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.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Church and state of Media
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Another one bites the dust
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.
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.
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