Content Bridges

1Cast: Hitting the Mobile Video Aggregation Trifecta

“Mobile.”

“Video.”

Usually, these are the rather dry one-world descriptions of What’s Next, items on to-do lists for anyone serious about building new digital businesses. Add “Social,” and you’ve got a trifecta.

Getting the words transformed from whiteboard to lively product is another undertaking entirely.

1Cast, a still-beta mobile video product, manages to do that.

I found 1Cast in my ambling around the News section of the iTunes Apps store.

It’s a remarkably simple idea – and one that many a news company should be thumping its head about: why didn’t we think of that?!?

1Cast – now available for the iPhone and Android, and coming soon, I believe, for the Blackberry – answers an old question in a new way: “What’s On?” And then makes coverage easy to share on Facebook, Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon, reddit or by e-mail. 

What’s on in this case is news, glorious, up-to-the-minute news. So far, most major producers of news video have signed on, willing to take a budding ad revenue share, as usage increases.

Among the news sources: AP, Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters, and the Dow Jones brands – WSJ, Barrons, Marketwatch and AllThingsD from the US; CBC, from Canada; BBC from UK and AFP from Europe.

Anthony Bontrager, 1Cast’s president, tells me more (national and local broadcast) sources will be announced within a couple of weeks and then still more as the company – started stealth in 2006 – comes formally out of beta in August.

The iPhone experience is intuitive. First screen: top headlines.  For the last couple of weeks, you could click on Iran Protests and get more than a half dozen up-to-date (and in this case we’re dealing with 24/7, follow-the-sun coverage) video segments. The Iran coverage answers the question on many of our minds: What the hell is happening in Tehran, best as the constrained global news sources can tell us, with pirated video and voiceovers. At our fingertips.

You can pick and choose your way through top stories, or pick by news network or do some initial customization and favoriting. Bontrager says that the sports channel will soon be joined by others, like business, lifestyle, music and comedy.

When I ask him who the competition is, he tells me that only Veoh and Hulu approach as competitors. They’re not really direct competitors of course, because they don’t concentrate on news video. Hulu, a smart if nascent aggregation play, of News Corp, NBC Universal and, soon, Disney, plays itself as a YouTube counterweight, and is still searching for a business model meaty enough to sustain three sharp-elbowed media heavyweights. Those owners produce lots of news, but Hulu considers “news” as a subset channel of entertainment, one of 18 channels on the site.

Veoh, Truveo, Blinkx and YouTube itself, offer lots of news video, but finding it is a crazy-making exercise, mixed among much amateur video, job training sessions and dancing iguanas.

1Cast “was born of frustration,” says Bontrager, an IPTV telco veteran. “How can we get the information we want? We saw news to be an underserved market.”

Wow. News people talk endlessly about glut and commoditization, and here’s a telco guy talking about “under-served markets.” Talk about a disconnect.

Pocantico Signals New Networked Future for "Watchdog" News Sites

Pocantico once served as one of the Rockefellers’ family estates. Stately, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, it speaks to the wealth of an earlier industrial era.  The Rockefellers, of course, built their fortunes on oil, but their brethren, like the Hearsts and the Pulitzers built them on paper and ink. The kinship is palpable as we move into the era of digital publishing and renewable energy.

Indeed, renewing energy is a part of what will be happening at Pocantico next Monday and Tuesday.  Spurred on by the foundations that are starting to pour money into them, a group of some 30 pixel-stained wretches will meet to plot a new course and a new network. 

"Creating the Investigative News Network" is the objective, and the session's goals and participants are clearly laid out at watchdogsatpocantico. Pocantico only sleeps 30, and that determined the number of participants. Those participants range from top national and regional investigative organizations to city start-ups (Saint Louis Beacon, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego) to newspapers (Sacramento Bee) to public broadcasting (NPR, WNET) to phenomenon of the year, Huffington Post. Expect more players to join the action after the initial conference.

The conclave is unprecedented, and its goals ambitious. I could also say timely, but that is obvious. Enough people have been screaming "Press Emergency!" that some people with money have listened.

Earlier this month, the J-Lab, Jan Schaffer’s Knight Foundation-funded project computed how much money has flowed into journalism from foundations. The total was surprising: $128 million in grants have been awarded to at least 115 news projects in 17 states and the District of Columbia, from the beginning of 2005 through mid-2009.  Its searchable database, which allows you to drill down into funders and grant recipients, is accessible.

A few high points from that survey give us the context for the Pocantico conference:

    * Of the 115 projects getting funding, 102 of them went to organizations that have launched within the last four years.

    * The largest share, $65 million, went to “investigative” projects. Of that amount, $56 million went to the “big 3'' investigative organizations, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica, all of whom are key Pocantico players.

Two of the those three, the East Coast-based Center for Public Integrity and the West Coast-based Center for Investigative Report (CIR), did most of the organizing of the meeting.

"Foundations want us to collaborate and cooperate," Robert Rosenthal, late of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle, and now head of the Oakland-based CIR told me. Certainly, many of the participants know each other and do cooperate, sharing tips, resources and databases. They haven't, though, organized themselves into an ongoing sharing network, one that can multiply the value of that widening foundation pipeline. One of the first pieces moving into place came with last week's announcement that AP will distribute the work of four of these investigative groups throughout its network. That's a first step in the six-month experimental distribution. What must follow, I believe, is solid monetization of this high-quality content, and that means testing sponsorship, ad and syndication models -- so that foundation funding isn't the only source of revenue going forward.

The potential Pocantico outcomes, according to the organizers: "Syndication, collaboration, cooperation, our own website." Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Ben Shute helped convince the organizations it was time to take their work to a new level. Rockefeller, the Surdna Foundation and the William Penn Foundation funded the meeting.

Co-organizer Bill Buzenberg, now director of the Washington, D.C.-based, Center for Public Integrity, brings a lot of relevant and unique experience to the group. He's a public radio guy who has both NPR and American Public Media experience. APM is a master syndicator, and NPR has endured the travails of national/local networking, still looking for a suitable model. 

$128 million is a significant number – but it may be just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come.

So take the Pocantico gathering as an indication that foundations will play a major role in the next chapter of American journalism, especially local journalism.

Sources tell me that major foundations – some that have previously considered “news and information” to be fairly far afield from their philanthropic mandates – are now talking about the large sums of money that may be needed to fill the gaps left by cratering dailies in big metro markets.

Yes, it’s hard for civic supporters not to notice the cave-ins and the emerging impact it’s having on the civic conversation. In the Bay Area, Hearst threatened to close the Chronicle and the MediaNews’ 30 papers have seen their staffs and papers drastically, all to stave off the bankruptcy woes that have afflicted six other news companies recently.  In Chicago, both the big dailies are in bankruptcy.  In Philadelphia, the two dailies, owned by one bankrupt owner, paw for a future.

So, yes, it’s becoming clear to foundations that “news and information “ – don’t call it journalism – may no longer be a market-sustaining product, but one, like the arts, health and education, needing foundation support.

These big foundations are meeting and beginning to ask the important questions. How do we support and enable larger-scale newsgathering and distribution – in the dozens, if not hundreds, of staffers?  The Voices, MinnPosts, Beacons and others have proven out smaller propositions, organizations of six to 12 staffers, editor-heavy with stipend-paid reporters, bloggers and columnists. Good stuff, and a tonic as the big table has been emptied of sustenance. But, small stuff, compared to what’s being lost in newsgathering and reporting. You can’t empty newsrooms of hundreds of people and expect these small start-ups to fill the void. The entrepreneurs running these sites are the first to tell you that.

So Pocantico marks another step into terra incognita. The foundations are properly concerned that the start-ups are heavy on journalistic fervor and light on business modeling and networking skills.  How to work better work together, learn together and grow together, is, accordingly, a key goal of the conference -- and must to-do coming out of it. Cooperativeness is good; high-level business savvy must be a next step.

It's no longer a matter of just doing good work. This is "replacement journalism." Half the foundation money has gone to the "watchdogs," and indeed they need to be fed. We know, though, that good, old-fashioned local reporting -- call it investigative or call it "beat" -- needs to replaced. Pocantico is a step in that replacement, as experimentation grows into significant and sustainable news operations able to replace what's been lost, and, of course, able to harness the multimedia tools of the day.

It’s ferment all around these days. The watchdogs meet at Pocantico. Newspaper CEOs fly into for a Chicago airport conclave. AP and others try to up the ante in their Google negotiations. “Paid content” advocates put on their own roadshows to sign up beleaguered publishers for new initiatives and platforms.

It’s a hell of a news summer, a summer of living on the edge.

 

 

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What's the Boston Globe Worth? A Buck, More or Less

The New York Times' David Carr asked six analysts one of the questions of the moment: just how much is the Boston Globe worth?

I liked how Fitch's Mike Simonton suggested that "buyer" may be a misnomer; "assumer of costs" might be truer.

Carr also reminds us that Jack Welch's indicated that he might be willing to round up some $500 million or so to buy the Globe just three years ago. 2006, though, now seems like another lifetime in the newspaper industry. How the Times could have used that kind of money to do battle with Rupert.

So, this week, as we try to separate the potential buyers from those who may just delight at seeing those books (how much of the $85 million in annual Globe "loss" is operating loss and how much "other"?, for instance), I'll amplify on my remarks to Carr.

Given the state of the world, the ad market, the newspaper market and vagaries of the online future, my best guesstimate of a price: a buck.

A buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands, says the buyer. I give you the great potential of the Globe brand, a top 25 news web site and improved ability to re-jigger the pieces, thanks to our new contracts and cost-cutting, says the Times.

A buck recognizes that there is so much unknown and such unchartable risk and reward here that only a token payment can even it out for both sides.

The Times gets shortchanged. It paid $1.1 billion for the paper just 16 years ago. It’s struggled to keep the Globe staffed through bad economic times. It’s subsidized losses. 

The new owner takes on great risk. It's highly unlikely any bank will finance a purchase, given the half-dozen bankruptcies we've seen over the last year in the industry. That means the new owner’s own money is immediately at risk. The new owner starts out behind, even with recent contract givebacks, given the trajectory of operating loss and a continuing 30% decline in year-over-year advertising revenue. Forget the purchase price; how many millions will I have to sink in within the next year?

The potential upsides include buying an ad-based franchise at the bottom of a recession and being able to be a shiny newly painted boat in a rising economic sea; 2010  ad numbers can hardly help to be an improvement over this year’s. The feds will soon be paying people to buy cars, and houses will start to sell again; related advertising will recover a bit. 2010, I'm coming to believe, will offer a breather to the beleaguered industry. Yes, the structural changes of ad spending and reading will continue, but a small ad bounce will help dramatically downsized companies in the next calendar year. That may only stop the gasping temporarily, but breath is breath.

The potential downsides include inheriting a heavy-on-cost business model at a time when competitors from Huffington Post to Politico to local start-ups to emerging online initiatives of local broadcasters threaten to do further damage to daily newspapers. In the fact, the new business models we're seeing from the start-ups -- small, editor-heavy, full-time staffs, growing legions of part-time reporters, columnists and bloggers, regional aggregation models -- stand far distant from the model of a paper like the Globe. If you truly believe that Boston needs a vibrant, public service-oriented news source, is assuming Globe ownership the place you want to start?

Mad Avenue Blues: "Business Models Lost in Space"

Sometimes, for brief moments we hope, satire is all we have left.

Mad Avenue Blues is a satire for our times, this discontented summer, this seeming nadir of media fortunes. Set to Don McLean's "American Pie," it's brilliant, wholly watchable for its full 9:21 run. It's done by the pseudonymic "LMcDuff08," who has a YouTube page with other satires. As John Battelle has suggested, watch it several times to get all the jokes.

"Oh and there we were all in one place. Our business models lost in space."

Mainly, it focuses on the cratering of the old ad world, and on network TV. Newspapers have a nice, supporting role with such lines as:

"I asked the man who ran the Times about turning dollars into digital dimes. But he just frowned and walked away....I went down to the corner store where I'd bought the broadsheet years before. But the man just said the paper didn't pay."

So "if algorithms got you cross-eyed" and "the digital revolution has taken you for a ride," enjoy and pass along.

New Detroit Daily: Nature (and Entrepreneurs) Fills Gaps

Ah, even the name is a rebuke: Detroit Daily Press. 

Entrepreneurs Mark and Gary Stern announced today that, within 60 days, Detroiters will once again be able to get a newspaper delivered to their door seven days a week, though it will have neither the Detroit Free Press nor Detroit News name attached to it. The Sterns certainly have a mountain to climb to achieve the break-even, 150,000 circulation model they've set out as the goal. 

The fact that the Stern brothers are even trying is what bears notice. It parallels a launch of another kind, a coast away. In March, Barbara Bry and Neil Senturia, wife and husband entrepreneurs, launched the San Diego News Network. 

Yes, SDNN is an online site, while the Detroit Daily Press is a print product, with some secondary digital presence to come. Both, though, point to an emerging reality: The rapid shrinking of daily newspaper companies is beginning to leave vacuums in local markets and marketplaces. Entrepreneurs are assessing those gaps and moving to create products that will work -- profitably. Expect these announcement to only accelerate as we see an economic recovery take hold. 

There's an irony in that, of course. Daily newspaper publishers have been making the point that the new economics of the news business simply won't pay for business (and staff and product) as usual. They are right, of course -- given their economics, but not necessarily the next guy's. 

Nine Questions: New England Guilds, Tribune Fallout, San Diego Vacuum and the News Industry's Most Successful Alumnus

Things are turning ugly. Globe staffers up the ante in Boston. John Carroll calls Sam Zell an idiot. Online ads on newspaper sites drop to double-digit negatives. Which leaves me, as we approach this summer of our discontent, with more questions than answers. Here's Nine:

1. Down the road, will the Globe Guild members like their new owners better than the New York Times Company? Certainly, the Globe's sense of loss is understandable -- and real. Still, it's intriguing to compare the Globe Guild's rejection of the Times' offer to the Portland Guild's recent partnering with venture capitalists to take Maine Newspapers down a new road. The Maine Guild accepted givebacks to get the deal done, and to get a share of the company. My sense: It's always easier to be enthusiastic about the new, unknown guys than the management you've dealt with for years, even it is the New York Times. 

2. Where will lenders -- the new owners-to-be of bankrupt newspapers like the Tribune and the Inquirer -- turn for new leadership? They've got old-time publishers to choose from -- lots of them in the market -- as they replace the entrepreneurs like Sam Zell and Brian Tierney who fatally entered the trade in the last several years. They've got broadcast people, borrowing a page from Zell's playbook, as inevitably newspaper and local broadcast operations do grow together. They've got their pick of ad veterans, if they smartly see that local media success is going to be dependent on inventing scalable digital businesses.

3a. Won't Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's okay of Tribune's merged TV/newspaper operations in Hartford seem quaint fairly soon? Sure, the FCC-related value of diverse community voices is a good idea. Going forward, though, the divide between local news video and local story/blog writing creation is an artificial one. Bottom line: The marketplace will probably take care of local news diversity rather than the increasingly outmoded rules of Old Media. 

3b. Aren't we finally able to put a pricetag on Sam Zell's unwarranted optimism and hubris? It looks like his $250 million "loan" to Tribune will be wiped out in the bankruptcy, as will his $90 million warrant. Still, it's just pin money for the guy who sold his real estate investment trust for $36 billion in 2006 and knows enough -- endowing the Zell Center for Risk Research at Northwestern -- to make judicious bets.  

4. While the San Diego News Network (Chris Jennewein's new hangout) is hardly a commercial threat yet in San Diego, the cratering of the Union-Tribune --  a one-time employer of 1422 people that will soon be paying only 572 850 -- leads to this question, in San Diego and elsewhere: How big a marketplace hole does a disappearing daily leave in its wake? My guess is that with an economic recovery, we'll see lots of small-shop entrepreneurs aiming to pick up local merchant dollars now in flux. 

5. Why would anyone expect the Kindle to "save" newspapers when it hardly supports advertising and takes 70% of subscription revenue? 

It's Time for a News Corps

Now, the nation's youth are, in their idealism, fleeing to farms, organic ones of course, as a way to make their mark on the new world. They are willing to shovel manure before dawn, in the belief that they are making a difference.

The organic farm internship movement -- which had a good run near the top of the New York Times' most e-mailed stories list Sunday -- joins education in capturing youthful enthusiasm.

Curiously, though, we see no such movement of the young in embracing the reinvention of the news, of remaking journalism in the digital age. We should. Journalism's never needed more reinvention, more passion, more youth.

Instead, even top young journalists are going in other directions.

Consider this Bloomberg article by Oliver Staley:

"The Harvard Crimson has produced 12 Pulitzer Prize winners and prepared generations of journalists for newspaper careers during its 136 years. That wellspring of talent is drying up as the paper’s editors now shun the field".

The piece goes on to tell us that "just three of the 16 graduating seniors who were on the Crimson executive board are seeking positions in journalism" and that the trend away from journalism, among Crimson editors, has been pronounced for five to 10 years. 

Yes, communication and journalism school enrollment is still up across the country, but that enrollment number may be masking the emerging problem.

First, much of that enrollment is devoted to the related arts of advertising and public relations. Second, some of the talk in the J schools is moving toward the applicability of the journalism major to other employable fields. In fact, Tim Gleason, dean of the University of Oregon journalism school, recently told me, “In the past, parents used to say, ‘I’m so glad he’s a journalism major rather than an English major.' That may change." Third, we have a sense that much of the top journalistic talent -- like the Crimson's -- is blowing away from journalism.

Curiously, the Crimson's outgoing managing editor, Paras Bhayani, is heading for Teach for America. That says reams about the crossroads of the country's talents and the mojo of the moment. TFA is and has been hot for several years, as graduates have heard the calling to fix the nation's perpetually underachieving educational system. TFA offers a challenge to new graduates: take what you've learned and reinvent the way of education, making a two-year-long personal commitment. It has graduated 14,000 teachers, and I've had the privilege to meet a number of them.

They embrace both the intellectual and on-the-ground challenges, and they do so with relish. 

I believe that we've got to see the financial collapse of the news business within the wider perspective of national change. The country, by force and by wish, is in the midst of reinventing education. It may soon be in the midst of reinventing health care. When we see smart, committed youth willing to move the manure along, surely we can find ways to engage them to move stories along, to push the news forward. 

Call it Daughter of Woodstein. The Woodward-Bernstein myth, as powerful as it was to a previous generation, is spent. The best evidence of that may be today's rehashing of the Post/Times Watergate saga; how yesterday to anyone born in the last 35 years. We need a new myth. We need tales of spirited multimedia reporters bringing back the news from Iraq and Indianapolis. 

Just for starters, let's think of it as News Corps. Yes, it's a bit close to News Corp., Rupert Murdoch's global empire, but maybe he'll support it. It borrows some almost-ancient WPA sensibility, and focuses on storytelling, but journalistic storytelling. It is this amazing set of storytelling tools --- the wonders of audio and video and text, of blogging style, of instant reader connection and involvement -- that define what should be an optimistic time, not a time of mourning. Never before have journalists had such a set of tools arrayed before them.

The News Corps notion, of course, would be just a piece of the puzzle. Beyond training and empowering a new generation of newsies, we'll need new ecosystems of training and mentoring and of distribution and aggregation. We can see the outlines of those already, though they hardly fully formed. 

Indeed, some of that reinvention is starting to happen, as we look at the start-up local news and investigative operations from coast to coast and the injections of foundation capital into those enterprises. That reinvention is good, but we're going to need more.

We need to make news cool. We need to make the deeper informing of communities a public good, a point that MinnPost's Joel Kramer made well in a recent Nieman Lab interview. We need to attract some of the most energetic and innovative minds to this reinvention, much as we need them in education, in health and in agriculture.

What News Corps would do is inject new supply into the system, and the supply is one of key problems we have. Those close to 10,000 newsroom jobs we've lost in the last several years means that hundreds of thousands fewer stories are bring reported and written this year. 

So let's start with a News Corps of 1000, and a starting wage of $35,000 a year, a decent start and parallel to what TFA provides. That's a tab of $35 million a year, a paltry sum by many measures and one that could be funded by a consortium of foundations to keep it free of government taint. News organizations, start-up and legacy, could apply for positions, promising mentorship, learning and engagement. News Corp could track the upward trajectory -- the difference its stories make -- that could offset the cascading gloom-and-doom clicking down of the traditional news industry.

One thousand new journalists would be a start and a no-lose test. I guarantee we'd learn things about the craft of journalism that we've only conjectured about. If the 1000- newly-minted-journalist-experiment works, think about the difference that 10,000 journalists could make. At that level, we're still only talking a third of a billion a year. The American newspaper industry itself, even in its flagging state, will bring in about $36 billion this year.

Yes, Knight and a legion of other foundations (among them The James Irvine Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Blandin Foundation) are stepping up to the challenges of the era, and that commitment has only been made more difficult by their recession-wounded endowments. They are now stepping beyond piecemeal funding of experimental projects to providing two- to three-year funding to build new core capacity among new news gatherers, as the recently announced California news initiative, which will operate out of the Oakland-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

I'm not convinced that we need a National Journalism Foundation, as suggested by Knight Fellow David Sasaki in November, but it's another idea that's worth considering here.

Let's look collectively at a big step. Let's look to scale. We've lost scale; now we need to gain scale and make a statement. Jump-starting supply by engaging talented and motivated young people is one way to do that.

Eventually, we figured, the woes of the news business would dawn on the young, and that time has apparently come. They may love the idea of writing and the romance of reporting, yet the economic realities of our time are pushing them in other directions. Let's re-kindle the fire, knowing that a thousand flashlights poking into near and far corners of our communities is a good and timely thing.

Amazon's Rookie Entry into the Blogosphere

Oops. As Amazon makes its move from retailer to publisher, it has stumbled clumsily, but not surprisingly. Amazon is fundamentally a bookseller, a bookseller that knocked out the walls in the adjoining online mall to sell everything from KLH sound equipment to Kingston digital gadgets K'NEX toys to now its very product, The Kindle.

The Kindle has convinced Jeff Bezos that he is no longer just a major merchant, but now a publisher. First, books, then newspapers and magazines and, as of last week, "Kindle Publishing for Blogs." No sooner had the program launched last week that people figured out at Twitter speed that anyone could register any blog, and get in the pipeline to get 30% of the subscription price any Kindle customer decided to pay for that block of content.

Tech Crunch's Erick Schonfeld broke the news of the flimsiness of the Amazon's vetting process on Thursday. He showed how easy it was for anyone to claim and register anyone's else content, doing so with NYTimes.com's Bits Blog. Good post. It hit directly on the easy invitation to copyright theft that the Kindle's blog non-process openly invited, though it didn't note that both profit-seekers and Amazon-folly-pointers were merrily posting porn blogs,  always a good digital moneymaker.

Now, Amazon has responded and says it has taken down the offending blogs. On Sunday, though, Kindle readers tell me that porn sites are still available through the new blog service. It's not clear what vetting process it will use going forward.

Overall, we can see a couple of things in Amazon's cluelessness about how to incorporate blogs into news products. First,  just because massive retailers can be publishers, that doesn't confer on them any of them judgments that real publishers -- Old Media and New -- have running in their bloodstreams. Everybody of course makes mistakes, but the truism in this case is true: everyone makes the same mistakes in editing, so make small ones as you learn the trade. Amazon just hasn't had time. Its pretense that it is a  publisher, when it is really a super-aggregator of books-plus, shows through in cases like this blog program.

We saw another indication of Amazon's inflated sense of itself in the last week's Senate hearings on the state of the newspaper industry. Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, was one of those who testified. Moroney talked about his negotiations with Amazon. Yes, he'd taken umbrage at Amazon's non-negotiable demand for 70% of revenue from subscriptions sold -- even Steve Jobs always takes only 30% at Apple for iTunes apps -- but he would have even swallowed hard and accepted that. What Moroney found unacceptable -- and well, he should -- is that Amazon wanted rights to distribute Belo content to "any wireless device", without further permission of the publisher.

If this is the case -- and I haven't been able to yet verify it -- then it shows a new publisher's overreaching. Sure Jeff Bezos wants to get repaid for all that promotional space on Amazon's home page -- building buzz, offering Millennial solutions to newspaper woes -- but trying to usurp wireless distribution rights is simply over the top. We will soon live in a wireless news and information bubble; asking vendors to turn over their futures really takes hubris. Hubris, always, takes its lumps, eventually.

We can see these learning publisher steps in craigslist's behevior around "erotic services" ads. Yes, we are all quite clear that federal law -- well-intended to enable the Web to become a free-flowing source of information in our democracy -- allows common carriers such as craigslist to flow through ads without checking each one. The right is fairly clear, and it's worked well to the original intention.

The right to publish, though, shouldn't be confused with the necessity to publish. That's a responsibility that all traditional publishers understand deeply over time. craigslist, a relatively new publisher, is still learning it. Yes, maybe, it's had the the right to act as a digital pimp for long time, but it didn't mean that it had to. An apparent ad-related murder, and the hot breath of prosecutors, brought home that point. craigslist didn't have to wait for that pressure. Amazon shouldn't have to wait for people to point out that it is allowing porn sites, or non-owned content to be added to the Kindle, to do the right thing.

Certainly, publishers make mistakes, but rookie publishers make bigger ones.

That's one big lesson about our Pro-Am world in which everyone can indeed be a publisher.

I also wonder about the the Kindle Blog initiative -- it was labeled "Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta" prominently in its acknowledgment of its blunder, though not "Beta" on its promotional page -- in terms of its blog selection process.

While it makes selective decisions about the books, newspapers and magazines that it accepts for the Kindle, it is opening up the blog program for all. That idea reinforces the democratic nature of the blogosphere, but gives up on the "qualified by Amazon" notion. It could have licensed directly or through blog aggregators the top end of the blogosphere, paralleling its books/newspapers/magazines approach. That, too, has often been the role of a publisher -- deciding what content to include and not to include. Maybe, that just seemed too daunting with blogs, or maybe Amazon just has another strategy in mind, including the usage of its prodigious recommendation engine to the world of current content. 

We'll have to wait to find out more about that strategy, as Amazon becomes more comfortable in that publisher role, and the implicit obligation that has long accompanied it: Participating in the media discussion itself.

The Shrinking Daily vs. The Daily Eric

New week, new storyline.

This one appears to be: The Shrinking Daily vs. The Daily Eric. 

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Today's FAS-FAX report tells us that print is dying off more quickly. The basics:

• 7% down daily and 5.3% Sunday;
• Double-digit carnage at major metros: The New York Times' Boston Globe, down 13.6% (daily) and 11.2% (Sunday); Hearst's Houston Chronicle down 13.9% and 7%; Cox's Atlanta Journal Constitution down 20% and 7% and McClatchy's Miami Herald down 15.8% and 13.1%. (Incidentally, the first reports out there today show what seems to be a smaller sample for the circulation report; that sample may be more skewed to metro dailies than it has in the past. So smaller market dailies, as has been the case, are probably faring relatively better than the metros, suffering single-digit declines.)

These losses cap deepening print circulation losses over the last five years -- and are accelerating. We've seen 2.5%+ annual declines in circulation for that period. We've heard from publishers that some/much of the decline was "planned," pruning farther-flung and junk circulation, more expensive to deliver and/or of less interest to advertisers. These numbers, their duration and their acceleration confirm much bigger things are happening here. 

Against this news today, we have Sharon Waxman's report of a conversation with the now-omnipresent Eric Schmidt (who recently seems to have a sense of bad timing, his Google growth announcements juxtaposed against news industry cries and announced woes) at a Hollywood soiree. The Google news summary on that talk:

The Daily Eric to Tell Readers What They Want to Know

Within six months, Google will automatically serve news readers the news they want by combining its knowledge of their reading, buying and search behavior. Google will sell premium ads on these pages and keep the revenue, sharing none with publishers. 

So there we have it. As print shrinks, Google will replace its daily functionality, its daily utility -- and it's been on that road for awhile -- with Google News, v2. It sounds like Google News, v1 meets Google IG meets AdWords for news, a new algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. Importantly -- distinguished itself from all the My Yahoo products that have come before -- Google is recognizing how fundamentally lazy we all are. In effect, we're taken to be the corpulent creatures in Wall E. Google seems to be saying: you don't have to do anything, we'll be your new paperboy.

Of course, this digital paperboy keeps all the money from the collections, a bizarro turn on the old value chain. News producers used to get the money and pay a few pennies (Newsies-like) to the distributors. Now the distributors are making the collections, and keeping it. 

How well will Google's new product work? 

It will be an improvement over Google News, the wonder whose main properties are aggregation, immediacy and some rough hierarchy of importance, though it's the last point that has made it vulnerable. Schmidt's project is as much as a defensive play, shoring up Google News against numerous others looking for ways to improve the news-finding experience (including AP with its landing page plans), as an offensive one. Lost in much of the current Google/newspapers debate is that Google News is still out of the Top 10 in U.S. "Top News" (Nielsen) and needs to improve there compared to Yahoo, MSN network, AOL and others. (It's Google overall dominance, News + Search + Paid Search, etc. that has made it the target.)

The two events of the day remind us how quickly the print to digital news acceleration is now happening. When we look back it, it will be simple to see:  Over the years, the ravages of Internet competition have damaged the press, causing it to cut back and back, and then the recession came long, just as a fierce storm whacks off the limbs of weakened trees, further diminishing them. 

What are the causes for the sharper downturn in circulation? How about:

• Continued generational change to online preference for news over print. Each year, the data speaks louder.
• Continued decline of the print product. You can't squeeze pages out and not expect to have an impact. 
• Earlier deadlines. In moves to consolidate production and printing, we've seen earlier deadlines around the country. Earlier deadlines mean even less timeliness for print readers, though there's no way print will ever beat digital on that.  
• The recession. With unemployment numbers where they are, and all of the above happening, it's an easier decision to not renew these days.
• More publisher cutbacks. Yes, there's been some truth to the publisher cutbacks of less-than-essential circulation, though that was supposed to have run its course. Given the need to reduce legacy costs however possible, some cutbacks are still happening.   

Add it all up, and the future gets clearer. And it's in pixels. The big questions get bigger. Who will pay journalists to create the news? Who will distribute it? How will a new, fairer, stable ecosystem emerge?

Attributor "Fair Syndication Consortium" Completes Newspaper Trifecta

With today's announcement of Attributor's "Fair Syndication Consortium," we see the third piece in what's emerging as a new news industry reckoning with the Web as a major distribution point.

Attributor's new service basically says, "Let the web be the web" --- let news and information flow freely without walls -- and let the technologies of the day loose on the business problems. 

Attributor's piece is one "anti-piracy" initiative. Anti-piracy, of course, came up in the San Diego industry meetings last week. That issue got conflated with Rupert Murdoch's and Dean Singleton's statements on copyright infringement, which further got conflated with how news companies should reckon their relationships with Google and other search aggregators, which further got conflated with the increasing talk of paid content models.

So, the three, fairly distinct pieces -- which, combined, represent a trifecta of web reckoning -- I see going forward now are:

• Renegotiation of news producers' relationships with Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. I've written about my notion of Fair Share (no relation and coincidental timing with Attributor's "Fair Syndication Consortium") and numerous others, including Maureen Dowd, have been exploring the issue. 
• Paid content models.  Janet Robinson today pointed out that the Times had recently studied 30 top publishing models and came away with the continuing belief that the ad-friendly model was the most lucrative. She also noted the Times will continue to look for other ways to monetize its content. Journalism Online's entry into the discussion here provides new firepower. Ultimately, I think we'll see greater concentration on niche pay models, rather than lots of new pay walls. 
• Anti-Piracy: Then, there's anti-piracy. Attributor will try to make its new solution an industry standard. Publishers will like the technology and the idea, and will have to sort through what role they want Attributor to play. Attributor points to a potential gold mine, saying that as much as $250 million annually in new ad revenue could be gained if the system were fully deployed. 

Collectively, these three initiatives constitute an attempt by news publishers to get a grip on how they can best use the web, as they quickly accelerate their businesses from print to digital. That acceleration -- largely fueled this year by the deep recession -- is underway. Publishers, though, must feel like they are riding in a rollercoaster just reaching the crest, with little idea what the fast-moving trip ahead will be like.  

I've gotten a quick look at and talk-through on the Attributor report on illegal use. While the degree of clear piracy -- using more than 50% of articles, not just headlines and snippets -- seems high, the point it makes is a good one. Whether or not major publishers are seeing "piracy" at more than five times their own destination traffic, the point is the same. Don't line up the lawyers to demand takedowns of content, or even distribution links that may provide more difficult-to-monetize traffic. Instead, let the content appear most everywhere (all kinds of exceptions can come to mind), and just take a rev share.

It is a rev share economy on the web. Turning "anti-piracy" into rev share just makes a lot of sense.

It seems like a smart play, if Attributor can achieve scale, first among publishers. Only three -- Reuters, Politico and the German Press Agency -- are on board for the announcement, though the company is hosting a big confab in New York City Thursday, showing off the product and hoping to get more big publishers signed on. 

Attributor already has 28 publishers as clients, so it needs some of those, including AP, the Financial Times and CondeNet  to sign on. Look at AP's up or down on this push as being significant, given both its public profile on piracy and the on-again, off-again weight it shows in the industry overall. 

AP -- and the news industry -- has to decide its comfort level with Attributor's role as a middleman here, just as it has to decide that about Journalism Online. Clearly, Attributor is trying to position its new service as a "consortium." I'm sure it listens to its publishing partners, as does Yahoo in its "newspaper consortium," but Attributor's role -- and rev share -- is clearly one that will get a lot of scrutiny.

If it can get scale there, then, it has a stick to bring to talks with Google (AdSense and DoubleClick) and Yahoo; those talks are in process at this point. Those two companies served more than 90% of the ads on the pages of pirated content, in its study. Paid search companies have long been able to say, "We just serve ads. We don't know who's licensed what content or not." If Attributor's system works as advertised, technology would make the knowledge of illegal (remember, significantly more than headlines and snippets) more transparent. All parties -- sites using content without license, search engines, ad networks -- could be forced to set up a new, and fairer system.