The Wall Street Journal is expected to begin charging nonsubscribers micropayments for access to individual articles, according to a report Sunday in The Financial Times.
Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told The Financial Times that "a sophisticated micropayments service" will launch this autumn. The system would charge small fees to occasional users who may not be willing to pay more than $100 a year for a subscription to WSJ.com, Thomson said.
The Journal is one of the few large daily newspapers still managing to charge for online content. The New York Times abandoned a two-year experiment with the Web-subscription model in 2007, suggesting that the company's projections for subscriber revenue were small compared with advertising sales.
Word of the payment model emerges as the newspaper industry is undergoing a dramatic contraction. As readers have increasingly gone online for their news, newspapers have suffered declining subscriber numbers and lower advertising revenue. Many newspapers have cut jobs, and some have warned that they may face closure soon if they can't make further cuts or find buyers for their operations.
That climate has publishers scrambling for new revenue models. New York newspaper Newsday announced in February that it plans to begin charging online readers for access to its content.
Publishers are also taking aim at search engines and news aggregators. Last week, Google defended itself on charges that it is profiting from content produced by newspaper executives, magazine publishers, and the Associated Press.
During a Senate hearing, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer said, "Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that Web traffic to increase their readership and generate additional revenue."
Extra! Extra! You don't have to pay extra to get Wall Street Journal content on your iPhone.
Good news for news junkies and anyone who can still stomach reading about the stock market: The Wall Street Journal just took the wraps off an eponymous iPhone app, offering news, video, and even podcasts. Better still, there's no charge for the app--or the content.
That may surprise Journal subscribers who pay a little more than $100 per year for unrestricted Web access. But it puts the app on an even footing with The New York Times and USA Today apps, among others, which also provide news at no charge.
The Journal app bears a striking resemblance to the Times app, with a five-icon toolbar that spans the bottom of the screen and a banner ad just above that. (Hey, somebody has to foot the bill.)
But this isn't just the Times repackaged. For one thing, the Journal app seems to load much faster than the notoriously pokey Times, and it sports prominent buttons for Video and WSJ Radio.
The latter consists of a two-minute podcast that starts streaming immediately when you tap through. But it lacks a time stamp, so there's no way to know without listening if it's any newer than the last podcast you played.
As for the videos: they flat-out refused to play, though we'll cut the app some slack on its first day; no doubt looky-loos have stampeded the Journal's servers.
Other amenities include a button to save articles for future reference and another to e-mail them to friends. Plus, you can customize the toolbar with any of 16 icons, giving you one-tap access to sections like Tech, Opinion, and Barron's.
Thus, despite a few early kinks, the WSJ app is sure to delight the business crowd--especially considering that they don't have to tap their slush funds to get it.
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)Updated at 3:40 p.m. PDT to include Wall Street Journal's deals for some of the news that it aggregates.
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.
A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.
The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.
"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, 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."
As for the AP, Macgillivray noted that Google already pays the wire service to reprint its articles and photographs. A dispute several years ago led to this agreement.
Of course, Google News is far from the only aggregator out there. Digg, Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post are also big players. But Google is unquestionably at the top.
For the past few years, as many mainstream media outlets (particularly on the print side) began to lose revenue, influence, and readership, some of them had a pretty clear message: blame Google. At the same time, Viacom still has a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google's YouTube over pirated video content. And much of the publishing industry is far from signing on to Google's book digitization initiative.
With struggling newspapers in a panic over whether offering content online for free might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Google--the ultimate source of free content--is an even easier target.
But Google says it's part of the solution, not the problem, and insists that its search and aggregation products only serve to help drive traffic to online news sites.
"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray said in his post. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international--day and night."
Traditional media is once again rattling sabers in the direction of Google and other sites that aggregate news stories.
There's tough talk coming from managers at The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press that include threats of legal challenges and even name calling.
"There is no doubt that certain Web sites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet," Robert Thomson, the Journal's editor, was quoted in Australian newspaper The Australian on Monday. "It's certainly true that readers have been socialized--wrongly I believe--that much content should be free...And there is no doubt that's in the interest of aggregators like Google who have profited from that mistaken perception. And they have little incentive to recognize the value they are trading on that's created by others."
William Dean Singleton
(Credit: Media News Group)Also on Monday, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP, the century-old news wire agency, said at the group's annual meeting in San Diego, "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," according to a copy of Singleton's statements posted to the company's Web site. "We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more."
Google has long said that it provides news site owners with a means to block the search engine from crawling their sites and indexing headlines. "Those who publish on the Web have a lot of control over which pages should appear in search results," Google said in a blog post. "The key is a simple file called robots.txt that has been an industry standard for many years. It lets a site owner control how search engines access their Web site."
The statements from the AP and Journal coming on the same day may have some people questioning whether there is a concerted effort going on within traditional media. There's not according to a spokesman for the Journal.
Regardless, the statements from two stalwart print publications raises questions about whether Google will be forced to open up a new front against yet another group of copyright owners. The search engine is currently defending itself against a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed in 2007 by Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures.
Google's plan to scan orphan books and preserve them in a database is also being challenged. Google has an agreement with the The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to scan the books, but a group called Consumer Watchdog says the agreement is anticompetitive and has called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to intervene.
In the case of the AP, Google has an agreement to use the news service's content. That is perhaps why Singleton, who is also CEO of MediaNews Group--the fourth-largest newspaper company in the United States in terms of circulation--didn't mention the company in the speech by name. A company spokesman said that the AP and the more than 1,000 newspapers that own the service, just want Google's help fighting the "misappropriation of content."
Besides Google, sites such as Digg, The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and Techmeme are just a few of those that aggregate headlines from news sources and post them on their sites. Google takes a headline and a description of the story but readers must click through to the news source's site to obtain the full story.
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