Though I possess the technical skill of a herring I easily accessed the text of a Wall Street Journal article that the newspaper’s website requires a subscription to read in its entirety. In the hope of saving the news gathering industry a lot of grief and money I’m going to tell them how I did it. And in the hope of saving the news gathering industry, period, I’m going to urge them to seek a different business model than one that prohibits readers from reading complete stories unless they become subscribers. You might as well try to carry water in a sieve.

It started with an item on a British website called Book Trade News, to which I have a free subscription. Every day or so the site emails me a digest of book industry-related stories, some of which I select as possibly blogworthy.

Today I received the following item: S&P Cuts Bertelsmann Ratings On Debt Levels, Ad Woes. The subhead was: Ratings closer to junk territory. If anything is blogworthy, the reduction of Bertelsmann’s Standard & Poor ratings to near-junk certainly is.

To follow up on this intriguing hint, I clicked on the hotlink that took me to Book Trade News‘s website. There I found this short abstract:

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services cut its ratings on international media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG closer to junk territory, saying declining advertising will hurt results this year.

The rating agency also noted Europe’s largest media company’s leverage is high for its rating level, BBB.

The abstract was followed by a hotlink to the source of the story, “Wall Street Journal item”. I clicked on it and got the same tease followed by a hotlink that said, “To continue reading, subscribe now”. When I clicked on it, I was taken to a page offering various subscription packages and their costs.

Okay, fair enough. But I wondered if I could get around the requirement to subscribe. Out of curiosity I copied the opening sentence of their teaser, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit “Enter”. It took me (in 0.26 seconds) to a page of Google listings: the very first item displayed was the exact same opening line of the Journal story. I clicked on it and was taken to the wsj.com page. There I found the complete text I was looking for, but it was overlaid with graphic material that appeared to be intended to block my reading or copying. Now what?

Determined, I highlighted the entire page, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The junk that had obscured my view disappeared and the text came out clean, legible and – free!

To make sure this wasn’t a fluke, later in the day I tried it again. This time Google took me to the same wsj.com page but without the garbage: the complete and unabridged story (actually a Dow Jones item) stared me in the face. I did not have to pay a dime to subscribe.

You can read the Bertelsmann story in its entirety by clicking on the above hotlink.. But that’s not the point. Here’s the point: as passionately as we all long to see the newspaper and magazine industries survive, I’m skeptical that restricting stories to subscribers will work. As much as I hate the Information Wants to Be Free concept, it’s unrealistic to think that information can be withheld from determined seekers. All the more dismaying is that an apparently secure system yielded to a complete amateur. Yielded, in fact, with scarcely any resistance at all.

My technical guru has since informed me that the procedure I instinctively followed is called Google-Fu, which Chris Perillo defines as “the ability to quickly answer any given question using internet resources, such as a search engine. It’s a Zen concept, if you will. The better and faster you become at finding the right answers quickly online, the higher your ‘Google-Fu rating’”. Check out his video explanation of the term to a chat-room caller.

Here’s the bottom line: information must either be locked up behind an unassailable firewall or we have to find a different way to monetize it. Armed with nothing but my trusty mouse, I laid siege to the Journal‘s firewall and it came tumbling down in moments.

I’m no Houdini, but at least I can now run with with the geeks. When they ask me what was my finest hack, I’ll shrug modestly and say, “Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I Google-Fu’d it. Piece of cake.”

Richard Curtis

What do an article in the New York Times and an emailed invitation to an Amazon.com press conference have in common? That’s what we’d like to know, and that’s why we’ll be at the door mid-morning Wednesday, May 6th.

We’re not sure if Las Vegas posts odds for stuff like this, but if we were gamblers we’d put a few chips on two possible announcements. The first is that Amazon will be producing a tablet-sized Kindle dedicated to newspaper and magazine reading. The second is that Amazon is teaming up with a major newspaper or magazine publisher to bring you a digital edition of your daily paper or favorite magazine.

That brings us to the Times’s article, Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press by Brad Stone. The gist? “Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.”

“These devices from Amazon and other manufacturers offer an almost irresistible proposition to newspaper and magazine industries. They would allow publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure.”

For those who follow our postings, most of the information in Stone’s piece will be familiar. For instance: “These new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print.” Check out our pieces about Plastic Logic’s as yet unnamed device and the iRex 1000. The former is notable because of its state-of-the-art screen technology, the latter because it has successfully carried newspaper and magazines for a long time and actually beaten Kindle at its own game.

Stone’s mention of News Corp’s interest developing a device for its publications is detailed in a recent piece asking if that company’s boss Rupert Murdoch is “ready to get E-ink on his fingers“.

And of course, for many of our readers, Amazon’s plans for large screen Kindles are old news.

Stone accurately observes that this new generation of tablet-sized readers offers publishers an opportunity “to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions.” But most intriguing of all is his speculation that newspaper and magazine publishers might “borrow from the cellphone model and offer specialized reading devices free or at a discount to people who commit to, say, a one-year subscription.”

For some time we have been invoking the spirit of King Gillette, inventor of the modern safety razor, whose motto and fabulously successful approach to fame and fortune was to “Give away the razor and sell ‘em the blades.” You can read all about that here, and it just may be an idea whose time has come.

Our thumbs are limber for an instant posting after Amazon’s press conference. But it won’t surprise us if there are no surprises.

RC

A few weeks ago after reading a stunning op-ed piece about torture published in the New York Times we were moved to lament how tragic it would be to lose the newspapers and magazines that generate such gems of investigative reporting. There just didn’t seem to be anything remotely comparable being produced in the blogs, even the best of them like Huffington Post. “Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must – find a way to preserve it,” I urged.

Admittedly, that was written more from a pained heart than a clear head. The truth is, magazines and newspapers are being relentlessly driven to desperation by fundamental and inexorable market forces and no plaintive cri de coeur is going to reverse the tide.

Fortunately for us, Arianna Huffington, the website’s founder, is blessed with a clear head. Responding to the crisis in in-depth reportage, she announced that Huffpost in collaboration with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors will underwrite the work of a number of investigative reporters to the tune of $1.75 million. Huffington said she and the donors were “concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time when the nation’s institutions need to be watched closely.”

She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists.The enterprise will be known as the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, according to an Associated Press report. Some 10 staff journalists, coordinating with freelance writers, will focus their efforts initially on the nation’s economy. Some details of the structure and thinking behind the fund are provided in this statement by Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and a senior advisor to the project. And Jeff Jarvis, blogging for The Buzz Machine, beautifully places the project into the media ecosystem, writing:

The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as [Huffington Post's].

The Huffington crossover operation could point the way to a healthy hybrid of traditional and Web reportage. Stories developed by journalists under this plan would undoubtedly be disseminated in print as well as online media, benefiting magazines and newspapers that are hard-pressed to finance long and deep investigations on their own. Look for more signs that the costs of developing those stories will be shared by others as we navigate the crisis in journalism.

Asked about the moribund print media when she appeared on a segment of the popular Morning Joe TV news program, Arianna Huffington said there are “too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.” Her biopsy of investigative journalism shows a lot of healthy tissue, and it’s good to see a bright beam of optimism in this dark time for print media.

RC

The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times (Sunday, May 15th) carries an absolutely blood-freezing contribution by Mark Danner. Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, managed to get his hands on a report prepared by the Red Cross after a unit of the humane organization visited Guantánamo late in 2006 to review the prison’s interrogation procedures. Its report was given in strictest secrecy to the CIA.

“A short time ago,” Danner writes, “this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.” Tales From Torture’s Dark World is a condensed version of that NYRB article adapted for the Times.

That the barbaric methods used to interrogate the prisoners, authorized at the highest levels of the US government, border on atrocity will be self-evident to anyone who who has a heart (Dick Cheney excepted). But what I wondered as I read it is whether the Red Cross’s report would ever have come to light without the investigative spirit and courage of Danner and the publications that sponsored him. Though abstracts of his report will appear on countless blogs, would any of them have been willing to invest their own resources to initiate the kind of probe he undertook? It’s one thing for bloggers to tread the path blazed by pioneers, but would any of them have the guts to break the story and risk prosecution or harassment?

I don’t think so.

I won’t try to match the eloquence of those who have appealed for humanitarian treatment of combatants and political prisoners. Nor can I judge the guilt or innocence prisoners from whom confessions were extracted by the cruelest forms of coercion. “From everything we know,” Danner writes, “many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be ‘brought to justice,’ as President Bush vowed they would be.”

No, the reason I’m writing this is to remind you that truth and openness, the pillars on which western civilization rest, depend on newspapers and magazines as well as book publishers such as those publishing these revelations. We also depend on writers like Danner to interpret those revelations and place them in a moral context such as this one:

“The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured – and have already done so at Guantánamo – means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which ‘torture doesn’t work.’ The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.”

This website has carried many items about the efforts of print publishers to arrest their sickening financial freefall. Some of these ideas are viable and some are not. The issues underlying the rescue of publishers caught up in a devastating paradigm shift are complex and challenging. But we have to find a solution.

Investigative journalism is the lantern we shine on the slimy horrors crawling under the rocks of our society. We must- must – find a way to preserve it.

Richard Curtis

About 2.6 million readers, purporting to read the magazine for its intellectual content, turn to Playboy’s centerfold first, sustaining its position as America’s bestselling men’s magazine. But that’s the only position the magazine can sustain as losses in advertising revenue – the same spectre haunting every other print publication today – hammer the magazine and its parent company. This according to Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times. Clifford reports that “As it posted a big quarterly loss, Playboy Enterprises indicated Wednesday that it would be willing to sell the company or change the direction of its flagship magazine.” The loss was $145.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2008 alone. In a desperate scramble to cut losses Playboy is closing its New York City offices and returning to home base in Chicago, according to Belinda Luscumbe in Time Magazine.

You can’t blame the company’s problems on digital media, as Playboy has built on its sex appeal with an eye-catching, video-stacked website, which management has tried to make more relevant as well as profitable. “Management” in this case is neither Hugh Heffner nor daughter Christie, who have removed themselves, or been removed, from the front line. It’s hoped that fresh blood will revive the magazine and its myriad enterprises. But hard-nosed investors are skeptical.

Says Time‘s Luscumbe,

Playboy Enterprises Inc. stock has been vulgar, dropping 90% in a year. The company has an entertainment arm in Los Angeles and licenses its name and bunny logo to anyone who’ll pay, including a wine company in 2008, but is said to make most of its money from its less well-known, more hard-core enterprises such as Spice TV and Clubjenna.com, named for porn star Jenna Jameson

Sex still sells but it doesn’t seem to sell enough, and if Playboy can’t get its revenue up using all its seductive wiles, American males may be reduced to reading the backs of cereal boxes.

RC
Photo: Arny Freytag

Keith Kelly of the New York Post reports that two major magazine distributors, Anderson News and Source Interlink, have imposed a 7-cent surcharge per copy – what they call a “handling fee” – to place magazines in stores. It doesn’t matter if a copy gets sold, it’s 7 cents going in. Several major magazine publishers like Time Inc. have refused to pay it. Wal-Mart, a huge source of retail magazine sales, is standing by the distributors.

Some years ago my brother and I were fishing in a dinghy in Rockaway Channel when, with a godawful hooting, a fireboat came tearing around the bend at full steam, heading directly towards us. A fireman with a bullhorn was shouting from the bow, “Get the @#%@#@ out of the way!” as if we needed any encouragement. My brother grabbed one oar and I the other and we started rowing to save our lives. Unfortunately, he was rowing forward and I backwards. When we realized our mistake, he started rowing backward and I forward. Our cockleshell spun in circles as the mammoth bore down on us. By the time we coordinated our strokes it was too late. There was only one thing we could do.

We started to laugh.

Somehow we managed to ride the wake out without capsizing, but the situation was so cosmically preposterous that laughter seemed like the only way to deal with it.

I thought of that experience when I read today’s (January 5, 2009) news describing various developments in the print media. The news is so awful it’s preposterous.

1. The Web is now officially a greater sources of news than newspapers. Alex Mindlin of the New York Times reports a Pew Research Center survey in which more than a thousand people stated they get most of their national and international news from the Internet.

2. Some major magazines lost so many pages at the end of the year they looked like promotions for bringing the Twiggy look back. The Times’s Stephanie Clifford says that although it’s normal for end-of-year issues to be thin (the industry average for January was minus 17%), Condé Nast’s flagships such as Wired, Architectural Digest, Vogue and Lucky were all off by more than 40%.

Are we laughing yet?

3. “In its latest concession to the worst revenue slide since the Depression, The New York Times has begun selling display advertising on its front page, a step that has become increasingly common across the newspaper industry,” writes RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA. This is may not sound tragic but it’s kind of like the society dowager selling off her antique brooch. The conclusion of the article tells us what’s behind this extraordinary move:

The company recently reported that in November, revenue from continuing operations fell 13.9 percent from November 2007; from January through November, it was down 7.6 percent. Advertising revenue at The New York Times Media Group, consisting of The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, the radio station WQXR-FM and Baseline StudioSystems, an online database, declined 21.2 percent in November from the same month in 2007.

4. And finally, in an article titled, “Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing,” Motoko Rich reports how book publishers are cutting back on luncheons, parties, travel, convention displays and attendance, and other perks.

Venerable houses including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster have all announced salary freezes or layoffs, or both. Simon & Schuster canceled its annual holiday party, held for the last few years at Tavern on the Green and scheduled in 2008 for Guastavino’s, a splashy banquet hall in Manhattan. One division of Random House had pizza, beer and wine in a room off the cafeteria for its holiday lunch instead of going out for pricey cocktails. Across the city, editors with Four Seasons taste are being asked to scale back on their lunch tabs.

Among the industry spokespersons solicited for the article was Robert Gottlieb, former editor in chief of Knopf and one of the most powerful people in the industry at the time. “I don’t think the dire situation of the publishing world is going to be solved by tightening that particular belt,” he says of cutbacks in luncheons. “It’s small potatoes compared to the problems they face.”

I second that motion, particularly as I remember having lunch with Gottlieb. We had yogurt on the carpet. The reason we had to dine on the floor is that the chairs and sofas were piled too high with books and manuscripts to sit in them.

It was one of the most satisfying and stimulating publishing luncheons I’ve ever had.

RC

Maureen Dowd, the trenchant Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, is unsettled if not freaked out by the lengths that a Pasadena newsman has gone to combat the erosion of the newspaper and magazine industries by the Internet.

James Macpherson, publisher of an onliner, Pasadena Now, let go of seven staff reporters making $600 to $800 a week and turned their tasks over to service providers in India. He now pays $7.50 per thousand words, Dowd reports. Some of their reportage is a a little clunky, for there are simply some subtleties of American culture that a foreigner can’t grasp. But that doesn’t outweigh the savings. “The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment — except there’s no one to bail them out,” says Macpherson.

Dowd quotes Dean Singleton, chairman of The Associated Press and head of a newspaper group, as saying that preproduction work on his papers is already “offshored” to India. What about writing and editorial? “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”

Everyone involved with book writing, editing, publishing, and agenting recognizes the truth of Singleton’s statement, but that doesn’t prevent us from experiencing a frisson of fear at its implications. Our next question is, can your editor at Random House or Penguin also be replaced by an “Offshori?”

Some of your book publisher’s tasks are probably performed by people overseas now. Production of many illustrated books, for instance, has for many years been turned over to cheap (by US standards) but superb printing craftsmen in Germany, Japan, Holland, China, Italy and elsewhere abroad. And today, almost all scanning and digitization of book texts is farmed out to foreigners.

But editorial? I’m dubious, but not because foreign people don’t speak and write English as well as US natives — many speak the King’s English.

No, it’s because of the water cooler. By which I mean that the culture in which editorial processes ferment can’t be reproduced by remote control, not even by teleconferencing. Editors gathered around the common cause of your manuscript produce a synergy that simply can’t be farmed out or piped in. They all speak the same language, and I’m not talking about English. (And by the way, these days it’s not a water cooler but a kitchenette with a state of the art coffee machine.)

The prospects for newspapers and magazines are scary and getting scarier, but the question of whether the book business as we know it will go the same way is still to be answered. It hasn’t exactly gone digital but is more digital than ever, and in a great many ways that’s good news. But conversion of books into e-books has not generated big profits any more than conversion of newspapers has. We have yet to figure out how to monetize e-books on the same scale as print editions. E-book sales per title haven’t remotely achieved the same numbers, nor has online advertising made up the gap. It’s hoped that programs like Google search may help the publishing industry to produce advertising revenue that will make e-books viable. That way, e-books can take their rightful place as partners with, not rivals to, print version.

Maureen Dowd’s column give us a lot to worry about, but the outsourcing of your editor’s job is, for now, not on the radar screen.

RC