Josh Sternberg of digitday.com reminds us that NewsCorp’s news app, The Daily, celebrates its first birthday this week, and after one year it’s not just viable but a growing commercial success in an Internet environment hostile to the publication’s business model: subscription.  Yet it has a quarter of a million monthly readers and 100,000 paid subscribers.

Though (full disclosure) my son is a reporter for The Daily, my enthusiasm for the app is completely independent.  I just happen to think it’s terrific. But don’t take my word for it – it’s the iPad’s third most popular app.

Though The Daily started out as a dedicated iPad application, it is now accessible on Android, but the eye-popping graphics play best on the iPad’s big bright touchcreen. Some fairly heavy-hitting advertisers like Verizon, IBM and BMW display their wares there.

“I think it is the future of print,” digitday quotes a media executive, an odd description since there isn’t a single drop of printer’s ink associated with the publication.  But that’s just the point: it delivers all the news, culture and entertainment of a printed newspaper or magazine, but the videos, popups, callouts and other dazzling graphics are exactly what the iPad was created for. If you don’t have one, borrow it, download a two-week free subscription and see for yourself.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”. I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

The Daily After One Year: Some Lessons Learned

Richard Curtis

The Daily, NewsCorp’s  tablet-dedicated news app, does not possess a single atom of organic matter. Yet we call it a newspaper. A news paper. Why?

Reporter Joshua Brustein explains that this is an example of a skeuomorph, a “superfluous reference to the past.”

He reminds us that we not only use skeuomorphs (“from the Greek words for tool and form”) every day but vitally depend on them to navigate our brave new digital world

Another example is the analog custom of designating consecutive page numbers in e-books when it is more appropriate, digitally speaking, to fix your position in the document with a percentage of your progress. “E-books, by definition, do not have pages,” writes Brustein. “Depending on which size font someone uses, she may have to advance the screen many times before ‘turning a page.’ Then there are the questions of how to approach books with many physical editions, or texts that exist only in digital space.”

Want more? Brustein cites artificial sounds as more important psychologically than practically. Digital cameras make a satisfying click that hearkens back to the sound of a mechanical camera but is completely artificial, especially in view of shutter-lag that produces an image several critical moments earlier than the soul-satisfying but otherwise useless sound of a shutter being activated.

Read about some other self-deceiving skeuomorphs in Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”.  I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Show of hands, please: how many of you believe that, given the opportunity to do the right thing, an unauthorized user will remove unauthorized files if you ask nicely?

Yes, we thought so.  But you pessimists are in for a surprise.

Attributor, the fast-rising piracy monitoring service about which we recently reported (see Attributor Badge Proclaims Your E-Book is Kosher) , has released an intriguing report on what it calls a Graduated Response Trial, though it might well be termed the Try A Little Tenderness Test.  While it was performed on newspapers, the implications for book piracy are apparent.

Attributor’s approach engages unlicensed content users in dialogue before resorting to formal takedown notices and even more draconian ways of making them remove illegally obtained content.  By educating infringers and reasoning with them instead of bombarding them with legal threats, Attributor was able to persuade 75 percent of the offending websites to alter their behavior.

A significant way to do that is to get them to work with you instead of against you  – that is, to make them revenue-sharing partners.  The study suggests “syndication models that compensate those who create valuable content, while appropriately rewarding those who aggregate, republish and monetize it.” It’s called FairShare and you can read about this cooperative model here. The principle is, better to take a safe fraction than risk getting into trouble.  For those taking advantage of the offer it’s found money.  Embrace rather than alienate, as one executive said to me.

Here are details from the trial:

• Attributor identified more than 400,000 unlicensed full copies across 44,906 sites from 70,101 online news articles from newspapers spanning pay wall, ad-supported and syndication revenue models with local, national and international distribution.
• A ‘full copy’ was defined as containing more than 80 percent of the original article and comprising more than 125 words.
• The trial randomly selected 107 (3 times the statistically significant amount) sites which used 10 or more full copies from a single content owner during a 30-day period and had advertising on the pages with copies
• Only the first two steps of the Graduated Response process were tested: (1) courtesy notices of unlicensed use sent to the site owner and (2) removal notices sent to the search engines to remove the listing from results and to ad networks to remove ads on the page of the copied content. The subsequent step: (3) removal notices to the hosting sites to remove the content was not part of the trial.
• The results show that 75 percent of the unauthorized sites agreed to either pursue licensing agreements or remove content voluntarily within the first two steps.

You can read full details here.

Certainly friendly persuasion is not only virtuous but far less expensive, time-consuming and frustrating than carpet-bombing. You can hold drastic methods in reserve and employ them for intransigent infringers and professional criminals.

Still think people won’t do the right thing?  Attibutor’s study suggests they will.

Our approach? Try killing them with kindness. If that doesn’t work, just kill them.

Richard Curtis

For full coverage of all things pirate, visit our Pirate Central archive.

Remember two years ago when we were on a death watch for the New York Times? “The New York Times is approaching the point where it will have to manage its business primarily to conserve cash and avoid defaulting on its debt,” wrote Henry Blodget on businessinsider.com. “This situation will only get worse as advertising revenue continues to fall, and it will be very serious by early next year.” Blodget’s piece was bleakly headlined New York Times Running on Fumes. Things got so desperate the newspaper had to borrow a quarter of a billion from a Mexican mogul at extremely disadvantageous terms – 14% interest.

Last week the Times‘s business section carried this story: “The New York Times Company intends to pay back a $250 million loan from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in early 2012, three years ahead of its due date.

Que pasó?

For one thing the Times dumped its wholly owned Boston Globe and slashed its debt by one-third, from $1.1 billion to $670 million. For another, the economy began to pick up and advertising revenue, every newspaper’s lifeblood, began to flow again, though not at pre-recession levels.  The paper’s website, though falling short of the paywall created by rival Wall Street Journal, has become dynamic, entertaining and accessible, and ad revenue on the site was up 14% in the third quarter of 2010. The digital version of the paper is available on a growing number of e-devices, generating income more efficiently than the profit-draining paper edition.

Though we don’t want to read too deeply into the Times‘s turnaround, it might presage a reversal of the decline in all paper reading formats – newspapers, magazines and books – as readers return to the pleasures of paper and discover the limitations of digital formats (see Students Give E-Textbooks a Failing Grade).

Read the AP story in full here.

Richard Curtis

The Internet is exhilarating. It grabs you. It’s impulsive.

But…

Magazines are enveloping. They embrace you.  They are immersive.

That is the message going out across the land on the heels of a major promotion aimed at reminding the world – especially the alien occupiers of our planet known as Young People – how wonderful magazines and newspapers are and how much we would lose if they were to succumb to the forces unleashed by the Web Revolution.  The campaign brings together rivals who recognize that, in Benjamin Franklin’s phrase, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

“Together, we can change the conversation about magazines and share what we in the business know to be true: magazines are relevant, play an important role in society and have a strong future ahead,” says Ann Moore, chairman & CEO of Time Inc. “This campaign showcases those messages of relevancy and longevity.”

The press release, which you may read in full here, uses some persuasive metrics to drive home its point:

• Magazine readership has risen 4.3% over the past five years
• Average paid subscriptions reached nearly 300 million in 2009
• Adults 18-34 are avid magazine readers. They read more issues and spend more time per issue than their over-34 counterparts
• During the 12-year life of Google, magazine readership increased 11%
• Magazine effectiveness is growing. Ad recall has increased 13% over the past five years. Action-taking—based on readers recalling specific ads—increased by 10%.
• Magazines outperform other media in driving positive shifts in purchase consideration/intent.

One reason to return to print reading, omitted from these talking points, is that it’s good for you, especially for young minds, which a number of scientific studies suggest may be compromised by the distractions of screen reading and viewing.  (See Watching Books and The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction)

The magazine industry’s message is one we believe in and promoted in countless postings. Though the promo doesn’t include print books the implication is unavoidable. If you’re not sure, watch the video and say “book” every time you hear “magazine”.

RC

Apple’s new iPad tablet gives newspaper and magazine publishers an opportunity to claw back what they’ve given away: profitability. The potential for reading a newspaper on a screen of reasonable size and shape and in a format that actually resembles the paper-paper you hold every morning, has been boosted sky-high by the introduction of Apple’s tablet.

Actually, for an inveterate reader of newspapers the format issue remains, whether you read one on a Kindle, iPad, Skiff (pictured left) or other device. If you hold the device vertically (portrait format) size you see just one page at a time and thus lose the option of viewing at a glance what’s on both sides of your newspaper, even peripherally. If on the other hand you hold it horizontally (landscape format) you can see both sides of the paper but cut the size down to an uncomfortable dimension. If this is the price we pay to shift from paper to plastic, I say so be it, but I say it with a big sigh. Because, dammit, I love my newspaper just the way it is.

But throwing a tantrum won’t stop the clock, so we must expect a day when today’s “paper” will be plastic, and reading the paper will become an anachronism as quaint as the “cc” in our emails that describes carbon copies. Newspaper publishers are rethinking their business model and considering a variety of solutions aimed at sealing the leak of content into the digital river from which all currently come to drink their fill free of charge. Last fall the Wall Street Journal started forcing news-hungry website visitors to become subscribers or miss out on breaking news. The New York Times has announced a similar initiative.

Though dropping today’s news into e-book format seems simple enough to do, there are land mines, As Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford of the NY Times point out “Media companies may have to swallow hard before tethering their futures to any high-tech company, let alone Apple.”

“Many publishers believe their economic health depends on finding a direct line to their customers, and it is not clear whether Apple — and other aggregators of Internet content — will allow that.

“Magazine publishers, for example, maintain sophisticated databases about their customers, which lets them cross-sell products, renew subscriptions and entice advertisers with statistics about their wealthy readers. A big part of the business is automatic renewals charged to credit cards.

“But when magazine publishers sell applications through the iTunes store, they do not get credit card information or even the name of the buyer.”

To make sure they aren’t jumping from the frying pan into the fire, Stone and Clifford report, some powerful magazine and newspaper publishers have formed a consortium that will operate its own online store, sell its own content, and collect its own consumer information.

You can read about it online here. Enjoy the pleasure while you can; the day will come when you’ll have to become a subscriber to access this content.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

If you’re getting it for nothing, why would you pay for it? Well, if you’re talking about news delivered online, about half of Americans say they would pay for it, according to a survey of 5000 people undertaken by the Boston Consulting Group.

That seems surprisingly high given the fact that America is the land of the free news. It’s so easily accessible on television or the Net that being asked to pay for it is like being asked to pay for air. Maybe that’s why those who say they would pay for news online don’t think it’s worth more than $3.00 a month. “In several Western European countries, more than 60 percent said they would pay,”writes Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times, adding that many would pay as much as $7 a month.

Even the higher figure is a fraction of a subscription to a printed newspapers. On the other hand, most of that subscription cost is for plant, paper and distribution. “Charging for online access to news would not greatly increase a newspaper’s revenue,” says Pérez-Peña, “ but since the cost of reaching Internet readers [is] very low, it could significantly increase profit.”

Read details in About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, Study Finds.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

PBS.org’s MediaShift recently hosted a two-part debate by two men with big credentials and even bigger opinions. The issue was whether newspapers should charge for online content.

Moderator Mark Glaser did his best to keep the dispute civil. Taking the pro-micropay position was David Carr, who writes the “Media Equation” column for the business section of the New York Times. In the other corner, opposing micropayments – virulently opposing micropayments – was Mike Masnick, an outspoken and influential blogger and founder of the Techdirt website. The photo at right not them.

Read The Great Debate on Micropayments and Paid Content, Part 1, then Part 2.

RC

The Internet may achieve what Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Der Fuhrer could not – shut down England’s Sunday Observer. After 218 years, the revered publication – as much an institution as a newspaper – is in serious trouble and may be shuttered – or worse, converted into a magazine issued on…Thursdays!

The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation that owns the media group that runs the paper, is debating its fate now. With circulation down to 400,000 from well over 1 million twenty years ago, and losses of ten to twenty million pounds annually, that fate seems to be writ large in crimson ink. Indeed, ink of any color seems to be the problem for this and every other newspaper.

Members of the Trust will be forgiven if they resist the Sunday Observer‘s termination. Founded in 1791, the original newspaper was one year old when Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, and four when John Keats came into the world.

Read Guardian Media Group plots closure of Observer newspaper and weep.

Richard Curtis

The Associated Press, a not-for-profit coop owned by its 1,500 member newspapers, is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, boasting 243 bureaus in 97 countries and employing some 4,100 people. It serves about 5,000 radio and television outlets and 850 radio news affiliates. It has won 49 Pulitzer Prizes including 30 for photography. It describes itself as “the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees news from AP.”

Why am I telling you this? Because I can’t think of a better way to tell you it’s probably not a good idea to mess with them.

They recently issued a stern warning to webmasters, aggregators, bloggers, scrapers, googlers, binggers, pirates and freemongers that it is determined to limit unauthorized use of A.P.-generated content. To reinforce its edict, the company is embedding software in its articles specifying just how much you are entitled to use. And, according to Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times, you’re entitled to use damn little.

Writes Perez-Pena: “Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs… If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

In other words, pay the price or pay the price.

If the phrase “Fair Use” just popped into your mind, we’re way ahead of you. News aggregators such as yours truly justify their quotations from newspapers and magazines on the grounds that United States copyright law recognizes it as a right – within limits.

And just what are the limits? One hundred words? Okay, but what if the article is 105 words long? Surely eight words constitutes fair use, yes? Yes, unless those words happen to be Robert Frost’s unique and immortal, “Whose woods these are I think I know?” A. P.’s Curley ducked the question of what’s fair, nor would he say just what the organization would do to perpetrators who step over the line – once he has drawn it, that is. “We’re not picking the legal remedy today,” Perez-Pena reports him saying.

Where I come from, you don’t make threats unless you’re prepared to back them up, and threats by the media against end users seldom engender good will. We recently wrote about a recording industry lawsuit brought against a lady who had the misfortune to upload some music into her iPod.

Another NY Times article, this one by Saul Hansell, reports on a California startup called Attributor that claims to have “developed an automated way for newspapers to share in the advertising revenue from even the tiniest sites that copy their articles.” So far, Attributor’s role has been to report to interested media outfits like the Times Company, Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast how extensively their content is being copped by bloggers and others. By showing its clients how leaky their ships are, Attributor hopes the next step will be to bludgeon freeloaders into paying up. How will they do this? One solution is for publishers to bombard websites with demands to remove “pirated” pages, forcing webmasters to spend their valuable time complying with take-down notices.

Before you click away, and especially before you dismiss A. P.’s initiative as another attempt to thwart your sense of entitlement, spend some time reading about Associated Press. It is a very formidable organization and not one at which you want to wave a red flag.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times – and, of course the Associated Press.