The New York Times finally changed their backwards model for paid archives and content, TimesSelect. Here’s a roundup of what people are saying, since I really don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said.

• “Whether or not content wants to be free, it is free,” says Jeff Jarvis.
• Jimmy Gutterman asks, Will Anyone Pay for a Newspaper Online?
• “Questioned recently about this, a Times spokeswoman told E&P’s Joe Strupp only that the company was always looking for ways to improve its site and its traffic.” (E&P)
• Henning Fischer at Adaptive Path says: “It’s refreshing to see an older, more established organization begin to question fundamental assumptions about its business and brand. What continues to mystify me is that it took two years to see the writing on the wall.” (Link)
• The Machinist has the best headline at Salon with “TimesSelect: Meets expectations, dies.”
• Adweek speculates on Murdoch removing WSJ’s pay wall here.
• Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts, thinks the glee over New York Times failure is misplaced. Scott Karp parries.
• Steve Johnson at Chicago Tribune talks about the declining value of subscribing to New York Times print product.

I’m sure I’ll be reading much more on this in the next few days.

Google News has closed out their outbound links to AP stories on newspaper.com sites. They’re now posting Associated Press news stories to their own domain, rather than linking to newspaper sites. See here for an example.

Media bloggers, particularly of the newspaper variety are screaming their lungs out about this, blaming Google for all their troubles.

They should really blame the AP.

We, as news organizations, hand our content over to the Associated Press. The AP, in turn, hands that same content over to other newspapers and television/radio stations and they also sell our content to Google. And to Yahoo! And to our other competitors. And we pay the AP for this service. Ha! And that’s on top of the AP directly competing with newspapers on stories. Yes competing!

So this really isn’t Google’s grand scheme to bone newspapers (state wires aren’t part of the deal yet). Smart newspaper.coms have been already using AP content for the same purposes, they just haven’t figured out the scale that Google commands.

While I can sort of see the argument of Google linking our content for their own purposes as “stealing,” in this case, the only people to blame are news organizations who willfully hand their content over to their competition via the Associated Press. For a fee, mind you.

The AP worked in an age where news organizations had a strangle hold on providing general news coverage to their areas, because their geographic locations and their markets access to other, outside media sources were nil. Those times are over.

Maybe now we’ll start to understand what hyper-local actually means.

With that said, here’s some outbound links to more on this issue:

Ryan Sholin has some rational thought here.
Lucas Grindley says ‘I told you so.‘
Joe Murphy points out where newspapers should focus their energy.
Howard, at Etaoin Shrudlu, points out that AP doesn’t sell state wires.
William M. Hartnett says ‘Meh’ to the whole deal.

MinnPost.com (not to be confused with parked site mnpost.com or news aggregate site minnesotapost.com), a Web only, not-for-profit news organization run by a bunch of laid-off or otherwise out-of-work Minnesota reporters has launched (sort of):

“MinnPost.com is for Minnesotans who are intensely interested in the world around them and want more insight and analysis than they’re getting from their media choices today,” said Joel Kramer, editor and CEO of the new not-for-profit enterprise, who served as editor of the Star Tribune in the 1980s and as publisher and president in the 1990s. “It will combine the best of traditional journalism with new forms of newsgathering and story-telling made possible by the Internet.”

But will it work?

My first impression of the site is this: Where’s the news? It seems like a horrible idea to pretty much launch a site–a news site–and the only news is a list of reporters and a news release declaring the upcoming launch of the site.

My second impression with the site is this: It looks like a blog, but it is not a blog as we know them today. The design flat out sucks. It might not be fair to say that, considering the lack of stuff to fill the page.

My third impression: What is the Web strategy? It is to be an online news source, after all. There’s no RSS, there’s no images (yet), there’s no video, there’s nothing but text and a few links. And they expect to compete with the Strib or the Pioneer Press? This whole site feels old. It’s certainly no Politico or Voice of San Diego right now.

My understanding is that they’re trying to tap into the news junkie market, to MPR listeners and to readers with a political slant, but I don’t know if launching a bare bones site with no features– a site geared towards news junkies–was the way to do it. At best this looks like a soft launch site with the marketing of a hard launch. Not good.

However, looking at the list of reporters, it should be interesting to see what they do. And to see if they can keep afloat as a non-profit, which has been a big talking point this year for many media bloggers. But right now: Yuck.

Here’s a few suggestions:

• Open yourself up to suggestions about your launch, build a community around your product. Start a blog (a real blog). Let people know what’s going on behind the scenes and let people have input.
• Seriously consider re-branding, too. The URL is confusing as it stands and it’s in a cluttered field of similarly named sites.
• Build a community! If this is just another top down news organization, what’s the point? What differentiates you from Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune and, heck, even Minnesota Daily? I want to see a site where I can be as close to the news process as paid reporters and editors. I want to see a site where Little League baseball matters and is reported . Think about Wikis, think about tiered news gathering.
• Read this
• And then read this

Update More on MinnPost.com:

Editor & Publisher
New York Times
Minnesota Public Radio
The Rake
Minnesota Monitor
Bob Stepno
Eyeteeth interview with Joel Kramer
The Deets

The following books are all great reads, and the ideas within can be applied to new concepts of journalism and media business.

Note: This isn’t advertising. There isn’t advertising on my sites. I’m not even going to link to any particular booksellers here. You can find them on your own.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Anderson does a good job explaining a rather simple concept, but one that has far reaching implications for the news business. His discussion of filters and searching should humble a few holier-than-thou editors.

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

See also: Fooled By Randomness.

Taleb takes a couple of swipes at journalism. The sections where he picks apart narrative theory are brilliant.

Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

See also: Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

If there ever was a book that would make old-guard section editors cower in fear, this is it. No longer are the newsroom discussions of what section a story belongs completely valid. Put it in both places. Or more terrifying, let your readers decide where the news belongs.

InfoWorld mag folds print edition!

SF Chronicle in Trouble?

Would you pay for the news?

These are the news items of the weekend in my feed reader. Over and over again these three stories came up. Theres a subsection of bloggers that get some kind of sick pleasure out of the death of print. They sit on death watch and rarely come up with solutions. It’s highly annoying to read on a Sunday afternoon.

Still, I’m left feeling that these three memes share a common talking point. How does a print product make money online, while slowing the decline in readership of said print product?

At the beginning of this year, Scott Karp made the prediction that a major newspaper would fold its print product and go strictly online. A bold statement, sure, but he makes an apt point.

Newspapers are struggling in multiple areas of their business. Craigslist and eBay have left many classifieds sections in shambles. Why read the source, when you can get the spin from your favorite pajama media personality? Display advertising dollars are moving towards away from the shotgun approach and are targeting ads with pinpoint accuracy on the Web.

While this all may be bad news for newspapers, this certainly isn’t bad news for news business.

InfoWorld has some tough competition with TechCrunch and GigaOM, but the magazine won’t have the kind of trouble with the move to online that a small weekly newspaper would. Its market is with people who probably already read TechCrunch and GigaOM and who would relish the idea of pulling in their InfoWorld news to their favorite newsreader.

If anything, the move will make more money for InfoWorld, since serving up Web pages offers so much more bang for buck than printing a magazine page.

People who read newspapers, really, really like newspapers. Which is why this shouldn’t be happening (via Tim O’reilly):

Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent “emergency meeting” that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.” (“And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”) Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.

Such gloom and doom is unnecessary. Newspapers have hardly become irrelevant. TV news doesn’t have the manpower to go out hunting for hard news, so they swipe it from the papers. Bloggers, god bless them, have yet to show they can do much original reporting (techmeme exists for this very reason!). David Lazurus is right. Most bloggers just comment on work done by others. 90% of the time the link trail leads to original reporting from a newspaper.

So instead of bitching about this and complaining about newspapers being irrelevant, old newspaper fogies need to figure out how to harness the blogosphere.

The answer, I’m afraid, is not to make people pay for content with a short life span like news. Especially once that content is purchased by one or two people, it can be “commented” on by bloggers giving the gist of the ideas therein. Here’s a great explanation if you don’t get what I’m talking about.

If newspapers want to make it online, they should do what they do best: gather information for readers. It’s not the content people don’t want. It’s the delivery mechanism. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Build a better mousetrap instead of complaining about the inefficiencies of the one you already have.

General Council for Viacom, Michael Fricklas, wrote a column about the suit which has no digestible name. In it, he calls YouTube a media company, not a Web company, thereby negating YouTube’s DMCA protections:

YouTube has described itself as the place to go for video. It is far more than the kind of passive Web host or e-mail service the DMCA protects — it is an entertainment destination. The public at large is not attracted to YouTube’s storage facility or technical functionality — people are attracted to the entertainment value of what’s on the site.

Among many arguments, Viacom claims that YouTube “induces” users to upload copyrighted material, which looks like an argument out of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.
which holds that software companies can be sued for copyright infringement by their users (by taking away safe harbor protections from Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios) and that these companies must take steps to stop copyright infringement through labeling, according to Judge Souter:

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

YouTube does this all over the site, and tries to nip the bud right at initial upload, (on both upload pages):

Clearly, that angle isn’t going to cut it in court. YouTube goes above and beyond the labeling requirements all over the site. So like any good lawyering, Fricklas and Viacom manufacture other arguments, like saying not only does YouTube not fall under protections from the Betamax and Grokster cases, it doesn’t even fall under the DMCA.

They claim that YouTube isn’t a service provider, it’s an “entertainment destination” as if it were one or the other. Even if for every 5 million videos watched, only 50 are uploaded, YouTube is still an “entertainment destination” and a service provider because it does both.

This is where things get murky. Some tech lawyers have rallied behind Google and YouTube:

To try to treat it like a media company, denying it the protections of the DMCA, would be like treating eBay as a full-fledged product company, said Gregory Rutchik, a partner at The Arts and Technology Law Group. (link)

The problem with that logic is that, on eBay, you buy products directly from other sellers and eBay simply facillitates the transaction, they don’t house the products. YouTube does house the products, so to speak.

Viacom should enforce its copyright protections, and it may have a partial case here. But the whining needs to stop:

Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others’ copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That’s hardly a workable or equitable solution. And it would tend to disadvantage ventures such as the one recently announced by NBC Universal and News Corp. that are built on respect for copyright. Under the law, the obligation is right where it belongs: on the people who derive a benefit from the creative works and are in the position to keep infringement out of their businesses.

YouTube is well within its rights (assuming its protected under Title II of theDMCA):

(1) In general.—A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider—

“(A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;

“(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or

“(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

So, please, Viacom, stop telling us how much you hate having to manage your own copyrights and (boo hoo) have to pay someone else to manage them for you. Obstructing markets is costly and hardly works (see the black market for guns and drugs if you need a reference point). Figure out how to go with the flow.

Around the Web: Related reading

Analysis of the Viacom/YouTube Showdown: Google’s Site May Have “Safe Harbor,” But Still Needs Media Allies for Suc (sic)
Viacom vs. YouTube: The Billion Dollar Question
PBS Analysis: Viacom Sues YouTube for Copyright Infringement
Viacom lawsuit could imperil Internet models

Missed last Thursday, so, without further ado:

This is the worst pissing match in the history of the internet. Aptly namend Michael Crook lured would-be pedophiles on craiglist in typical Dateline fashion. 10zenmonkeys wrote a blog post criticizing him and his appearance on Hannity and Colmes and they posted a screen grab of his likeness from FOX News.

Well, Mr. Crook freaked out and sent 10zenmonkeys a fake DMCA notice demanding they take down his photo.

Long story short, the overzealous EFF jumped to legal action against Crook, settling to this video out of court.

10zenmonkeys won’t drop it and made a completely retarded post about it here.

Welcome to high school, folks.

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Google is rumored to be testing television ads in a Calif. market. This news comes at the heels of Google testing contextual ads in various newspaper across the country. Should be interesting to watch the disruption.

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Speaking about disruption:

March Madness is in full swing and Oral Roberts, my dark horse pick to win the damn thing lost today. However, TechCrunch says online betting PicksPal is has held an amazing win rate of 66%. Too bad that data is going to professional betting rooms and will make gambling that much more of a degenerate sport.

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Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with a State of the Media 2007 report this week. Verbatim from the study:

• Web sites have developed beyond their root media. In character, many news sites now cut across medium, history, audience size and editorial structure.

• News sites seem to be exploiting two areas of the Web most of all: editorial branding, or establishing a distinctive identity through original content and a distinct editorial process; and the potential for users to customize information, particularly through mobile delivery of it.

• Sites have done the least to tap the Web’s potential for depth — to enrich coverage by offering links to original documents, background material, additional coverage and more. That suggests that putting things into context, or making sense of the information available, is an area Web journalists still need to work on.

• Digital journalism has also not fully exploited the potential for users to participate by commenting and adding their own voice to the information.

• Only a few sites excel at multiple areas of the Web’s potential. Only four of those we analyzed earned top marks in even three of the five content categories studied. Most excelled at only one or two.

And why aren’t people reading newspapers, according to PEJ?

The answers overlap some, but the biggest reason by far, according to data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is people saying they don’t have time (23%).

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The Name Inspector has a strange write up on search engine company names.

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Offline documents are falling by the wayside, says New York Times.

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Anne Zelenka sums up my feelings about Web 2.0: “Why does everyone have to write about the same stuff all at once? You all are smart people… let’s see some original ideas and topics.”

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YouTube has had a pretty crummy month. First they folded to pressure from Turkey (of all places) over one “offensive” video and then, well, you know about the lawsuit.

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Men tend to look at George Brett’s crotch, according to a new study reported at OJR:

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

That’s a little unfair, don’t you think since Brett is in swinging position in the photo and men know that’s the strike zone. As for the dogs…well, you just can’t avoid dog balls.

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And finally, TIME has photoshopped a tear in Reagan’s eye for this week’s cover: