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?

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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
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


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



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

http://www.montmartreabbesses.com


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Circulation = Revenue and the Paid Content Dilemma (NYT)

Here are two quotes from a recent article in the NTT by David Carr.

"If more people are reading newspapers and magazines, why should we care whether they are printed on paper?

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for."

The above being the case, isn't it about time old media started working out how to better monetize their content on digital platforms? Obvious question, obvious answer. So why haven't they managed to do it yet?

Here's another received MSM media wisdom:

"The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there."

Thank you for your use of the conditional in that sentence, Mr. Carr, but you're just covering you basaes.

Question: Are you sure about that vision of the blogosphere Mr. Carr?

In the short term perhaps, more difficult to navigate perhaps, but in the long run it would function pretty damn well. Especially with so many collaborative blognetworks springing up, staffed by ex-MSM media journalists.

The Media Equation (NYT)
By DAVID CARR
Published: October 28, 2008
The news that Google settled two longstanding suits with book authors and publishers over its plans to digitize the world’s great libraries suggests that some level of détente could be reached between old media and newIf true, it can’t come soon enough for the news business.
It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.
Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.
It goes on. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago.
The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest paper in the country, which was threatened with closing, will apparently survive, but only after it was announced that the editorial staff would be reduced by 40 percent.
And two weeks ago, TV Guide, one of the famous brand names in magazines, was sold for one dollar, less than the price of a single copy.
The paradox of all these announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem — newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news, and growing — but they do have a consumer problem.
Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.
Historically, people took an interest in the daily paper about the time they bought a home. Now they are checking their BlackBerrys for alerts about mortgage rates.
“The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem,” said Clay Shirky, the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones.”
For readers, the drastic diminishment of print raises an obvious question: if more people are reading newspapers and magazines, why should we care whether they are printed on paper?
The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.
More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.
The difference between print dollars and digital dimes — or sometimes pennies — is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.
New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood’s nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff. And dozens of communities served by Gannett will have fewer reporters and editors overseeing the deeds and misdeeds of local government and businesses.
The authors and book publishers looking for royalties from the Google deal may be the lucky ones in the old media sweepstakes. Print publishers are madly cutting, in part because the fourth quarter, postfinancial crisis, is going to be a miserable one. Advertising from the car industry, retail business and financial services — for years, the three sturdy legs of a stool that print once rested comfortably on — are in steep decline.
So who can still afford to pay for the phone calls that reporters have to make? USA Today was made exempt from the current rounds of cuts at Gannett but even national papers, including The New York Times, have resorted to modest staff cuts over the last year. The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there.
At the recent American Magazine Conference, one of the speakers worried that if the great brands of journalism — the trusted news sources readers have relied on — were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a “cesspool” of useless information. That kind of hand-wringing is a staple of industry gatherings.
But in this case, it wasn’t an old journalism hack lamenting his industry. It was Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.

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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

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Amazon.com

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People will pay for content and internet advertising is over-rated.

O.K, TimesSelect was a failure (sorry, a success, but an ad model was better) we are told. And there a lot of believers out there who want you to believe that there is no future in paid content.

I disagree.

On the reader side there is heaps of content I would pay for, content I shamelessly nick and post in full on this blog just to demonstrate the fact that there is content that I personally would pay for and don't have to.

On the ad side, a lot of these ad networks (300 by last count?) are delivering poor value to advertisers because their metrics systems are poor (at best).

And, back to the reader, they are often annoying, and for the advertiser don't offer the impact of print. Way, way too much inventory and poor industry pricing models.

There are people who don't run with the sheep, the FT is one of them.

Where we're at with the Internet and media is NOT a crisis point but THE VERY VERY BEGINNING of what will come: better thought out models - that exploit audience fragmentation, not fight against it; better technology for monetizing content; changing user demands and habits.

I hate the cliche carpe diem, but this is the day to go for it.

When is the NYT Company going to demonstrate they can do this?

FT.com focuses on "quality not quantity (Editors Weblog)

Posted by Alisa Zykova on October 28, 2008 at 10:29 AM

As we reported yesterday, FT.com has launched the Long Room page on the Alphaville blog. In an interview today, Managing Editor Robert Grimshaw reported that the website will not be participating in monthly traffic measures by the UK's Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCes), because its focus is on "quality not quantity."

Grimshaw said that online news sources in the UK that have cut back on advertising and stopped charging for their content may experience difficulties in the future in the event of declines in advertising revenue. "We think it's philosophically right. We've produced some hugely valuable content and we know for a fact that our users are prepared to pay for it," says Grimshaw. "It's about using the flexibility of the access model and the business model overall."Grimshaw thinks that his site's competitors are too reliant on the advertising industry, whereas FT.com aspires to "carve out its own path online," according to Journalism.co.uk.

Long Room's content will adhere to FT.com's business structure and will be "high-level" and "intellectually charged", but will not propagate "expertise."

In March, the site attained 7.1 million users, although it is more interested in the 500,000 to a million senior users.
Source: Journalism.co.uk
http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2008/10/uk_ftcom_focuses_on_quality_not_quantity.php

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Paid Content at WSJ

Group think says there's no future in paid content. The WSJ begs to differ and it was while visiting their site for my normal first two paras free of charge that I was presented with a full article under this header.

This prompted me just to take a look at their current offers and marketing. This house ad on top right hand corner of their home page.

This adclick takes you through to three offers, off a 2 week free trial automatic renewal offer:

2 Weeks Free(54 weeks in total) with your payment when you purchase

1 year of WSJ.com + the Print Journal

Print Journal
1 year for $89

WSJ.com
1 year for $89

WSJ.com +Print Journal
1 year for $99

All looking good. I'm in Europe, the dollar is a peso; I've had a subscription before but I can get round that - marginally alter my name and new address. Old trick.

They nearly had me.

Before I read the small print:

This is a special offer made available only for first time annual subscribers. Thereafter, your subscription will be renewed automatically at the then-current annual rate. You will be notified of any rate changes in advance. Savings percentage based on 52-week newsstand price for The Journal print edition plus the standard 1-year rate for The Online Journal. Offers good for new subscriptions for a limited time only. Newspaper delivery is only available in the contiguous U.S. Sales tax may apply.

Good, simple, clear marketing and a timely moment given the financial crisis to tempt me in with a full sample article (we can argue about pros and cons of automatic renewal offers subject to seeing their conversion data - as a consumer I personally never bite, but as a marketer I know they work).

However, they've forgotton one rather important fact: this offer is on something called the world wide web, their offer is for contiguous U.S only, I live in France and no option to click through to WSJE.

Mr. Murdoch, your subscription marketing people are asleep on the job. In Manhattan-centricitis land.

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Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media (WSJ)

ADVERTISING
OCTOBER 14, 2008
Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media
Special Software in Cellphones Measures Customers' Exposure to Marketing on TV, Radio and Movies

For years, marketers measured the reach of their ads one medium at a time. For TV, it generally was Nielsen; for radio, Arbitron; newspapers and magazines report circulation figures; while the Internet shows hits and page views and other traffic data.
But there haven't been many ways to measure an ad campaign across all of these media at once.
A small media research company called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to bridge that research gap with a new technology that measures consumers' exposure to the audio in ads on television, radio, computers, mobile phones, DVDs and inside a movie theatre -- using a consumer's cellphone.

NBC is among the networks using the cellphone-based data

to track how people watch shows like 'Saturday Night Live.'

The Internet's ability to produce evidence on the effectiveness of ads -- such as how many people viewed an ad and whether or not they clicked on it -- has led to something of an industry obsession with new forms of measurement. The financial crisis promises to make marketers even more reluctant to risk money on ads, especially if they can't keep score on how effective the spots are. Meanwhile, media fragmentation continues, as big-tent events like the Olympic Games and the Super Bowl are consumed in more and different ways.
"People don't know how to measure the multimedia world we live in, so any piece of the puzzle is helpful," says Brad Bortner, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
IMMI embeds its software into the cellphones of the company's 4,900 panelists. The software picks up audio from an ad or a TV show and converts it into its own digital code that is then uploaded into an IMMI database, which includes codes for media content such as TV shows, commercials, movies and songs.
IMMI's database then figures out what the cellphone was exposed to by matching the code. Cellphone conversations and background noise are filtered out by the software, IMMI says, since there is no "match" in the IMMI database.
To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI's data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain.

"We follow the same person from end to end," says Tom Zito, IMMI's chief executive.
IMMI isn't the first company to attempt this kind of measurement, but past efforts were stymied by the costs of creating a large-scale panel. IMMI's use of cellphones means that consumers don't have to labor over diaries or push buttons, says Mr. Zito, who worked for years as a journalist and rock critic before launching a number of Silicon Valley start-ups since the mid-1980s.
IMMI is still a tiny company, especially compared with competitors like Nielsen Media Research. The company's 4,900-person panel has teenagers and adults in just six major markets -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Denver. IMMI panelists are paid $50 a month or receive free phone and data service in exchange for making the cellphone their primary phone, and carrying it with them at all times.
But the San Mateo, Calif.-company has managed to attract the attention of movie studios and broadcast networks like General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC. NBC has used IMMI data to track how people watch shows like "Heroes" or big sporting events like the Beijing Olympic Games.
While the technology isn't perfect, IMMI is helping NBC answer questions about how viewers watch its programming, says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC. "I'm convinced the handset will be the way we will measure media going forward," he says.
Still, IMMI is unlikely to change the way marketers develop ad campaigns. Mark Loughney, vice president of sales and strategy research at ABC, says that IMMI's panel is still too small to make long term decisions. "For now, it's a supplement, not a replacement to what we use," he says.
IMMI also doesn't measure outdoor or print ads, or Internet ads that don't use audio.

But the company is already getting the attention of big competitors like Nielsen, which teamed up with IMMI to sell a service that tracks ad exposure in places like bars, health clubs, hotels and the office. Walt Disney's ESPN and Zenith Media have already signed up for the service.

http://online.wsj.com:80/article/SB122394454320231201.html

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Ad Pullback Doesn't Spare National TV (WSJ)

WSJ.com

OCTOBER 13, 2008

Economic anxiety may be seeping into some of the more insulated parts of the media world, including national advertising on U.S. cable- and broadcast-television networks.
In a bad sign for the media sector's third-quarter earnings, both Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. cut their 2008 profit forecasts Friday, citing weakness in ad sales and the slowing economy.
The disclosures come as ad executives are seeing more cuts in already-soft ad spending, as a result of the upheaval in global financial markets. "We see reductions coming from all sectors," said Maurice Levy, chief executive of Publicis Groupe SA, one of the world's ...

I'd like to give you more of this but the WSJ has a .....paid content model.

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Campaign articles from Newsweek become e-books for Amazon Kindle

Campaign articles from Newsweek become e-books for Amazon Kindle
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Monday, October 13, 2008
It would seem to be a magazine's dream in these straitened times: Take something you have already published and sold, repackage it and distribute it without all that expense of paper, ink and trucks, and then sell it again.
This week, Newsweek will publish four books, one about each of the major presidential and vice presidential candidates — Senators John McCain, Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, and Governor Sarah Palin — books that will not appear in print but will be available only as e-books from Amazon.com for download to Amazon's Kindle device.
The books will contain versions of articles that Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Company, has already published during the campaign. Turning this kind of collection into books is an old idea; what is new is to do it with such minimal production and distribution costs that even the most limited sales could be profitable.
Amazon says this is probably the first such venture by a publication, but it is not likely to be the last.
"We think it's a very interesting model that could broaden," said Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle reading device. "This could start to change the way at least some books are published."
The books, at $9.99, will go on sale Wednesday and can be ordered starting Monday.
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, approached Amazon with the idea about a month ago. The use of material published over the course of the campaign points to another advantage of digital books: a fast turnaround time.
"Every magazine editor thinks their stuff should be in an anthology, but that's hard to do economically," Meacham said. "Here's a way of doing it more quickly and with virtually no overhead. This is competing in the digital space with our traditional strengths, and that's been hard to do."
News magazines, like newspapers, have struggled financially, with circulation and advertising in decline. The economic downturn has cut deeply into advertising, while the magazines are forced to compete with many sources of information available instantly, and usually free, on the Internet.
The Kindle, introduced in November, costs $359. Amazon offers 180,000 books for wireless download, along with more than 40 newspapers and magazines.
The potential audience may be voracious, but it remains relatively small — Amazon will not say how many Kindles it has sold. Industry analysts have estimated that the figure is in the low hundreds of thousands.
But the experiment is appealing "because anyone who owns a Kindle is someone we want as a reader," Meacham said. "We're putting it in front of committed readers."

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People paying for content? I thought that wasn't supposed to exist.

Here's one to watch.

TECHNOLOGY (WSJ.com)
OCTOBER 3, 2008
Sirius Unveils Raft of Options for Programs

Looking to boost its revenue and number of subscriptions, Sirius XM Satellite Radio Inc. Thursday announced a range of new programming options that lets subscribers buy programming from both of the recently merged rival services.
The moves are the New York company's first steps toward boosting and integrating the services of the former Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio Holdings since their merger was completed earlier this year. A new programming package known as "Best of Both" lets subscribers receive a range of stations from each for $16.99 a month, $4 more than the $12.95 a month most XM ...

I would like to give you more info from wsj.com but, well, I'd have to pay for the content and apparently people do.......

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Celebs, Hollywood and all that Jazz in the International Herald Tribune

Once upon a time the People column did me nicely. Now I don't even read that.

I do like the film festival reporting (especially the IHT's Joan Dupont) and the occassional MSM movie A.O Scott review.


And that's about all I want, personally. Things are going on in the world beyond Britney.


So I was a little alarmed to read this report about the creation of a dedicated media desk at the NYT.


One thing I can tell you, is that when the NYT did a stack load of research on IHT readers, they found out we love movies (true) and that led to more movie coverage. So that's all good. But please, no more Britney.

I must say, Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily isn't very complimentary about either the NYT's existing media coverage, nor the proposed structure and personnel of the new media desk.








The 411 Behind NYT's New Media Desk...




UPDATE: David Carr sends along this email to me: "My job has not changed. I do Culture/Oscars for Sam Sifton and a Monday media column for Bruce Headlam, two of the best editors in a building that has its share. I love working for both and will sit where ever they tell me to, although I don't think it matters much."

It's Business. It's Culture. It's Business. It's Culture... Finally, The New York Times is solving its Chinatown-like infotainment dilemma and setting up a dedicated Media desk physically and symbolically located between the other two sections on the paper's 3rd floor. "This culture clash between Business and Culture for years has annoyed the top of the masthead," an insider told me, referring to Bill Keller, Jill Abramson and John Geddes. "They think reporters have been working at cross purposes because there's nothing clearly defined where a certain kind of media story belongs. Look at our writers strike coverage: half went into Business, half went into Culture."

The Media editors and reporters announced Tuesday draw equally from the Business and Culture sections, including movies and television, yet there are some important names missing. (See below).

The official memo described the beat thusly: "Convergence is the biggest story in media and entertainment today. Hollywood studios are investing millions in online television, people are reading newspapers on their iPhones and bloggers and YouTube are turning even presidential election campaigns into homegrown affairs. By the end of the decade, we might all be watching Lost on our shoephones. Accordingly, we are doing some convergence of our own, and today announce the birth of a new and expanded media desk for The Times, joining reporters and editors from Business Day and Culture under one banner to cover media news for both desks... It will feed the news needs of both, as well as the feature wells of Sunday Business and Arts & Leisure, among other outlets."

The real story behind this move is that the paper's top editors want to shake the staff covering movies, TV, Big Media, advertising and related beats out of what is perceived as a stupor. "The top of the masthead want more media stories. They want newsier reporting and they want people to work harder," a source explained to me. "No one has said that, but it's obvious." (Certainly to me and the Wall Street Journal. But the last thing I want is for the NY Times and the LA Times to start covering the infotainment beat more aggressively. Because then there'd be less scoops for me to break.)

Bruce Headlam, currently the editor of the Monday edition of Business Day, will top edit the Media desk.

Underneath him will be editors Rick Lyman and Steve Reddicliffe.

The reporters will be Tim Arango, Brooks Barnes, Bill Carter, Michael Cieply, Stephanie Clifford, Stuart Elliott, Richard Perez-Pena, Motoko Rich, Jacques Steinberg, Brian Stelter, and Ed Wyatt.

Editors and writers alike will answer to both business editor Larry Ingrassia and culture editor Sam Sifton.

But that very fact seems to just re-create the turf war this Media desk was supposed to solve. What the fuck?

You'd think media reporter and part-time movie blogger David Carr would be the Media desk's star. Nope. I'm told he's staying put in Culture, where he'll become more of an all-around critic, although he's being copied on all the Media desk memos to keep him in the loop. (Carr does a lot of things well, but breaking news isn't one of them.)

As for movie editor Lorne Manly, who's also missing-in-action, his current status is even more confusing.

Manly came to the NYT as a media writer/editor, then became media editor, then became media writer, then became movie editor. Now there's a Media desk and he's not on it. (Understandable, because Manly's oversight has been more like undersight: his reporter Michael Cieply has missed major story after major story.) I'm told that he'll stay in Culture to edit features and some of the critics.

Plus, there's ex-Hollywood business reporter Laura Holson, who now covers mostly cell phone stuff out of the paper's headquarters and should be included in this attempt at convergence, but isn't.

Didn't the NYT memo specifically refer to shoephones? (Or else someone saw the Get Smart remake once too often...)

Look, if the NY Times editors really want to shake up the paper's coverage of infotainment, the way to do it ain't rocket science. Simply tell reporters to stop believing anything the CEOs tell them. (And I do mean Tim Arango and Bill Carter specifically. Arango's recent softball lobbed to Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes was an embarrassment. And Carter's never-ending regurgitation of every TV chief's corporate line crap is unforgiveable.) Only then can truth-telling start.

http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com:80/behind-the-scenes-of-new-nyt-media-desk/

Anyone think there's a future in paid content?

The received wisdom is that newspapers will save themselves via the Internet and other platforms.

But that's going to have to revolve around getting advertising CPMs up, because the idea of future generations paying for general interest content seems a poor one to rely on, given how there is already a perception that Internet = Free.

Combine that with a new moral compass on copyright among the young, and a willingess to rip even highly specialised content (once considered the saviour for the paid content model), well, then it's back to the drawing board on paid conent models.

Witness this little peach (which as an author I feel super about, but understand):

DIGITAL DOMAIN
First it was song downloads. Now it's Organic Chemistry.

After scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for "all publishers" of college textbooks, warning them that "myself and all other students are tired of getting" ripped off. (The contributor's message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.) All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere. Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John McMurry's "Organic Chemistry." A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it's about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/27/technology/27digi.php



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