The problem is calling them newspapers …

– Barry Diller, in an interview with Katherine Weymouth, CEO of the Washington Post, at the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange on Tuesday

The New York Times is looking for a new ad sales head, following a corporate re-org that went into effect yesterday.

Denise Warren, who used to head up both ad sales and the Times website, has a new role heading up “digital products and services” for the company. In her place, the Times has temporarily installed ad executives Todd Haskell and Andy Wright.

In a memo explaining the change last month, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and new CEO Mark Thompson said the company would look for a permanent replacement “immediately, considering both the talent we have inside The Times and the external market.” Warren had been in charge of ad sales at the publisher since 2005.

Whoever gets the job will have their work cut out for them. Like the rest of the newspaper industry, the Times has seen print ads decline for years, but recently its digital ad revenue has been contracting as well.

In February, the Times said advertising had dropped by 8 percent in the last three months of 2012. The paper also warned that the ad tech boom had begun to compound the pricing problem Web publishers were already seeing from a “glut of available ad inventory,” citing “a shift toward ad exchanges, real-time bidding and other programmatic buying channels.”

In other words: “Premium publishers” like the Times used to be able to charge advertisers more than the rest of the Web. But the gap between the haves and have-nots is shrinking, aided by technology that is supposed to let advertisers cherry-pick the eyeballs they want, wherever they are.

We should see the newest evidence of that later this month, when the Times reports its results from the first quarter of 2013.

The Times said it is selling the paper, along with the rest of its New England Media Group, because “a sale is in the best long-term interests of these properties and the employees who work for them as well as in the best interests of our shareholders.”

Bloomberg first reported the sales talks.

The Times bought the Boston paper for $1.1 billion in 1993, and hired Goldman Sachs to explore selling it in 2009.

Dumping the Globe is consistent with the Times’ larger strategy of selling off everything but its flagship paper. Last year, for instance, it sold About.com for $300 million to Barry Diller’s IAC.

Last year the New England Media Group, which also includes the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, generated revenue of about $400 million. That was down approximately 2.5 percent from the previous year, and accounted for nearly 20 percent of the Times’ total revenue.

On Jan. 2, blogger Andrew Sullivan announced with much fanfare that he was using Tinypass to power his experiment in self-publishing, a move that generated an enormous amount of attention for the 12-person shop.

Now Tinypass has its own announcement to make: It has hired a CEO and raised $1.25 million in seed funding.

The money news comes with a caveat, because the company had raised the round throughout last fall; now they’re just making it official.

But the new boss is actually new: Trevor Kaufman comes to the company after a five-year stint working for ad giant WPP, who bought his Schematic interactive agency and kept him around to run Possible, a roll-up of other ad/design shops.

Tinypass is a spinoff of another e-commerce platform aimed at filmmakers, and it hasn’t had a CEO before. Up until now, it has been run by COO David Restrepo, who also happens to be a Schematic veteran. He’ll stay on, Kaufman says.

Now the job for the company is to build on the momentum Sullivan has generated. They have about 45 paying clients right now, but Sullivan’s spotlight has prompted 400 people to download their software for a test drive.

Tinypass is supposed to offer publishers maximum flexibility for selling their stuff. Sullivan is using it to create a sort of freemium/meter operation, but you could also use the software to put up a strict pay wall, or to sell content via a download model, or some kind of combination.

In most cases, Tinypass takes a cut of its publishers’ sales; for some large clients, it charges a license fee instead.

Kaufman has a whole pitch ready to explain why publishers might consider selling their content, instead of, or in addition to, relying on advertising. But you, clever readers, already know about the declining-CPM-and-increasing-inventory hamster wheel of doom that most Web publishers are spinning on. So, no need for that.

The bigger question for Tinypass is why publishers should work with them instead of several similar outfits. JournalismOnline/Press+ has been selling a version of this, mostly focused on daily newspapers, for several years. MediaPass does something very similar, and they claim “hundreds” of clients, including Weekly World News, the people behind Bat Boy.

But I bet “good enough for Andrew Sullivan, good enough for you” will work fine for a lot of people, at least in the short term. And perhaps with investors, as well — Kaufman says he expects to raise a Series A round in the near future.

While details are being finished, people familiar with the matter said that a metered paywall — meaning a Web site that allows casual readers to read a certain number of stories free before charging a subscription fee — is likely to be rolled out in 2013, along with increases to the print newspaper’s newsstand price. One person familiar with the matter said the paywall will be introduced no earlier than next summer.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

anxiously awaiting The Daily Planet’s move to three day per week publishing.

– From commenter Everett Will, on a post about DC Comics’ decision to have Clark Kent quit the Daily Planet in Superman #13

The search giant is shutting down Google TV Ads, its attempt to create an online marketplace for traditional TV spots. The idea was Google could make ad buying more efficient and Googley, but buyers, programmers and distributors never embraced the notion.

Google sank five years into the project, and eventually boasted that it could reach 42 million households, including agreements with distributors like Verizon and DirecTV. That’s close to half of the pay TV universe, but it’s hard to find evidence that the program really got traction.

Google TV Ads did last much longer than Google’s efforts to leap from digital into newspaper and radio ads. Those programs were shuttered in 2009, and in the case of the radio program, Google took the rare step of actually laying people off. That won’t happen this time around, Google says.

If you want to put a positive — and plausible — spin on it, you could argue that Google doesn’t need to spend any more time trying to break into traditional media, because it’s doing a bang-up job with digital. No need to chase dollars in the old media you don’t own if they’re flowing into the new world you dominate.

The company has more than 530,000 paying subscribers for its digital editions, and it credits the plan with a consistent increase in circulation dollars. Which it needs, because its ad dollars continue to shrink.

Here’s another data point in favor of the plan: A report from Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, who estimates that the paper will have more digital subscribers than print subs within a couple of years.

The caveats: Even if Venkateshwar’s projections are right, the digital subscription story won’t solve all of the Times’ problems. For starters, each digital customer generates much less revenue than a print customer: The digital sub pays around $220 a year for the Times, versus approximately $730 for the paper-and-ink version.

And while the profits that each kind of sub generates for the paper should be roughly equal — because it’s a whole lot cheaper to produce and deliver a digital copy than a print one — that only holds true if the Times isn’t overly reliant on discounts to sell its digital subscriptions.

Still, Venkateshwar, who has been bullish on the Times for a while, argues that most of the digital subscribers to date seem to be new customers. So all of this is incremental revenue. That’s a best-case scenario for the paper.

“I was hanging on, and so was the whole family,” the 81-year-old Mr. Murdoch said in an interview Thursday. “We were very emotional about it. … I went through lots of ups and downs.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The split would carve off News Corp.’s film and television businesses, including 20th Century Fox film studio, Fox broadcast network and Fox News channel from its newspapers, book publishing assets and education businesses. News Corp.’s publishing assets include The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and the Australian newspaper, as well as HarperCollins book publishing. If a separation occurs, the publishing company would be far smaller than the entertainment company.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The reason for the change is that articles are no longer written only for the newspaper. Breaking news is posted immediately on the Globe’s websites; stories are then fleshed out, posted again, then put into the process for the next day’s paper and the next day’s web entries. With all that traffic, a reliance on “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow” is an invitation for error.

– Charles Mansbach, Page 1 editor of the Boston Globe, on why the paper will no longer use the words in stories

The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent.

(We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent.

Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight.

But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases.  [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]

Who in their right mind would lie to Ira Glass?

That was my first reaction to the revelation that the theatrical monologuist Mike Daisey had lied or fabricated — or in his words, “taken dramatic license” with — certain parts of his stage play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

When I met people at parties in recent weeks and told them that I write about technology and that I had devoted more than a decade to covering Apple, the first question I used to get was: “Did you know Steve Jobs?” Since about January of this year, that first question has become, “What do you think of Mike Daisey?”

I haven’t had a real answer. I hadn’t seen his show, which was favorably reviewed by the New York Times, nor had I heard the episode of the highly respected public radio documentary program “This American Life” titled “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” that had been adapted from his play.

The show — or shows — hit a cultural nerve at a critical moment. Apple is the biggest company in the world, sporting a market capitalization of $546 billion as of Friday, with $100 billion worth of cash and investments on its balance sheet and the most popular stable of consumer electronics products in the world, especially the iPhone and the iPad. All of them are manufactured by workers in China, who labor for wages that are low by Western standards, put in hours that by Western reckoning are long, under conditions that to Western eyes aren’t ideal, doing jobs that by any standard are incredibly tedious.

Daisey’s stage show, which became a sensation among New York’s chattering classes, sought to draw attention to the plight of allegedly oppressed workers at Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner in China. As New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood put it, the play “is a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone.”

The stage show had been adapted for radio on public radio’s “This American Life,” which is probably the most-respected radio documentary program in the history of broadcasting. And the Daisey episode was presented as documentary, meaning the radio show’s staff of journalists and producers were vouching for it being true.

The problem: Much of it wasn’t.

In the show, Daisey described a trip to China, as well as a visit to Foxconn’s outer gates and other manufacturing companies in Shenzen, where many are located. He delivers a detailed and emotionally riveting account of meeting girls as young as 12, 13 and 14 years old who claimed to work for Foxconn. This would be in violation both of local laws and of Apple policies.

He also told of meeting workers poisoned by a chemical called n-Hexane, used to polish screens.

And, perhaps most movingly, he related a tear-jerking scene in which he showed a working iPad to a man who said he had crippled a hand while making its parts in a Foxconn metal press, yet had never so much as seen one of the devices powered on. Seeing the iPad’s screen in action, he tells Daisey, “is like a kind of magic.”

The word “magic” fits oddly here, because these meetings didn’t happen as Daisey said. “This American Life” yesterday aired a lengthy episode entitled “Retraction,” documenting Daisey’s many liberties with the facts.

To help do so, a reporter for another public radio show — Rob Schmitz of “Marketplace” — did what no one else in the media seemed to be willing to do, which was subject Daisey’s claims to scrutiny. Most damning of all in Schmitz’s report was the testimony of Daisey’s translator, called Cathy. She was found — after Daisey had told TAL he had lost contact with her — and disputed many of the anecdotes taken from the play and used in the radio segment about Foxconn.

Among the fabrications: Daisey didn’t speak to quite as many people nor visit nearly as many plants as he said he did. She disputed finding underage workers. The n-Hexane poisoning incident occurred not at Foxconn in Shenzen where Daisey visited, but at a Wintek facility in Suzchou, more than 900 miles to the north of Shenzen.

The stage show, and therefore the radio show that was derived from it, turned out to be a mixture of facts and fiction. Which might be fine for a production on the New York theatrical stage, where fiction and fact blend readily. And, while it might be okay in entertainment products, you don’t expect it from a prestigious radio documentary program.

And that is where the problems began.

When Daisey’s monologue was adapted for “This American Life,” outrage began to grow among people who wanted to do something about it. It was, Glass says, the most downloaded episode of “TAL” ever, and public radio listeners did what public radio listeners tend to do. For one thing, they started a petition. More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition at Change.org, inspired by the TAL production based on Daisey’s work, demanding that Apple make changes.

That includes crafting a “worker protection strategy” for new products released, as well as publishing data from Fair Labor Association audits.

Feeding the frenzy, Daisey stepped up as the leading voice for worker rights in China’s electronics industry. He was seemingly everywhere in the media. Since the TAL segment aired in January, Daisey has been seen on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” in a report that, like the “TAL” episode, is now going to have to be retracted or at the very least walked back.

Another CBS-owned property, CNET, hosted Daisey as part of “Reporters Roundtable,” alongside Charles Duhigg of the New York Times, co-author of a series of front page stories in that newspaper. Duhigg ended his “Roundtable” appearance by urging people who care about the issue to go and see Daisey’s play.

Daisey also appeared on MSNBC repeating the same anecdotes and tarnishing the usually shiny Apple. And on HBO. And PBS. And C-SPAN.

Needless to say, there will have to be many more retractions in the days ahead.

At this point, it’s hard to determine what’s more outrageous, Daisey’s lies to Ira Glass and his team, or the national media’s willingness to give Daisey a platform to repeat the same lies and fabrications without making the slightest effort to vet them.

The circumstances around Apple’s manufacturing arrangements in China aren’t new. As a columnist for Businessweek I wrote about Apple’s first round of “sweatshop” allegations in 2006, well before the age of the iPhone and the iPad, which had at the time first come to light in part because of the reporting by London’s Daily Mail.

I’ve never been to China. Many people know more about the on-the-ground facts concerning Apple’s factories than I do. But there are many reporters who have been there. In 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour wrote a powerful cover story for that magazine, which aimed to get to the bottom of the string of suicides that occurred among Foxconn employees that year.

ABC’s “Nightline” visited Foxconn earlier this year. Its report was criticized in some circles, because at the time of his death, Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs happened to be the largest shareholder of that network’s parent company, Disney. Also, ABC had been invited by Apple and Foxconn. Even so, “Nightline” anchor Bill Weir, seeing conditions very different from what Daisey described in the course of his reporting, wondered if Mike Daisey’s work was questionable.

At the very least, Daisey is a dramatist who now admits he chose to lie, but for reasons known only to himself. The chance to raise his profile and sell more tickets to his monologue are obvious potential motivations. Whatever it was, his dramatic product is meant to be consumed as thought-provoking entertainment, not as fact-based journalism, which many people assumed it was.

This is the crux of Daisey’s defense for lying to Ira Glass and his fact-checker: That he’s not a journalist and took dramatic license with the events, and now regrets doing the “This American Life” segment.

And that’s the real shame here.

Clearly, people care about how workers who make our electronics are treated, or there wouldn’t have been a market for Daisey’s show, or for an hour-long radio documentary adapting it. And the subject is one we need to discuss at length as a society. The net result of Mike Daisey’s efforts to put self-promotion ahead of the facts has badly muddied the waters, and has probably done more harm to the people he sought to help.

So, instead of illumination on a serious topic, we are left with little. Mike Daisey is an opportunistic fabulist and should be ashamed of himself for lying. Ira Glass and his team are ashamed for giving him wider attention, and have said so. But there are many more people who should be even more ashamed for taking Daisey’s lies at face value. There should be many more retractions and apologies in the days ahead.

But now we have to start the conversation about Apple and Foxconn and workers’ rights all over again, this time with real, verifiable facts at our command. Is that so much to ask?

(Image courtesy of Mike Daisey’s Web site.)

The numbers of readers signing up so far suggest that at many papers, “paywalls” aren’t about to reverse publishers’ deteriorating finances. Yet the results aren’t discouraging industry executives, who say their efforts are succeeding in shoring up the core print business after years of declines.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But maybe not. Michael Crichton, for instance, had insisted in 1993 that “what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.” Crichton, of course, wrote “Jurassic Park,” so we must defer to him on dinosaur expertise. But he was far wide of the mark on the extinction of mass media, so perhaps his vision about newspapers in particular was also flawed.

A hint of where Crichton’s vision went wrong can likely be found in the same speech, where he said this:

“More and more, people understand that they pay for information. Online databases charge by the minute. As the link between payment and information becomes more explicit, consumers will naturally want better information. They’ll demand it, and they’ll be willing to pay for it. There is going to be — I would argue there already is — a market for extremely high-quality information. …”

But that’s not what happened, at least outside of trade publishing (industry newspapers, magazines, and newsletters). The closed online services of the 1980s (CompuServe had started its service in 1979) and early 1990s, with their usage fees, gave way in the mid and late 1990s to the open Web. Prodigy, which already in 1991 boasted a million members, was sold at a billion-dollar loss in May 1996, just 18 months after the release of the test version of the Netscape Navigator browser.

And notions of what consumers would pay for — and what they should even be asked to pay for — were turned on their heads. By early 1996 the media theorist (and former Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow was writing in Wired that the optimal price for information in many cases was … free. “Most soft goods,” Barlow declared, “increase in value as they become more common. Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.”

And that is precisely what newspaper publishers and others fairly quickly sought to do.

The rest of this e-essay is available on iTunes.

Richard Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom. At ProPublica, he has responsibility for all of its non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper; vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company; and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones.

The New York-based start-up has been at this in various incarnations since 2009, but CEO Shafqat Islam says he’s getting some traction, and is able to charge Web publishers $3,000 to $5,000 a month per “vertical” for access to his (borrowed) content. He says he’ll do $1 million in revenue this year; last month, Islam raised a $4 million Series A round led by First Mark, along with Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Shari Redstone’s Advancit Capital.

Content syndicators aren’t a new idea, by any means, and NewsCred’s basic pitch sounds quite similar to Mochilla, which has raised a pile of money. Several folks are trying versions of this in video, including AOL’s 5min and U.K.-based Perform Group’s ePlayer. And Demand Media has tried putting its super-low-cost freelancers to work for publishers including USA Today.

NewsCred’s basic pitch seems to be that it has a better selection of blue-chip content makers, all of which are getting guaranteed payments for their stuff. Islam pitches his product as a disruptor out to take on the likes of the Associated Press, but he also syndicates content from Reuters and Bloomberg, also giant newswires. So presumably they don’t feel threatened quite yet.

Here’s an interview I conducted with Islam earlier this week, featuring a cameo from Pat the Contractor (NewsCred is in the process of moving into its own place, after graduating from start-up launcher General Assembly).