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

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Mark Fiore, who won the prize for animations that ran on SFGate.com, submitted an iPhone app to Apple last year and received an email informing him that his application had been denied, according to a post by Laura McGann at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. In an email that Mr. Fiore said was from Apple, the company wrote that the app was being rejected because it “contains content that ridicules public figures.”

According to the email, the app was in violation of a clause in the iPhone developer agreement that allows Apple to reject materials that it believes may be found “objectionable.”

But a representative from Apple called the cartoonist Thursday and suggested that he resubmit the app, Mr. Fiore said in an interview. “I feel kind of guilty,” he said. “I’m getting preferential treatment because I got the Pulitzer.”

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Turns out Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt isn’t quite sure himself.

But posed with that question during a Boston news conference yesterday, Schmidt did use the opportunity to expound on the difference between pro bloggers and amateur ones. Or at least, his vision of the difference.

From Nieman Journalism Lab blogger Zachary Seward’s transcript of his exchange with Schmidt:

Me: A very small question. Google News very recently added a label for blogs, to differentiate from non-blogs. It seemed weird in 2009 to make that distinction. I wondered, did you have any input on that or –?

Eric Schmidt: I was not directly involved in that. There seems to be a difference between blogs and traditional news. It’s sometimes hard to distinguish because many people in the traditional news are also bloggers.

Me: Or they use a blog platform.

Schmidt: Or they use a blog platform. So we’re trying to find that line. And it’s hard to articulate what that difference is.

Me: How would describe that line if it’s not based on the tech behind the publishing platform?

Schmidt: No, it’s not the technology. My guess is–again, I’m speculating, which is always a mistake–it has a lot to do with the infrastructure around the writer. So a blog that’s associated with a major, legitimate organization–of which, I think, the majority, if not everyone, in the room is associated with–would be, I think, treated differently than an individual blogger who’s using his or her right of free expression to say whatever he thinks. So the presence of an editor, as an example. You know, an editor that’s not your mom.

As Seward points out, Schmidt is wrong about the way Google News categorizes. As best I can tell, Google basically lumps all blogs, including this one, which I like to think of as reasonably professional, in its “blog” category. And no, despite her occasional appearances on this site, Kara Swisher’s mother is not an editor here.

Anyway, the real question for me isn’t “how does Google refer to my work in its search results?” but “how does Google determine where to put my my work in its search results?” Schmidt and company can call it whatever they want–just send those eyeballs my way.

[image credit: kevindooley]

The text in question: The passing reference to an “impending Apple slate” by New York Times (NYT) executive editor Bill Keller in an address to his staff. That’s it.

How is this considered news? Because while everyone in Appleland is positive Steve Jobs has a wonderous tablet computer up his sleeve, no one has actually seen one. But if the guy running America’s newspaper of record mentions it, then it must be true, right?

I had a different take on this: The Times, like every other big publisher, assumes Apple (AAPL) is working on a tablet and would like to figure out how to get its stuff onto the device. But I assumed that the Times, like every other big publisher, has had no contact with the famously secretive company about its plans.

That is, Keller could have said “the Apple slate or tablet or whatever that I believe the company is working on, but don’t know about firsthand.” But he whittled his thoughts down to three words–because he’s good at writing and words and stuff like that, the way you’d think the guy running America’s newspaper of record would be.

But just for kicks, I checked in with Keller yesterday to clarify: Does he actually know what Apple is up to? Or is he in the same boat as the rest of us?

His answer, delivered via a PR rep: “I ain’t sayin’.”

Okay, then!

Let’s start by noting that it’s possible that Keller is simply tweaking a reporter’s earnest query with a purposely delphic remark.

And even if Keller does know something about Apple’s plans, that doesn’t mean he knows much. Apple is famous for keeping its vendors and partners in the dark about its product plans until Steve Jobs unveils the devices onstage.

Still, if Apple has talked to Keller and the Times about its tablet in any way, that news will come as a surprise to other publishers I’ve talked to, who can’t get Apple to even wink or nudge about the device.

Earlier this month, for instance, I reported that executives at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. couldn’t get Apple “to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device.”

Yesterday, I talked to an executive in charge of digital efforts at another big brand-name publisher who said the same thing. “You can’t even joke with them about a tablet,” said the executive. “They get very serious and cut the conversation short.”

Has Keller or any other Times executive had a longer conversation? I pinged Keller again last night for clarification, but haven’t heard back. If I do, I’ll update here.

In the meantime, if you want to read the tea leaves yourself, they show up around the 8:30 mark in this video, first published by the Nieman Journalism Lab:

Bill Keller speaks to the digital group at The New York Times from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

In fact, reps from Google and the AP linked up in Manhattan on Wednesday to discuss the deal, which expires at the end of this year, people familiar with the meeting tell me. This timing makes sense since Google (GOOG) had flown in many of its top brass to New York for a series of internal meetings this week.

But that would come as a surprise to anyone who took Curley’s words, delivered after a speech in Hong Kong on Tuesday, at face value.

Here are Curley’s comments, recorded by an attendee at the Hong Kong meeting and transcribed by Zachary Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab:

Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP’s demands. “They have said very strongly that they would,” Curley responded. A bit earlier, he said of Microsoft, “They know how to have a conversation.” And what about Google? “I’m not talking about Google,” he said. “We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked with them in any serious way.”

AP spokesman Paul Colford says he has nothing to add to Curley’s comments. But I’ll try to make a case on his behalf: Maybe this is one of those “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” situations whereby Curley doesn’t consider the talks the two sides have been having to be “talks.” Alternate proposal: Maybe Curley is going for “truthiness” instead of “truth.”

I guess that’s possible. The recurring story I’ve heard from sources on both sides of the negotiations, which have been going on for months, is that they’re not moving very far.

The problem: The AP has a list of demands, which start with more money and move on from there, including assurances that its copy will receive better treatment than secondary outlets. And Google hasn’t expressed much interest in changing the existing agreement. The company is “quite happy” with the deal it has now, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters on Wednesday.

I understand why Curley would want to play up his talks with other portals, as well as the notion that he’s willing to pull his cooperative out of the world’s biggest traffic generator. Per above, I don’t think those are particularly effective tactics, but I understand them. But that’s different from creating an alternative reality altogether.

The search giant is planning to upgrade its existing Google Checkout payment service to handle a broad suite of billing and subscription services targeted at premium content creators like newspapers, according to a memo the company recently submitted to the Newspaper Association of America.

The memo, which went online this week, responds to the NAA’s open request for new “paid content” solutions earlier this summer. It was first spotted by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

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Denton disclosed his new policy, which isn’t really a new policy but a revival of an old policy, in an interview yesterday with Nieman Journalism Lab. He’s tried this a couple of times before: Last year he experimented with paying readers $7.50 for every 1,000 page views they generated via submissions. And in 2007, he offered a bounty of $10,000 for anyone who could land an “unretouched” version of an image that ended up on the cover of a women’s magazine, and paid out for this shot of Faith Hill.

I followed up with Denton this morning and he told me that he hasn’t fleshed out his plans yet–they’re “half-baked” right now–but they’re likely to be of the Faith Hill variety: Payouts to winner of contests, sweepstakes, etc.

Paying for tips, interviews and exclusives is standard practice outside of the U.S. The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, paid a source that helped it break the expense account scandal that’s been roiling that country’s Parliament.

But it’s supposed to be verboten for “respectable” American media, though that self-imposed standard has been eroding for some time. It’s increasingly common, for instance, for TV news operations to pay big “licensing fees” to sought-after interview subjects, purportedly for access to family photos and videos.

Paying for tips is also old hat for newspaper tabloids. And TMZ, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse, has made it well-known that it will pay for tips. It’s a very good bet that the Web site has been writing many checks during the past couple weeks of the Michael Jackson frenzy.

Ultimately, Denton says, he’d like emulate the TMZ model. “I’d love to have their reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.” Dream big!

TMZ boss Harvey Levin talks about his pay-per-tip policy in this interview with Kara Swisher:

Yes, says WSJ.com Executive Editor Alan Murray, who alluded to his plans in an interview with Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Murray doesn’t go into any level of detail about what he has up his sleeve except to say that he’s thinking about niche products that might focus on energy, or a “news service for chief financial officers.”

In other words, trade newsletters, which have proven to be a very resilient business for the likes of McGraw-Hill (MHP).

The video of the interview is embedded below, and you can see a full transcript here. But here’s the relevant text:

Murray: We’re working on a premium initiative to launch a series of, as you say, niche or narrower information services that we can sell at a premium to smaller groups of subscribers on subjects that they care most about.

Question: What sort of subjects?

Murray: Oh, I mean, there are potentially thousands of them. Energy might be an example. Obviously a lot of our readers are deeply interested in financial subjects. Perhaps some sort of a news service for chief financial officers. There are a lot of ideas that are on the table. We’ve started prioritizing them–got a few that will probably come out first. But I’m not going to break that news on your video.

I’d complain about the Nieman crew not following up on this (and burying the lede, too–what are they teaching over there at Harvard?), but the fact is that Murray has been talking about this stuff internally for a while. So has his boss, WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson, so I’m not sure whether this qualifies as new news.

But it is worth noting that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who was just forced to take a huge write-down on the Journal, has sounded increasingly disenchanted with advertising-based businesses, period. You may recall that when Murdoch acquired the paper in 2007, he was geared to take down the pay wall surrounding the Web site altogether, as the New York Times (NYT) had done with its flagship site. Now it looks like News Corp. (NWS) is willing to put up even more walls.

Also, while I’m at it, the disclosure: The site you’re reading right now is owned by Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal. But as far as I know, we’ve got no plans to charge for it. Enjoy, gratis!

Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal on charging for content from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Here he is in 1995, at a Harvard University forum on journalism in the “on-line era,” thinking outloud about the ways his company might make money in the Internet era.

This is all an experiment. We don’t know where this is going. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. We do know that. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. And there’s not a lot of ways to make money.

As far as I know, there are only four–three, if you exclude blackmail–“Mr. Roberts, I won’t put that information up in exchange for $100,” which may be the only way to make money at this business today. Either the reader is going to pay or the advertiser is going to pay, or we’re going to get a piece of the transactional action. If the reader decides that she wants to get theater tickets from the Shubert organization for “Cats,” one, we’ll try to talk her out of it, but if she still goes out to see “Cats,” then maybe we’ll get, you know, one one-hundredth or one-tenth, or whatever the heck it is, of that transaction.

I had no idea Sulzberger harbored such an anti-”Cats” bias. Who knew?

I’m also not sure what to make of the fact that the Times–and everyone else in the news business–is still struggling with online economics 13 years later. Should the industry get credit for grappling with a problem that’s much harder than it looks? Or should our collective big brains have resolved this one by now?

Thanks to Harvard’s excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for digging up the transcript of the forum, which also featured tech pundit Esther Dyson; Walter Issacson, who was at the time a top executive at Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.; and Frank Daniels III, publisher of the now-defunct Nando.net. You can read the entire thing (warning: very, very long)  below.

Evidence: This eye-popping traffic chart, created by the smart fellows at Nieman Journalism Lab, using data from Nielsen Online, via Editor & Publisher (and yes, if you’re counting–this is the third time this info has been repurposed).

Boilerplate caveats: Nielsen data are different than internal logs, Nielsen data are different than comScore, Gawker Media has a bigger audience than the Los Angeles Times, etc., etc.

Big picture: No other daily newspaper that employs actual journalists to write real news stories comes close to the Times online. This includes my employers at News Corp. (NWS), who are making a concerted effort to position The Wall Street Journal as a Times competitor for general interest readers. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns the Journal and this Web site.)

As always, this distinction won’t do much for the Times if paper can’t afford to stay in business. But it’s worth noting that in a world where all of us are supposedly creating our own news aggregators and building our own microsites full of news that appeals only to us, more and more of us end up visiting the paper of record. Surely that’s worth something, no?

How about this instead: Some brief reminiscing, via this June 2004 Harvard Crimson article, written “nearly a semester after” 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had launched thefacebook.com. At the time, it had 160,000 users.

It’s a great story (thanks to the excellent Nieman Journalism Lab for pointing this out via its Twitter feed), but let’s just zoom right ahead to the end:

Zuckerberg participated in a live television interview for CNBC, and says he has been wined and dined in Harvard Square by representatives from major software companies.

Still, he is maintaining the same approach: don’t sell.

“That’s just like not something we’re really interested in,” he says, referring to selling out thefacebook.com. “I mean, yeah, we can make a bunch of money—that’s not the goal…I mean, like, anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network. I value that more as a resource more than like any money.”…

“My goal is to not have a job,” he says matter-of-factly. “Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.”…”I assume eventually I’ll make something that is profitable,” he allows.

The site is currently running some advertisements, but Zuckerberg says they are only being used to offset server costs. Nonetheless, the facebook’s business manager has posted notices soliciting ads on multiple websites, and a thefacebook.com rate card shows that the site is interested in attracting national advertisers….

“There are a couple ads on the facebook because [the site] costs money and servers don’t grow on trees,” Zuckerberg says.

But will the facebook ever be auctioned off to the highest bidder?

“Maybe when I’m bored with it, then we’ll work something out,” he says. “But I don’t see that happening anytime in the near future.”

Cool foreshadowing, huh? (Harvard kids! So smart!) But let’s put Facebook’s success in context–by comparing it to Silicon Valley’s most successful start-up of the last couple of decades. Here’s how Facebook today stacks up against the Google of 2003, when that company was 5 years old.

I’ve pulled the Facebook stats from various sources, so please consider them estimates. The Google (GOOG) stats are much more solid: I’ve pulled most of them from the company’s 2004 IPO prospectus.

Facebook:
Workforce: 700+
Revenue: $260 – $300 million
Net income: None (EBITDA of perhaps $50 million)
Valuation: Something in the $4 billion range, based on reports of share sales
Motto: “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves.”

Google:
Workforce: 1,907 (as of March 2004)
Revenue: $962 million
Net income: $106 million
Valuation: Something in the $20 billion range, based on press reports
Motto: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served–as shareholders and in all other ways–by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”

So take a bow, Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve built something really cool. But if you want to keep up with Larry and Sergey, you’d better get back to work.

[Image Credit: deneyterrio]