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

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.
10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

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

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees



International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

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

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

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Dodging the death knell of obsolescence (cough, cough, newspapers)

My new sport is awaiting the first serious reporting by a NYT or IHT journalist about the fate and fortunes of their own employer, the NYT Company.

Today we're still at the polite 'cough, cough' stage, but watch this space.

Dodging the death knell of obsolescence
By Catherine Rampell
Sunday, November 16, 2008
By some logic, there is no earthly reason why bicycles should still exist.
They are a quaint, 19th-century invention, originally designed to get someone from point A to point B. Today there are much faster, far less labor-intensive modes of transportation. And yet hopeful children still beg for them for Christmas, healthful adults still ride them to work, and daring teenagers still vault them down courthouse steps. The bicycle industry has faced its share of disruptive technologies, and it has repeatedly risen from the ashes.
Other industries (cough, cough, newspapers) should be so lucky.
For some businesses, the current economic downturn is a bit problematic. For those already facing fundamental threats — like newspapers and American automakers — it could accelerate the path to what, it has been said, might be death.
But history offers some reason for optimism. Industries like bicycle manufacturers, when faced with a threat of obsolescence, managed to creatively reinvent themselves. What lessons do they provide for struggling industries?
There's no clear route to cheating industrial death. Those companies that have survived technological challenges have in common some combination of perseverance, creativity, versatility and luck. Their precise strategies vary. Some made sweeping changes, and abandoned their original products entirely; others were able to endure by changing little but their marketing.
Take, for example, a certain class of luxury goods. Inventors have created more user-friendly writing implements than fountain pens, more dependable time-keeping devices than mechanical wristwatches, and more efficient ways to heat houses than fireplaces. Yet, many consumers still gladly opt for the cultural cachet of technologically more primitive goods.
These older technologies have survived by recasting themselves as luxuries and by marketing their sensory, aesthetic and nostalgic appeal. Their producers emphasize their experiential rather than functional qualities.
In short, they were Ye-Olde-ed, and a boutique-y rump of the original industry now survives.
The popularity of newspapers the day after Barack Obama's election — when they were probably valued more as historical artifacts than as sources of news — had a whiff of this development.
But newspapers were not designed with maximum tactile pleasure and durability in mind. "Newspapers were always this scrubby sheet of paper with ink that came off, and that deteriorate in a few hours," said Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California at Davis.
For that reason, he said, it is somewhat difficult to imagine newspapers remarketing themselves as a luxury product.
Perhaps there are other qualities unique to newspapers that can be exploited, just as previous creative industries have discovered when facing disruptive technologies.
Photography might have killed Western painting and portraiture, for example, because painters knew they couldn't compete with the speed and accuracy with which photographs represented the visual world. Instead, many painters and other traditional visual artists innovated with more abstract and less representational images.
Similarly, television might have crowded out movies. Instead, Hollywood focused on bigger, more spectacular, more risqué films — the stuff that television couldn't deliver.
Some survivor industries discovered new customer bases.
Bicycles, for example, grew in popularity in the United States through the late 19th century, peaking in the 1890s, but the craze weakened around the turn of the last century. After the First World War, manufacturers discovered a new youth market, which lasted until the baby boomers were kids. Then bikes fell out of favor again, but were revived during the 1970s when those boomers, and their kids, became more interested in personal exercise and gas-free, environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Radio is an even better example. In its 1940s heyday, it was the center of U.S. national entertainment. Then, in the 1950s, television began stealing radio's biggest stars, like Jack Benny and Abbott and Costello. National advertisers — radio's revenue base — followed the talent. "Radio, actually shockingly, was pronounced dead in 1953," says Susan Douglas, chair of the communication studies department at the University of Michigan.
But the industry revitalized itself by tapping into new markets. First it stumbled upon the youth music market, congregating around the car radio. Then radio innovators found other neglected markets, including underground music movements, longer-form news and talk radio. Along the way, radio's business model changed; the medium cultivated new niche advertisers, rather than national advertisers, to pay for its new niche programming.
For some companies, nestling into a marketing nook wasn't enough. They made radical transitions to new products and new industries, and survived through evolution, not preservation.
"Much of the history of the 'American system of manufacturing' is the story of inventors moving from a declining industry to a new expanding industry," says Petra Moser, an economic historian at Stanford who studies innovation. "Inventors take their skills with them."
Gun makers learned to make revolvers with interchangeable parts in the mid-19th century, Moser says. Then those companies (and some former employees, striking out on their own) applied those techniques to sewing machines when demand for guns slackened. Later, sewing machine manufacturers began making woodworking machinery, bicycles, cars and finally trucks.
Some famous companies have taken more improbable turns, either because their original business was fading or because they saw better growth opportunities. Before making cellphones, Nokia made paper. Before making cars, Toyota made looms (a Toyota textile business still exists). Corning is still a specialty glass and ceramics company known to most consumers for its tableware, but for more than a century it has also profited from uses as diverse as early light bulbs, space, defense and fiber-optic cable.
Some superstar companies managed to reinvent themselves multiple times — IBM, for example. Over a century, the company has nimbly transitioned from punch-card accounting equipment (its original business) to large mainframe computers, to personal computers, and finally to information-technology — each time facing skepticism from analysts who thought IBM might be too big, too old or too entrenched to adapt.
These companies survived by keeping their ears to the ground. New customer needs emerged, and smart corporations positioned themselves to meet them. "You have to be willing to walk away from the things that have made you great," says Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, which consults with companies (including newspapers and automotive businesses) on how to foster a culture of innovation. He argues that the incumbents in the newspaper industry were caught sleeping during the initial meteoric growth period of Web sites like Wikipedia because the avenue for innovation — letting crowds rather than experts aggregate and filter data — seemed so antithetical to what newspapers did well.
Of course, straying too far from what a company does well has also proven dangerous. "If you look at the history of firms that have tried to diversify their businesses, you'll see it's virtually an impossible thing to do," says David Hounshell, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who studies technology and social change. "Usually when a firm announces a program to diversify, they've pretty much written their death warrant."
Newspapers have faced challenges before and have adapted — including through efforts at diversification. Can these historical precedents teach newspapers how to defeat the economic forces of technological change once again?
Like previous industries fearful of obsolescence, newspapers can either develop a new product, or find a way to remarket and remonetize the old one. Right now, newspapers are doing a little of both: They're adapting their product to the Web to attract new audiences, and they're trying to re-monetize by delivering more targeted advertising.
Meanwhile, we've already seen some of the "destruction" half of Joseph Schumpeter's famous "creative destruction" paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry. So a bigger shakeout may yet come.
But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists — or, for that matter, autoworkers — will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/16/news/16rampell.php

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
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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


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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


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Why newspapers need to come up with a paid content model.

Most group think says that paid content models for newspapers won't work.

Well, with current approaches, ideas and technology they won't.

But people like me, who have different approaches, different ideas and different technology don't agree. Problem is: we can't find a newspaper interested in talking about it or the money to invest in making it doable.

If you doubt the need for a paid content model for newspapers, do two things.

The first is to check out my other blog, www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com which is many things but not least of all an active demonstration of the need for newspapers to come up with paid content models.

My view is this, and as an author I obviously have mixed feelings about this: if you can't come up with a paid content model then you're too dumb to deserve not being ripped off by bloggers like me.

Show us a way to pay and we'll pay.

Secondly, read this little gem, which is, need I say it, a pirated article:

Pirated articles costing publishers
The Associated Press
Friday, November 14, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO: The audience for unauthorized copies of newspaper articles online is nearly one and a half times larger than the readership on the newspapers' own Web sites, a study released Thursday found.
Attributor, a company that monitors copyright issues, said media companies could capitalize on the trend if they could figure out a way to get a piece of advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories.
The worst copyright headaches diagnosed in Attributor's study occurred in stories about automobiles, travel and movie reviews. The readership of unlicensed stories in those three categories was four to seven times higher than on the Web sites where the content originated.
Attributor, which makes software that trolls the Internet for copyright violations, estimated that the average Web publisher could collect more than $150,000 annually in additional revenue by selling ads alongside its unlicensed material.
The company said the estimate was based on an assumption that advertisers would pay $1 for every 1,000 pages of unauthorized material viewed on Web sites that are not owned by the copyright owners.
If anything, Attributor believes its calculations understate the loss to publishers. The company is already working with a few media companies that could generate more than $1 million in annual advertising by enforcing their online copyrights, said Rich Pearson, Attributor's vice president of marketing.
"The people creating all this content are not being justly rewarded and publishers are clamoring for every dollar of revenue that they can get in this environment," Pearson said.
Attributor, which is privately held, would stand to profit if it could persuade potential customers that the Internet is riddled with copyright abuses that could translate into more revenue if the poachers were identified. Attributor's customers include The Associated Press, Reuters and The Financial Times.
But the issue of copyright infringement was a sore point for media executives long before the company began developing its detection system in 2006.
Attributor's study reviewed 30 billion Web pages hosting copies of stories from more than 100 major Web sites. None of the sites belonged to Attributor's current customers. After excluding all properly licensed content, Attributor then discarded any page that copied less than 50 percent or fewer than 125 words of a copyrighted story.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/13/business/papers.php

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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

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14

'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
http://www.amazon.com/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/029785173X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225089096&sr=8-1

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.
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Jeff Jarvis vs. Slate on the future of print.

New-media guru is forever down on print, in fact name a media web operation that isn't (hello FishbowlNY - any of this ring any bells).

Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum has had a gutfull and there is lot I agree with in his remarks. There's even more I agree with about Jarvis and the need for newspapers to get fucking real (to paraphrase Jeff).

It's interesting about Jarvis' remarks about newspapers calling him for brainstorming and him asking whether Ron would have him tell them to fuck off and die (quote unquote).

That rings a bell. I know media people who are trying to contact newspapers with ideas and if not being told to fuck off and die, then at least not having their proposals followed-up or emails replied to or calls returned.

The death of print must be fully under control at all these newspapers, in a kind of 'we've got the funeral plans well in hand thanks, we don't need your help, young whipper snapper, to lower the coffin'.

Thank God for big media Strat Planners. They've only had 13 years to spot the iceberg and change direction. Do they ever read what their own journalists have been reporting?

Jeff Jarvis Is Kind of Jerky About Journalism: Daily Intel at nymag

11/12/08 at 12:45 PM

Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum unleashed a fusillade of attacks on new-media guru Jeff Jarvis today for "gloating too much about the death of print." Rosenbaum exhaustively recounts examples from Jarvis's speeches and his blog, showing how the former EW and Daily News editor repeatedly mocks old media institutions and makes claims like: "The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists' fault." Rosenbaum, a journalist who straddles both worlds, is insanely offended, and attacks the writer cum Internet consultant:
Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media consultants. A lot of good, dedicated people who have done actual writing and reporting, as opposed to writing about writing and reporting, have been caught up in this great upheaval, and many of them may have been too deeply involved in, you know, content — "subjects," writing about real peoples' lives — to figure out that reporting just isn't where it's at, that the smart thing to do is get a consulting gig.
"It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting," Rosenbaum asks, lamenting his "contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession." Citing Jarvis's own practice of not reporting out blog posts (and his book on Google), Rosenbaum didn't contact him for comment. But we did, and his response was: "I'll post later today after I — gasp! — teach my class of journalists."
Jarvis calls Rosenbaum a "pissy third-grader" and says he criticizes because he's only trying to help!
I’m not sure what he’d rather have me do: Sit in my room and mope, sitting shiva for the past? Refuse to discuss the future of journalism? Tell newspapers when they call asking for brainstorming to fuck off and die? Would that be in solidarity with my hack brethren who did too little to transform journalism in the last 13 years of the web?
"Whether we save all the journalists today is entirely another matter and not my goal," Jarvis explains. "Rosenbaum believes that makes me heartless. I think it makes me realistic. And we need some realism in this business." It goes on like that for about 1,200 words.
Ugh, if we have to spend any more time meditating on new media today, we're gonna hurl.
Is Jeff Jarvis Gloating About the Death of Print? [Slate]There, There, Ron [BuzzMachine]

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/11/jeff_jarvis_is_kind_of_jerky_a.html

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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

'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


For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

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If the future of newspaper print is so grim, why would progressives imitate the NYT in print to make their point?

I'd say this story about a fake edition of the NYT, circulated in NY yesterday, is about the best news the NYT has had in a long time. Who says print is dead? It isn't, it just isn't giving (younger) people what they want.

It's interesting that this parody/satire was in PRINT and NOT just a web-based venture.

I rest my case.

Not that the ever-anti dead tree gang over at FishbowlNY see fit to make this rather critical point.

By the way, it wasn't the "Yes Men" who did it, it was me (and a few others).

Wednesday, Nov 12 (Fishbowl NY)
The Future of the New York Times is Fake!

Those of you who work in the city are probably already aware that some enterprising souls (Gawker is pointing to the "Yes Men," which seems to be the case) took the future of news into their own hands today and created their own fake(!) New York Times. The spoof paper, which was distributed by thousands of volunteers across the city, was dated July 4, 2009 and ran the headline "Iraq War Ends." By all accounts it was "an exact replica" of the real thing (notwithstanding the content, obviously):
[The fake Times included] International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline.We have yet to see the real thing, but according to people we've talked to it's rather well done — complete with a Thomas Friedman op-ed ("The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write") as well as an apology from the Times for supporting the Iraq war. It even comes with fake ads!
There is even a website to accompany the paper, which was down for much of the morning, is eerily similar to that of the real NYT (except without the page-long Mac ad). As the Times City Room blog noted many of the links lead to "dozens of progressive organizations." Obviously this was a huge and expensive undertaking, but why now?
Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper's writers, tells Romenesko:
"It's all about how at this point, we need to push harder than ever...We've got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do. After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven."Ah yes, heaven. The Times responded to our email (and others' it would seem) thus: "This is obviously a fake issue of The Times. We are in the process of finding out more about it." It's hard to imagine the Times not getting some enjoyment out of such well-done imitation — it is the sincerest form of flattery afterall. Also, we're told that under the parody exception to copyright the Times is pretty much unable to sue.

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
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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

'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

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

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N.B One element of this posting is fake.

What the U.S Elections Told Us About MSM

First-off, print is alive and well. The NYT had increased print runs (35% more copies election Wednesday than usual, an increase of about 150,000. It then added another 75,000) and ran a full-page advert on Thursday offering readers an election result day copy of the paper for a staggering $14.95. Despite the fact that if you check EBay the going rate is $200!

What a bloody shambles, what a chronic sign of miscalculation on their print runs. Only a 35% extra print run? You're kidding me right? They had people queing round the block on Wednesday to buy their paper!!!

Kiosks ran dry, they didn't even believe themselves how many copies they could sell. Absolutely staggering and a sign that not even the NYT's own circulation department believes any longer in the power of print.

The anti-newspaper blogosphere was laughing its head off.

Wednesday, Nov 05
Obama Sells Out Dead Tree Editions of Local Newspapers

We've noticed a number of people twittering and facebooking today that they couldn't find a copy of various papers this morning. Turns out they weren't imagining it! The Daily News sold out of even the extra printed copies of their regular morning edition and planned on printing and distributing an updated second edition. The New York Times reported that the New York Post had also sold-out (in our non-scientifically based experience it is always the first to go) along with the Times.

The [Times] printed 35 percent more papers in the 'single copy' print run, which supplies newsstands. Still, by morning, company officials found that papers were "selling out all across the metropolitan area" and decided to print 50,000 more copies for sale in the New York area.This isn't a New York-based phenomenon, either.

Apparently the Washington Post also sold-out of newsstand copies and the Chicago Tribune was experiencing very long lines. Now if Barack Obama could just do something historic and momentous every single day for the next four years he could feasibly save the entire print journalism industry!

Secondly, Palin: She got a free ride. Not only that but I didn't see a MSM outlet explore this possibility, which happens to be my own personal opinion:

Did the Republican Party of George W. Bush want to win this election? I wonder.

With many of its moderate senators and congressmen unseated, that party still exists and it's not evident it belongs to Senator John McCain.

But either way, this was a hospital pass election if ever there was one. Perhaps either McCain, or the GOP grandees, came to the conclusion that this wasn't a ball they wanted to receive, that only a Democrat administration could wipe clean the slate for the GOP or at least begin to. Were I a Republican party grandee, I'd be quite happy to let the Democrats pick up the check for the last 8 years and try and pay it off, because the chances are they'll end up having to wash dishes in the kitchen to sort this mess out.

McCain began his primary campaign well before the financial meltdown, before the war in Afghanistan was lost, before Mexico began the final journey to becoming a narco state (a government plane crashed on the day of the election, an accident we are told, at least for now, but a fine time for a cartel to murder the U.S.A.'s southern neigbbour's Interior Minister); before Bhutto's assasination and a nuclear Pakistan possibly falling to the Taliban, before the escalation of Iran's nuclear capabalities; beforethe Congo, before India degenerating into ethnic chaos, before global recession/depresssion, before Obama won the democractic primary. Surely he must have realised that the presidency was a poisoned chalice.

Chosing Palin, someone so clearly incompetent and in the very midst of an ethics investigation, a person who who stood a 1 in 8 chance of becoming President, given all the variables, was the equivalent of scuttling his campaign.

McCain may have started out wanting to become President of the U.S.A but by the time it looked like he might actually have a chance, he bailed.Palin moved the undecided and previous moderate republicans firmly to Obama. Race relations in the U.S.A are so appalling that only such a fine W. mess could possibly have allowed a black man to be elected, even a half white one who has spent his entire adult life less than 12 miles from an elite American university campus.

Berlusconi's tasteless remarks about Obama being young, handsome and even tanned pretty much summed up what type of black man is 'in'. Gays on the other hand are still very much 'out' as judged by the large number of anti-gay marriage ballot successes.

Nevertheless there was a photo from the campaign trail of a confederate flag with the slogan "Even Rednecks Have Had Enough". Perhaps so had McCain.

I'll leave someone more eloquent than I to explain this Palin Oversight by papers such as the NYT but MSM failing to nail Palin, as they could and should have done, is cited below as a reason why MSM is imploding:

Andrew Sullivan: The Daily Dish 06 Nov 2008 11:51 am
The Civic Responsibility Of Carl Cameron
Look: I understand that information given strictly off the record cannot be used. I am a stickler for that myself and there's stuff I know that I cannot tell Dish readers because of those rules. But at the same time, my commitment to you is never to bullshit my opinion that reflects that information. And the reporting of Palin fell into that category at times. I became convinced very early - just from public information - that she was obviously a disastrous choice, made on a whim, and obviously not ready for prime time. On August 30, I posted the following quotes from serious leaders in Alaska who knew Palin:
"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"
And this:
Anchorage Democratic state Sen. Hollis French said it's a huge mistake by McCain and "reflects very, very badly on his judgment." French said Palin's experience running the state for less than two years hasn't prepared her for this.
But actual reporters were soon finding this out for themselves - and not even conveying the gist of that to their viewers and readers. Why not?
They kept taking Palin seriously as a veep candidate when she didn't come close to even minimal standards for passing a citizenship test. I'm sorry but I think this is a terrible failing, and it is a reason the mainstream media are imploding. They let the rules of the game over-rule their duty to tell the American people the truth as they began to discover it. The truth is that Sarah Palin had no business whatever being on a national ticket. It was an insanely reckless choice. She could never adequately perform the job of president at a moment's notice, and the McCain campaign and their media enablers were putting this country and the world at serious risk by perpetuating this farce.
It was a farce. And it was a potential threat to national security if anything happened to McCain in office. But they couldn't admit a mistake because it would have killed their campaign, destroying our impression of McCain's judgment and management skills. So they kept this farce alive for two months, putting the country at potentially great risk to massage their own careers. Now they are doing all they can to dump on her. But the dumpage goes both ways. The McCain camp picked Palin and stuck with her far longer than any people who put country first would have. Every reason why she should not have been picked is a reason why McCain should never have been president.


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