August 2009 Archives

When you move eye to eye with business sense, there is no escaping that giving the news away free on a paper's web site makes little or no sense.

Still, almost every paper in the business has been doing just that. And every paper in the business has been losing money hand over digital fist.

Ad revenue continues to drop (about 28% in the first quarter of 2009 according to the Newspaper Association of America) and there seems to be no way for online ads to make up the difference.

True, the current economy is partially to blame as some businesses are simply going out of business, and others are cutting back, but that is only part of the equation.

Why should I buy the print paper if I can get it free online? And going online, I'll drop my print subscription, which equals fewer readers, which equals less ad revenue. Also, some advertisers are aware that the attention span of the online reader is most likely shorter than that of the paper reader, and therefore will only pay about 25% of a print ad for its online equivalent.

News Corp

No one seems to be feeling this pinch quite as acutely as Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp is hemorrhaging red ink these days--something he is determined to stem. His strategy: charge for online access.

However, such a strategy would only work if there were no other--as in free--way of getting to the content. And as long as major competitors offer their news free, online readers would most likely abandon the News Corp ship in droves ones it starts charging for news. His strategy: Coordinate with major news publishers to synchronize a move to an online subscription model.

Anti-Trust

Smacks a little of anti-trust issues, but he's going ahead. As reported by the Los Angeles Times in a recent article, News Corp has begun their sit-downs with competitors to synchronize efforts. And it seems that News Corp is taking a leading role in these conferences, partially because of their success with the Wall Street Journal, which now boasts over a million paying subscribers.

Other parties at this table include the New York Times, Washington Post, Hearst Corp., and Tribune Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times. All we know at this point is that they are talking among themselves (and probably also with their lawyers, to circumvent any anti-trust challenges to this synchronization--and trust me, there will be a few).

Point is, though, the newspaper industry took careful aim at one of their feet, slowly squeezed the trigger and thoroughly shot themselves when they rushed to beat their competition with free online news access--financial folly at best, suicide at worst.

Those blunders have now come home to roost, hence the scramble to mend things.

Stay tuned.

Back in 2001, a report called "e-government: The Next American Revolution," based on findings of a survey conducted by Hart-Teeter for the Council for Excellence in Government, found:

"Americans have an agenda for e-government that is more ambitious than just cutting paperwork or time spent waiting in line. They see its potential for giving citizens more information, which gives people the power to hold their government more accountable."

Eight years later, that agenda is a lot closer to reality than to dream.

The Sunlight Foundation

In a discussion today (9/17/09) on C-SPAN, Sunlight Foundation Executive Director and Co-Founder Ellen Miller described how, by the use of the Internet and technology, we have come a long way in many areas of government transparency.

The three-year-old foundation is now funding the digitizing of information about congress and the executive branch that prior to this had only been available in paper form.

On top of such newly available data, along with existing electronic data, they are also providing tools to allow the average citizen to make use of this information, on websites like Open Congress where tens of thousands of people go to find out about legislation. Not interpreted information, but the actual, searchable, text of bills.

Some of this information, Ms. Miller mentioned, we have dug out of basements of obscure government agencies, or the office of the US Congress.

Databases

In new a database being release next week (keep an eye on the foundation's site) you can, for example, establish what Americans lobby on behalf of foreign governments. It is a new searchable database from records in the basement of the justice department that citizens, journalists, bloggers, can search, country by country, or legislator by legislator to see who were lobbied by these lobbyists; you can also search by lobbyist.

This effort is now bringing data together to answer questions like: "Who is the highest paid lobbyist?" and "What foreign government spends most money on lobbyists?"

Also, the foundation has established searchable congressional record, day by day. Each day the congressional record contains more words than "Tale of Two Cities" but this site allows citizens to search for the words most used that day, on a cite called Capitol Words.

The Sunlight Foundation has as an unstated mission to combine data from many sources to make it more useable, searchable and summarizable (digestible) by the average citizen.

As Ms. Miller said, "This is what the new technology offers; this is the connected age. We no longer need expert filters, for now we have the tools to gather and combine the information we need or want."

Another example is Open Secrets, a database with information on lobbyists.

A New Wiki

Little Sis is a wiki described as an involuntary FaceBook for the powerful, where contributors are right now focusing on revolving door lobbyists in the health care industry--contributed by people doing their own research--about those who used to work for members of Congress and who are now health care lobbyists.

Ms. Miller pointed out that the wiki technology allows you to pool the wisdom of the crowd; allows you to add a lot of sources of relevant information.

Other Transparency Sites

Through Read The Bill the foundation is asking congress to put bills under consideration on this site for public comment for at least 72 hours before deciding on the bill.

Also, research (funded by Pew Charitable Trusts) is now taking place, and being posted on Subsidy Scope revealing the extent of Government Subsidies--attempting to document this huge government spending item; including bank bailout money, how much, to whom. The next area of investigation is the transportation sector.

Information is Power

"Information is Power," said Thomas Jefferson; and at this intersection between technology and political information, it seems that this power is being made available to the general citizen.

Citizen Involvement

Apparently, 50 Million people went online during the last election cycle to obtain political information; and 25 million of those also contributed data, whether through comments or blog posts or email. That's a huge potential base of interested people.

But how many citizens actually visit today's government transparency sites. When asked directly how much traffic the foundation sees to their sites, Ms. Miller evaded the question, and instead talked of dramatic increases in traffic (without giving any numbers) during hotly contested bills.

And when asked how she would gauge the success of the Sunlight Foundation, she gave a two-fold answer: "By seeing Government take more responsibility for providing information in a digestible format. Data.gov is a good first step."

Her second answer, however, revealed that the current level of citizen involvement is not where it should be: "Also, by the citizen use of this information. We want to see more and more citizens come to our sites."

This tells me that while the data, and the tools to sound this data, is becoming increasingly available, citizen interest and responsibility to keep informed is not expanding commensurately.

Leading a horse to water comes to mind.

Food for thought.

Rupert Murdoch is nothing if not business savvy. Viewed by many over the years as a bully who puts the bottom line far ahead of any other consideration--including journalistic integrity--he has nonetheless earned the respect of even his enemies for an admirable ability to survive even the most threatening crises.

During the early 1990s, for example, he borrowed heavily against the future earnings of The Sun to keep a rapidly sinking (and taking in lots of water) News Corp afloat long enough to ride out the recession.

Now, in the midst of another, and possibly deeper, recession, News Corp has posted some of its worst losses in history, and Mr. Murdoch, according to a recent article in The Observer, is again ready to do what it takes to keep his interests afloat, and this time, he says, he will do so by restructuring his news business models to include charging for online news content, a move he says will go into effect by June 2010.

Invitation

Precisely how this is to be done the tale does not tell. Will The Times and The Wall Street Journal charge monthly or annual subscription fees? Will there be a per visit access? Your guess is as good as mine. But the important thing to consider that this strategy is not likely to succeed unless his major competitors follow suit, and quickly.

That is why, in my opinion, Mr. Murdoch announced this strategy ten months in advance: to give his competitors and his News Corp time to finalize plans and to coordinate a shift over to pay-for-news online business model.

Mistakes

Mr. Murdoch is capable of making mistakes--such as acquiring MySpace, just as Facebook exploded into capturing a much large audience--but they are few and far between.

Charging for news will be a mistake if News Corp tries to go it alone. My guess is that others, such as Los Angeles Times, who among others are already charging for news via amazon's Kindle, welcome this Murdochian move and will be all to glad to work out a joint strategy to charge for online news.

Villain to Hero

Should Mr. Murdoch succeed, he will in fact stand out as the rescuer of journalism as a trade, rather than the villain who puts the bottom line ahead of all else. An amazing turnabout.

In fact, his recent acquisition of The Wall Street Journal did not result in a cheapening of the journalism practiced by the paper, but rather quite the opposite has occurred, much to his detractors' consternation.

Survival

I've mentioned it before in this blog that digital news will only survive long-term, if an equitable pay-for-news model is developed. And it looks like we might be well on our way.

Whenever we talk of the digital divide we mostly, if not always, portray it as something quite undesirable, as a threat to social equality, as the great gulf between the digital haves and the digital have-nots, forgetting that there is such as thing as the digital wants and the digital want-nots.

For all its blessings, the digital world is not necessarily desired by all.

A few years ago, I ran across the acronym RL (Real Life) which didn't scare me as much then as it does now--now that I've had time to consider all of its implications.

And one of them is that when the virtual citizen (which is a digital citizen gone a little extreme) talks about RL in his or her emails or text messages, Real Life is often being referred to as an alien thing, something outside the reality of the digital conversation or relationship, as something foreign.

And therein lies the danger.

Every now and then, I receive a letter from Sweden, from an old friend who likes to write long missives in beautiful cursive. These letters arrive in my RL mailbox as thick envelopes with lots of canceled Swedish stamps.

I treat these letters with reverence; and I usually brew some tea before I sit down to read them, savoring not only the touch of the paper, and the so familiar inky path across the page, but also the smell of the paper and the ink, and yes, of the apartment where it was written. It's a lot more RL than an email, let's put it that way.

One day the post office will stop delivering paper letters. Mark my words. There'll be no need, for no one is writing them any more, and that will be the death knell of RL as we know it. By this time--thirty, forty, fifty years from now?--the digital world will have taken over, will be everywhere; and there will, by survival necessity, be no digital divide whatever. This will be a time when without access you cannot work, communicate, live. A time when life is lived online or otherwise hooked up. A time when living off the grid means no Internet access, something which may one day be deemed illegal.

Yes, it's an Orwellian outlook, but I want to hold it up as a contrast: for there is a lot to be said for the Real World; for meeting people in person rather than on dating sites; for writing your letters longhand with care and forethought; for entering the bookstore and browse real books (rather than amazoning them); for perusing a music store rather than downloading iPod tracks.

Some writers still write their novels in longhand--feeling, they say, a higher sense of connection with the word than when typing it on a laptop keyboard. Some readers still attend author readings, just to meet the writer and to hear the story in his or her own voice. Very RL.

Don't get me wrong, email lets me stay in contact with more of my friends than ever before, ebooks save on trees, ditto for enews. But we must draw the line somewhere this side of RL so that we don't lose it altogether in the overwhelming drive to bridge the digital divide.

We must retain the power of choice to stay off-grid if that is how we live life the best.