The Social

In a move that makes him seem a bit like Dr. Evil wanting to be paid one hundred billion dollars for Austin Powers' ransom, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that he will charge for all the online content associated with the newspapers and television stations he owns.

Rupert Murdoch, media baron

(Credit: Dan Farber/CBS Interactive)

It's a goal that some in the digital-media space will bill as ludicrous--and some as inevitable.

The Financial Times reported the news Thursday, adding that Murdoch had spotted "some good signs of life" in the battered advertising sector.

He's already got most of The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired two years ago, behind a pay wall. But he also owns the rest of Dow Jones & Company, the Fox television and film empire, the New York Post, and the U.K.'s The Times. News Corp. is also a partner in Hulu, the joint video venture that offers a big chunk of Fox television content (as well as NBC and ABC) for free on the Web.

Robert Iger, the CEO of new Hulu partner Disney, said at a conference last month that he does not believe Web content needs to be offered for free, and that consumers will be willing to pay for it.

"We intend to charge for all our news Web sites," Murdoch said, according to the Financial Times. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media."

In late 2007, well before the market collapse last fall, Murdoch had said pretty much the exact opposite, claiming that a free and ad-supported model would be more beneficial than a subscription model for The Wall Street Journal.

Presumably the new paid-content strategy wouldn't apply to News Corp.'s digital-only assets, like social network MySpace.

Leaked photos of the alleged 'Kindle DX' device from Amazon.

(Credit: Engadget)

Newspapers hoping the next version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader will be a savior for their beleaguered businesses are likely to be disappointed when it's unveiled Wednesday. But this Kindle could win plenty of converts in academia.

Amazon is slated to unveil a new, larger-screen version of the Kindle, which it originally launched late in 2007. Possibly called the Kindle DX, the new device is designed for reading newspapers, magazines, and textbooks, and it's expected to be part of new electronic course material test-runs at six universities this fall. The list, according to The Wall Street Journal, consists of Pace University (where Amazon is holding Wednesday's press conference), Case Western Reserve, Reed College, Arizona State University, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Princeton University--Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' alma mater, which already publishes Kindle textbooks.

This move makes loads of sense. Anyone who's been to a U.S. college in the past few decades could tell you that textbooks are very highly--some would say obscenely--priced. They're also bulky, and often difficult to get rid of once purchased: Selling the third edition of an introductory biology textbook on the used-book market is pretty difficult when the fourth edition comes out a year later. Theoretically, this should be the perfect market for an electronic reader like the Kindle.

But just because Amazon has inked a few deals with textbook companies, and a handful of prominent academic institutions, doesn't mean that hordes of incoming freshmen across the U.S. will be moving into dorms this fall with Kindles in hand.

"I do think the textbook market will be the killer app for e-readers," said Sarah Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research. "(But) we think it's going to start to develop in 2011 and really pick up in 2013...We've been talking to publishers, talking to universities, and what we're seeing is that from the publisher perspective there's some hesitation."

Why's this? There are a lot of questions for the publishing industry, the biggest of which is whether electronic textbooks will take a bite out of the profits that manufacturers are making from paper textbooks. There's also the potential issue of licensed content in textbooks that might not have digital rights stipulated in its original agreement with the publishers. Then, as Epps pointed out, there's the Google problem.

For the past few years, Google has been pushing forward a book scanning and digitization project called Google Book Search, and though it has some prominent allies in the industry, to say that Google Book Search has been controversial would be putting it lightly. The Association of American Publishers sued the search giant in 2005 over potential copyright violations. Authors and publishers of out-of-print books have petitioned for royalties from digitized books. More recently, library industry trade groups have expressed concern in the form of a legal filing over what Google's efforts could mean for their business. An agreement in court has been delayed.

For Amazon, this could mean that it'll have to deal with some publishers who have become quite suspicious of large-scale digital book projects. But on the flip side, this could work to the Seattle-based retailer's advantage: if the digital shift is as inevitable as it appears, and Google is to be the Silicon Valley villain in this story, then Amazon, which has been in the book business for nearly two decades, could be the friendlier alternative.

There's also the potential for the new Kindle, whatever it's called, to have a significant impact outside the U.S. Forrester analyst Epps speculates that it will make waves in developing markets like China and India, where there are millions of university students with tight textbook budgets. "Using e-readers for textbooks would be incredibly empowering for students in their universities," Epps said, "but that's going to take some time."

It's clear that Amazon could shake up the twin pillars of educational publishing and academia with its new Kindle, potentially a much bigger splash than the launch of the original Kindle or its improved Kindle 2 successor earlier this year. What's less clear is how immediate the change will be. And what's even less clear is what impact the new, bigger Kindle will have on the market that everyone was expecting Amazon would target: print periodicals.

Rumor has it that The New York Times will be part of Wednesday's Kindle announcement, possibly lowering its price for a Kindle subscription. But this doesn't mean that Amazon's skinny gadget will suddenly save print media: Newspaper and magazine publishers may think they still get the short end of the stick.

"The way things work now, newspapers and magazines can distribute their content over the Kindle if they want, but it's not a very good model for them. Amazon is keeping the majority of the revenue," Epps said. "In addition, there are some business problems, like that publishers can't count subscribers toward their rate base, so it's diluting rather than adding to their subscription base from the perspective of the business."

But while Amazon has the textbook market in focus, it shouldn't let newspapers and magazines get away from it: this is somewhere that the manufacturer of a rival e-reader could sneak in.

"Some of the other device competitors that will be coming to the market over the next year may be more appealing partners for newspaper publishers," Epps said. "It's another distribution channel for their content, but not all distribution channels are created equal. So there could be a great opportunity for publishers to distribute their content on other types of e-readers, where they have a more favorable business model."

The Internet, as we all know, has taken a toll on the venerable newspaper industry--so we'd understand that print media folks would be a little bit sensitive when their writers crack jokes about it. But, as it turns out, they might be more thin-skinned than we thought. Humor writer Elliot Kalan, who writes a column for the free daily newspaper New York Metro, might've just gotten fired over it.

Kalan, who is also a segment producer for Comedy Central's The Daily Show, wrote a column in the publication's August 3 edition entitled "Newspapers: Information's Horse & Buggy, in which he asserted that "Nobody reads newspapers anymore...As this very copy of Metro shows, the only way to get most people to read a newspaper is to literally force it into their hands." Ouch. A potshot not only to the print media as a whole, but also to the phenomenon of free dailies that are ungracefully waved in your face like giant newsprint mosquitoes as soon as you emerge from the dank underworld of New York City's subways.

New York magazine's Web site reported that the powers that be over at Metro, which also runs Boston and Philadelphia editions, weren't too happy, and sacked Kalan immediately.

Betting pool time: Which blog will hire him now?

(Via Jossip)

Note: This story was updated at 6:00 a.m. PDT to include a correction from a New York Times representative regarding TimesSelect subscriber figures cited by the New York Post.

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software.

A Times representative told CNET News.com that the company isn't releasing any statement beyond: "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com." The representative did point out, however, that the Post had made an error: Sanders' article said that the number of TimesSelect subscribers had fallen from 224,000 in April to slightly over 221,000 in June. According to the Times, TimesSelect subscriber numbers have actually risen from 220,090 in April to 224,580 in June.

The demise of TimesSelect, which has been in operation since 2005 and puts archived content as well as popular opinion pieces behind a subscription wall, has been rumored for some time among New York media circles. Adding fuel to the fire is News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch. When speaking about his decision to purchase Wall Street Journal company Dow Jones, he suggested that the Journal might free up its own premium content.

New-media pundits have typically been very critical of TimesSelect, considering it a disadvantage for the legendary publication to be locking up so much content, particularly opinion pieces by well-known writers. "By cutting stars like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich off from the rest of the Internet," Peter Kafka of the Silicon Alley Insider commented in July, "the Times has diminished its (and their) influence--and helped create room for upstarts like The Huffington Post to step in."

Currently, TimesSelect subscribers pay $7.95 per month, or $49.95 per year, for access to op-ed columnists, archives dating back to 1851, extra multimedia features, and occasional access to the Sunday paper's articles before they are made available for free or in print.

The MyCapture offering for the Contra Costa Times' Web site

(Credit: Contra Costa Times)

The actual merit of this month's CNN-YouTube Democratic debate has proven arguable, but it at least appears to have been influential, as more and more "traditional" news outlets are turning to the power of YouTube and its ilk as a way to breathe some new life into participatory citizenship.

One CNET News.com editor directed me to a relatively new feature offered by the online operations of the California regional paper Contra Costa Times--"Your Views," which allows users to submit their own photos, videos, and cartoons. The whole system is provided by a multimedia service company called MyCapture. It's not all that well-integrated into the main newspaper site, but it does offer some cool ways for readers to interact with the publication and ultimately network with other members of the community.

The most notable offering is probably the fact that readers can submit letters to the editor in video form, much as the CNN-YouTube debate encouraged ordinary citizens to go beyond the restrictions of the usual question-and-answer format. It is, as you can imagine, quite versatile. Presumably, you can now use video to show the newsroom powers-that-be that your street is full of potholes, that the naughty kids next door just TP'ed your magnolia tree again, or--as so many YouTube videos do--that your cat knows some really cute tricks. That being said, it doesn't look like the Contra Costa Times' video letters to the editor have really caught on yet.

Anyone else have local newspapers that are taking video letters-to-the-editor or are doing something else particularly unusual on the new-media front?