Webware

Newspaper and content providers on the Internet are getting increasingly antsy about how to make money. Kachingle announced its solution in February, and it has gained so much interest, the founders say, that the launch is being delayed while the team builds out the service so it can support what they think will be a popular offering.

Here's the basic idea of Kachingle: Users contribute a small amount, currently $5.00 per month, voluntarily. While surfing they select content sites they like and want to support. At the end of the month, their monthly fee is distributed to their sites, based on how much time they spent on each site.

Founder Cynthia Typaldos created the idea five years ago, but says it was too early. "Content providers weren't desperate enough," she says. They are now, but Kachingle isn't yet ready. It should launch in July. At the moment, some parts of the original product don't scale, Typaldos says.

Kachingle has had over 250 unsolicited inquires to use its service, of which 75 percent are from the U.S. and Canada, and 25 percent from the rest of the world, according to Typaldos. So far 80 percent of the queries are from bloggers and 20 percent from other content sites like newspapers, some of which have multiple sites and millions of users.

"We're going to have at least three, probably five or six major newspapers signed up by the time we launch," said Fred Dewey, CEO of Kachingle.

The event was a bit of a culture clash between the Americans and the mostly European and Asian journalists in the audience. To a person, the Americans were pessimistic about the future of print and at least somewhat optimistic about blogging and online journalism.

While none of us predicted that print will disappear any time soon, we all agreed that the future of print publishing is looking pretty murky. But several Europeans who spoke up had a different perspective. More than a few were somewhat bullish about printed newspapers, pointing out that many European cities still have multiple competing papers at a time when American newspapers are facing enormous challenges. The Rocky Mountain News recently shut down, and many other U.S. newspapers teeter on bankruptcy.

Even papers not at imminent risk of folding, including the venerable New York Times, are coping with fewer employees, fewer subscribers and fewer advertisers. Some problems of American papers can be attributed to the current economic climate. But even after the recovery, papers will have major challenges thanks to the ever-rising cost of printing and their ever-shrinking share of ad dollars. Having to compete with Internet Web sites for display advertising dollars is challenging enough, but competing with Craigslist and other free or low-cost sites has taken an enormous toll on the once-lucrative classified advertising business.

The European papers also have their challenges, but the Internet hasn't yet had the same impact as it has in the United States. But it's only a matter of time before my overseas colleagues start to face the realities that U.S. print journalists are dealing with now.

But the news business is not about print, it's about information. It doesn't really matter whether you read the news on paper, on a computer screen, on a mobile phone, on a Kindle, or on an as-yet unavailable technology. However the news is consumed, what's important is that there remains a cadre of talented, honest, and enterprising journalists to dig up facts, dispel myths, and keep powerful people in check.

What's sad about the current state of the newspaper industry is that there are now fewer people to do this important work. Some say that's OK because the bloggers will pick up the slack. But a lone wolf opining on a blog is not the same thing as a newsroom full of reporters and editors with the resources and experience to shine the light of truth on the often murky world of government and business. While there are plenty of blogs focused on national and global issues, there are relatively few dedicated to local topics. Someone has to keep an eye on mayors, city councils, police, school districts, and other local services.

There are still TV and radio stations, of course. But while some stations have excellent reporters and investigative units, it's no secret that many people working in broadcasting rely on newspapers and wire services for ideas and even some of the basic facts that make up their stories. I know that firsthand. Even though I do my own fact-checking, hardly a day goes by that I don't look at Web sites with copy from The Associated Press, Reuters, and several U.S. and overseas newspapers to find topics for my CBS News and KCBS radio segments.

Eventually, our economic troubles will abate. Let's hope that competent news organizations--however they deliver the product--survive and find the resources to flourish. Given our collective hunger for truth, I'm optimistic that will happen. I'm just not sure how.

Podcast: Listen to Tom Merritt and Larry Magid discuss their experience with European journalists.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Today the Rocky Mountain News publishes its final edition after nearly 150 years. Elsewhere, newspaper publishers everywhere from San Francisco to Philadelphia face equally grim prospects.

The reasons have been well chronicled by others like Poynter Online and I won't waste time rehashing familiar arguments and analyses. But one complaint about newspapers is that they increasingly are out of step with their readers, who for too long were ignored at the bottom rung of a one-way hierarchy which defined their relationship.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: "Openness and transparency isn't an end state. It's a process to get there."

It was only a coincidence, but the Rocky Mountain News announcement came on the same day that Facebook declared that it would embrace a community-driven process for governing. Responding to a controversy earlier this month over changes to its terms of service, Facebook said it will henceforth put any proposed modifications to its membership up for public debate in a "notice and comment" forum.

Not everyone was impressed by the announcement. Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a scorcher over at ReadWriteWeb, dunning Facebook's management for losing its grip. But if I read Marshall correctly, he's not slamming the company for its bid to be more transparent. Rather, he's arguing that Facebook still hasn't fully absorbed the real reason behind the flap.

What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Fair enough. And voting may not be the best idea out there. Still, I think Facebook deserves credit for at least trying. Listening to the conference call on Thursday, I found myself wondering whether some of the very decades-old newspapers now going through a horrid time might have fared had they found a way to similarly engage their readers once the Internet went commercial. How long, for instance, has it taken for newspapers to let its reporters begin blogging? How about the inclusion of reader comments--let alone taking feedback on how to make coverage more relevant to the community's needs? Or reader blogs, for that matter? (There still aren't many of the latter.)

There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper and I'm not suggesting that the cure here is simply to sprinkle some Web 2.0 fairy dust and everything will be as it was 25 years ago. But Facebook is also a media company and as Larry Magid smartly writes, its 175 million users are the ones who supply the content. Giving them a voice in policy making, whether to quell a brewing storm or to get out ahead of the next one--that's less interesting to me than Facebook's willingness to experiment.

It's not a perfect system and there doubtless are going to be rough spots ahead. Still, I'm going to cut them a break. It's easy to be cynical about the motivations but if Facebook has found a way to offer up more transparency and yes, even as Marshall suggests, participation over governing, then the company has hit upon a formula that will keep it relevant. Wish The Rocky Mountain News and its industry cohorts would be able to say the same. Sigh.

Update, 12:33 p.m. PST: A Brooklyn blog reports that The New York Times next week will begin neighborhood blogs. Thanks to a pointer from TechCrunch, where Jim Schachter, the editor for digital initiatives at the Times, confirms the pilot program. Schachter also asks the following:

Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think.

Updated 2:57 p.m. PDT with Google's commentary about ad revenue sharing and other details. Also, my colleague Rafe Needleman covered Google's launch of the newspaper digitization work at TechCrunch.

Google is making searchable, digital copies of old newspapers available online through partnerships with their publishers, the company said Monday.

Under the ad-supported effort, Google will digitize millions of pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements, Google said.

Google's newspaper archive search and display effort is supported by ads, visible on the right edge. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

"Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily," said product manager Punit Soni in a blog posting about the effort. "The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that."

The effort is of particular interest to reporters such as myself who've made the jump from print journalism to online. When I started at CNET News a smidgen shy of 10 years ago, I was initially concerned that the online medium was more ephemeral than print.

But as soon as I realized that CNET's search box opened up our archive of work, I realized that online news actually is more permanent in many ways than a newspaper that's almost invariably recycled or thrown away within a day of its publication. Few have the time and money to visit a newspaper's archive of old papers, called the morgue, or flip through back issues in a state library's microfilm collection.

The results of Google's project initially will be available through the Google News Archive site, Soni said. "Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we'll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you'll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well," he said.

Google didn't reveal which publishers are partners except the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph and two organizations, ProQuest and Heritage Microfilm. However, examples of the service showed pages from The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Fla., the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, The Tryon (N.C.) News, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The project expands on an earlier partnership to digitize content from The New York Times and The Washington Post, Google said.

Google has tangled with news agencies before over who has rights to content. It settled a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse in 2007 and a similar suit from the Associated Press in 2006.

The profit motive
With Google, it's often hard to tell what project is designed to contribute revenue directly and what's part of the larger corporate mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," which can have the effect sometimes of making Google's search better, therefore used more often, therefore a better business.

The newspaper effort falls into this profit-and-loss gray area. Although the company is supporting it with advertisements, loftier goals were foremost in the mind of Adam Smith, the director of product management who oversees the newspaper effort, Google Book Search and related efforts.

"For us this is about improving the users' experience on the Web," Smith said. "Our objective is to bring all the world's historical newspaper information online in conjunction with our partners."

That's not to say money isn't involved. Google supplies advertisements on the right edge of the page that are based in part on the content in the newspapers, he said.

The majority of the ad revenue goes to the publishers, Smith said. (Update Sept. 12: Apparently I misheard Smith--it's only the majority of revenue, not the vast majority.)

And other revenue models are possible, he said. "There may be pay-per-view in the future, but we don't have anything to announce now," Smith said.

Although the project involves Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which both have microfilm archives, Google is doing the actual scanning of the film. The index has more millions of articles so far, he added.

Currently the system shows only images of the newspapers, not the text that's shown by existing news archive partnerships with newspapers that typically already have digitized much of their content.

Dozens of publishers are involved in the effort, he said.

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?

The new USA Today blends original content with the wisdom of its crowd.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

USA Today is the subject of a lot of blogger commentary today due to its new Web site, which features community features like profiles and blog spaces for registered users, the capability for users to vote stories up (but not down), and open comment threads on every story. The paper's Web site also says it will be recruiting readers to send in their news: "We're going to be asking you to send us your photos... [so] you can be part of covering the story."

In addition, USAToday.com has been redesigned and modernized. It's a functional if not very attractive Web 2.0 design, with an Ajax story carousel and a list of the most popular and most commented-on stories. It's easily understandable by people accustomed to contemporary Web sites, although it bears little design resemblance to the paper with the same name.

The blogosphere is mixed. TechCrunch says, "bravo," but Steve Rubel says the new site "doesn't go far enough." Stowe Boyd found the limitations of the social features, "ultimately annoying."

The people who matter--USA Today's readers--are baffled. Initial feedback to the new site is negative. Following the trend of most publishing redesigns, however, the readers will probably forgive the paper eventually. And the article-based discussions are already taking off.

It's unclear, though, how the community features will actually improve the news content at the paper itself. We can get user commentary from thousands of online sources, but precious few sites pay people to research and write actual news stories. Say what you will about USA Today's reporting and writing style, it is a bona fide newspaper with actual journalists on the payroll. When I visit news sites like it, I want to read the work of those journalists, filtered by their editors, front and center. Learning from the community of readers is fine--as long as it doesn't get in the way. I definitely don't feel any pull to write a blog on the USA Today site.

I like that USAToday.com now has some community features. But call me old-fashioned: I like it even more that I can still just read the site as an online newspaper.

TechMeme has a great roundup of blog commentary on this topic.

There's a deep, dark, hidden Web out there: the Web of paid content. You probably run across it from time to time when you click on a link to an interesting-looking story and find that you'll either need to pay a few bucks to read the story, or subscribe to the site to get access. You won't see the paid Web on Google or other search engines, though: it's not in their interest to show you what you can't have.

Congoo gives you free access to paid content

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Congoo is one way to bypass the content toll-takers. The company has done deals with hundreds of content providers and will give you access to a limited quantity of stories from each of them--generally up to five or six stories a month per publisher.

Many of the sites are newspapers, and frankly I don't understand why some papers charge for old stories and not the current ones. Nonetheless, if you want to read an archived story from the Financial Times or from a local paper like the The Bellingham Herald, Congoo has done the deals that will get you access when you need it (although one paid site that I'd like to see as part of the Congoo network isn't there yet: The Wall Street Journal). But more importantly, the system has access to stories from medical, business, and trade journals that are generally not accessible without a paid subscription. If you're researching a medical condition, you might be able to find important content that otherwise would not turn up in a search.

Congoo also can return articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica, if you like your reference materials old-school style (I'm sending my kids to Wikipedia -- because it teaches them not to believe everything they read).

The downside to Congoo is that in order to access the articles it makes available, you need to use the Congoo search toolbar (there are versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer). You might not mind this, since Congoo searches both its own database and Yahoo, but if you're hooked on another search engine, using Congoo means either adding a new toolbar to your browser for intermittent access to stories, or replacing the toolbar you're using now. The company is working on a toolbar-free solution, but for the moment it needs to run via the toolbar since that code is the gatekeeper that metes out paid content.

Congoo is free, which makes it a deal. The company makes its money displaying ads on its search result pages. In the future, it may offer paid services as well.

Congoo opens up big parts of the Web you might not otherwise see. If you can stand the fact that it requires a toolbar installation, it's worth using.