Sad but not surprised to see another 100 let go at the Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously publishing newspaper in the country at 254 years old. This once-proud newspaper is the Northeast beachhead of the Tribune Corp., which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
I remember interviewing for a job there back in the day. The editor spoke with was partcularly proud because they could lay claim to be the “first newspaper published in space.” They had sent a fax of the top headlines to the crew in the space shuttle.
Among the 100 let go are 30 in the newsroom, which has seen its staff cut in half in less than a year. As I’ve written before, ten years ago the Courant could have saved itself and Times Mirror in the process.
Sadly it has come to this: The Dora the Explorer folks are smarter than Time Magazine’s Walter Isaacson.
In the paltry 56-page Time this week, Isaacson, its former managing editor, argues that the way to save your newspaper is to start a micropayment system on the content we surf. Hardly an original thought, considering another Time writer argued the same iTunes-like model a couple of weeks back, and I took him to task as well.
Thankfully, this micropayment idea will go nowhere, for several reasons. Chiefly, iTunes works because U2’s version of Sunday Bloody Sunday is unique, not a commodity such as news reporting on a presidential innauguration. Also, paying 99 cents for the tune also allows for portability for non-internet use. Let’s not forget other music service such as Pandora are thriving by allowing access to their music without a micropayment or 99-cent download system.
What’s interesting is how quickly Isaacson breezes past the glaring fact that we pay upwards of $5o a month for broadband
access to Time.com content — and Time receives none of it. For his treatise to have any credibility, Isaacson needed to call out his counterparts at Time Warner Cable, who last month agreed to pay Viacom additional fees from 13 million cable television subscribers to show content such as Dora the Explorer.
If they are paying for Dora content, why not for Time.com from the $34.95 monthly broadband fee collected by Time Warner’s Roadrunner broadband service?
Fear not Walter, there’s a much simpler way to save major newspapers and media publishers. It will cost about 5 minutes of HTML work and a tap on the shoulder of your favorite Time.com operations webmaster.
Simply block the major ISPs from accessing your content unless they pay a fee from all the money they are already collecting from us. A simple HTML page that says “Unfortunately, you cannot access Time.com because your internet provider does not participate in the Time Media Network. Here’s the phone number and e-mail of your provider to contact for more information.”
When all major media players start doing this, you’ll get your share.
Taking in today’s coverage of the Super Bowl ads, I cringed when I saw the Boston Globe sports section today. Used to be you’d see follow-up ads in print as the major ad campaigns kicked off during the Super Bowl, but zero evidence of that here.
To wit: There was only one ad in the Globe Sports section today – a quarter page ad for a fishing show in Worcester.
This is scary to newspaper folks because of the ad-to-content ratio: Newspapers, when they were healthy, never dipped below 60 percent ads and 40 percent content. Today’s Globe sports section itself was only 10 pages, so that means the ratio was less than one percent ads.
To be fair, there was a full page ad for boston.com/cars and a half page for boston.com/jobs. Likely strategic partnership deals where ads are provided in-kind as part of a larger joint agreement (Read: not full retail value). Even counting those ads at full value, that’s a 17.5 percent ad hole for the section.
Interesting post at A Second Opinion, Ross Levinsohn’s blog. At a VelocityInteractive event, he asked 30 attendees what site they could not live without, and which sites they couldn’t believe had “made it.” More than half replied Twitter. He then polled 13 teens in the room and asked them if they had every heard of Twitter.
The kids however are a different story. We live in a bubble. They live in reality. So when I asked the 13 girls and boys about Twitter, the answer I got surprised me, and the room full of entrepreneurs. Stunned was an expression I would use to describe the room. Of the 13 kids we asked — do you use Twitter? — not a single hand went up. Then, we asked if they had heard of Twitter — only 1 hand sheepishly went up. Stunned silence.
Among his conclusions is that as media and tech aficionados, we need to temper our enthusiasm with a reality check at times and ”It may mean that Twitter is more for the 30-40 crowd, then the teens and 20-somethings.”
So I followed up with my reality check: My 16-year-old has heard of Twitter but doesn’t use it “because none of my friends are there. Only like, two.”
Thinking of Twitter as more of an adult and corporate brand perfectly dovetail’s with what I spotted on Geek.com – a UK startup will microblog for your brand on Twitter for a fee. So the adults and brand managers may be more into Twitter and perhaps permeate it in no time with company-based tweets.
Hopefully these paid postings will be clearly marked as “Sponsored Tweets” because the kids, of course, will suss such advertising posts out right anyway if companies try to sneak them past as “organic.”
That is, if those 13-year-olds ever decide to sign up in the first place.
Well, saw this coming. The wizards at Gatehouse Media finally figured out they could change their robost.txt file to prevent the Boston Globe crawlers from hitting their site and rendering their headlines.
Of course, they had filed a lawsuit first, before someone probably send them a wikipedia entry on how to block the crawler. They quietly settled out of court.
An absolutely priceless news report 1981 showing how the two San Francisco newspapers started offering their regular editions online back in the day as an experiment. The downloads back then took two hours for a newspaper, with a $5 an hour phone charge — when it could be bought on the street for 20 cents. They called it the “telepaper” and predicted someday we’d all get our news this way.
Ok, it’s like 1999 again. Or so thinks the hyprocritical folks at Gatehouse Media, who have sued the New York Times, parent company of The Boston Globe. The reason: The Globe had the audacity to link to stories from GateHouse Media newspapers on their local web pages. Wrote the Globe’s Robert Weisman:
At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites….A response filed Jan. 14 by Times Co. listed a string of counterclaims and noted that GateHouse’s websites similarly have used and linked to content from the Globe, The New York Times, and other news sites.
Years ago I worked at The Patriot Ledger, which has since become a Gatehouse property and it hasn’t been pretty watching it decline the past few years. I’m a subscriber to both papers. I can tell you that the Ledger, which used to be quite a feeder paper to the Globe, is now a nice photo journal. Their “redesign” launched last year was just a simpler way of putting in larger pictures and headlines and less news hole.
Frankly, it pains me to say I’m not sure they’ll be around in a year. Could be the next Portland-Press Herald. Yet I know where the Ledger executives are coming from: The Old Media paradigm. It used to be that when you became a member of the Associated Press, you could stipulate that certain competitive newspapers in your region did not have rights to re-publish your content. But that was then.
Here’s hoping the judge see this as the regional spat it is and throws the case out. Google already fought this battle about rendering headlines and blurbs and won in the U.S.
Take your choice of views from four live streaming feeds, add instant commentary with your Facebook friends and you’ve got a paradigm-shifter.
A look at the various media outlets today made CNN the clear winner, with more than 18 million video streams running from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET. That’s triple the 5.3 million streams they handled on election night. MSNBC reported 9 million video streams.
What put CNN over the top was the instant chatting capability with Facebook, which saw 4,000 status updates a minute and 8,500 updates the minute Obama stood to take the oath of office.
Coverage of live events with commentary is not new — you can do so with an online subscription to any of the major sports leagues. And Lycos Cinema has launched a similar tool for movies, not live events. But the CNN feed was live, free and did not require any registration. Frankly, that seems too good to be true for a long-term business model.
What is yet to be seen is the expense side of the streaming and whether CNN can make this ROI-positive. As I’ve pointed out in the internet is not free, CNN gets a share of our cable television payments, yet CNN online inexplicably does not get a share of our broadband payments to our cable companies.
This clearly is a paradigm-shifter and a huge win for CNN and Facebook brands. I fully expect companies such as MySpace and AOL with their messenger client to see the power of this with a network partner or the Associate Press to do the same next time.
And cheers to the tech teams that pulled it off with no crashes, glitches or even choppy video, from what I saw.
Ok, it’s no Edward R. Murrow vs. Joseph McCarthy, but Rick Sanchez had a great defense of the journalism profession against the idiotic commentary of Joe the Plumber – “war correspondent.”
Just when you thought you could figure out the latest web business model or the best way to get a higher conversion from ads on Facebook, John Dvorak comes to the rescue.
Just beg.
Dvorak, the curmudgeonly PC Mag scribe and pontificator of all things web, has his own blog called Dvorak Uncensored.
It’s mostly pedestrian stuff, but he thinks it’s worth more than most.
So don’t miss his left hand ad begging to keep those pesky ads off his site, because ads are well, for the common bloggers apparently, not his high-minded posts about Star Trek clips and George Bush cartoons.
Seriously, what an insult to an industry that has paid his salary handsomely during the years. He’s used to the print model where his columns were published without all the messy distractions next to his scintillating commentary. Any U/I aficionado worth his salt knows about visual blocks anyway, so I’m not sure what he’s so atwitter about.
John, remove the ads from your site if you’re so incensed. To see you begging for donations is a downer to say the least, and it also colors any further commentary you may have on others’ business models. Most of us thought you could do better than that.
continuously publishing newspaper in the country at 254 years old. This once-proud newspaper is the Northeast beachhead of the Tribune Corp., which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. 
In the paltry 56-page Time this week, Isaacson, its former managing editor, 
access to Time.com content — and Time receives none of it. For his treatise to have any credibility, Isaacson needed to call out his counterparts at Time Warner Cable, who last month agreed to 
and which sites they couldn’t believe had “made it.” More than half replied Twitter. He then 
A look at the various media outlets today made CNN the clear winner, with more than 18 million video streams running from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET. That’s triple the 5.3 million streams they handled on election night. MSNBC reported 9 million video streams. 
John Dvorak comes to the rescue.
Seriously, what an insult to an industry that has paid his salary handsomely during the years. He’s used to the print model where his columns were published without all the messy distractions next to his scintillating commentary. Any U/I aficionado worth his salt knows about visual blocks anyway, so I’m not sure what he’s so atwitter about.