This was a very apolitical group that had absolutely no understanding about the military-industrial complex whatsoever, and no understanding about international finance. As a result of joining our battle and trying to protect themselves, they have come to see that the threats related to Internet freedom come from the military-industrial complex, the banking system and the media.

– Julian Assange, in Rolling Stone, referring to Anonymous

Michael Bloom joined the publisher, which owns Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men’s Journal, in May. On Friday afternoon, he sent out a memo announcing his departure. Here’s the bulk of the note:

As some of you already know, I’m moving on from Wenner Media. While it’s been a relatively short time, I’ve really enjoyed working with so many talented and creative people across Wenner’s incredible brands.

Over the past six months, a new digital leadership team has been put in place, and a lot of great work has been done to set the foundation of what will be a terrific digital future. I’m proud of what you guys have accomplished and I know that you will go on to do great things in 2012. I’ll certainly be rooting for you from the sidelines.

Unlike many of his competitors, Wenner Media owner Jann Wenner has never rushed to embrace digital publishing. For a long time, he did very little with the Web beyond handing over his flagship RollingStone.com site to RealNetworks.

That deal made him money, but it also allowed upstarts like Pitchfork to grab lots of territory and mindshare over the years. Last year, Wenner got control of the site again and moved to put most of it behind a pay wall.

Around the same time, Wenner declared himself unimpressed with the commercial upside of the iPad for magazine publishers, a position that put him at odds with the conventional wisdom. Since then, many of his peers have become much more sympathetic to his take.

Bloom, who had previously put in time at Sharecare, MTV, and AOL Time Warner, didn’t mention a new job in his note; Wenner Media hasn’t announced a replacement. I’ve asked Bloom and a Wenner rep for comment.

I don’t think that gives you much advantage as a magazine reader to read it on the tablet — in fact less so. It’s a little more difficult. From the publisher’s point of view I would think they’re crazy to encourage it.

Digital unenthusiast Jann Wenner, explaining why he’s not rushing to create special versions of his magazines — US Weekly, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone — for the iPad or any other tablet. Well worth reading the entire interview in AdAge.

As Yahoo (YHOO) seeks to sort out its women’s strategy online, Brandon Holley (pictured here)–the editor-in-chief of its main women-focused site, Shine–is leaving for a job with the same title at Condé Nast’s Lucky magazine.

In the women’s space, Yahoo’s Shine site, is huge, but has lagged in social networking and other current trends.

Juicing it up is important, since the women’s market is a big one for advertisers, with many competitors–from iVillage to AOL (AOL) to a recent effort by Demand Media to reach women using a site created with supermodel Tyra Banks.

Here is the press release from the New York media giant about the move by Holley, who had been at Condé Nast before (and you can read a story here in the New York Times from earlier this year, in which she compares her online and offline jobs):

BRANDON HOLLEY NAMED EDITOR IN CHIEF OF LUCKY

New York, N.Y., September 8, 2010–Brandon Holley has been named Editor in Chief of Lucky, it was announced today by Thomas J. Wallace, Editorial Director of Condé Nast. Her appointment is effective September 20, 2010. Ms. Holley was the Editor in Chief and business lead of Yahoo! Shine, one of the largest online destinations for women, since 2007. She replaces Kim France, who is leaving the company.

:Brandon is an extraordinarily innovative editor whose extensive experience in both the print and digital realms will be key to developing the Lucky brand across multiple platforms,” said Mr. Wallace.

Under Ms. Holley’s leadership, Yahoo! Shine attracted 25 million visitors per month, according to comScore. Her appointment at Lucky marks a return to Condé Nast for Ms. Holley, who was Editor in Chief of Jane from 2005 to 2007, when it ceased publication. In 2001 she launched ELLEgirl where she remained editor until 2005. Ms. Holley served as senior editor at GQ from 1998 to 2000. She was also part of the launch team of Time Out New York where she served as the dining and shopping editor from 1995 to 1998. She started her magazine career as a writer for Paper magazine and worked as a fact checker for Rolling Stone. In 2002, Ms. Holley was named one of Advertising Age’s Women to Watch.

Lucky and Luckymag.com focus on shopping and style, showcasing what to wear and how to wear it, while making fashion and beauty fun and accessible. The magazine, which launched in 2000, has a circulation of 1.1 million. Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, operates in 25 countries.

In the United States, Condé Nast publishes 18 consumer magazines, two trade publications and 27 websites that garner international acclaim and unparalleled consumer engagement.

Kara stayed above the fray this week by opening up with a signature exclusive. She lunched with Ben Horowitz and got his take on why Andreessen dropped out of the race to fund Foursquare. Kara then got to look forward to some Bartz-baiting, as she prepared for Yahoo’s (YHOO) earnings call. It should be noted that Bartz-baiting is the official past time of residents of BoomTown. It turns out that Yahoo! did well this past quarter, even if revenues were still a little soft. Kara rounded out a solid week of reporting with a second exclusive that made use if her stealth-mode penetrating radar (we hear she had it installed back during the Reagan administration). She peeked under the blanket of Kakai, one of the Valley’s stealthiest startups and saw a Kindle for students. She couldn’t get much more, but we know that the company has a red phone to Chegg, the online textbook rental service, so the pieces are coming together.

John made it back from Europe this week, and now that the Volcano has settled down, it was time for Digital Daily to be truly daily again. Early in the week, John reported on the loss of some very important intellectual property by a tech giant. No, German beer was not involved. It turns out that the sensitive stuff hackers got a hold of during a recent attack on Google (GOOG) was the source code to their single sign-on system that interacts with all the Google-y services that seem to make the world go ’round. Tuesday, he reported the action as Apple (AAPL) trotted out its new, lengthier bank rolls on its earnings call. It was a good last quarter for Apple. Hopefully the unfortunate start to this one doesn’t get them down. John finished up the roller coaster week with a post about how it’s not just girls dressed up in animal ears that are huge in Japan. Apparently, so is the iPhone, which has now dominated near 75 percent of the Japanese smartphone market. Weekend Update expects it to continue to loom over Tokyo, at least until Mothra shows up.

Peter was still on baby hiatus this week, so Media Memo was a little sparse, but he managed to post a couple stories to tide us over until he returns in earnest. It turns out that Rolling Stone may be waking from its Rip Van Winkle-esque sleep and entering the digital age. And get this, they are going to charge for content. Tuesday brought news that blog platform Tumblr raised another $5 million from VCs. It seems that they aren’t done yet either. Tumblr will also be coming for the money of its users, with a monetization strategy that includes some of the usual suspects; pay premium service, virtual goods and the like. Peter finished the week with a point to ponder about the upcoming pay plans from Hulu. $10 a month seems to be the number filtering out of the reporter pool, but Peter wonders if $120 per year will be a little steep for consumers and a still not quite enough to pay for Hulu’s own bills. At least Tumblr can find comfort in knowing that even big businesses have trouble making money on the Web.

Walt reviewed the HTC HD2 this week in an attempt to answer the age old question, “How big is too big?” The device, currently on sale from T-Mobile, boasts a giant 4.3 inch (diagonal) screen. Walt didn’t think size was an issue, as the screen was nice and still portable. The issue came in the software and ease of use. It didn’t measure up to the big players in the market, and in the end, it doesn’t matter how big the screen is if you can’t use it for much. Mossberg’s Mailbox was headlined by a question about social games on the iPad, and Walt relayed the sad news that there would be no Mafia Wars on the iPad, at least not yet. He also demystified Apple TV, which even confuses Weekend Update from time to time. Katie finished up the week with a review of a new sort of service in the cloud. ICyte saves Web pages for later reading, even if the site changes or goes offline. It allows users to share these snapshots of sites, as well as spreading them around the social Web. Katie used the free version of the service, which is ad supported, and had good things to say overall, and thought it might be especially useful for people who do a lot of research online.

It’s been a long, stressful week for all of us here in the tech media space, and Weekend Update is going to sign off now and head over to our local watering hole for beer and some downtime with friends. As an added precaution, we’ve duct taped our iPads to our arms. Wouldn’t want to leave them by accident.

Rolling Stone magazine, which has more or less slept through the Web era, is finally waking up. A deal with RealNetworks (RNWK), which made the magazine money but left it far behind the competition, has expired, and a revamped site launches today. So does a new strategy: Pay to play.

You can still get access to some of the site’s stuff for free, but much of the magazine will be moved beyond a pay wall. Subscriptions will range from $3.95 for a one-month look to $44.95 for a two-year commitment.

In exchange, you get goodies like a print subscription and access to all the magazine’s back issues dating to 1967. Which is more or less what I wanted to see the company offer. So that’s nice.

I do wish that Rolling Stone rewarded its existing print subscribers as well by offering them discounted or free access to the site. But I’ll let Jann Wenner and company explain why they’re not going that route.

One thing that’s not popping up in the discussion of Rolling Stone’s digital do-over: Any mention of an iPad edition. Perhaps there’s one coming down the road, but I think the Apple (AAPL) omission is intentional. I imagine that Wenner, who is fundamentally a magazine guy, has no interest in sharing with Steve Jobs any digital dollars he does earn.

But how do you find cool music blogs? That’s where Twones, a Dutch start-up wants to come in: It has launched a new service designed to bring you stuff you might like. Or at least that you’ve never heard before.

Sound familiar? It should: You can describe The Hype Machine the same way, and that service is already cherished by Web-savvy music lovers.

And investors, too. But due to worries that it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, Hype Machine hasn’t attracted any serious money despite four years of accolades.

That’s because the MP3s the music blogs post are almost always copyright violations, technically speaking. That’s not a problem for the blogs because the big labels now tend to turn a blind eye (usually).

But Hype Machine caches those songs, which means you can hear them almost instantly, but which also puts it in a legal gray area (at best). I know of at least a couple prominent investors who are convinced they would be sued as soon as they sent the company a check. So they haven’t.

Back to Twones. The service, which is set up as a toolbar for Firefox browsers, sidesteps Hype Machine’s legal landmines (I think) by simply sending users directly to the music blogs themselves. When you select a song (or Twones picks one for you) it opens the page in a new browser window, and the song is supposed to play automatically.

So no legal liability (theoretically). No licensing fees either.

But it’s not nearly so much fun. At least in the brief spins I’ve seen. Precisely because the songs aren’t cached, going from one Twones blog to another can mean there’s a gap between songs as the page loads. Or no song at all if Twones steers you to a dead link.

It could be that all of this is simply early-stage kinks, because the service just opened to the public this morning. But I fear that playing by the rules will ultimately cost Twones here.

This one isn’t a total shock, as EMI and Grooveshark had supposedly been close to a deal prior to the lawsuit. And it wouldn’t be the first time that a label sued a Web company: See Warner Music Group (WMG) and Imeem, as well as Universal Music Group and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, among others.

No details on the deal from EMI or Florida-based Grooveshark, which offers free streaming music, a la MySpace Music, Imeem, Spotify and others. Unlike those services, though, Grooveshark doesn’t appear to have licensing deals with three of the big four labels and plays their music anyway. But with the exception of the EMI suit, it has remained unmolested. Interesting.

For the record, here’s the release (Inside baseball note to Grooveshark guys: Please don’t attach press releases as PDF files. Really cumbersome. Thanks.):

Music streaming service Grooveshark signs deal with EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing
Gainesville, FL–Today, digital music service Grooveshark.com announced it has entered into agreements with major label EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing that will give Grooveshark users access to content from EMI’s roster of current and legendary catalog artists and EMI Music Publishing’s songwriters.

Grooveshark offers music fans the ability to stream songs for no fee from a vast catalog of music. Fans can enjoy Grooveshark’s music without having to download client software or register. The basic service is free to fans and supported by visual advertising. Fans who opt for a $3 per month premium service can enjoy unlimited ad-free streaming music. The site was recently named the best way to listen to music on the web by Rolling Stone, and just surpassed one million registered users.

“EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing have collaborated with us to create a mutually sustainable deal which represents the future of digital music,” says Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino. “We will continue to deliver the best music service on the Internet to our users, and we will expand our capacity to strengthen fan-to-artist connections through our technology.”

“We think services like Grooveshark offer great music discovery options for fans,” said Mark Piibe, EMI Music’s Global Head of Digital Business Development. ”In turn, Grooveshark offers a new revenue stream for our artists and will help us learn more about how we can better connect different types of fans with artists.”

And who knows? It may even be true. But here’s one bit of nuance to chew on: Magazine mogul Jann Wenner has made money–as in, a profit–on the Web for the last five years.

How so? By licensing Rollingstone.com to RealNetworks (RNWK) and letting that company bear almost all the costs of running the site. True, the site didn’t blow anyone away. But it has generated cash. I’m told the RealNetworks deal is worth “several” millions in profit per year.

That kind of performance wouldn’t be very meaningful for a title owned by a big public company like Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., where it would be important to show Wall Street that you’ve harnessed the power of the Web and turned it into your own personal growth engine.

But for Wenner’s privately held company, which owns all of three titles, a few million bucks a year in profit is a few million bucks a year in profit. And that profit has come in handy the last couple of years, when the Internet growth engine has turned out to have problems of its own.

Let’s be clear: Wenner’s cautious, cash-flow-positive strategy has now left Rolling Stone far behind everyone else on the Web when it comes to market share. Which is why I’d suggest that his company not try to replicate its print strategy–which aims to straddle an uneasy line between modern pop culture (“The Hills”!) and golden oldies (“The Beatles”!)–and forgo the idea of becoming “The Rolling Stone of Web.”

Even if Wenner had tried this years ago, I don’t think it would have worked; the Web is too diffuse and pop culture tastes too fractured for any single site to gain the kind of traction that his magazine got during its heyday. And if any site does have that power, it’s Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, and no one’s going to displace that now.

My two cents: Turn RollingStone.com into an amazing online archive that capitalizes on the magazine’s glory years, when it really was the hub for popular culture. The magazine should have a treasure trove of stuff at its fingertips–interviews, articles, photos,  etc.–but you’d be hard pressed to find any of it on the site now.

Take the interviews that Wenner himself conducted with John Lennon and other luminaries, for example: Great stuff. But if you’re looking for, say,  Wenner’s 1970 interview with Lennon, you can’t find them on his own site. You’ll have to look over on…YouTube.

It should be relatively easy, and inexpensive, to cull this stuff, make it searchable, figure out ways to recycle, repackage, and redistribute it, right? It won’t necessarily do blockbuster numbers, but it won’t cost much, either. Get lucky, and you could even turn a profit.

Last night, onstage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, my most excellent partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed well-known techno musician Moby about music and entertainment in the digital age.

The wide-ranging talk was part of an ongoing cultural festival series organized by The Wall Street Journal, called Summer Scoops Live.

Here are three video clips from the event:

If you prefer to read, here is a live blog that Michelle Kung did of the event to enjoy:

7:30 p.m.–Out of the steaming heat and into the cool, air-conditioned confines of Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse.

7:39 p.m.–The lights dim and Moby and Mossberg make their entrances. Moby slinks down in his chair (“Am I greasy, or is it the chair?”) just before WSJ culture editor Christopher John Farley introduces the pair.

7:43 p.m.–Mossberg plugs his son, who’s in a band, before asking Moby–whose real name is Richard Melville Hall–if he is really related to “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville. Moby replies that that is what his parents have always told him and explains the origins of his moniker: “When I was 11 minutes old, my parents looked at me and I was this little grub of a baby and my mother said, Richard Melville Hall is a very grown up name, and my father said jokingly, let’s call him ‘Moby.’ All these years later, I still have this name I’ve have from infancy.”

7:46 p.m.–Mossberg asks Moby, in between jokes about being both being bald-ish, about the difference between “Play” and his new album, “Wait for Me.” Moby begins by talking about how the success of “Play” completely surprised him, because he was considered a “has been” by the time the album was originally released in the early 1990s and that Rolling Stone refused to review the album. His success with the album also confused him, because he was unsure of his next step–was he supposed to listen to the label now? To the fans? To himself?

“Wait for Me,” his ninth studio album, was designed as a return to simplicity, and created with old instruments–many of which were purchased on eBay–in his bedroom in Manhattan. When Mossberg asks Moby to clarity what he means by “his bedroom,” the musicians lays out out his floorplan–he lives in a two-bedroom apartment on Mott Street and with a small space (“two people starts to feel claustrophobic”) set aside for his music work.

7:52 p.m.–Moby uses a Mossberg question as an excuse to slam Jay Leno, whom he calls the “least prepared interviewer.” He fakes a Leno voice, and mock interviews: “So Moby, you have a new record. Tell me about it.” Mossberg interjects, “So I have a low bar?” to the delight of the crowd.

7:53 p.m.–Mossberg asks Moby how he used technology in “Wait for Me.” Moby begins by explaining that while he loves technology, he don’t fetishize it like some of his friends. “I have an 18″ flat screen TV. A bigger screen doesn’t make TV any better. ‘Family Guy’ is still funny on a little TV. If it works and doesn’t cause me undue stress, I love it.’

7:55 p.m.–Moby launches into an explanation of what Pro Tools and plugins are, and how thanks to this nifty recording/mixing operating system, he can take prerecorded “notes” that have been recorded abroad, say, in places like Vienna, and then recreate a 60-piece orchestra on his keyboard.

7:59 p.m.–On to issues of intellectual property. Moby says: “I don’t mind when people pirate my music–if you want to steal my music, more power to you.” Mossberg immediately asks, “Why?” And he deadpans, “Deep-seated emotional issues.” He then goes on to explain that personally, he’s so honored that people want to listen to his music, he doesn’t want to restrict access to it. “I don’t have alimony, I don’t need insulin…I don’t have crystal meth problems.” Thus, he personally doesn’t mind, but he can only speak for himself. But to clarify, he does want you to buy his album so his friends at the label are happy.

8:04 p.m.–Mossberg and Moby discuss the RIAA’s decision to sue customers. Moby says that it’s never been cheaper to make music, videos, and promote albums. EMI, he thinks, broke even. So why are they alienating their customers?

8:06 p.m.–Blind item alert! Moby says that a few years ago, he was talking to a record label head, and when he asked the top honcho about their iTunes plan for their biggest star’s newest album, he was told, oh, we’re going to wait a couple months.

Moby then launches into philosophy mode and brings up the is/ought fallacy to illustrate his point, noting that the current music model “underpins the failure of major labels–they think, it used to be this way, so it ought to be this way.” Their ethos is, “Please go away. Make the future die.” Mossberg suggests he write a song/album with that title. Moby quips back with “Young People Suck” as a potential label-inspired tune.

8:12 p.m.–Moby adds a qualifier to his comments, touting Mute, his own record label. “Mute is wonderful, and they care about music–it’s the big major labels who have been egregiously bad stewards of music. It’s hard to feel bad for them when they’ve brought us some of the worst music ever created.” He then gets in a dig at Lars Ulrich of Metallica, saying that if he needs a “fur-lined walking humidor,” that’s him.

8:15 p.m.–Moby asks the audience if he can get pedantic for a moment. They cheer their assent. He then launches into a story about the early days of the Beatles, a band that got “lucky” because everything they did was in mono. “The first ‘Meet the Beatles’ was recorded in four hours. They played the songs and it was done.” He explains how this is not possible anymore.

8:18 p.m.–Yay! Moving on to a discussion about Auto-Tune, which “enables anyone to fake perfect pitch.” Moby declines to name names in his anecdotes, because he has enough feuds already, but singles out Cher’s “I Believe” as the first of the supremely auto-tuned songs, and mourns how kids can’t recognize real singing anymore. Next, a discussion of playback, aka the technology that failed Ashlee Simpson when she was reduced to her now infamous hoedown on “Saturday Night Live.”

8:23 p.m.–Memory lane for Mossberg. He recalls seeing the Supremes, and Simon & Garfunkel in the ’60s for $3/ticket in a gym, and how the concerts back then used to sound just like the album. But everything is much more complicated now.

8:25 p.m.–Moby talks about how he plays to bigger crowds in Europe, and how he can enjoy the concert experience. Playing in front of a big crowd, he says, with big production values, is the musician’s equivalent of playing the big penis card.

8:28 p.m.–Mossberg asks: When you make music, do you have to consider the fact that it’s going to be listened to on [Apple] iPods and [Microsoft] Zunes? Moby says sadly yes, and tells a story about how super-processed music works on the subway, because the noise of the L train doesn’t interfere with, say, a song by Rihanna, but the subtleties of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” will get lost.

8:32 p.m.–Mossberg moves on to playing a snippet of the song “Pale Horses” from “Wait for Me” because we’re running late, and Moby says he has to pee–”Syphilis is a demanding mistress.” Mossberg: “Bill Gates doesn’t say that to me…I can’t believe I’m defending Microsoft.” Moby: “I’m just saying the Zune is clumsy as hell.” [For those lacking the implied sarcasm, Moby clarifies later on that he does not, in fact, have syphilis.]

Moby on “Pale Horses” and many of his other songs: 80% of the work is done in a couple days, but it’s the finishing stuff that is what really takes a really long time. To get the job done, he holes himself with the music–”Hopefully, a more benign version of Ted Kaczynski during the creative process.”

8:40 p.m.–Audience Q&A time. Moby is asked about his licensing deals, and says he doesn’t license music anymore, because he’s sick of being the whipping boy for the process. Which is ironic, because everyone’s selling out now. He adds that he initially licensed the music for “Play,” because it allowed more people to hear the album.

8:46 p.m.–Moby interrupts a question-asker to comment on how he wishes the stage were against the left window like a previous panel he was on, so everyone could get a glimpse of the view. The questioner then proceeds to take out a Chilean flag and hold it up before asking Moby if there’s relationship between his music and the cosmos. The short answer? Yes.

8:51 p.m.–Mossberg sums up the evening and offers kudos to Moby for sharing his time and process.

8:52 p.m.–Moby plugs a new tour date in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And good night everybody!

And, here is a rather unusual cartoon video of Moby being interviewed by a dog that the Journal did:

And, here is a video of Moby last week, talking about the digital impact of the music, in an interview on the Leonard Lopate radio show on WNYC:

Finally, here is a Q&A that Walt did with Flavorpill’s Caroline Stanley about a range of tech trends, as a preview to the event.

[Moby photo credit: AFP/Getty]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090811/mossberg-does-moby/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090408/trueslant-tests-another-model-of-web-journalism/ http://allthingsd.com/20090408/trueslant-tests-another-model-of-web-journalism/#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:08:03 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090408/trueslant-tests-another-model-of-web-journalism/ As newspapers, magazines and TV stations face dire economic challenges, and journalism moves increasingly online, debates are raging about how best to preserve quality news and commentary while still making money.

There’s lots of experimentation with different approaches. Many journalists, old and new, are operating as stand-alone bloggers, but finding it hard to make a living. Web advertising has weakened with the economy, and often can’t cover the costs of expensive reporting. A couple of respected traditional publications have successfully attracted large numbers of paid subscribers online, but many others who have tried have failed.

Meanwhile, advertisers also are scrambling to figure out the best way to sell their products online, in a manner that both attracts potential customers and blends in well with the content and style of news sites. And publishers are trying to capture the conversation and sense of community that permeate services like Facebook and Twitter.

This week, a new Web news site is entering the fray, with a novel approach to journalistic entrepreneurship, new forms of advertising, and an effort to blend journalism and social networking.

The site, called True/Slant, at trueslant.com, is opening its doors via an odd preliminary status it calls an “open alpha.” This means it’s rough around the edges, and not yet taking in revenue, but hopes to attract enough participation to hone its design and operation.

True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,” assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the originating outside site.

The initial group of contributors includes current or former writers for publications such as the Financial Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Time magazine and the Boston Globe.

Readers can go directly to the page of their favorite contributor, but the site’s home page will knit together popular content and contributors, and each reader will be able to track multiple topics and contributors through a streaming feed called “I’m following.”

True/Slant will run regular Web ads throughout. But, in a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists’ pages, but will be labeled as ad content.

The journalists are paid a small amount, but the plan is to turn them into minipublishers under the True/Slant umbrella. They will be offered a share of the advertising and sponsorship revenues their individual pages generate and, in some cases, equity in True/Slant, which is backed by venture capital.

These contributors are allowed to keep writing elsewhere, either online or in traditional media, and even to promote these outside efforts on True/Slant. But they are expected to post original commentary and analysis to True/Slant. They also are allowed to arrange for their own advertising or sponsorships, in addition to what True/Slant can sell, and even, in some cases, to add other authors to their pages.

In another unusual move, the contributors also are required to actively engage with readers on the site. They must post a minimum number of comments in reader discussions about their articles and curate the comments, giving prominence to the most interesting. They are even expected to comment on each other’s posts.

This required engagement is an attempt to capture some of the excitement of a social network, and it ties in directly with a contributor’s success. On the home page, and elsewhere throughout the site, True/Slant promotes not only the most popular contributors, but also the most active ones. High rankings in these categories can lead to higher traffic on each contributor’s page, and, indirectly, to higher income.

Readers who are active commenters can also gain prominence on the site, especially if those comments are popular or called out for special attention. A front-page panel will highlight the most active commenters, and the most called-out comments.

The layout of the site is clean and handsome, a decent effort to meld a news site and a social network. One layout flaw the company hopes to fix: There’s no easy way to find a list of all topics, only those it considers hot at any moment.

It’s way too early to know if True/Slant will succeed. For one thing, it is still dependent on advertising, not subscriptions. And ethical questions could arise, because the site’s operators don’t edit or preapprove the content, and the model of blended journalism and advertising could prove problematic.

But it’s another example of how the Web is changing traditional media, and might be worth a look.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090408/trueslant-tests-another-model-of-web-journalism/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/ http://allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:46:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/ Believe it or not, there are people who want nothing to do with smart phones like BlackBerrys and iPhones — they just want a basic cellphone for making and receiving calls. Maybe it’s because they think smart phones are too big or too expensive. But as email becomes harder to miss and social-networking sites grow more popular, these people might start to feel a twinge of smart-phone envy, and wish that they, too, had a way to stay plugged in.

Notifier’s home screen condenses quick snapshots of data from various sources into: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.”

For the past week, I’ve been testing an application called Notifier by iSkoot Inc. (iSkoot.com), which is designed to give basic cellphones a smart-phone-like shot in the arm. Notifier aggregates updates from various sources and social communities — including email, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds and instant messaging — into one application made for no-frills phones.

I tried Notifier on a Samsung Propel that costs $50 with a two-year contract and rebate. I appreciated the app’s way of keeping so much content in one spot, which saved me from checking various places for information. And Notifier is designed so you should need to sign into an account only once. But I found serious drawbacks in the experience.

Unlike on a BlackBerry or an iPhone, on which you can place programs you use frequently on the very first screen, Notifier is buried on the phone in a section called “My Stuff,” under a section called “Games and Apps,” which takes 10 clicks to reach. That’s a tremendous pain when you just want to quickly check Facebook. There aren’t any shortcuts or hard keys on phones that will open Notifier more quickly.

Second, Notifier’s user interface can be awkward. Posting updates to my social networks through Notifier was a clumsy process that was riddled with extra steps. My phone even had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I preferred to use Notifier for its namesake purpose: It “notified” me of news like friends’ status updates, new messages (tweets) on Twitter and RSS news feeds.

Notifier costs $3 monthly and is exclusively available on roughly 30 AT&T (T) phones, 21 of which don’t have QWERTY keyboards. AT&T advises people who use it to do so with a data plan; these start at $15 monthly for unlimited data without text messaging. You must buy Notifier in AT&T’s online store, MEdia Mall.

Smart phones are flush with apps that aggregate content from several social networks into one spot, including Xumii for the BlackBerry or iPhone and a feature called Pulse in Yahoo’s (YHOO) oneConnect for the iPhone. There’s even a fun — though not too functional — iPhone app called Ziibii that floats social-network tidbits down an on-screen river.

Whether they’re on smart phones or basic cellphones, apps that display a lot of data in one condensed place need to do so clearly. Notifier does this by displaying a ribbon of icons at the top of the phone’s screen that it calls the carousel, and you can move the phone’s directional arrows left or right to switch from one program to the next. Whatever icon is highlighted in the carousel is the program that appears on the rest of the screen.

A tiny house icon represents the home screen, where three categories of boxes show quick snapshots of data: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.” The top box, labeled New, shows names of programs with numbers to show how many new items, or updates, were submitted to that program. For example, “Inbox: 3″ means that three new emails were received; “Feeds: 54″ represents 54 newly received snippets of news from an easy-to-use RSS reader built into Notifier.

Below this data are the My Update and My Stream sections, with left and right arrows to let you scan through various subcategories within each section. My Update shows your status on the various social networking sites.

I found My Stream to be a little confusing. It lets you arrow left or right to see what’s going on in your social network — if you received a new email, for instance, or someone sent you an instant message. But because you’re arrowing left or right, not up and down in a list, it’s hard to find the beginning of this stream. And Facebook notifications are a little too vague; one might say, “Barbie Roberts updated her Facebook profile,” without telling you what she did to update it.

Another Facebook glitch that I ran into was that I had to sign in more than once. This could be a hassle if you’re on the road and nowhere near a computer. In one instance, I was signed in and typed out a status update, but had to sign into Facebook yet again to post my new status. ISkoot says this and other Facebook navigation issues will be fixed within a week.

I flicked through My Stream while standing in line to board a plane and minimized the Notifier screen to get back to the phone’s functionality. Notifier can alert you of new messages even when it’s minimized. This works because the app stays connected to the network, so when you get a new message on Facebook, an email or an instant message, an indicator pops up asking if you’d like to open up the Notifier screen.

The trouble with this indicator is that it doesn’t specify what kind of message you received. I care a lot more about email and instant messages than I do about Facebook messages and would rather not be notified about Facebook. And messages received in the Facebook inbox won’t display in Notifier’s “New” inbox; instead users must take an extra step out to the browser. The company says it’s working on fixing this.

I liked the Notifier news feeds, which were easy to set up. A technology category offered content from 11 sources, and the entertainment category’s seven sources ranged from Rolling Stone to the Onion to Perez Hilton. These feeds are mixed into My Stream, like email or any other news from your network.

Instant messaging, however, required too many steps. It took a while for buddy lists to load. When I selected a person’s name to start an IM conversation, a white screen appeared that looked like a place where I could type my message, but I had to select a “Write” option to skip to another screen and start composing. Likewise, emails couldn’t be typed on the screen of the message itself; rather, you have to open a separate screen for text entry. You might get used to this after a while, but it felt clumsy to me.

Notifier’s extra $18 monthly cost (not including a voice plan) might be worthwhile if you just need a way to stay plugged in and notified of the latest goings-on with friends and email. And compared with the cost of a smart phone, it might be an economical alternative. But its awkward interface and poor placement on the cellphone leave a lot of room for improvement.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080723/f8-dont-be-bad/ http://allthingsd.com/20080723/f8-dont-be-bad/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:38:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2850 At precisely 1:35 p.m. Pacific time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the guy “Rolling Stone” once described as a “Nietzschean superdork,” takes the stage and begins his address with a simple, unassuming “hey, guys.” He moves quickly on to the “Facebook Movement” and the company’s mission, which he defined while on his recent worldwide vision quest. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Apparently, we’ve refined things a bit since D6 and that “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” episode.

“We want to define human presence and extend it,” Zuckerberg says. “We’re working to make the world a more open place. We’re working to make people have a more open connection with each other and the world around them … We’re making the world more transparent.”

Zuckerberg says Facebook’s goal is to highlight the good in people, cultivate it, and expose the bad. “Facebook is all about transparency,” he says. “It’s good for people to be good to each other.”

“It’s good for people to be good to each other.” Sort of like Google’s (GOOG) informal “Don’t be evil” motto, but sillier.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080723/f8-dont-be-bad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080723/f8-dont-be-bad-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20080723/f8-dont-be-bad-2/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:38:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2850 At precisely 1:35 p.m. Pacific time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the guy “Rolling Stone” once described as a “Nietzschean superdork,” takes the stage and begins his address with a simple, unassuming “hey, guys.” He moves quickly on to the “Facebook Movement” and the company’s mission, which he defined while on his recent worldwide vision quest. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Apparently, we’ve refined things a bit since D6 and that “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” episode.

“We want to define human presence and extend it,” Zuckerberg says. “We’re working to make the world a more open place. We’re working to make people have a more open connection with each other and the world around them … We’re making the world more transparent.”

Zuckerberg says Facebook’s goal is to highlight the good in people, cultivate it, and expose the bad. “Facebook is all about transparency,” he says. “It’s good for people to be good to each other.”

“It’s good for people to be good to each other.” Sort of like Google’s (GOOG) informal “Don’t be evil” motto, but sillier.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080723/f8-dont-be-bad-2/feed/ 0