Category Archives: Steam media

The Digger wants to give up Googlejuice.

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Funny to see the Dirty Digger and arch-libertarian Henry Porter climbing onto the same mattress, but life’s like that sometimes. History’s littered with strange alliances. Here’s Forbes.com’s take on it:

Rupert Murdoch threw down the gauntlet to Google Thursday, accusing the search giant of poaching content it doesn’t own and urging media outlets to fight back. “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Google sees it differently. They send more than 300 million clicks a month to newspaper Web sites, says a Google spokesperson. The search giant is in “full compliance” with copyright laws. “We show just enough information to make the user want to read a full story–the headlines, a line or two of text and links to the story’s Web site. That’s it. For most links, if a reader wants to peruse an entire article, they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site.”

Later in the piece Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor of the Dallas Morning News Online and a director of the Online News Association is quoted as saying:

“I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do.”

Now that would be a really interesting experiment. If I were the Guardian and the BBC I’d be egging these guys on. It’d provide an interesting case study in how to lose 50% market share in a week or two.

UPDATE: Anthony Moor read the post and emailed me to say that Forbes’s story presented an unduly simplistic version of his opinion:

Just to clarify, I’m not one of those who think Google is the death of newspapers. Quite the contrary, I emphasized to reporter Dirk Smillie that search engines are the default home page for people using the Internet, and as such, direct a lot of traffic to us. That traffic is important. I don’t believe Google is “stealing” our content. And I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about “turning off” to Google. We don’t matter much to Google. I was musing about what might happen if all news sites turned off for a week. What would people think? Would they survive? (Maybe.) I wasn’t suggesting we block Google from spidering our content. That wouldn’t test the “what if digital news went dark” hypothesis. In any case, none of that will fix our own broken business model.

Google organizes the Web. Something needs to do that. My concern is that they’re effectively a monopoly player in that space. Oh sure, there’s Yahoo, but who “Yahoos” information on the Web? I understand and recognize the revolutionary nature of the link economy, but I’m concerned that it’s Google which defines relevance via their algorithms. (Yes, I know that they’re leveraging what people have chosen to make relevant, but they’re still applying their own secret sauce, which is why we all game it with SEO efforts) and that puts the rest of us in a very subservient position.

I wonder if there isn’t another way in which the Web can be organized and relevance gained that reduces the influence of Google and returns some of the value that Google is reaping for the rest of us? I predict that someday there will be and all this talk of Google’s dominance will be history.

STILL LATER: At the moment, there’s a very low signal-to-noise ration in this debate : everyone has opinions but nobody knows much, and it’d be nice to find some way of extracting some nuggets of hard, reliable knowledge on which we could all agree. An experiment in which major news sources turned off their online presence for a week or two might be useful in that context. And it might enable us to move on from the current yah-boo phase. It would enable us to assess, for example, the extent to which the blogosphere is really parasitic on the traditional news media. My view (for what it’s worth) is that the relationship is certainly symbiotic, but that the blogosphere is more free-standing than print journalists tend to assume. The experiment would shed some light on that.

Let me through — I outrank PageRank

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From Advertising Age.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Major media companies are increasingly lobbying Google to elevate their expensive professional content within the search engine’s undifferentiated slush of results.

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they’re newly upset that Google’s algorithm penalizes paid content.

“You should not have a system,” one content executive said, “where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately.”

Glyn Moody is not impressed.

Let’s just get this right. The publishers resent the fact that the stuff other than “professional content” is rising to the top of Google searches, because of the PageRank algorithm. But wait, doesn’t the algorithm pick out the stuff that has most links – that is, those sources that people for some reason find, you know, more relevant?

So doesn’t this mean that the “professional content” isn’t, well, so relevant? Which means that the publisher are essentially getting what they deserve because their “professional content” isn’t actually good enough to attract people’s attention and link love?

And the idea that Google’s PageRank is somehow “penalising” paid content by not ignoring the fact that people are reading it less than other stuff, is just priceless. Maybe publishers might want to consider *why* their “professional content” is sinking like a stone, and why people aren’t linking to it? You know, little things like the fact it tends to regard itself as above the law – or the algorithm, in this case?

The Last Two Journalists in America

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Lovely WashPost column by John Kelly.

The last two journalists in America sat at a card table in the middle of their empty newsroom. They faced each other, about to flip a coin.

The coin was to decide which one would be the second-to-last journalist in America and which one would be the last journalist in America.

The last two journalists in America were dressed oddly; not poorly, as journalists usually dressed, but in what appeared to be costumes. The woman looked as if she’d stepped out of a black-and-white movie. She wore a tight-waisted woolen [sic] dress with angular shoulders. There was a seam up the back of her stockings. Two pencils stuck out of a bun of tightly-gathered hair at the back of her head. The man had on flared pants, a loud, collared shirt and a necktie as wide as a dinner napkin.

She was from "His Girl Friday." He was from ‘All the President’s Men.’

“Call it,” the man said, flipping the coin in the air.

They’d known this day was coming — had spent the past 10 years watching it get closer — but even so it was a bit of a shock to see it arrive. The newsroom that had thrummed for so long was vacant. The computers and phones were gone. The desks had been sold for scrap. Their contents — spiral-bound notebooks, computer printouts, government documents, letters from inmates, soy sauce packets, Freedom of Information Act requests, paper-clip chains, journalism awards, eraserless pencils — had been push-broomed into huge drifts that dotted the cavernous room like termite mounds on the savanna.

“Heads,” the woman said…

What do you get when you take ‘news’ out of Newsweek?

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My guess: a pale imitation of the Economist.

According to today’s Observer,

Newsweek’s owner, the Washington Post, unveiled a raft of job cuts recently, following a previous round of redundancies that led to more than 100 departures, as it slims its editorial operation. It will no longer cover news, its editor Jon Meacham has said, choosing instead to focus on explaining events and providing readers with commentary and analysis.

A smaller staff working for a smaller Newsweek will deliver intelligent insight to a more discerning, affluent readership. If that sounds familiar, it is because the Economist, one of the most successful current affairs titles for many years, already offers readers a similar service.

Newsweek will position itself as a slightly more upmarket equivalent, printed on heavier, more luxuriant paper, with a new design placing a premium on white space. There will also be a shift in editorial emphasis, with more culture coverage and a bluffer’s guide to the week’s events, an innovation borrowed from the Week – Dennis Publishing’s news digest which now sells more than 500,000 copies in the US, following a 2001 launch. The hope is it will attract new advertisers, including luxury goods groups, weaning the title off its current dependence on financial services giants, car manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry.

The Media commentator and Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff isn’t impressed. He told an audience of industry executives in New York last week: “If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner.”

The Evening Pravda

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Aw, isn’t this nice.

The billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is to buy London’s Evening Standard tomorrow, in a dramatic move that would see him become the first Russian oligarch to own a major British newspaper, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

Lebedev is poised to buy a controlling stake in the ailing title, following a year of secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, its owner and the chairman of the Daily Mail General Trust.

Under the terms of the deal Lebedev will purchase 76% of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining 24%. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with Daily Mail General Trust tomorrow. The agreement will make Lebedev the paper's controversial new proprietor.

It’s a logical move, really. After all, the KGB already controls all Russia’s media outlets. It needed to diversify overseas.

So will Mr Lebedev be interfering in British politics? Perish the thought. “My influence would be next to zero,” he declared. He promised an “absolutely” hands-off approach, and said it would be up to the Standard’s editor-in-chief and journalists to agree the paper’s editorial line. Absolutely. But now at least his friend Vlad will get a fair deal from the Russophobic British press.

Wonder how long it will be until he has a peeerage.

Blaming the voters

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This is really interesting. It turns out that the mainstream media were rather too credulous about popular hostility to the US ‘bailout’ plan. Here’s what the Pew Research Center found out.

The American public is taking a bad rap for Congress’s failure to pass the bailout bill. Members who voted against the original House bill are said to be responding to strong opposition to the rescue plan from their constituents. While there is little doubt that Congressional representatives are hearing a lot of harsh words from voters back home, that clamor does not reflect broad American public opinion. It is a classic case of the squeaky wheels getting first attention at a time when Washington is in a quandary about what to do.

The most recent polls — those conducted through Monday night — show the public is at best divided over the plan. There is little indication of overwhelming public rejection of the bailout proposal. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 27-29 found support for the bailout slipping, but still showed a narrow 45%-38% plurality of the public saying that a government plan to invest or commit billions of dollars to secure financial institutions is the right thing to do.

An ABC/Washington Post survey conducted on Sept 29 found the public evenly split with 45% favoring and 47% opposing a government proposal to use $700 billion to shore up failing financial institutions on Wall Street. The question asked in the survey also pointed out that critics of the plan say that the failing companies don’t deserve a bailout, while proponents say it is necessary to protect the economy…

I was a bit suspicious of the way TV and radio reporters were using random vox-pop interviews to support the excuses of Republican refuseniks in the House for voting down the Bill. I should have pursued the thought, but didn’t. It’s also a case, though, where professional journalism could have done better. Mainstream media have the resources to commission polls.

Poynter Online – Forums

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The Manaing Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer has sent a memo to all staff. It reads, in part:

Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson…

This has caused quite a stor in the blogosphere. For example, Jeff Jarvis writes:

Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves…

The Changing Newsroom

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced an interesting report on “the changing newsroom”.

Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years…

Thoughtful piece of work. Worth reading in full.

Flat Earth News: the seminar

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Photograph by Michael Dales.

We had a terrific seminar last Monday in Wolfson. Nick Davies (left in the photograph) came to talk about his book, Flat Earth News, a scorching critique of the UK newspaper industry, and John Kelly (right) of the Washington Post was the discussant. The event was chaired by Phil Parvin (centre). MP3 of Phil’s introduction is here. For Nick Davies’s presentation, click here. And John Kelly’s comments are here.

John later posted a thoughtful account of the discussion on his blog. He also counted all the roundabouts between Cambridge and Oxford. Guess how many? Er, 71.

Journalistic racism is ok so long as it’s implicit

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If you read nothing else today, then read this NYT column by Frank Rich.

He begins with the obsessive attention the US media have paid to Barack Obama’s now-terminated devotion to a screwball black preacher named Jeremiah Wright. Then he draws our attention to this:

i.e. a white (note colour) screwball preacher comparing the Catholic church (the “Whore of Babylon”) to Hitler.

What’s interesting about this? Well,

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

It seems that McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements.

Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”

Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Now, here’s the funny bit. Whereas Obama’s ‘Wright problem’ has been endlessly retailed in the US media, we’ve heard awfully little about McCain’s Hagee Problem.

“Aw well”, you say, “Unlike Wright, Hagee didn’t say that America had brought 9/11 upon itself”, and that’s true. But perhaps Wright was a bit slow off the mark there. After all, two days after the attack, the NYT reported that

The Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson set off a minor explosion of their own when they asserted on television on Thursday that an angry God had allowed the terrorists to succeed in their deadly mission because the United States had become a nation of abortion, homosexuality, secular schools and courts, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

What’s interesting about that? Well,

Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.

So, here’s the situation. A (black) pastor spouting nonsense is apparently a big problem for a (black) presidential candidate. But white evangelists spouting nonsense are not seen by the US media as posing any kind of problem for a white Republican candidate.

And here’s another interesting fact that is apparently of no interest to the fearless US media. The Republican party “does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington”.

This particular column is one of the best things I’ve read in ages, not least because its savage indignation never spills over into incoherence. It’s beautifully controlled from start to finish.