Wednesday, 19 November 2008

The future of newspapers in a world of Capitalism 2.0

I've blogged a lot about a publicly endowed public-to-private move by the NYT Company in order to save itself.

I just want to clarify something for a Think! reader who wrote to me about this.

Yes, one option is to go the non-profit endowment route.

But another, and one which is part of my thinking, is that pure endowment isn't the only play here.

Let's just consider for a moment that, after the recent financial meltdown, we're going to see new flora and fauna emerging, a bit like after a forest fire.

I think this is likely not just in the case of newspaper companies and their offerings, but also capitalism in general. It's what I call the birth of Capitalism 2.0. (I don't know if anyone else is using that term, but if so I haven't read about it.)

Capitalism 2.0 is a market place for profit-minded investors (yes, capitalists still want an ROI) within which different classes of investors emerge who are willing, for reasons of contributing to the broader base of social capital, to accept reduced, capped or fixed income returns on their investments.

In my scenario of 100 rich Americans/foundations/endowments/whoever stumping up, let's say, $10 million each to achieve this for the NYT Company, they would enable the NYT Company to survive in the short term and flourish in the long term (once the NYT Co. get with the programme of what is actually going on in the media world and what the market wants and come up with some new ideas). But a fully blown not for profit endowment is not what I have in mind.

What I have in mind is an investment class of managed profit expectations where investors are willing to accept, in return for a broader (can we say greater?) good, lower returns on their capital than they can achieve elsewhere.

Capitalism 2.0 will still leave plenty of investment classes for people who are driven purely by greed and profit, but in 25 years time, might we be asking each other at dinner parties whether we're into - to shorthand the idea - social capital class B investments or pure profit motive class A investments? Emerging social trends will determine which class of investment is called A and which class is called B.

This differential between investment classes can be applied to any company or sector you care to mention. Oil companies that are Investment B class or Investment A class for example, the former being one that caps its profit margins at a certain percentage, re-invests that money in alternative non-fossil energies and pays out, yes, a lower dividend.

Given the NYT families who own the voting stock are going to have to swallow considerably lower dividends for some years to come, even if (and it's an if) they survive, might they like to go for this model and at least claim some glory for developing the concept (after me that is)?

We're constantly told what terrifically socially minded and all round great people the family is (a bit like the Bancrofts, ho hum) so let's see them put their money where their mouth is. Sorry kids, some of you are going to have to get real jobs, but you've all got the nice Manhattan brown house/loft apartment/trust fund based on NYT dividends to date, so it's not all bad is it?

As for management and editorial staff, well, sorry too.

You're going to have to take a pay cut.

I would if I were you in this scenario because given the media meltdown, both re, media market B-side and editorial staffing cuts, there's plenty of members of the liberal media elite who would be more than willing and capable of working for a Capitalism 2.0 NYT Co. on a wage platform of, off the top of my head, at least 25% less than you're currently getting paid.

With the $10 million members of the liberal media elite poneying up to get the debt down by around a billion dollars, the company going public-to-private, the resulting drop in debt servicing fees and 25% off the biggest cost base without you losing your job, this could be one hell of an offer.

And we'll all get a chance to see just how liberal you and the Ochs-Sulzbergers really are. Which would be nice wouldn't it?


If you don't like the deal on the table you can always go and set up a blog, because boy, that's the future isn't it (not).

And let's not forget, that with NYT Company stock trading at as low as $6.90 yesterday, your performance related stock options aren't worth a bag of beans anyway, so no big loss on that front.

Naturally investor/employee participation is going to be a big part of the reward of being in Class B investments as an investor or employee, so we may need a few changes of management style. But judging by the mood music I'm hearing, no one would be worrying too much about that.

BTW: if something like this does happen at the NYT Co. I still want that place on the board. And given how much I've made out of the naked short selling of NYT Company stock in the last 24 months, I'm more than happy to put the first 10 mill on the table. Can't do fairer than that ;)

Today's article in the IHT about the Smithsonian (see below) is perhaps relevant in all this, but there are more thoughts beneath it about the future of newspapers in the world of Capitalism 2.0.


At meeting, Smithsonian practices new openness
By Robin Pogrebin
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
WASHINGTON: Fielding questions about its diminished endowment fund, the possibility of charging admission fees and the fate of its fabled yet shuttered Arts and Industries Building, the Smithsonian Institution held the first public board meeting in its 162-year history on Monday as part of its new commitment to openness and accountability. Sitting on the stage of a 565-seat auditorium at the institution's National Museum of Natural History, members of the governing body, or Board of Regents — including members of Congress — took questions from the audience present and online.
The two-hour meeting was a window on public concerns about the Smithsonian's shaky financial state and potentially endangered programs, rather than merely a forum for combative accusations after two tumultuous years in which the institution has been battered by mismanagement scandals. Museumgoers and Smithsonian staff members had the opportunity to ask whatever they wanted about the organization's operations and direction.
Although billed as an open board meeting, the session seemed more like a chance for the regents to hear from the public than for the public to observe the regents at work. Questions ranged from broad issues like the thrust of the Smithsonian's new strategic planning initiative, intended to draft a course of action for the institution's financial future and its programs, to whether a tram might be built at the National Zoo.
There were nonetheless more challenging moments.
"Why did you not all resign?" was the first question, submitted on a card by an audience member. It referred to the Board of Regents' decision to stay on after revelations about the lavish expense-account spending of Lawrence Small, the Smithsonian's former secretary, or chief executive, who resigned in March 2007.
Roger Sant, chairman of the Smithsonian's executive committee, replied that the regents had asked themselves, "Do we resign, or do we roll up our sleeves — and we chose the latter."
The question that drew one of the most emphatic responses from the regents concerned the viability of the Smithsonian's policy of free admission at all of its components, which include 19 museums and galleries, the zoo and 9 research centers. The Smithsonian draws 70 percent of its $1 billion annual budget from the federal government.
One written comment suggested that "the luxury of free admission must be a thing of the past." The audience booed.
Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and a Smithsonian regent, called the admission policy "one of the great hallmarks" of the institution.
Calling attention to the Smithsonian's unusual governance structure was the scheduled role of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who serves as the Smithsonian's chancellor and traditionally presides over board meetings. At the last minute the chief justice was unable to attend and Sant presided instead. "We've been trying to do some fixing," Sant said upon opening the meeting. "The board views this meeting as an opportunity to directly engage with all of you about the issues facing the Smithsonian."
Many questions were answered by G. Wayne Clough, the former president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who took over in July as the Smithsonian's secretary.
He faces the task of restoring stability to an institution struggling with a $2.5 billion shortfall, crumbling buildings and a recent legacy of improprieties by leading Smithsonian executives. "We believe the Smithsonian is at a turning point," he said in his opening remarks. "The world is rapidly changing in so many ways."
Like other organizations, the Smithsonian has been seriously affected by the nation's economic downturn; the value of its endowment has dropped 21 percent since June. "Of course we can't predict the future," Clough said, "but we can prepare for it."
He said the Smithsonian had "to find ways to be more self-reliant." The institution raised $135.6 million last year, he said, an improvement on its goal of $115 million.
The developer and philanthropist Eli Broad, who serves as a regent, said the board had become more conservative about its investments.
The organization has also raised $400,000 toward the $1.3 million cost of its strategic planning effort, Clough said. But he said that fund-raising was not enough and that the institution needed to set about attracting a younger and more diverse work force and audience.
Clough said he had established a committee to ensure that executives at the institution — including regents, staff members and contractors — reflected the nation's ethnic diversity. "The Smithsonian is the treasure of America and it represents America," he said. "Therefore its Board of Regents should as well."
Several of the questions dealt with the Smithsonian's neo-Classical 1881 Arts and Industries Building, which has been closed for four years and is listed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the nation's most endangered places because of its state of disrepair.
Clough said that the cost of repairs had been estimated at about $75 million and that the Smithsonian would conclude a study on its future use in January. One member of the audience suggested setting aside part of the building as an information center for all the institutions on the National Mall.
The Board of Regents plans to hold open meetings at least once a year. The next one is expected in June. Sant said the board might adjust the format in the future.
"We don't have it exactly right," he said. "But at least we're trying to tinker with it."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/arts/18smithsonian.php

If you think all of the above is a load of old bollocks then you'll be cheered by these remarks by Mr. Capitalism 1.0s recent remarks:

Murdoch upbeat about the future of newspapers
By ROHAN SULLIVAN – 2 days ago
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Global media magnate Rupert Murdoch says doomsayers who are predicting the Internet will kill off newspapers are "misguided cynics" who fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers.
Newspaper companies in the United States and elsewhere are facing fundamental changes to their businesses as more people get their news from the Internet and other sources, and advertisers follow the market away from the paper-and-ink format.
Murdoch, the Australian-born chairman and chief executive of News Corp., said in a speech broadcast Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees" that the Internet offered opportunities as well as challenges and that newspapers would always be around in some form or other.
"Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," Murdoch said in a speech, recorded in the United States and relayed nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It was the latest in an annual ABC series of lectures by a prominent Australian.
"Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights" in the 21st century, Murdoch said.
Murdoch grew a small city newspaper he inherited in 1953 into one of the world's largest media conglomerates that now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox News Channel and Sky Broadcasting, Dow Jones & Co. and the online networking site MySpace.
He said people now were "hungrier for information that ever before" and that papers have an edge over bloggers and other newcomers because they are more trusted by readers.
"Readers want what they've always wanted: a source they can trust," Murdoch said. "That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future."
He said newspapers would have to evolve from the physical item to "news brands" that are delivered in a variety of ways and are flexible for readers.
"I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone," he said. "But our real business isn't printing on dead trees. It's giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.
"It's true that in the coming decades, the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we' ll see gains in circulation — on our Web pages, through our RSS feeds, in e-mails delivering customized news and advertising, to mobile phones," Murdoch said.
"In this coming century, the form of delivery may change, but the potential audience for our content will multiply many times over," he said.
Murdoch cited two of his most prestigious newspapers, The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, as examples of how newspaper brands can win large online readerships.
But he stressed that even these papers must recognize that online customers will decide what news they want and how they receive it.
"To compete today, you can't offer the old one-size-fits-all approach to news," he said. "The challenge is to use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves and then deliver it in the ways that they want."
To capitalize on online opportunities, Murdoch said The Wall Street Journal was planning to offer three tiers of content online — free news, a subscriber-level service, and a third "premium service" of reader-customizable "high-end financial news and analysis."
Murdoch was scathing of journalists who predicted the death of newspapers as self-pitying and "misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity."
"The newspaper, or a very close electronic cousin, will always be around," he said. "It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo around society and the world."

That's all great Rupert but your share price is hardly crash hot either is it?

On that cheery note, I am taking a break from Think! for at least a week, if not more. Knee operation in hospital and other more pressing matters to deal with. I may or may not be back.

Can I just conclude by telling those people who edit the simply dreadful T magazine that, as reported in their piece on Amsterdam in their recent travel edition, Amsterdam is NOT the capital of Holland; The Hague is the capital of The Netherlands. (I think we can sadly take it as a given that the headline writers weren't thinking from their desks in Manhattan about the various provinces in The Netherlands when they called that one.)

Finally.....CHRISTMAS COMPETITION

I'm running a prize competition for the Think! reader who most accurately predicts the NYT Company share price on 31 December, 2008. It's a good prize and I'll send it out in the first week of January, 2009, as well as announcing the winner (anonymous you may remain if you prefer but your entries to ihtreraders AT gmail.com please - if you want to claim the prize I will need your postal address at some point.)

And please, if you are a reader of this blog, and there seem to be lots of you, particularly in Paris, London, Hong Kong and NY according to my stats, and if you haven't yet voted on the three polls on this blog that close at the end of this year, please take a minute to do so.

By far the biggest readership, as judged by the polls, is IHT subscribers but I have data and ISP addresses which would seem to suggest otherwise.

Time to fess up and vote!






READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to.
His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com

Putting the story back into newspaper storytelling

One of my central theories about the decline of newspapers is that they've forgotten, in the world of 24 hour news cycle, the meaning and value of the word 'new' in their product offering of 'new' information in newspapers.

(For more on this take a look at a revised posting on repeat stories in the IHT.)

Another, is that partly as a result of this, they've just forgotten, or never realised they had to quickly acquire, the skills of story telling: developing meaningful daily narratives that engage readers in interesting, paradoxical and stimulating ways. I'm not talking about individual pieces, I'm talking about the packaging of those stories into a narrative that people are excited by and want to follow.

Fuck whether it's useful to their job or 'the power of knowledge' or all that other crap newspapers use to market themselves. Tell me a goddamn good story man!

The reason I sign off these blog posts with the invitation to 'explore an alternative daily narrative' at A Place in the Auvergne, is that this Auvernge blog is, among many other things, an illustration of how to tell story using exactly the same information as appears on any given day in the IHT or at www.iht.com. It's rushed, it's not perfect, it's illustrative only of my point, but if you give it some serious study for a day or two you should begin to get the, well, story.

So this piece on story in today's IHT did naturally catch my eye. Worth reading, and substituting the newspaper industry for the movie industry.


Putting the story back into onscreen storytelling
By Michael Cieply
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
LOS ANGELES: The movie world has been fretting for years about the collapse of stardom. Now there are growing fears that another chunk of film architecture is looking wobbly: the story.
In league with a handful of former Hollywood executives, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory plans to do something about that with the creation of a Center for Future Storytelling, which opened Tuesday. The center is envisioned as a "labette," a little laboratory, that will examine whether the old way of telling stories - particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end - is in serious trouble.
Its mission is not small. "The idea, as we move forward with 21st-century storytelling, is to try to keep meaning alive," said David Kirkpatrick, a founder of the new venture.
Once president of the Paramount Pictures motion picture group, Kirkpatrick last year joined some former colleagues in starting Plymouth Rock Studios, a planned Massachusetts film production center that will provide a home for MIT's storytelling lab while supporting it with $25 million over seven years.
Arguably, the movies are as entertaining as ever. With a little help from holiday comedies like "Yes Man" with Jim Carrey and "Bedtime Stories" with Adam Sandler, the U.S. domestic motion picture box office appears poised to match last year's gross revenues of $9.7 billion, a record.
But Kirkpatrick and company are not alone in their belief that Hollywood's ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.
"I even saw a plasma screen above a urinal," said Peter Guber, the longtime film producer and former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment who contends that traditional narrative - the kind with unexpected twists and satisfying conclusions - has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter.
A common gripe is that gamelike, open-ended series like "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Spider-Man" have eroded filmmakers' ability to wrap up their movies in the third act. Another is that a preference for proven, outside stories like the Harry Potter books is killing Hollywood's appetite for original storytelling.
Guber, who teaches a course at the University of California, Los Angeles, called "Navigating in a Narrative World," is singularly devoted to story. Almost 20 years ago Guber made a colossal hit of Warner Brothers' "Batman" after joining others in laboring over the story for the better part of a decade.
But in the last few years, Guber said, big films with relatively small stories have been hurried into production to meet release dates. Meanwhile, hundreds of pictures with classic narratives have been eclipsed by other media - he mentioned "The Duchess," a period drama that foundered last month as potential viewers were presumably distracted by the noise of a presidential election - or suppressed by louder, less story-driven brethren.
"How do you compete with 'Transformers'?" asked Guber.
Ultimately, he blames the audience for the perceived breakdown in narrative quality: in the end, he argued, consumers get what they want.
At the Sundance Institute, as it happens, other deep thinkers tend to think that film storytelling is doing just fine.
"Storytelling is flourishing in the world at a level I can't even begin to understand," said Ken Brecher, the institute's executive director. Brecher spoke last week, as his colleagues continued sorting through 9,000 films - again, a record - that have been submitted for the coming Sundance Film Festival.
The festival, set for Jan. 15 to Jan. 25 in Park City, Utah, will have story as its theme. The idea, Brecher said, is to identify film stories that have defined the festival during its 25-year run, and figure out what made them tick. (Brecher said the final choices had not been made and declined to identify candidates.)
If anything, Brecher added, technology has simply brought mass storytelling, on film or otherwise, to people who once thought Hollywood had cornered the business.
The people at MIT, in any case, may figure out whether classic storytellers like Homer, Shakespeare and Spielberg have had their day.
Starting in 2010, a handful of faculty members - "principal investigators," the university calls them - will join graduate students, undergraduate interns and visitors from the film and book worlds in examining, among other things, how virtual actors and "morphable" projectors (which instantly change the appearance of physical scenes) might affect a storytelling process that has already been considerably democratized by digital delivery.
A possible outcome, they speculate, is that future stories might not stop in Hollywood at all. "The business model is definitely being transformed, maybe even blown apart," said Frank Moss, a former entrepreneur who is now the media lab's director.
Kirkpatrick is not completely at ease with that prospect, partly because his Plymouth Rock Studios, a $480 million enterprise, will need scores of old-fashioned, story-based Hollywood productions to fill the 14 soundstages it plans to build.
In a telephone interview last week, Kirkpatrick said he might take a cue from Al Gore, who used a documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," to heighten concern about global warming. Kirkpatrick is now considering an alarm-bell documentary of his own, he said.
Its tentative title: "A World Without Story."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/20/arts/plot.php



READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times



Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to.
His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com

NYT's media correspondent tells us all we need to know about what's wrong with newspapers

I think this speaks for itself. I mean, really, this is like GM backing SUVs and being surprised when Toyota and Renault do better.

Filling media gaps, watchdogs spring up online
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light - city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its big newspaper, The Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from the downtown - a site that did not exist four years ago.
As newspapers in the United States - and much of the western world - shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, taking up some of the slack and forcing the mainstream media to follow the stories they uncover.
Here, it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists - the province of the mainstream media, but without the expensive paper and ink. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, Connecticut; the Twin Cities in Minnesota; Seattle; St. Louis, Missouri; and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a critical mass, its founders think, to form a planned association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for by themselves. And hardly a week goes by without a call from frustrated journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, journalism director at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism."'
That is a subject of hot debate among people who follow the besieged newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is nowhere near robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so, financially, VoiceofSanDiego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems abroad. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back decades.
But experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many. They have a complex relationship with the mainstream media, whose failings have created an opening for new sources of news, and whose cutbacks have created a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from the mainstream media. The executive editors - Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32 - each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service. The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is thin - strictly local, selective in coverage and without the wire service articles that plump up most sites.
On a budget of less than $800,000 this year - almost $200,000 more than last year - everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing, and Woolley, president and chief executive officer, said he is convinced the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/voice.php


READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times
Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to.
His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Attributor and Paid Content for the NYT?

I recently posted on Why Newspapers Need to Come up with a Paid Content Model. citing in large part a study released by the company Attributor (along with my own blog A Place in the Auvergne as proof positive of how much content is nicked by people like me.)

The point I made was that if you can't come up with a paid content model, don't bitch and moan if people nick you content without renumerating you.

Whilst I'm not yet in a position to judge if Attributor's model can help the NYT's structural and rather systemic flaws, I was interested to receive this email from Attributor's VP marketing, Rich Pearson.

Hi Ian,

I work for Attributor and worked on the study you cited. I agree with your point - we're trying to enable the open syndication model in which "payment" equals an ad revenue share of any money made from re-use.

In this world, content can flow freely and those who produce quality, original content get compensated.

Wouldn't that world be a nice one to live in?


READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to.
His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com


Public-to-Private, socially minded rich New Yorkers and Crowdfunding as a possible way out for the New York Times.

Regular followers of this blog will have noted that I've been blogging a lot on the idea of the NYT taking the company private/charitable status with the help of a group of very wealthy, socially minded rich New Yorkers.

I'm indebted to a Think! reader, Simon Garner at PBS, for tipping me off to another variable in this equation which is crowdfunding.

Two projects are cited: spot.us and Representative Journalism.

Now my crowd idea was just a smaller one, involving some very rich people, rather than lots of micropayments, which is essentially what a subscription or kiosk purchase is, and that sure ain't working.

However Leonard Witt's idea over at Representative Journalism is closer to my thinking. He's talking about 1000 people (at a local level) making donations of $100 a year to cover a particular issue.

Well, roll that thought out to where I am and you come to say 100 people in the U.S.A. making a one off donation of $10 million dollars. That would pay off $1 billion of the NYT's debt of $1.2 billion, the company goes private/charitable status, and a lot of your problems are over.

Here below, is the piece written by Mark Glaser, a colleague of Simon's at PBS, about exploring crowdfunding for economic sustainability in journalism.

Below the piece, but check the link to see the comments of readers on how this idea was received. There are nice ideas in this piece, but as re. the NYT Company and in the real world I prefer mine. (If it comes off I want a seat on the charitable board btw. Seriously.)


Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business?

by
Mark Glaser, November 13, 2008
Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. "It" is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and the economic recession.
Two experiments in crowdfunding, Spot.us and Representative Journalism, are testing the concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, while Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.
[Full Disclosure: I am on the advisory board to RepJ and, like Spot.us, have also received a grant from the Knight Foundation.]

Spot.us is the brainchild of journalist David Cohn (a.k.a.
Digidave), who worked on NYU professor Jay Rosen's groundbreaking NewAssignment.net citizen journalism project and helped research the chapter on crowdfunding in Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing book. Cohn won a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for Spot.us, and writes about the project on MediaShift Idea Lab, the sister blog to MediaShift where Knight grantees write about their projects. Here's how Spot.us works:
1. Anyone can come up with a "Tip" or story idea they'd like to see covered. People can "pledge" money toward that story.
2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.
3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).
4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.
5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.
The site officially launched last Monday, but had already funded three stories through a simple wiki set up beforehand. Cohn told me that the challenge for Spot.us isn't so much the technology as it is the fundraising, something that is new to him as a journalist. He said that Spot.us is just one possible alternative business model for journalism.
"I never try to sell Spot.us as a silver bullet that will support a whole news organization," Cohn said. "But I do see it helping a news organization so they can do something beyond their regular means. They can strive for excellence, but it won't support day-to-day reporting. It has its limitations...Community-funded journalism relies on two basic shifts. First, the audience has to think of journalism as a public good like art that's worth sustaining with their own money. The second shift is with reporters who have to realize they are a personal brand and they can pitch the public."

Unlike Spot.us and its piecemeal approach to crowdfunding per story, RepJ takes a longer term outlook by hiring a full-time journalist to work for a local community or cover a specific issue. Leonard Witt, communication chair at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, came up with the idea for representative journalism and
got a $51,000 grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation for the trial project in Minnesota. Witt believes that a community or interest group could raise $100 donations (or $2 per week) from 1,000 people to support a journalist who covers their locale or issue for a year.
Witt has yet to test this donation model; he's first trying to get his initial representative journalist, Bonnie Obremski, more ingrained in the community in Northfield, Minn.
"We are dealing with a total Northfield population of just 17,000," Witt told me via email. "We have to literally weave together an information community of members willing to pay for high quality journalism. So we have to work on three fronts: 1) we have to provide high quality journalism; 2) we have to get the community to know our journalist; and 3) the community has to feel that their membership in the community and the news and information it produces has value worthy of their financial support."
Crowdfunding Bloggers
MoveOn.org pioneered getting small donations to pay for political advocacy campaigns, and Barack Obama raised small donations from millions of people in the '08 campaign. And independent bloggers and online journalists have for years been asking their audience to help support their work through small donations. Political bloggers such as
Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan, and tech blogger Jason Kottke have raised thousands of dollars from online fundraisers in the past. And freelance reporter/blogger Chris Allbritton financed a trip to cover the Iraq War in 2003 by raising nearly $15,000 from his readers, and wrote dispatches on his Back to Iraq blog.
Allbritton was able to finance a drastic change of beats, going from being a media and technology reporter to becoming a foreign correspondent covering war zones in the Middle East. By supporting his trip to Iraq, Allbritton's readers helped him gain steady work as a freelance correspondent to Time magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Daily News. Now, he is a
Knight fellow at Stanford University on a year-long quest to see if the reader-supported model can work at an institutional level.
When I contacted Allbritton for this story, he was amused at the term "crowdfunding" and noted that its advocates might not realize how expensive foreign reporting really is -- especially in a war zone. Even with nearly $15,000 for his Iraq stint, Allbritton quickly went through the funds in just one month because of the high cost of being a foreign correspondent in Iraq. "There was no guarantee that more moneys would be forthcoming from an already tapped audience," he said. "Trust me: You don't want to suddenly find yourself broke in Iraq."
Even so, Allbritton was amazed that he could go cover a war at the behest of his audience, without approval from any editor or news organization.
"I didn't have to ask anyone's permission or check with anyone," he said. "I was relying on my own judgment. It was an amazing sense of freedom to do stories and explore things that I thought were really interesting. That said, it also carried a great sense of responsibility. I mean, when you're at a newspaper or magazine, you have an editor or two to answer to. Now, I had thousands of people watching me and I didn't want to let the donors down. I took that very seriously."
On a less serious subject -- satirical political blogging -- Ana Marie Cox was on the campaign trail covering John McCain for Radar Online when the magazine went belly up. She posted a
Rate Card on her personal blog, asking her readers to support her coverage for the last week and a half of the campaign. For $10, you would get a personal thank-you email, and for $250, Cox would pose your question to a McCain advisor.
Cox was surprised that she raised more than $7,000 from her fans in just a few days.
"Words cannot properly convey my gratitude and amazement in the faith you people seem to have in a little Midwestern girl and her fondness for foul language, politics, and hard-luck stories -- not in that order," she wrote
on her personal blog.
Still, Cox was quick to note that "due to the astronomical costs of traveling with a campaign, I am pretty sure that amount will run short of covering the trail through election day."
Not long after the pledge drive happened, Cox was picked up by the Washington Independent to continue providing reports from the McCain campaign.
Another blogger that recently started a crowdfunding drive is Jim Hopkins, a former USA Today reporter who writes the
Gannett Blog as a watchdog to the newspaper chain and media conglomerate. For the past month Hopkins has been asking for $5 subscriptions from readers via PayPal, and raised nearly $1,500. But he had one particularly vexing problem: Most of his readers want to remain anonymous because they work for Gannett, so using PayPal would reveal who they are to him. To get around that problem, Hopkins set up a post office box to accept cash from them in the mail.
Hopkins told me he is trying to make money from Google AdSense ads, and is using online video to strengthen his appeal for funds.
"I had read that video is a good way to make an appeal because it's more emotional," he told me. "Until recently, my readers had not heard my voice or had a sense of who I was as a person. Just last week I figured out a cheap way to produce video, and people's reactions have been interesting. They said I might have come across as a mean, anti-management person, but the video made me seem more like a real human being. So if I used it as a fundraising tool it could result in more money coming in."
Hopkins is interested in using Spot.us to fund other story ideas, but he is worried that if he puts his pitches online, they could be scooped up by competitors.
"I have to think about ways to present my ideas without having them taken by someone else," he said. "That's an issue that
Profnet has wrestled with for years; [it's a site] where a journalist presents a story to [potential] sources, but they have figured out a way around it."
Supporting Crowdfunding Operations
While an independent blogger or journalist might raise funds from readers directly, it's not something that comes naturally to most writers, who might have a gift for words but not business. That's where the "hub" idea makes more sense, and a platform such as Spot.us -- properly marketed -- could help connect writers with potential funders, and handle financial transactions. That hub model has worked at
Kiva.org for funding entrepreneurs in the developing world; at DonorsChoose.org for matching charities to donors; as well as entertainment sites such as Sellaband for funding bands directly and IndieGoGo for funding films.

IndieGoGo launched at Sundance last January, and has raised more than $70,000, with more than 800 film projects posted on the site. Filmmakers pitch the public, and they can then micro-finance projects. IndieGoGo takes a 9% cut of all donations, and donors do not share in the proceeds from the film, instead getting quirky "VIP perks" such as film credits or trips to the set. IndieGoGo co-founder and head of marketing and strategy Slava Rubin told me one filmmaker who made a documentary about Iraq gave donors strips of a Persian rug that came from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Rubin thinks the crowdfunding model could work in journalism as long as the journalists can engage the right audience.
"If someone writes [a story about] corn in our energy supply, and they try to get money from people in Iowa, that could work," he said. "You need to be able to engage your audience. You have to be closely connected to your niche, and take advantage of the tools out there to engage that audience. There's Sellaband for music, and there are others, but you have to make a connection with the audience."
Cohn told me Spot.us would try to become sustainable by asking for donations to support the overall operation at the point of sale for story donations. He said that's been a successful strategy for Kiva.org, whose president told him that 79% of people giving money to entrepreneurs will give an extra 10% to cover the costs of Kiva.org's operation. Cohn also would like to get money from advertisers in new ways.
"[Someone like] Macy's could have a survey on our site, and Spot.us users can fill out a survey for them, and in return, they would get credit," he said. "So instead of Macy's giving money to a pitch, they would give it to users, and the users would decide where the money would go. I don't know if it's advertising, but it's a win-win -- the user gets real money to donate, the company gets a survey filled out. But that's in the future."

Wired contributing editor and "Crowdsourcing" author Jeff Howe told me that he was bullish on the crowdfunding model, because it takes much less effort to get someone to throw in a few bucks online than to do the free work of crowdsourcing. Howe thinks Spot.us has promise because of the low cost involved for freelance journalists.
"You just have to pay someone to write the piece, and as you and I know, a couple grand in our pocket will fund a week or more of reporting for us, and that's what the Spot.us model is," Howe said. "I'm really optimistic and hopeful for this as a model for journalism. We're in such disarray right now, where the music industry was in '02 or '03, because of changing mediums and a fickle audience."
One worry he did have was that journalism funders would expect a particular outcome from the story pitch -- and would get upset if the result didn't fit in their assumed world view.
"What you get with a newspaper is a convention to find the facts and write the story," Howe said. "I'm not sure how that convention changes with crowdfunding. I expect that the writers will come back with stories that the funders wanted to see. There's going to be an imperative -- unconciously or not -- to please the funders. And what we know of online communities is that they tend to gather around shared viewpoints and interests. Crowdfunding will work by tapping those communities and they are not disinterested, they will have an axe to grind. People who want you to investigate the local utility will already believe that the local utility is guilty of malfeasance."
What do you think about crowdfunding efforts by Spot.us and RepJ? Do you think micro-donations can support local freelance stories or a long-term journalist covering a particular community or issue? What potential conflicts do you see with these operations and how much could they help bridge the gap in the changing business model for traditional journalism? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/can-crowdfunding-help-save-the-journalism-business318.html


READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times


Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to.
His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com

Headline Paradox when it comes to African Lives

K. Annan was visiting the IHT's offices yesterday. He spoke, inter alia, of the need to keep up development money for Africa in times of economic crisis.

I wonder what he would make of the comparative treatment, most notably the headlines used and the length, of these two stories in today's IHT.

One concerns a black congregation church being burnt on U.S election night. That is described as 'an act of horror'(as well as being, further to my earlier post on the Spanish Royal story, two weeks behind the news curve).

A time of hope, marred by an act of horror
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/america/17land.php

A six-year-old boy being killed and his body dismembered in the east African state of Burundi, the latest in a series of attacks in the region on albinos, whose bodies are prized by witchdoctors, is headlined:

Albino boy killed and body dismembered in Burundi
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-TANZANIA-BURUNDI-ALBINOS.php

Which is an act of 'horror' seems pretty self-evident from where I'm sitting, if we don't want semantic devaluation to run wild, and I'll leave you to calculate the respective word count and news hole play.

However, in fairness, Mr. Gettleman in Nairobi did write about this 'horrific' problem back in June of this year (Albinos in Tanzania face deadly threat
By Jeffrey Gettleman (The New York Times) SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 2008) but there is something about the headlines that jars.


Don't get me wrong: burning a black church in America on the night Obama was elected is very troubling, deeply worrying, upsetting, racist and all the rest. But it's the relatively frivolous use of the word 'horror' in one story and the neutral, unemotive headline ascribed to the latest in a long line of truly 'horrific' child murders for the other story, that I don't care for.

If a murder of that nature took place in Detroit, I think we'd have an adjective, let alone an abstract noun, in the headline.

Horror is the Congo, horror is life in Iraq, horror is lots of things.

Horror/terror are words you just don't want to chuck around.


READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com

A Royal Pain for IHT Readers - repeat stories, way behind the news curve.

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the IHT running NYT pieces, on stories that IHT editors (alert, on the ball, all good) had already picked up weeks earlier.

To give an example from today's paper, compare and contrast the following:

A royal pain for the Spanish monarchy
By Victoria Burnett
Monday, November 17, 2008
MADRID: When the English monarch in Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader" decides to write her memoirs, she takes the prudent step of abdicating first. Queen Sofia of Spain may be wondering whether she, too, should have waited for her husband, King Juan Carlos, to leave office before granting a Spanish journalist a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
The resulting book, "The Queen Up Close," has provided Spaniards an uncomfortably close look at their queen's conservative views. Her comments on homosexuality, gay marriage, euthanasia and religious education have outraged liberal Spaniards and tarnished an image of discretion that she had carefully tended for decades.
In the most notorious gaffe in the book, the queen said that she respected people's different sexual tendencies but did not understand why "they should feel proud to be gay."
"That they get up on floats and parade in the streets? If all of us who are not gay were to parade in the streets, we'd halt the traffic in every city," she said. She then added that while gay people had a right to unions, they should not be permitted to call them marriages.
As well as homosexuality, the queen takes several forays into politically tricky territory, saying that she does not support euthanasia - an issue being hotly debated in Spain - and that she believes schoolchildren should be taught the origins of man from a creationist point of view.
The book is also peppered with personal tidbits about world leaders and royal travels. At one point, Sofia congratulates herself on persuading the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to wear a suit and tie, instead of his "shapeless" military garb. The late King Hassan of Morocco drove her "crazy" with his mania about food, she says, bringing a retinue of cooks and his own supplies when he visited Spain because "he didn't trust us." Former President Jimmy Carter was a good enough sort, but "behaved really badly toward the Shah of Iran" when he refused him asylum, she said.
The controversy is one of a series of incidents that have revealed cracks in the cocoon of respect that envelops the Spanish royal family. Recent attempts to stifle embarrassing cartoons or claim privacy from the news media have challenged the balance between protecting free speech and protecting Spain's royals.
"I don't think many people would be surprised to learn these were the queen's views," said Juan Díez-Nicolás, a professor of sociology whose organization, ASEP, polls the Spanish public about the monarchy. They are routinely voted the most respected public figures in the country.
"What surprises them is that she would say such things for publication," he said. And moreover, "not offering a view that is widely shared by Spaniards."
Born Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark in November 1938, the queen converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism when she married Juan Carlos, then the future king, in 1962. Elegant, circumspect and fluent in several languages, she became popular in part because of her role in helping to steer Spain toward democracy after the death of Franco in 1975.
Long considered a paragon of royal reserve, the queen emerges from the book as the 70-year-old observant Catholic that she is, rather than the sweet, demure figure that the Spanish public apparently wants her to be, people who follow the monarchy said.
Her comments on gay pride and marriage provoked indignation from the gay community, which won the right to marry in 2005, and prompted a swift apology from the royal household. In a statement read to the press late last month, a spokesman for the royal family said the queen "deeply regrets that the inaccuracy of the comments attributed to her may have caused discomfort or offense."
The statement claimed that the queen had been quoted "inexactly" and suggested that the interviewer, the journalist Pilar Urbano, had published comments intended to be private. Urbano denied this and said galleys of the book had been reviewed by the queen's office, which approved them for publication.
In an interview by telephone, Urbano said she had interviewed Sofia several times, though she did not use a tape recorder. Journalists who closely follow the royal family said that the king was incensed by the book and that those responsible for giving the green light may yet be fired.
Antonio Poveda, president of the Spanish Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, said his organization accepted the palace's apology but that "there's definitely still some bad feeling among the gay community."
"The monarch has always been at pains not to comment on social or political issues," he said. "It seems they have broken with this tradition."
The publication of the book, "The Queen Up Close," follows a rash of setbacks for members of the royal family and Spanish aristocracy looking for greater protection from the press that have contributed to a sense that they are no longer untouchable. A court this month ruled against the Duchess of Alba, who was seeking to have copies of a satirical magazine whose cover featured her lying naked in pile of money removed from news stands.
Telma Ortiz, sister of Queen Sofia's daughter-in-law Princess Letizia, this month lost a court battle to obtain restraining orders against dozens of media outlets, which she accuses of hounding her and her family. The court ruled that Ortiz, an aid worker, is in the limelight by dint of her relationship with her sister and ordered her to pay around €45,000, or about $57,000, in costs, according to press reports.
While Díez, the sociology professor, said the ruckus over the book would blow over and have no impact on Sofia's popularity, other analysts said the dents in the Spanish royal family's image were part of a wider trend away from monarchy in Europe.
"Monarchy is old-fashioned by nature, and Europe is modern in its self-esteem," said Geoffrey Hindley, a historian who has written on European monarchy. "The ethos of republicanism is the style of the majority in Europe."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/europe/sofia.php

Over two weeks ago, the IHT ran the piece below on www.iht.com and an edited version in the paper.

I imagine the NYT didn't but their global edition did and it's not evident to me that two weeks later Victoria Burnett (was she on holiday at the time?) has added all that much value.

And if you're an IHT reader in Spain, you must be yawning over breakfast.


Spanish book quotes queen's disapproval of gay marriage
The Associated Press
Friday, October 31, 2008
MADRID: A Spanish journalist on Friday defended the accuracy of her book that quotes Queen Sofia criticizing gay marriage.
The book has irked the Royal Palace.
The Spanish king and queen are largely respected as figurehead representatives of the state, and rarely speak out on political or social issues.
The veteran journalist, Pilar Urbano, released the book - "La Reina muy de cerca," or "The Queen, very close up," - this week to mark the queen's 70th birthday Sunday. The journalist said it was based on 15 interviews with Queen Sofia, and that the Royal Palace approved the book's galley proofs before it was published, according to news agency Efe.
"What the queen said is what my book says," Urbano said.
The Royal Palace has challenged the comments attributed to the monarch, however, saying in a statement they "do not correspond exactly" with what she said. The palace also said the book also fails to reflect the queen's traditional neutrality on public affairs or respect for people who suffer discrimination, like homosexuals.
"I do not answer to the queen or king, or the Royal Palace. I answer to the truth," Urbano told Efe.
In the book, the queen is quoted as addressing a wide range of issues and saying she opposes abortion and euthanasia. Spain allows the former under restricted circumstances, and outlaws the latter. But the queen's alleged remarks on same-sex marriage are the main source of friction and have angered gay rights groups.
Spain legalized gay marriage in 2005, becoming one of the few countries in the world to recognize same-sex couples as having the same rights as heterosexual ones, including the right to adopt children.
"If those persons want to live together, dress up as bride and groom and get married, they can do so, but that should not be called marriage because it is not," the queen is quoted as saying in Urbano's book.
The conservative newspaper El Mundo said the queen erred by breaking with her tradition of quiet neutrality.
"As human as this burst of royal sincerity might be, certainly there were better ways to make Queen Sofia's birthday a new tool for bringing society closer to the throne," the newspaper said in an editorial.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/31/europe/01spain-fw-360944.php


REVISED: WEDNESDAY 19TH NOVEMBER, 2008

Just so you know I'm not imagining this problem as being regular, as opposed to infrequent, compare and contrast today's story about fighting in the Congo threatening gorillas (by Gettleman) with the same story from Reuters run in the IHT and on www.iht.com on November 10th, 2008, on the same subject.

Once again, wire service well ahead of the curve, and not a hell of a lot of added value from the NYT correspondent.

It's this type of absurd allocation of precious foreign correspondent resource which is why newspapers seem so damn irrelevant and it seems their own memories of what they've already run are really pretty poor.






READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE


LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended."
The Oxford Times
Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read
A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to.
His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country. Financial Times


Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit
ianwalthew.com

More companies may go private in new year - could the NYT Company be one of them? And might they have to write down the value of About.com?

I've been blogging with increased regularity now for some time on the very real possibility of the NYT Company going public-to-private.

If you think it's just the rantings of some nutter in the Auvergne, read this.


More companies may go private in new year
By Simon MeadsReuters
Monday, November 17, 2008
LONDON: A dearth of capital provided by banks may drive public companies into the arms of cash-rich private equity firms and could help rekindle the moribund market for public-to-private buyouts.
Private equity companies say there have been some signs of revival in the market, which has been virtually shut for more than a year, as institutional investors seek a way out of companies whose share prices have dropped.
There has been a pickup in business in just the past couple of weeks, with two public-to-private deals going into the due diligence phase, said Andrew Roberts, a private equity partner at the law firm Travers Smith.
A slow drip-feed of liquidity back into the system next year could give more impetus to the market for mergers and acquisitions, Roberts said.
"It's still going to be relatively small deals, in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions," he said.
In the first nine months of 2008, there were only 15 public-to-private buyouts in Britain, according to figures from the Center for Management Buyout Research.
The £2 billion, or $3 billion at current exchange rates, buyout of Emap, a media company, was the largest. It was one of only three buyouts worth more than £1 billion.
This contrasts with the 24 public-to-private deals made last year, including the European high-water mark deal - the £11.1 billion takeover of Alliance Boots by a consortium led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
And there is a precedent for a rise in this type of deal after a sharp fall in asset values. Toward the end of the dot-com boom, there were 46 public-to-private deals in 1999 and 42 in 2000, accounting for 28 percent and 39 percent of total buyout deal value, respectively. That total includes other deals between private equity firms and buyouts by privately held companies.
Private equity firms have to put in more of their own money when buying a company with borrowed cash, and the size of such leveraged deals has dropped drastically after the credit crunch slammed the door shut on credit markets.
Private equity firms are hoping tight financing conditions may bring back the heady days. With markets for initial public offerings shut and a mountain of refinancing awaiting already tight corporate debt and loan markets, companies have few options.
"Large shareholders are hugely important in these types of deals," said Roberts, the private equity partner at Travers Smith.
In London, the FTSE 100-share index has slumped by more than a third already this year and large institutional investors are set to dominate shareholder registers as the hedge fund industry shrinks and retail investors continue to stay away.
"Now that prices have come down on the listed market, it will open up the possibility of doing public-to-privates," said Richard Chapman, a partner at the private equity firm ECI Partners. "You also have willing vendors."
"There is a desire by institutional investors to pull out of the smaller and midcap companies."
Sam Hart, an analyst with the brokerage firm Charles Stanley, said he believed that investors in any quoted company would be extremely pleased to see interest from private equity firms.
"I'm sure they would look extremely favorably on any approach, and as long as the offers they were making for companies represented a reasonable premium to the current share price, I would have thought they would be quite inclined to accept those offers," he said.
But, Chapman said, although there is room for a pickup in public-to-private buyouts, activity may not restart until 2009, after banks complete reporting 2008 balance sheets and there is an easing of bank debt.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/business/deal.php

And if you think some of my posts about About.com have been off-the-mark (I think the NYT Company overpaid for an out-of-date, distinctly uncool, ageing demographic, behind the Internet curve dot com company) then you might like to check in on this little gem about companies having to write down the value of assets on their books, bought when times were good and money was cheap: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/business/deal18.php

Of course, if they are looking at a public-to-private, that wouldn't be such a bad thing would it?

Meanwhile they plan to merge iht.com into www.nytimes.com, effectively wiping value off the balance sheet - given how much they (overpaid) for the IHT when times were good and money was cheap. WaPo must be delighted.





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