we utilize the full energy and intellect of all of you. All that work begins today. As we said earlier, our goal is to create the best possible user experience, integrating many of our customer management systems throughout the Company. It will take time to get this right.

Moving with appropriate care will enhance our ability to embrace an array of promising opportunities that are at our doorstep. As we look ahead, we see a broad range of end-user devices coming to market that will provide even more mobility, connectivity, rich media experiences and a higher degree of application value, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.

There has also been much speculation in the media and elsewhere about whether The Times will join a consortium as part of the metered model implementation plan. At this stage, our plan is to introduce the metered model as a stand-alone product. At the same time, we continue to discuss alternatives with a broad range of prospective collaborators with regard to bundled offers and other aggregation opportunities.

We will provide additional details about our plan as we get closer to launch.

The creation of a metered model for NYTimes.com is part of a long evolution to expand our presence on the Web and exploit new mobile and social networking vehicles. We are able to take this step today because of the scale and success that we have developed over the past 15 years. NYTimes.com is now widely recognized as the gold standard in online news and information. This decision is a natural next step and we hope that you will be as excited as we are to take on this new opportunity.

Yawhoo!

2010-01-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

The New York Times may part the red sea yet. Quoting:

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: January 20, 2010
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.

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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Beginning in January 2011, unlimited access to NYTimes.com will require a paper subscription or payment of a flat fee.

Related
Q.&A. on NYTimes.com (January 21, 2010)
Media Decoder: Dialing in a Plan: The Times Installs a Meter on Its Future Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.

“This announcement allows us to begin the thought process that’s going to answer so many of the questions that we all care about,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times Company chairman and publisher of the newspaper, said in an interview. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right.”

For years, publishers banked on a digital future supported entirely by advertising, dismissing online fees as little more than a formula for shrinking their audiences and ad revenue. But two years of plummeting advertising has many of them weighing anew whether they might collect more money from readers than they would lose from advertisers.

Financial analysts and writers who follow the media business had mostly qualified praise for the decision of The Times. NYTimes.com is the most popular newspaper site in the country, with more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online; analysts say it is the leader in advertising revenue, as well, giving The Times more to lose if the move backfires.

“You can’t continue to be The New York Times unless you find” a new source of revenue, said James McQuivey, media analyst at Forrester Research.

Mike Simonton, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, said, “We expect that The Times will be able to execute a strategy like this,” adding that other papers will try it in the near future, but few are likely to succeed.

But the response was far from universally positive. Felix Salmon, a respected writer on media for Reuters, wrote, “Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.”

Others endorsed the idea of a pay wall generally, while criticizing the approach of The Times.

Thousands of readers sent e-mail messages to The Times or posted comments on the site Wednesday, with those saying they supported the move outnumbered by others who vowed not to pay.

Shares of the Times Company fell 39 cents, closing at $13.31.

All visitors to NYTimes.com will have full access to the home page. In addition, readers will be able to read individual articles through search sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing without charge. After that first article, though, clicking on subsequent ones will count toward the monthly limit. Among the nation’s largest newspapers, only The Wall Street Journal and Newsday charge for access to major portions of their Web sites. A few smaller ones also do, including The Financial Times, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Albuquerque Journal, and more are expected to join their ranks this year.

The Times Company has been studying the matter for almost a year, searching for common ground between pro- and anti-pay camps. Company executives said the changes would wait another year primarily because they need to build pay-system software that works seamlessly with NYTimes.com and the print subscriber database.

“There’s no prize for getting it quick,” said Janet L. Robinson, the company’s president and chief executive. “There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”

Within the newsroom of The Times, where there has long been strong sentiment in favor of charging, the primary criticism was about the wait until 2011.

“I think we should have done it years ago,” said David Firestone, a deputy national news editor. “As painful as it will be at the beginning, we have to get rid of the notion that high-quality news comes free.”

The Times has tried and abandoned more limited online pay models. In the 1990s it charged overseas readers, and from 2005 to 2007 the newspaper’s TimesSelect service charged for access to editorials and columns.

Company executives said the current decision was not a reaction to the ad recession but a long-term strategy to develop new revenue. “This is a bet, to a certain degree, on where we think the Web is going,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “This is not going to be something that is going to change the financial dynamics overnight.”

Most readers who go to the Times site, as with other news sites, are incidental visitors, arriving no more than once in a while through searches and links, and many of them would be unaffected by the new system. A much smaller number of committed readers account for the bulk of the site visits and page views, and the essential question is how many of them will pay.

The Times Company looked at several approaches, including a straightforward pay wall similar to The Journal’s, which makes some articles available to any visitor, and others accessible only to paying readers. It also rejected the ideas of varying the price depending on how much a consumer uses the site, and a “membership” format similar to the one used in public broadcasting.

The approach the company took was “the one that after much research and study we determined has the most upside” in both subscriptions and advertising, said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations. “We’re trying to maximize revenue. We’re not saying we want to put this revenue stream above that revenue stream. The goal is to maximize both revenue streams in combination.”

Cutting through the fog

2010-01-19T07:58:00.000-08:00

Individuated news -- self-chosen stories and ads on any platform -- could cut through the fog of all the new platforms. Although this new platform is long-awaited and if history is any precedent should be exciting.

Skiff ahoy

2010-01-18T08:26:00.001-08:00

And for the newest entrant into the e-reader sweepstakes: The Skiff from Hearst.

Payday maybe

2010-01-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

The arrival and soon onslaught of e-tablets and apps for smartphones that present branded content upon subscription hold out the hope of a payday for news organizations, unlike websites never have. Read this insightful piece: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8414725.stm

We're a tribe

2010-01-02T23:21:00.000-08:00

In the modern-day lingo of Seth Godin's book "Tribes", those of us interested in personalizing web content onto all platforms from print to mobile to shower curtains, are a tribe, who get together once a year for the Individuated News Conference. If you haven't read Godin's wonderful book watch this. This year the conference will be in Denver June 21-23.

The problem with subscriptions

2009-12-14T09:53:00.001-08:00

We all are shocked by the closing of both the print and online E&P. Here is a well-thought out discussion of the whole problem with any kind of subscription.

More sixth sense

2009-12-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

Another Wow video on sixthsense technology.

Sports Illustrated alive

2009-12-08T12:22:00.001-08:00

We've all been hearing the pitch for the Sports Illustrated tablet. Take a swing.

Cultural divide?

2009-12-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

As Mr. Springer is quoted as saying at the end of this story: Germans are print centric; Americans may be online centric. No matter what Axel Springer, the head of the largest daily in Germany, explains is that aggregators need to pay a licensing fee -- which is a copyright law issue, essentially -- just as a radio stations pay a licensing fee to aggregate music, etc. Everyone should read this. Another gem in the story is the observation that "a highly industrialized society" cannot function on rumor, instead of solid reporting.

Google gets in the act

2009-12-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

Now even Google is getting more serious about people paying for valuable information on the web.
The New York Times reports today that Google announced in a blog post on Tuesday, the company will allow publishers to limit nonsubscribers to five free articles a day.
And the loophole by which people avoided subscriptions has been closed.
Is this a foreshadowing of things to come? Is this a concession??

Post-Kindle

2009-12-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

So we are now post-Kindle. Here come the digitized magazines WITH advertisemnts. Can newspapers be far behind? Hoorah. Last month Conde Nast demonstrated its concept of a digitized magazine tablet. Now it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demo-ing an iteration of Sports Illustrated compatible with the "upcoming" Apple tablet and/or other tablets. Both publishers will offer add-ons like multimedia and links into the web. But it's the replica aspect here that may make the digitized business model work. Circ-based advertising sales will still work, we hope. And let's hope the magazines are beautiful en tablet. Read all about it on Tabbloid.

Wow, just Wow

2009-12-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you see things that are phenomenal.
Check this out: Ted.

Takes me back to the "wow" I originally felt reading Being Digital by Nicolas Negroponte while on my way to Boston in 1996, where I experienced the Media Lab.
Beyond all the deja vue all over amazement, this short video has a whole section about minute 7 on newspapers and books and media.

(If for some reason that link says the video is not available paste this URL into your browser:
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html )

Murdoch on the march

2009-12-01T08:48:00.000-08:00

Rupert Murdoch, the head of the News Corporation (which owns the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London) has testified at a public hearing about his well-rehearsed opinion of Google.
"To be impolite," he says. "It's theft." Read The Washington Post's report.
Deep in this story you will see where Murdoch says he plans to put all his content behind a pay wall.

kibboko.com

2009-11-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

Personalisation of newspaper websites is a tricky business. One of the best is kibboko.com where the old thumbs up and thumbs down navigates you quickly through the legion of stories available.

Magazines galore

2009-11-27T15:23:00.001-08:00

Most of the major magazine companies are collaborating to create an onine newsstand, according to a published report. Now if we all just had time to peruse that newsstand. That's what was so great about the brands that had been created already --we knew what brands we wanted before we knew exactly what we wanted from them.
It's great that they will all be on a digital platform so that an individuated search function can find stories of sympatico across the brands. Will they charge by the story? Not sure. Here's what the New York Observer story said:
"The formation of a new company to run the online newsstand -- sometimes characterized as an 'iTunes for magazines' -- may be announced in early December. Time, Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith all intend to be equity partners in the new company, although the deals have not yet been signed.
"In the face of slumping print circulation for many magazines, the publishing houses are eager to exert some control over digital readership, said people at the companies, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the plans.
"In other media sectors, rivals have already formed joint ventures for the Web. Several television networks are stakeholders in Hulu, an online television and film Web site. Some music labels are partners in Vevo, a music video site powered by YouTube that will make its debut next month.
"The new magazine company would, in theory, make it easy to buy print and electronic copies of magazines like The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and Better Homes and Gardens from a single Web site. While mostly leaving the hardware to others, the alliance of competing publishers would develop software standards for magazine viewing on iPhones, BlackBerrys, e-book readers and other platforms, people familiar with the plans said.
"The New York Observer reported Tuesday that the Time Inc. executive John Squires would become the new outfit's interim chief executive while the partners look for a permanent head. In June, the Time Inc. chairmwoman Ann Moore gave Mr. Squires the responsibility of creating a digital road map for the company.
" 'It's increasingly clear that finding the right digital business model is crucial for the future of our business,' Ms. Moore said in a memorandum at the time. She added, 'We need to develop a strategy for the portable digital world and to refine our views on paid content.' "

Murdoch and BING versus GOOGLE

2009-11-25T11:21:00.001-08:00

Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Wall Street Journal, the London Times and is chairman of the multimedia News Corp., has fired a salvo across the bow of Google by insinuating he may make an exclusive deal with Microsoft's Bing for his content.
I've often thought that breaking news creators -- newspapers, radio, teleision and sundry websites -- should create a "live story" site and search tool, because of the innate differences between research and timely content.

Yes, boy meets grill

2009-11-25T09:05:00.000-08:00

Jeff Kline is the president of a software company, Accrisoft, who understands where media is headed before it gets there. His most recent blog underscores the reality of individuated news. Under the title "Boy Meets Grill" he explains how social media helped him chose a key retail purchase, not traditional media or advertising: Read it all.

Can Individuated News count for circ?

2009-11-24T08:28:00.000-08:00

You betcha.
Scott Hanson, SVP electronic & centralized audit services for the Audit Bureau of Circulations, has endorsed Individuated News home printed reports as unique editions of newspapers, which means that the reports count the same as paid and delivered editions of he daily newspaper.
Here is a transcript of the letter dated Oct. 30, 2009, referring to the tests of individuated editions of the Denver Post: "Right now, you do not need to do anything differently, we would qualify the Individuated News as a Unique Edition of the Denver Post."
So newspapers can grow their topline circulation with Indivduated News. That's great news.

No more walled gardens

2009-11-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

On Nov. 8, 2009, The New York Times reported that the mass killer Hasan was a nut case and, on the same day, the London Times reported that Hasan was associated with 9/11. So who do you believe? Which news do you choose? Prince or pauper, princess or pauper, none of us live in a walled garden of media any more. You are free to pick your landscape. If you want various flowers in your garden, all the better.

News readership up and down

2009-11-18T08:26:00.000-08:00

So today Scarborough reports healthy newspaper readership. That is 74 percent of the American population read a newspaper in print or online every week: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004043293.
Whereas last week ABC reported a 10 percent drop in newspaper readership in 2009.
(Of course, ABC counts newspapers sold; Scarborough counts newspapers read.)
Meanwhile researcher NPD says spending on media is up 7% year over year to an average $115 per household. That includes 29 percent of households that have newspapers and 41 percent that have magazines: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i6b92ac9c285d01765e337338f9028ec4
What news do you choose?

Niiu at India conference

2009-11-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

The individuated newspaper (that I blogged about yesterday) that debuts next week in Vienna, Austria, will be reported out at the WAN-IFRA conference in India in December. According to a press release from the global association: "Wanja Oberhof, co-founder of niiu, which combines paper format with internet convenience, has joined the programme of the World Editors Forum, and will speak in a session devoted to some of the most promising business models being developed today." You can sign up to attend.

Traction atlas

2009-11-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

Now we're getting some traction. News and Technology has broken the story of the second individuated newspaper in Northern Europe. Last year Syntops produced a newspaper in Bavaria comprised of various pages from various newspapers at the choice of readers. This year Niiu is following the same multi-cultural path by aiming a variable data printed newspaper in Vienna, Austria, at college students who the article says prefer reading on paper anything that is more than three pages of text online. http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/digital_editions/Page7_1bb65303-251c-4f81-bcad-d52fae75b1cf_2243ca48-648a-4bd0-a647-ee2fdc193c09.aspx Or visit http://www.niiu.de/

Not so funny thing?

2009-11-15T22:28:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Carr writing in the New York Times magazine today ("The Price of Free") writes: "That's one funny thing about the Internet it's an extraordinarily rich communications systems, but as an information and entertainment medium it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we're together today, we're often apart, peering into our own screens."

This is a problem, especially with individuated news, if people construe IN to be a form of consumption rather than expression. In other words if your choice of news is all about your private experiencing, we're doomed. If it's about expressing yourself to other people, we have succeeded. It's all a question as to what end you have in mind for individuated news.

Team divorce

2009-11-15T06:59:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Dodgers have been one key pitcher away from the world series the last two years.
And now the team's owners Frank and Jamie McCourt are engaged in a costly and public divorce.
So where does the fate of the Dodger team lie? In the field of baseball trades or in the court of divorce.
What News do you choose? www.latimes.com or www.dodgerdivorce.com?
Essentially if the post-nup is not valid then California law divides the team between the two of them, which would probably force a sale without the needed pitcher, no matter where the trade talks are headed.
If the post-nup holds -- without too much legal expense -- then probably Frank would own the team and be able to spend the millions for the trade for a needed pitcher, if the trade talks had proceeded well.
Which news do you choose to follow?

Heyday for newspapers

2009-11-13T19:57:00.001-08:00

Peter Kaplan formerly editor of The New York Observer and a journalistic descendant of Clay Felker the guru of new journalism at New York Magazine (patron of writers like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer) has predicted that the upcoming e-tablets will bring a new heyday for newspapers. Watch on The Charlie Rose show.

A twist of fate

2009-11-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

The London Daily Telegraph online editor has a fascinating column that says: "And the longer times goes on, the more convinced I am that the internet needs newspapers."
The column ends with: "So, in a curious way, things have come full circle. Fifteen years ago, the Telegraph newspapers needed an internet site to help transform the brand image of the paper, to make it seem more modern and relevant. Now, I think, when our internet presence has made us a global brand, we need the newspaper even more to remind those readers why they value what they are reading."
Check out the full column: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6546773/Why-newspapers-are-vital-to-the-future-of-the-internet.html

New presentation presents

2009-11-13T11:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes its hard to keep track of the newest available E-readers and their relative size and shape. Here is a good presentation of these new presentation devices with the idea of a Christmas present in mind at the Missouri School of Journalism home page.http://devemail.missouri.edu/pl_templates/html.scene1.asp?action=&dsid=17172178&pid=7970&key=431531463307370&slide_id=7942&slide_1=7942&scene_1=scene1

The error of the wall

2009-11-13T07:54:00.000-08:00

Der Spiegel is commemorating the fall of the wall with an article entitled "The Error That Led to Unity."
The story explains that bureaucratic confusion over new travel regulations led crowds of East Berliners to gather Nov. 9, 1989, to entice the border guards to open the gates, sparking the night of celebration and reunion. In America, we believe that is trivializing an historic change. Which news do you believe? Which news do you choose? Prince or pauper, princess or pauper, no one lives in a walled garden of media any more. We are free to create our own landscape. In fact, construct we must. Even 20 years later.

Solomon's decision

2009-11-13T07:50:00.000-08:00

In the wake of a shakeup at The Washington Times its peripatetic editor John Solomon has opted to move on. That's the profession's hopefully shortlived loss. John was instrumental in creating last year's super successful, third, global Individuated News Conference in Washington and his energy permeated the whole event. Can't wait to see where he resurfaces.

Dynamic Format

2009-11-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

Of all the PDF generating sites that I can find, none of them have solved as seamlessly the combining of ads with the sweet presentation of pagination of RSS driven or simply website driven content. Yet here comes a company that simply separates the functions and gives new emphasis to the advertising component: http://www.formatDynamics.com. The content is obviously whatever you have chosen to print from the web. The advertising is targeted to who you are and where you live and what the website believes you may be interested in.