Digital Media

NEW YORK--Manhattan is the center of book publishing, all four music labels have headquarters here, and it's home to the country's largest general newspaper.

(Credit: New York magazine)

But even in the Big Apple, many people appear unwilling to pay for media.

New York magazine conducted an apparently unscientific poll of 100 pedestrians in Manhattan's SoHo district and it revealed some startling and humorous results.

Few of those polled are willing to pay for The New York Times. Asked whether they subscribe to the paper, 79 said no. Asked how much they would be willing to pay to read the paper online, 63 said "nothing." To the question of how charging a fee to read the paper online would affect The Times, 65 answered that it would make it less successful.

The good news for the music industry was that 34 of the respondents say they pay for all their music. The bad news is that 61 acknowledged obtaining at least some of their music illegally.

As for downloading TV shows illegally via BitTorrent files, seven of those polled said "all the time." Five said never." 38 said only if they miss a show on TV. 12 asked "What the hell is a torrent?"

When it came to books, the respondents were much more willing to pay and don't appear to be Kindle fans. Check it out.

Google executives have been spending an awful lot of time of late talking about journalism in the 21st century, and reports surfaced Monday that it has been thinking about putting its money where its mouth is.

Two reports--by Fortune and The Washington Post--suggest that Google has been talking to both The New York Times and the Post about possible areas of collaboration, or even investment. The Post's Howard Kurtz says Google has been talking to executives at the paper "about improved ways of creating and presenting news online," quoting fellow Post employee and former managing editor Philip Bennett, who is currently working on analyzing the future of the news business for The Washington Post Company.

It's not clear what exactly that might entail, but the talks "range from creating new Web pages to technological tools for journalists or readers," Kurtz wrote. A Google representative told MediaMemo "This was an informal meeting, and we're always talking with publishers to find new and creative ways to help them make money from compelling online content."

Separately, Fortune reports that Google was approached about taking a financial stake in The New York Times, giving the idea a serious look before eventually deciding not to pursue the matter. MediaMemo notes that Times staffers were told during a meeting today that their company is also in talks with Google about presumably the same kinds of collaboration that The Washington Post is kicking around.

Google has always disdained the idea of producing its own content, and would therefore at first glance seem an unlikely owner of The New York Times. But Google clearly has a fair amount of money to throw around, and a keen interest in staying at the center of the world's demand for information.

Despite all the rancor directed its way from some corners of the publishing industry, healthy media companies are definitely in Google's best interest. After all, a stranglehold on searches for the Web content produced by those companies is part of what gives Google all that money, and therefore power.

This is the second part to my early analysis of the new Kindle DX large-format e-book reader. In the first post ("Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview") I discussed the physical and software features of the new device. In the third post, "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", I'll talk about how the DX will fit into the educational market.

The new Kindle DX is larger than the Kindle 2 with more than twice the screen resolution.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

But here, let's talk about the DX's suitability for reading electronic newspapers.

Newspapers are about text, and there's only a moderate need for interactivity. For each story, the reader views the headline and perhaps skims the opening paragraph, and if it doesn't look interesting, moves on to the next story.

Even with these relatively undemanding requirements, the Kindle DX isn't as good for reading newspapers as a real newspaper. We're all used to the ability to glance over a full newspaper page worth of articles at once. You can't do that with the Kindle.

This issue boils down to the amount of time we spend reading articles vs. the amount of time we spend glancing at headlines and turning pages. Call that the "reading ratio." A real newspaper offers a very high reading ratio even if we're not reading much of the paper, because it takes so little time to flip through the pages looking for articles to read.

On the Kindle DX, the ratio will depend very heavily on how much of the paper we're reading. For those who just read through the whole paper, the ratio can be fairly high, probably 90 percent or better. It'll still be lower than a real newspaper because it takes a certain amount of time to turn the virtual pages of the Kindle, and page turning is much more frequent.

(Demonstration videos seem to show that page turning takes about the same amount of time on the DX as on the earlier Kindles.)

For those who read only a fraction of the stories in the day's paper, the reading ratio of the Kindle DX will be much worse than a real newspaper because the experience will be dominated by page turning. Since most of us can't simply increase the amount of time we spend reading the paper each day, I'm afraid that the Kindle approach to e-news will actually reduce the amount of news we read.

It's also worth comparing the Kindle e-news experience with that of the iPhone and a laptop. These devices have active displays with fast update rates, greatly reducing the page-turning delays. I use The New York Times application on my iPhone pretty regularly (once or twice a week, at least), and it's really quite easy to flick through the day's top stories, which appear on the iPhone with the headline, a thumbnail photo, and usually about half of the lede.

On the other hand, the delay to read the story itself is quite long, since the Times' iPhone software is not designed to pre-load the stories, as the Kindle does. The iPhone takes about 10 seconds to bring up a story once selected, but once it's in, there are no further delays. The rest of the story scrolls past as fast as I want to flick through it.

At home, on my laptop, The New York Times Web site is even faster. It's easy to skim the titles and ledes of about a dozen stories on the main page for each "section," and loading a story takes no more than a second or two. Once loaded, again, there are no further delays.

The Kindle DX simply can't deliver that kind of e-news experience because the screen technology is inherently too slow to support scrolling or fast page-turning.

In fact, it looks like the Kindle DX isn't even taking full advantage of its own capabilities. The newspaper interface is very basic: one wide column of text, not the multiple narrow columns that help us skim through real newspapers. I wonder why?

But again, I think the DX will do an adequate job for people who like to read most of the day's news stories. How much of the market that is, I can't guess, but I suspect it's a higher fraction among older, wealthier customers.

(Now, continue on to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: E-textbooks", or return to "Early analysis of Amazon's Kindle DX: Overview".)

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera says lots of people in print journalism know aggregating news is fair but said "this knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership."

(Credit: Gabe Rivera)

Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a "parasite" or "tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet."

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it's unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On the same day that Thomson made his comments, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the The Associated Press, sized up how many in print journalism feel about sites that aggregate news: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore."

But Gabe Rivera, who founded Techmeme, a popular tech-news aggregation site, suggests that Techmeme displays only a short snapshot of a story. This, says Rivera, serves only to promote the content.

"All successful Web publishers want their content quoted and linked," Rivera wrote in an e-mail to CNET News. "The benefits are clear. Some prefer that the quotes remain short...these are precisely the kind that Google and Techmeme use. So for AP and News Corp. to discourage quoting is a clue that they don't really get the Web and are in danger of shooting themselves in the foot."

Rivera also noted that the Journal and The New York Times also aggregate news.

"It's illuminating to observe that both WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators," Rivera wrote. "Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership."

The Journal and Times do have cooperative exchanges with some publications. Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, operates the Factiva service, a database of business stories and other information, which has financial arrangements with numerous news outlets. But the Journal does aggregate some Web content without compensating owners, according to a source with knowledge of the company's business partnerships.

On Tuesday, Google defended itself and other aggregation sites in a blog post.

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," wrote Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray on Google's blog. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rights' holder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."

Both Thomsom and Singleton hinted that their companies may consider mounting legal challenges to sites that package news stories without permission.

AUSTIN, Texas--The future of news is not breadlines for journalists, a lack of reporting on politicians' scandals, and a dearth of coverage of what's really going on behind the lines of wars around the world.

In fact, a surprisingly optimistic author Steven Johnson said Friday during his talk, "The Ecosystem of News," at the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), there's actually a bright future for news and the best hope for a vibrant, effective, and worthwhile news-gathering community is to look back at the model set over the last decade or so in technology journalism.

Steven Johnson

These days, there's no shortage of signs that the news business is collapsing in on itself, unable to develop a modern business model, and confused by how to tackle the threats posed by online classified sites like Craigslist and amateur bloggers posting news items obsessively and continuously.

And where many see these signs pessimistically as proof that the news business as we know it is dead, Johnson, whose books include "The Invention of Air" and "Emergence," sees the same fate as a good thing. After all, he suggested, why cling to failed systems when new ones that are rising to meet the needs of the future are emerging all on their own?

Johnson began his talk by framing what he called "old growth media," the traditional combination of newspapers, magazines, and television news. He recalled how, when he was in college in the late 1980s, he used to stalk his local bookstore around the same time every month, eager for the latest issue of Macworld.

Back in those days, he said, the best way to get the most recent news about what Apple was up to was to read periodicals like Macworld. Yet, with the long lead times of monthly magazines, that latest news was always several months late, Johnson said. Later, when things like CompuServe came along, he was able to compress the timeframe for getting the most up-to-date Apple news to a few days by downloading the most recent issue of Macweek.

And then along came the Web, and sites like MacInTouch.com, Apple's first site, rumor blogs, and fan sites, Johnson said, which made it finally possible to get the latest Mac news in near real-time. "Now the lag is seconds," Johnson said, "thanks to people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs speech."

Today, he said, many people are panicking as newspapers fail left and right, and as they see the likelihood that as a result, the crucial newsgathering role played by professional journalists will disappear with their dying employers. Yet the example set in technology journalism should give such pessimists something to feel good about, Johnson said.

And just because the impressive advances in newsgathering on the Web were seen first in technology journalism doesn't mean they won't spread to more mainstream--read: important--topics like local government, crime, and so forth.

"The Web...just has a tendency to cover technology first," Johnson said, "because the first people to use the Web were much more interested in technology than" things like school board meetings.

The point? That the model is established, and that for consumers of news, the example set in technology news should be cause for optimism, even if not for the health of the traditional news business. And the proof? Johnson pointed to politics, and the coverage of presidential campaigns.

He said that the first campaign he followed closely was in 1992. His main sources for the most up-to-date news were TV shows like CNN's "Crossfire" and magazines like Newsweek, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. At the same time, he said he watched each of that year's debates religiously and stayed up late to devour the post-game analysis on networks like CNN.

And while all of those outlets still existed during the 2008 election (except "Crossfire"), someone sticking to them last fall would have been hopelessly out of the loop compared to the millions of people who were obsessively glued to the Internet, which was delivering an unbelievable amount of coverage of all kinds about the election.

Johnson talked about how blogs like TalkingPointsMemo.com, HuffingtonPost.com, FiveThirtyEight.com, DailyKos, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish--one could determine his political bent by the sites he mentioned--served up a steady flow of breaking news and in-depth analysis never before possible during a presidential election. Add that to the fact that he could watch the debates with "a thousand virtual friends Twittering away with me" and the fact that as many as 8 million people watched President Obama's famous race speech on YouTube, and it's obvious that the political news ecosystem, like that of technology, has found a way to move past the antiquated models of just a few years ago.

"What's happening with technology and politics is happening elsewhere as well," Johnson said, "just on a different timetable."

Local news, once the lifeblood of newspapers, is unlikely to be so in the future. Papers like The New York Times can no longer afford to cover neighborhood stories that interest a small subsection of a much larger readership. Yet, it's those very issues that are of most interest to the people in those neighborhoods, Johnson said.

"Most of what we care about in our local lives is in the long tail," he said, referring to the ability of the Web to bring news about the smallest events to those who want it. And, of course, even the Times itself is now starting to cover neighborhoods with blogs.

"Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half-mile of my house," Johnson said, "and I don't get an e-mail alert about it within half an hour, it'll be a sign that something is broken."

And as more and more of this long tail-type of news is covered by those other than professional journalists, Johnson argued, it might well free up those professionals to work on the very kinds of stories that people worry they won't be able to do in the future: war coverage, investigations, and the like.

The key, then, will be for the traditional publications to serve the role of public gatekeepers, or filterers of the flood of information coming in from the amateur Web. And that, Johnson suggested, would be a natural task for the editors of institutions known for their authority: newspapers and TV news networks. And while the readership of physical newspapers has plummeted, the numbers for those publications' online sites has risen dramatically, proving that the audience is still there.

In the end, however, it will be the entire ecosystem of news that will bring the full value to news consumers. It will be social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which can serve as link circulators, as well as large group filters like Digg and, yes, professional journalists and editors. All together, the news will get covered, Johnson said.

The problem is that what should have been a 10-year ecosystem evolution for the news business has been forced into a much more compressed timeframe by today's financial exigencies. And this sense of panic has caused us, as a society, to lose sight of what, in Johnson's view, is a very positive long-term change.

"We need to remind ourselves that there's a lot of value" in this ecosystem and what it will become in the future," Johnson said. But "it's tough to live through transformations."

By using semacodes, The New York Times could in the future make it possible for users with cell phone cameras to quickly and easily get access to the paper's latest video stories, as well as movie trailers and other video content, all by photographing the special digital symbols.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

SAN JOSE, Calif.--By now, just about everyone who follows the media industry has heard of the deep fiscal troubles of The New York Times. But even as the paper does its best for all the news that's fit for newsprint, it is also conducting experiments aimed at moving itself into the forefront of digital journalism.

At the Emerging Technologies conference (ETech) on Tuesday, Nick Bilton, the design integration editor and user interface specialist at the Times' research and development lab, spoke about "sensors, smart content, and the future of news," essentially a recap of some of the most forward-thinking projects coming from the tech-savvy minds at the paper of record.

Bilton explained that the Times' R&D lab is divided into three main subject areas: emerging platforms, analytics, and core R&D. As a member of the latter team, Bilton said he and four colleagues are devoting their time to researching new technologies that are 5 to 10 years out, particularly at systems involving innovative digital advertising.

Among the projects he talked about, one done in conjunction with software maker Adobe Systems seemed particularly appropriate in a world where everyone has a different size display and uses windows of infinitely varied sizes within their browsers. Bilton explained that the project is aimed at automatically resizing and reformatting data onscreen for whatever sized window in which the user is reading the Times, or its sister publication, the International Herald Tribune.

"When I resize the screen, it re-lays out and reformats the (data)," Bilton said. "It's a really unique way to resize and reformat data for different sized displays.

And he said that the Times' R&D lab is also looking intently at touch-screen devices in an attempt to best understand how usage of such technology impacts how readers experience the news.

Another innovative concept he talked about is what he called "smart content," a system that would keep track of what users have read digitally across all devices. So, under this system, for example, if a reader has looked at a story on their computer and then loads the Times on their iPhone, that story would be grayed out on the assumption that the reader wants to be presented only with the most meaningful data.

Bilton then talked about a digital take on the traditional street newspaper box, those banal metal containers which take your quarters and (usually) give you a copy of the paper. In the lab, the Times is experimenting with a machine, called "CustomTimes," that looks like a newspaper box with a computer monitor on it. The idea is that those who find the boxes--most likely in controlled indoor settings so that they aren't stolen--will be able to peruse Times content in the manner that best suits their needs, allowing them to print the stories they want at the touch of a few buttons.

A member of The New York Times research and development lab looks at a CustomTimes machine, which is essentially a digital newspaper box that allows users to choose the precise Times content they want and print it.

(Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

And in a nod to the fact that newspaper printing deadlines often force publications like the Times to close their earliest editions before results from things like elections or sporting events are known, the paper is also experimenting with a system in which users reading stories with incomplete results can send text messages and have final tallies sent to their mobile devices.

Similarly, Bilton said the paper is trying out a semacode system in which users with cell phone cameras can take pictures of the special, digital codes embedded in, say, movie advertisements and their phones could auto-load trailers for the film. The same would be true of any kind of video content the Times might offer, including its latest video stories, all of which could be available to users with mobile phones with cameras.

And, leveraging mobile phones with built-in GPS, the Times is also thinking about serving up localized content to users, Bilton said, as well as technology that could determine that if a user travels between cell towers at high speeds--likely because they're in a car--stories could be served up in an audio format.

Another interesting system Bilton talked about was one that could integrates Times' content in readers' homes, and in particular, on their Internet-connected TVs. He explained that the Times may offer APIs and that an example of how they could be used would be to auto-detect how far a reader is from their TV. And depending on the distance, the system could automatically change the layout of the content to match the distance and the optimal size of text.

To be sure, much of these ideas are quite a ways off, but some might be in the near future. And for the Times, this is definitely an important time to be taking the lead on digital innovation given that the paper is in serious financial shape and there's been talk about it shutting down its print edition.

Bilton seemed to say that the end of printed newspapers was nowhere near, and that no matter what technology comes along, there will always be a printed edition of the Times. But that may be wishful thinking. Still, regardless of whether you can still pick up an actual paper New York Times or not, there is little doubt that digital is the direction that will dominate in the future. And it's fitting, and crucial, that the journalistic institution that just about everyone else looks to for leadership takes the lead in moving the profession forward.

Despite a virtual meltdown in the newspaper industry, the nation's top 10 online newspapers posted a 16 percent increase in December Web traffic, according to a report released Tuesday by Nielsen Online.

Such results bode well for an industry that is currently undergoing tumultuous times, with a growing number of pulp-based publications contemplating bankruptcy, scaling back delivery days, or switching to an online-only format, as readership continues to decline and advertisers shift their spending online.

Unique visitors in the month of December rose to 40.1 million, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the report.

Chuck Schilling, Nielsen Online's research director agency and media, noted in a statement:

Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth.

News coverage in December ranged from how the 2008 holiday season would be affected by the weakening economy to Obama's latest nomination for his administration, all of which helped to drive this impressive growth.

The New York Times posted a 6 percent increase in its December Internet traffic to 18.2 million unique visitors, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the report.

USA Today jumped 15 percent to 11.4 million unique visitors and The Washington Post climbed 12 percent to 9.5 million.

Publications posting substantial increases included the New York Daily News with a staggering 99 percent increase to 5.9 million, the Los Angeles Times with a 73 percent jump to 8 million and the New York Post with a 60 percent increase to 4.6 million.

Despite such gains, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which audits the paid circulation figures of publications, noted the six-month average for the top 25 U.S. Sunday newspapers, dropped by 3.2 percent to 7.2 percent for the period ending in September, over year ago figures. The Washington Post fell 3.2 percent, while the New York Daily News dropped 7.2 percent.

Schilling noted:

The challenge for newspaper publishers today is to learn how to capitalize on this active online readership and translate their increasing engagement into revenue.

A publisher of mostly small, local newspapers has sued the New York Times Co. over its aggregation of news headlines on Boston.com, challenging the practice many sites use of linking to other sources.

In its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts on Monday, Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media, which publishes more than 100 papers in Massachusetts, accuses the Times of violating copyright by allowing its Boston Globe online unit to copy verbatim the headlines and first sentences from articles published on sites owned by GateHouse, including the Newton Tab.

The links, as seen on Boston.com's Newton site for instance, lead to the original articles on the GateHouse-owned sites, which display advertising. However the lawsuit claims GateHouse is losing advertising revenue as a result of the linking because readers don't see the ads on the GateHouse site's home page.

The linking also confuses readers, leading them to believe that GateHouse endorses the linking practice, according to the lawsuit.

Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications at the New York Times, said the linking practice is commonly used around the Web and that GateHouse's claims are without merit.

"Boston.com's local pages, like hundreds of other news sites, aggregate headlines and snippets of relevant stories published on the Web. They link back to the originating site where the interested user can read the entire article," she wrote in a statement.

"Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web," Mathis wrote. "It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site."

In an e-mail sent to GateHouse staff, an executive said GateHouse had taken the legal action after being unable to resolve the matter informally.

"GateHouse has taken this step to enforce its rights under the law and protect the integrity of its trademarks and original news content, in furtherance of its ability to provide hyper-local news coverage to its newspaper readers and website viewers in the communities throughout the greater Boston region which it has served over many years," wrote Kirk Davis, president of GateHouse Media New England. "As a matter of policy, I won't be commenting further on this matter. Instead, it is appropriate that we let this matter take its natural legal course."

Google got heat a few years ago for its Google News aggregation of headlines and summaries and settled a copyright lawsuit with Agence France-Presse last year. Google also is paying the Associated Press to use its content on Google News.

Meanwhile, a weekly publication in Chicago, The Chicago Reader, has pointed the finger at The Huffington Post for re-posting an entire concert preview.

In an e-mail sent to CNET News on Tuesday, Chicago Reader Web Editor Whet Moser wrote that the Huffington Post had printed multiple concert previews "in full from multiple publications over the course of a couple months."

Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti defended the site's aggregation practice to Wired News and said the complete article re-printing was a mistake.

The Pulitzer Prize Board is finally recognizing the obvious: if newsprint's highest journalism award wants to stay relevant it had better welcome the Web.

The Pulitzer board announced Monday that it will consider entries from online-only publications in addition to print outlets for the 14 journalism categories that once were prestigious but now few care about.

Any organization interested in submitting stories for Pulitzer consideration must publish at least once a week, be U.S.-based, and feature original reporting. Online or print magazines need not apply. The Pulitzers are for daily or weekly news organizations.

Why the change of heart? The board has turned up its nose at online journalism for a decade, but not even the guardians of print journalism's highest honor can ignore that readers now favor getting information from online sources more than newspapers.

That's one reason why you've seen a bloodbath in the newspaper industry the past week. On Monday, Tribune Co. became the first major newspaper chain to declare bankruptcy in modern history. Last week, Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper publisher and parent company of USA Today, laid off more than 600 employees across its 85 daily papers in what was probably the largest single layoff in the sector's history, Reuters reported. Other major newspapers including The New York Times have cut staff in the past year.

The Pulitzer board opened its doors to the Web before there was no one left in print to honor.