By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) Dec 2 | Although the following two articles are not LGBT related at all. They are relative due to the changes in the way folks will get their news in the not so distant future along with how access to the news in the era of the web is obtained.
As a freelance journalist, this argument is of critical importance as who I am able to write for has suddenly become a drastically smaller marketplace to peddle my services. It is also of importance to the public as information is empowerment, the ability to know how one's world is shaped and the effects of issues and events from far away that may impact one's own community. Limiting this access or restricting it may have negative impacts that are far reaching and create unnecessary burdens on news gathering organisations and journalists alike.
I especially agreed emphatically with Arianna Huffington's spin on this issue.
From the guardian.co.uk comes this three part story:
Rupert Murdoch Photograph by Shannon Stapleton ReutersBy Mercedes Bunz (London, UK) Dec 1 | Rupert Murdoch has today reiterated his belief that internet users will pay for content, saying they would be happy to shell out for "information they need to rise in society."
Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, gave a wide-ranging address to US media regulators that attacked internet news aggregation as "theft" and claimed that advertising-only business models were dead.
"From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want," he said.
He said newspapers should not blame technology if they failed. "If we fail, we fail like a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat."
His company's customers were "smart enough" to know they had to pay for news, Murdoch told a US Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the internet age.
Referring to his much-criticised plans to put his newspaper sites behind a paywall, Murdoch said he had succeeded before when nobody had believed he would, adding: "We started Fox when everyone said it couldn't be done."
One News Corporation newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, already charges for content and has 1 million subscribers. "We will expend to extend this model to all our news organisations such as the Times in London. At the Times, there are journalists who invested days and weeks into their stories, and our customers are smart enough to know that they can't get something for nothing," he said.
"Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft.
"Without us, the aggregators would have blank slides. Right now content producers have all the costs, and the aggregators enjoy [the benefits]. But the principle is clear. To paraphrase a great economist, [there is] no such thing as a free news story."
Murdoch said that making the reader pay was the only way to create future revenue streams: "The business model that relies on advertising-only is dead. Online advertising is increasingly only a fraction of what is being lost from print advertising, and it is under constant pressure."
Murdoch, who read his speech from printouts and not his laptop at the FTC workshop, announced that News Corporation had worked on a two-year project to spread news content from TV and newspapers to mobile devices, because "today's news consumers do not want be chained to boxes in their homes".
He attacked plans to protect newspapers with public funds, saying it could damage democracy. It would lead to "papers giving up their rights to endorse politicians".
"In other words, it subsidies their failures. The press is the only institution that is truly accountable. The founding fathers put the first amendment first for a reason."
Murdoch ended his speech with a plea to adhere to a series of clear principles in the digital world. "Let them innovate when they want and how they want. Let consumers pay. Let aggregators desist and start employing their own journalists.
"When we think of the future of newspapers, we think of the future of democracy. It doesn't matter if we are reading our news from paper or on another device, but the basic truth is that to make informed decisions free man and women need news. If they come on electrons or dead trees is not that important. Therefore the news industry should remain free and competitive."
Two men heckled Murdoch as he ended his speech, shouting from the audience: "Do you agree that Obama is a racist?"
This was a reference to the controversy surrounding Glenn Beck, the presenter on News Corp-owned Fox News, and his controversial criticism of the US president. Murdoch did not reply as he left the stage at the FTC event and the two men were ushered out quickly.
Arianna Huffington Photo By Anna GordonNot long after Murdoch delivered his remarks, Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post shot back with these remarks:
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington has accused Rupert Murdoch of confusing aggregation with misappropriation following his Federal Trade Commission speech claiming "There's no such thing as a free news story".
Huffington began in a humorous vein:
"First of all, I would like to quote my great grandmother who likes to say: 'Never bet on a company that takes itself out of Google.' "
Then she introduced the audience to the three topics of her speech:
"One, desperate times lead to desperate metaphors; two, desperate times lead to desperate revenue models; three, desperate times desperately call for better journalism."
She added:
"I've talked about how the future of journalism will be a hybrid future where traditional media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism). And with so many traditional media companies adapting to the new realities, it was ridiculous to engage in an us vs them, old media vs new media argument. Either/or was the wrong way to look at things.
But playing nice has increasingly become a one-way street – suddenly the air is filled with shrill, nonsensical, and misplaced verbal assaults on those in the new media."
Huffington said she was disappointed by the insults used by the old media:
"Sites that aggregate the news have become, in the words of Rupert Murdoch and his team, 'parasites', 'content kleptomaniacs', 'vampires', 'tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internets, and, of course, thieves who 'steal all our copyright. It's the news industry equivalent of 'your mama wears army boots!' Although, not quite as persuasive. In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They'd rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content."
And she offered a solution to the News Corp chief:
"Any site can shut down the indexing of its content by Google any time it wants with a simple 'disallow' in its robots.txt file. But be careful what you wish for because as soon as you do that, and start denying your content to other sites that aggregate and link back to the original source, you stand to lose a large part of your traffic overnight. But as they say in Australia: 'Good on ya.' Of course as someone who cares deeply about the future of this country, I'd say that having Glenn Beck not searchable by Google is an entirely good thing. But a good business move? Not so much."
Huffington said that the Huffington Post was often wrongly viewed as only an aggregator. She pointed out that she strongly believes in aggregating, but that the HuffPo does original reporting as blogging.
"In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law – and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web's DNA. Period.
At HuffPost, aggregation goes along with a tremendous amount of original content including original reporting and over 250 original blogposts a day. And we love it when someone links to one of our posts, or excerpts a small amount and links back to us.
Most sites understand the value of this and the way the link economy operates. It's why HuffPost gets hundreds of requests from news outlets asking us to feature their material and link back to their site. They understand that the web is not a zero-sum game and that consumers love the freedom to be able to follow where their interests – and the offshoots of a story – take them."
She added that News Corp sites are also aggregators:
"The Wall Street Journal has a tech section that's nothing more than a parasite – uh, I mean, aggregator – of outside content.
FoxNews.com has a Politics Buzztracker that bloodsucks – uh, I mean aggregates and links to – stories from a variety of different sources, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.
AllThingsD has a section called Voices that not only aggregates headlines, but also takes a nice chunk of text – and puts the links out at the bottom of the story.
And Murdoch's News Corp also owns IGN, which has a variety of web properties, including the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site – which is entirely made up of movie reviews pulled together from other places. Did someone say 'stealing'?
Talk about having your aggregation cake and bitching about others eating a slice too."
Huffington then turned to revenue models:
"It's time for traditional media companies to stop whining and face the fact that far too many of them, lulled by a lack of competition and years of pretax profits of 20% or more, put cashflow above journalism and badly misread the web when it arrived on the scene. The focus was on consolidation, cost-cutting, and pleasing Wall Street – not modernisation and pleasing their readers.
They were asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station, let the ship sail – pick your metaphor – and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the internet and new media represent. And now they want to call timeout, ask for a do-over, start changing the rules, lobby the government to bail them out, and attack the new media for being ... well, new. And different. And transformational. Suddenly it's all about thievery and parasites and intestines. Get real, you guys. The world has changed."
She went on to say that the landscape of media had changed:
"Did you know that newspaper circulation is down 7 milllion over the last 25 years while unique readership of online news is up 34 million in the last 5 years?
Did you know newspaper advertising fell nearly 19% this year while web advertising is up 9% and mobile advertising is up 18%?
Did you know that more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, CBS, and NBC had been airing all-new content every minute of every day since 1948?
And did you know that we have access to more than 1 trillion web pages, 100,000 iPhone apps, and send more text messages a day than there are people on the planet? And Rupert Murdoch still thinks aggregators are the problem?"
After these statements she finished her attack saying:
"And now they want to call 'Time out!' and start questioning 'fair use' – have you heard that? – as well as praising the first amendment. Basically they are attacking new media for being, well, new and transformational and there to stay. Get real you guys, the world has changed."
In terms of her second point, "the desperate revenue models", she continued joking about the ever-changing strategy of old media:
"The big buzz last week was about News Corp's fantasies of breaking up with Google and tying the knot with Microsoft, giving its heart – and all its content – to Bing. I'll gladly wager my share of the Huffington Post that this ain't gonna happen.
The charge-for-content crowd seems to change strategies as often as Lindsay Lohan switches meds. First paywalls were going to be the answer. Then it was micropayments. Then per article purchases. Then day passes."
And she warned old media about moving behind a paywall:
"It amazes me that Murdoch and Brill and the paywall team at the Times continue to believe that people are prepared to pay for news online – despite the recent survey showing that 80% of US news consumers say they 'wouldn't bother' to read news and magazines online if the content were no longer free.
Sure, free news content is not a perfect system but it's a lot like what Churchill said about democracy: it 'is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried'. That's the reality. Free content is not without problems. But it's here to stay, and publishers need to come to terms with that and figure out how to make it work for them."
Huffington said news was no longer something passively consumed:
"The news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience."
She added:
"The contributions of citizen journalists, bloggers, and others who aren't paid to cover the news are constantly mocked and derided by the critics of new media who clearly don't understand that technology has enabled millions of consumers to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation – from couch potato to self-expression. Writing blogs, sending tweets, updating your Facebook page, editing photos, uploading videos, and making music are just a few of the active entertainment options now available. But when the data began to show a significant shift in consumer habits, traditional media responded by belittling web journalism.
The same people who never question why consumers would sit on a couch and watch TV for eight hours straight can't understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues – great and small – that interest them. For free. They don't understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who Twitter for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook page for free, who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities ... for free.
The same people who never question why people sit on a couch to watch eight hours straight ask why people would do something for free. They don't understand that people write for Wikipedia or blogs or tweet for free. We believe in it. And as the advertising is getting more, and it is increasing, we are going to hire more and more journalists."
She ended her speech by saying it was time to embrace the new media world:
"Put aside the increasingly desperate metaphors and increasingly desperate revenue models, and focus on what really matters: ensuring that in the future, journalism will not only survive, but be strengthened and thrive".
Finally came this article by the Guardian's Jason Deans:
Google is to allow publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access internet users have to their websites from Google News.
The move, announced by the Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen late yesterday, comes after mounting criticism of the search engine giant from newspaper publishers, not least the News Corporation chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch.
Just yesterday, Murdoch accused online aggregators such as Google News of "theft" of content, speaking at a US media regulators' workshop on the future of journalism in the internet age in Washington.
Murdoch plans to put News Corp content, including from UK newspapers such as the Sun and the Times, behind a paywall and has threatened to remove it from Google's search index and Google News.
However, Cohen said publishers would be able to charge for their content and still make it available via Google following the changes announced yesterday. "The two aren't mutually exclusive," he added, on a Google News blog.
Cohen said Google had achieved this by updating its First Click Free programme, so that publishers can limit Google News users to looking at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing.
"If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day ... while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis," he added.
Cohen said that Google will also begin crawling, indexing and treating as "free" any preview pages – usually the headline and first few paragraphs of a story – from subscription websites.
"We will then label such stories as 'subscription" in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free," he added.
"Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it. These are two of the ways we allow publishers to make their subscription content discoverable, and we're going to keep talking with publishers to refine these methods. After all, whether you're offering your content for free or selling it, it's crucial that people find it. Google can help with that."
It remains to be seen whether this will placate Murdoch, who told the US Federal Trade Commission workshop yesterday: "Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft.
"Without us, the aggregators would have blank slides. Right now content producers have all the costs, and the aggregators enjoy [the benefits]. But the principle is clear. To paraphrase a great economist, [there is] no such thing as a free news story."
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