Darn. We were really hoping that Joshua Karp’s The Printed Blog, a mule-like hybrid medium that offered printed versions of blogs to subscribers, had a shot at success. Karp figured his publication would resolve the paradox that although people are migrating to the Internet for news, the Web doesn’t generate nearly as much ad revenue as newspapers. “We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” the venture’s publisher declared at the time.

We had some fun with the story, speculating on the appropriate way to describe this half blog, half newspaper: Blogpaper? Blaper? Newsblog? Prog?

Sadly, the apt word for The Printed Blog is “Flop”. The New York Times announced that Karp had run out of money and couldn’t raise enough investment capital to carry on.

Perhaps the most valuable part of this venture was the entrepreneur’s experience: “I thought maybe this would translate into a new, venture-funded model for newspapers,” he told the Times‘s reporter, Claire Cain Miller, “but no one believes print news will survive. If I had a penny left, I would bet newspapers will survive in printed form.”

There’s a penny waiting for you in our offices, Mr. Karp. We’re betting on newspapers too.

RC

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.

Nicholas Carlson, employing a full complement of fingers and toes to perform his calculations, estimates that “it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead,” according to his posting in The Business Insider. In all fairness to Mr. Carlson, he does say that asking its subscribers to switch to Kindle is not “anything we think the New York Times Company should do.”

If you want to check his math you can take your abacus in hand and click on Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle but here’s how he arrived at his bottom line. First, using some publicly known financial information, he estimated the Times’s delivery costs at $644 million per year. Then…

“The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: ‘We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.’ Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And that was before Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle by one sixth to $299, which makes the case for Kindle vs. paper even more cogent. And if that’s not cogent enough for you, Carlson points out that “a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.”

Carlson’s bottom line? :”As a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”

Thanks for telling us all this, Mr. Carlson. Now if it’s okay with you, we will now return to our laughably inefficient but utterly informative, entertaining, absorbing and indispensable paper edition of the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

We know that information is gold. But for those who believe they have found a way to sell information that can be accessed for nothing, the ore may be fool’s gold. And the list of alchemists trying to do it is pretty impressive: News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, ACI CEO Barry Diller, MediaNews Group CEO Mary Junck, and a whole host of magazine, press and media lords for whom experience does not seem to have triumphed over cockeyed optimism. Diller categorically assets categorically that “People will pay for content. They always have…I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free phase into a paid system.”

Jon Fine, blogging in Business Week’s MediaCentric online column, describes two new ventures, Journalism Online and ViewPass, whose founders seem confident they can roll back the Information Wants to be Free tide that is swamping the newspaper and magazine businesses. Though he approaches the schemes with some well founded skepticism (“Too good to be true?”), Fine nevertheless sees how a subscription model just might work this time. The key is something called Freemium, which sounds like a blend of gasolines but is actually a blend of concepts:

” The preferred terms du jour describe “premium” offerings, or even, forgive them, ‘freemium,’ given the blend of free and paid. The dream dancing through some executives’ heads involves a hybrid model: maintaining much or all existing free traffic while charging some subscribers fees for certain offerings, then using data from these users’ browsing habits to help sell ultra-targeted — and thus higher-priced — advertising.”

Fine points out that for any of these “moonshots” (his word) to work, “publishers would have to agree on a platform, consumers would have to use it, and then, most importantly, companies would have to buy ads.” What he leaves out is the most important condition of all: ironclad security against the predations of hackers and file-sharing freemongers. If a digital illiterate can penetrate a subscription website (see A Google-Fu Master Unlocks the Wall Street Journal. Or, How I Know Subscription Model Won’t Work), what can an army of determined geeks accomplish?

Nevertheless, we wish these enterprising business men and woman success and godspeed. I have instructed my stockbroker to buy shares in the first newspaper or magazine that can demonstrate a truly foolproof subscription model. As he’s fond of reminding me, though, there are an awful lot of fools out there.

RC
Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Business Week.
Painting by Herbert James Draper

“I should do a freebie for Google? What’s the matter, do they have a tin cup and an eye patch on the street? F**K NO!”

Though none of the artists solicited to donate their work for nothing to Google Chrome actually said that, they might well have paraphrased Harlan Ellison’s foaming-at-the-mouth rant against Warner Bros. and all other corporate patrons that think they’re doing writers and artists a favor by displaying their work.

Canadian-based illustrator Gary Taxali’s written response to Google was slightly more printable than Ellison’s, but the writer would certainly agree with the graphic one issued by the artist (left). Here’s what Taxali had to say:

DON’T CALL ME
In the last little while, there has been a MAJOR backslide in the industry. Poor rates have been an issue for a while but things are becoming worse. Clients fees are getting even lower and the rights theyre demanding are even higher.

You want examples? How about SWATCH calling me and asking me to design a watch. They wanted a complete transfer of copyright for a paltry fee. As if thats going to happen. Google calls me and wants my work for their new search engine all over the web, the fee? Nothing. Editorial clients are slashing 1999s fees almost in half and citing the bad economy as an excuse. You know what? My excuse is that the economy is bad so you have to pay me MORE for an illustration. Hows that for an economic stimulus package?

So heres to every client with shitty fees and terms. Do not waste my time or contact me. I am very busy working with clients who respect artists and youre wasting my time with your solicitations. So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I dont need your work.

According to Andrew Adam Newman writing in the New York Times about the Taxali-inspired uprising, his posting on Drawger “drew more than 200 responses, many from other illustrators who also had rejected Google’s offer.” Newman quotes another illustrator, Brian Stauffer, who also turned Google down. “When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent.”

Sadly, there are plenty of artists who need the exposure and will take Google up on its offer.

And of course, Google may feel it needs an eye patch and tin cup. It only squeaked by the first quarter of 2009 with a $1.42 billion profit.

You can read the whole story in Newman’s Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google. You can also Catch a snatch of Ellison’s fulmination on YouTube and buy it online.

Richard Curtis
This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.

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

The New Yorker’s “Book Bench” feature reports a Tribeca Rooftop celebration to honor author and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers, whose nonprofit 826 National is devoted to turning children on to writing and assisting them to develop writing skills.

Eggers gave an impassioned and inspiring speech that will send chills down the spine of any who despairs that the printed word is finished. But if you’re still ready to climb out the window, he offers an email hotline to talk you back inside, where you can inhale the intoxicating aroma of ink on paper, listen to the crinkling of newsprint, and rejoice to the crack of a book’s spine the first time it’s opened. Here’s an excerpt, including the special email address:

Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

RC

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

One of the world’s largest producers of newsprint, the papers on which newspapers are printed, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday. Suffering from nearly $9 billion in debt, it sought to compensate by raising newsprint prices at a time when newspapers, with more than enough troubles of their own, were desperately cutting costs.

“A rapid decline in advertising has prompted some newspaper closings and industrywide cutbacks in the size, and in some cases the frequency, of newspapers,” reported Ian Austen in the New York Times. “The Pulp and Paper Products Council, which is also based in Montreal, reported that in February alone newsprint demand in North America fell by 33 percent compared with the same month a year earlier.”

It’s easy to make fun of company name, a tonguetwisting composite of two firms that merged in 2007, but the results of bankruptcy are far from funny, impacting as they do on a newspaper industry that is already running on fumes. “If they go under,” we wrote last month, “so does a big piece of the paper industry.” A spokesperson for the firm said that for now, its vast pulp and paper mills would continue producing.

RC

I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think those may be Rupert Murdoch’s hands examining Plastic Logic’s thus-far-nameless e-book reader, a Kindle competitor scheduled for release in 2010.

Why would Murdoch, who presides over a media empire ranging from Fox Broadcasting to HarperCollins Publishers to the world’s largest agglomeration of English language newspapers, be caressing an e-ink reading device? Is he contemplating going E with such papers as the Daily Telegraph, the Times of London, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal? Media reporter Peter Kafka thinks so.

Kafka, covering the cable industry’s annual show, heard Murdoch expressing admiration for the Kindle and ruminating that he might be willing to invest in a Kindle rival.

“At a Q&A at the cable industry’s annual show today,” Kafka reports, “Murdoch waxed on about the Kindle’s qualities, then made a reference to investing in a machine that could be even more attractive – one that boasted a large, full-color screen.” Reconstructing his notes, the reporter recorded Murdoch as saying,

“We need new models. The first inkling of it is the Kindle. You can get the whole paper there. And you can get the whole of The Wall Street Journal on your BlackBerry. We’re investing in a new device that has a bigger screen, four-color, and you can get everything there.”

Not trusting his notes, Kafka checked with a spokesperson from Murdoch’s News Corp and sure enough, it was confirmed. “News Corp. is indeed in ‘exploratory’ talks about making an investment in a company working on e-reader technologies.”

Which device is Murdoch thinking of investing in? Perhaps it’s the no-namer being developed by Plastic Logic, about which we wrote last fall. Though its display is currently black and white, color screens are “on our road map,” VP for Business Development Daren Benzi told The Observer. The plot thickens when you realize that Benzi spent 14 years at News Corp before moving to Plastic Logic. That said, PL already has substantial – $200 million – backing from investors, so do they need Murdoch’s investment too?

Okay, so maybe it’s the Flepia which, we announced just the other day, is in fact developing a color screen. But it too is already capitalized – by Fujitsu.

Could it be the iRex Reader 1000, the potentially Kindle-killing device introduced last year? It’s not in color yet, but a color iRex Iliad has been long rumored.

Rupert-watchers will have a field day second-guessing his thinking. But it shouldn’t be that opaque. Steeped in newsprint though he may be, the shrewd press czar has seen the writing, and it’s not on the wall. It’s on a screen. His romance with e-ink was foreshadowed in 2006 in a speech he gave at the Annual Livery Lecture at the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

What happens to print journalism in an age where consumers are increasingly being offered on-demand, interactive, news, entertainment, sport and classifieds via broadband on their computer screens, TV screens, mobile phones and handsets?

The answer is that great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

And, crucially, newspapers must give readers a choice of accessing their journalism in the pages of the paper or on websites such as Times Online or – and this is important – on any platform that appeals to them, mobile phones, hand-held devices, ipods, whatever.

The possibility of converting paper journalism to electronic must certainly have triggered severe myocardial ischemia among the august members of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, but Murdoch can’t say he didn’t warn them. The cost of producing and distributing newspapers is ghastly. For instance, the newsprint used in one year’s worth of The Montreal Gazette is the equivalent of 186,816 trees. Multiply that by all of Murdoch’s newspaper holdings and the number of dead trees is nothing short of astronomical.

Watch this space for updates.

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