Paid-content advocate Steven Brill (right) has been busy defending his position lately. He squares off over the pay wall issue with visionary Clay Shirky on McKinsey & Co.'s website. Shirky says forget about charging readers for content. They'll pay only if the information is "necessary, irreplaceable and unshareable." The Financial Times can get away with charging for online access because people make money from the information they find there, but few outlets have the kind of audience demographics to do the same. On the sharability point, Shirky notes that preventing paying subscribers from sending interesting information to their friends goes against the grain of the Internet, thereby subverting the pay wall by its very nature.
Brill begs to differ. The point is not to charge everyone for access, he says, but rather to charge those people who are most committed to the product and are willing to pay. So a college newspaper could ask alumni to pay for a subscription in order to subsidize free copies for the students. Brill says he basically agrees with Shirky but thinks publishers should go after subscription revenue where they can get it. He resorts to that most annoying of branding tactics by inserting that little ™ symbol whenever he mentions his own products. We at the Death Watch™ just hate that.
Brill was also at an event sponsored by the Paley Center for Media that put him up against National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller, iconoclast Jeff Jarvis and media consultant Shelly Palmer. The most damning quote came from Vivian Schiller, who was previously general manager of NYTimes.com during the newspaper's ill-fated TimesSelect experiment. The pay-walled venture "made $10 million, but I don't think it was worth it," she said. "Trying to force a change in audiences' behavior is the fundamental problem I have with some of these pay wall models." PaidContent.org's David Kaplan notes that despite the debate format, the panelists really weren't that far apart on the fundamental issues. All of them believe publishers need to find new ways to monetize their audiences. It's just that most believe that charging for content that readers can find elsewhere for free is not the way to do it.
Bloggers Need Shield Laws
Writing on Media Shift, Clothilde Le Coz says a double standard applies when it comes to shield laws for citizen journalists. She notes that 37 states have passed laws that protect journalists from prosecution for failing to reveal their sources. Now there is a bill awaiting Senate approval that proposes to implement a shield law on a national level. The problem is that the bill defines journalists as people who work for professional media organizations. Bloggers are not specifically addressed in its language, which seems a rather blatant oversight these days.
Le Coz cites the 2005 case of journalist and blogger Josh Wolf, who was jailed for failing to hand over video of a clash between protesters and police during the G8 summit. Wolf spent a month in jail but was eventually released under the terms of California's shield law. "Imagine what would have happened if Wolf wasn't a journalist and couldn't argue his right to protect his sources?" Le Coz writes. "He would have been forced to give up his footage and thus become an accomplice in the arrest of protesters."
Blogger anonymity is a thorn in the side of many professional journalists, but the writer argues that it's an essential tool for bloggers in some countries if they are to speak freely at all. Even in the US, the rise of citizen journalism as a legitimate complement to mainstream media would seem to argue for an extension of legal protection to those who happen to be on the scene when something happens and who report the details.
Miscellany
If you have a couple of hours to kill and want to trace the history of the Boston Globe's near-death experience at the hands of owner New York Times Co., PaidContent.org has a link list of its coverage in reverse chronological order.
USA Today's loss is The Wall Street Journal's gain. As the Gannett-owned week daily announced a plunge in daily circulation figures earlier this week, the Journal reported a year-over-year increase of .8%, making it the top-circulating US daily. The shift in industry leadership has more to do with accounting practices than actual leadership habits. USA Today attributed much of its circulation plunged to Marriott's decision to stop distributing the paper free to all guests in its hotels. Meanwhile, changes in Audit Bureau of Control rules now permit the Journal to count more of its deeply discounted copies as legitimate circulation.
"We bought BusinessWeek to invest in it," says Bloomberg Chief Content Officer Norm Pearlstine in an interview with PaidContent.org. The former Wall Street Journal and Time, Inc. executive says Bloomberg did have some reservations prior to its blockbuster acquisition of the struggling newsweekly, which was announced earlier this week, but that the financial publisher sees BusinessWeek as a tool to expand its reach into the executive suite. Bloomberg intends to invest in the magazine's editorial staff and become a "true newsweekly," meaning 52 issues a year and no games during slow times. Paid content.org has a history of the BusinessWeek sale in links.
Huffington Post is doing some pretty creative stuff with customization, reports Zach Seward on the Nieman Journalism Lab. It's writing two different headlines for some stories and showing them randomly to viewers for five minutes. After that time, the headline that generates the most clicks becomes the default. Huffington Post is also toying with the idea of regional versions of its homepage that would serve up, for example, a different menu of stories to the lunchtime crowd in New York than to people just arriving at their workplace in Los Angeles.
After years of cutbacks and sales declines, the Dallas Morning News is fighting back by raising subscription prices and investing in better journalism. The seven-day home delivery rate just jumped 43%, making the Morning News one of the US's most expensive metro dailies. The paper has also added pages, increased local news and sports coverage, expanded its recipe section and introduced a new feature in the business section. And it's looking to hire five reporters. "We need it to continue to be profitable so that we have the funds to invest to make the transition...to digital," says publisher Jim Moroney.
If you're using WordPress for your blog (and who isn't these days?) then be sure to check out this list of 85 WordPress plug-ins for blogging journalists. They include gems like BackType Connect, which pulls comments posted about you on other social media sites into your own pages, and Global Translator, which translates entries into 34 different languages. We'll include a plug here for Apture, a utility that makes it drop-dead simple to insert links and media into posts without going through the tedious download and upload process. See our ham-handed application of Apture in the Wikipedia clip above. We're still learning.
And Finally...
Ninety-three percent of all newspaper sales "can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day's date in filmed ransom demands," reports The Onion in a hilarious spoof on the industry downturn. It seems that evildoers just can't get enough of "the smell of ink coupled with the mildew odor of a windowless basement." Publishers are seizing the opportunity to cater to this influential audience by targeting advertorials and special sections devoted to ski masks, abandoned warehouses and industrial meat freezers.
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