New York Times Pay Wall Will Go Up, But Where?

By Matt Robinson

PHOENIX — The New York Times is building a metered pay wall debuting in 2011, but still figuring out where to put it.

The pay wall will allow readers free access to stories initially, but after a certain number of page views or another metric, readers will have to pay. The Times decided that another stream of revenue was needed as they continue to develop their digital advertising model.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the paper, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference, says the strategy was designed for the nytimes.com site, given its national and international reach. But he didn’t recommend it for other newspapers, including The Boston Globe, a sister publication, because of its local focus.

Figuring out how to quantify reader’s usage is difficult. Readers don’t see 10 clicks on a photo slideshow as similar to 10 different page views, Sulzberger said, and neither should the paper. He’s also uncertain on how the more than 60 blogs on the site will be monitored as well, including CUNY’s Local and NYU’s upcoming East Village site.

Sulzberger explained that the success of the new project is “inextricably connected to the promise of quality journalism.” The Times research and development department, which was started to explore digital initiatives, is spearheading the transition.

That translation decided against a possible “iTunes model,” where consumers buy songs for around a dollar. That model would do the same per story, but unlike music, readers are unlikely to enjoy a story over and over again, Sulzberger says.

He avoided forecasts on how successful the pay wall will be, focusing on the current environment. “It’s what the Times needs to do today,” he says, adding, “It will take time to get this right.”

The paper expects to lose some traffic from people who refuse to pay, but are confident loyalists will continue to support the paper. News on the iPhone app will continue to be free.

The Times has started an ad campaign for its New York coverage as the paper will be competing with the Wall Street Journal’s New York edition, which debuts next month.

The Rumor Mill: Social Media Trumps Traditional Media

By Moria Byrne

As social media expands into the role of news source, media experts question the reliability of personal contacts as sources.

In a recent experiment sponsored by Public Francophone radio, Janic Tremblay and four other journalists tested how reliable social media sites for accurate news. Tremblay and friends concluded in their blog documenting the experiment, Behind Closed Doors on the Net, that social media news was only as reliable as its sources.

“It’s really important to choose the right people (to follow) because what they say and do will be very important,” says Tremblay, a radio broadcaster of Radio-Canada.

There are 30,000 followers on the Canada Broadcasting Channel (CBC) Twitter profile, according to Tremblay. Yet, he’s only seen retweets once or twice coming from CBC.net. Apres, a local Canadian newspaper, has the same number of followers on Twitter. Tremblay receives many retweets of Apres’ articles from readers. Why? The stories from Apres journalists have been retweeted by people following the individual reporter.

“There’s some kind of relationship that develops between the journalist and their network,” Tremblay says. “And network seems more enthusiastic to retweet the stories from the journalist themselves rather than his employer.”

Using Twitter as a news source is really all about finding a trusted source for news information, according to Robin Carey, press contact of Social Media Today. The micro blog entry should be cited, contain a link to a reliable news source or social network site and provide proof the event/news did happen.

“If I receive a link to a blog that’s not citing any links or citing any sources, well, and no one else knows about it, I’m going to be a lot more skeptical about that,” says Andy Carvin, senior strategist, NPR Social Media Network Desk.

Carvin says he learned about many major stories such as Michael Jackson’s death first on Twitter. He’s found his Twitter feeds to be accurate almost every single time, as he follows people on Twitter who are reliable sources.

For example, if someone sent him an article on Twitter from TMZ that said Michael Jackson was dead, Carvin wouldn’t automatically trust this information. TMZ doesn’t have a track record of being completely accurate all the time, Carvin says. Readers need to be discerning and pay attention to the sources of tweets received, he says.

“You are who you follow,” says Tremblay, who follows people interested in news or working in the news industry on his Twitter account.

Misinformation
“The one downside of social media is that enables the spreading of misinformation,” Carvin says.

Tremblay saw Twitter create a momentary panic among residents in Lille, France. There was news on Twitter of an explosion in Lille. As many as 5,000 people signed onto a special fan page with updates on the Lille explosion status. The danger Tremblay saw in this uninformed chatter was that people were not only were people sharing (retweeting) the news, they were responding to the news. Also, most of the updates people posted on the Twitter site were actually false. The day after, the media reported that it was a plane crossing over a sound barrier.

“You can hear a lot on Twitter but you don’t always know what’s happening (what the truth is),” Tremblay says.

A month ago, a Canadian singer, Doug Fieger was reported dead on Twitter. The message originated from a Facebook entry written by her stepfather.

When journalists spoke to the record company for verification, the spokesperson reported that singer was doing well. This created a great deal of tension between people who had passed this false message along. Eventually, journalists confirmed that the singer was in fact dead. Yet, the mistake continued to plague the Twitter community in Canada, according to Tremblay. He believes that the incident may have forced users to reconsider how they use Twitter in the future.

“Maybe we’re starting to learn that there are some subjects that we better not tweet about,” Tremblay says.

Although social media allows users to share information freely, Tremblay noticed during his experiment that most retweets originated from a news source.

There was a PEW Research Center study, 90 percent of the information mentioned on Twitter and Facebook comes from regular, traditional media and only 4 percent on Twitter comes from original content.

And there’s still admittedly a quality gap between social networks and regular news, says Robin Carey, press contact, Social Media Today. But she thinks that the gap is increasingly going to close. “You’re going to see a lot more cross pollination between traditional news gathers and social networks,” Carey says.

Opportunities
While social media network Facebook allows users to share news articles and videos, the channel revolves around sharing personal information about daily life, according to Carvin. Twitter, on the other hand, is a “real-time chat room;” a combination of a chat and a newswire service, according to Carvin. Twitter has been gaining greater attention over the past year as a real-time news source during the Iran election.

Twitter became a useful tool for gaining information when there weren’t any usual forms of communication available to journalists.

There were no electricity or phone lines working after Haitian earthquake. Yet, people managed to contact each other on Twitter. Many citizen journalists provided critical insight and updates following the earthquake, according to Tremblay who monitored the post-earthquake chatter on Twitter. Also, Haitian photojournalists, Carel Pedre, Marvin Ady and others took pictures and sent them on Twitpic. Their pictures were all over the newspapers the next morning.

Despite the advantages of social media, Tremblay still believes news belongs in the hands of journalists; they have institutions to protect them and professional journalism skills.

Self-policing
Users keep each other in check through an open communication and transparent approach to social media and community.

If someone’s got a large group of followers and writes something false, people will respond, according to Carey. Social media channels are a medium that are inherently transparent and self-policing.

A well-known blogger, Dave Winer was having a conference call with someone else in northern Virginia when the co-worker heard an explosion and told Winer. As the blogger mentioned this event on Twitter, his many followers started passing this information around. Meanwhile, a local radio station, WTOP, quickly posted a write up about the explosion. In the course of a half an hour, a several people in northern Virginia wrote back to negate earlier claims. Some felt it wasn’t an explosion but a small earthquake. Twitter users had corrected the rumor. Eventually, the weather channel confirmed that what Winer’s co-worker and others in northern Virginia experienced was in fact a small earthquake.

If someone says something out of the ordinary, enough people will question it, and eventually it gets resolved, Carvin says.

Best journalistic best practices ask writers to confirm a source, according to Robin. Just as Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein needed to get confirmation from Deep Throat before going public with the Watergate story, the same holds true of all news stories. There isn’t an equivalent rule in social media, Carey says. Information is confirmed through links, but the information isn’t required to have a source. Instead, it’s the “wisdom of the crowd” that serves the same function, Carey says. Undocumented information could lead to copyright infringements and defamation among other problems.

Yet, a survey of online research revealed that 65 percent of journalists go to social networking sites (Facebook or LinkedIn), while 52 percent refer to Twitter and other microblogging sites for information, Poynter reported.

Future
Most online journalists get their news, from informal networks or Twitter or other social networks, according to Carey. She believes the trend will continue to grow.

Social networking sites are the most popular with 75 percent of 18-25 year olds and 35 percent of 25-34 year olds.

The number of people using social networks is growing at such a fast rate, the new director of BBC Global News, Peter Horrocks, told staff last week that they need to start using social media or find another job.

Yet, as there is a quality gap, most people would be unwilling, at this point, to accept something on Twitter totally on face value, Carey says.

“Most people realize that they need to cross reference that (micro blog) with a paradigm for trust,” Carey says.

The Paywall Debate: A Historical Perspective

By Sheila Shayon

The New York Times Company recently announced a paid, metered model for  the beginning of 2011. Users will have free access to an - as yet - unspecified number of articles per month, and then be charged when usage exceeds that number.

What they’re looking for - like all Web publishers, is additional revenue streams. The company says this will provide the “necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.”

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times‘ extraordinary, professional journalism,” says Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

News Corp, the largest and loudest proponent of ‘pay-to-play’ online content, has also begun rolling out pay walls for its online news. “We’ll be charging for online wherever we have publications,” says chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch. “Consumers are willing to pay to be entertained and informed.”

And therein lies the problem.  According to Joseph Turow, professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, “The media history of the 20th century has been teaching people that content is cheap. It goes as far back as the late 19th century, when The Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post exhorted readers to buy what their advertisers were selling, because they support your magazine. There has always been the intrusion of advertisers - you, the consumer, don’t have to pay for anything because it’s all ad-supported. But - this does not work on the Web.”

Media history is a series of outmoded distribution and economic models being ported from one technology to another - without requisite reinvention or evolution: newspapers and radio to TV and now the Internet. The basic equation of distribution, access and revenue - has not yet been adjusted for the Web.

A bit of historical perspective is helpful in understanding the axial moment we’ve arrived at today regarding a fundamental shift in the delivery and economics of mass media. It was the advertising industry, in the 1920s, which first coined the term medium as a backdrop to placing ads across different media, which were previously known as publications.

In the early 1960s, Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village. It described the end of an individualistic, visual, print culture due to emerging electronic media, which would move society from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, and a “tribal base.” These comments, made in the 1960s, of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system pre-dated the Internet but stamped the concept into the DNA of popular culture 30 years before it actually happened.

Digitally defined pay walls have been compared to the Internet equivalent of the Berlin Wall. Professional journalists fear the disintermediation wrought by the Web, especially the burgeoning forms of social media such as blogging, and massive content factories employing amateur experts for meager wages.

Simultaneously, it’s a fact that bloggers and crowdsourcing are uncovering news otherwise not covered. Traditional journalists writing behind pay walls are prevented from building their own personal brands, while un-credentialed and unskilled writers can rise to the top of their peer heap in meritocratic online communities.

The explosion of social media bloggers underscores the fact that the online experience is not just about the content.  It is about the relationship. Pay walls limit a news organization’s relationship with its customers - the public.

Pay wall proponents are exponents of news organizations no longer providing free content at point of delivery. The underlying theory is that this will augment the value of news content by reinstating rules of scarcity and habituating a new generation to paying for news.

The pay wall protestors affirm a fundamental lack of understanding of the information abundance era — a misguided effort to sustain a 20th century ethos of intermediated media. Charging for content depends on an entitlement environment, an antiquated business model built on scarcity and publishers who control the food chain.

Charging is replete with its own lack of profitability: increased marketing expenses; smaller audience; less ad revenue; fewer clicks and links. The new linked economy, leveraging networks and specialization efficiencies born of Web usage, demands collaboration.

The following timeline takes a historical point of view on major metrics for when the media of newspaper, radio, television and Internet reached mass (for the time) distribution, and how and when audiences began to pay for content. The incubation period ranges from 1615 years for newspapers; 21 years for radio and 14 for TV. The Internet still hasn’t been able to prove a pay model for its content, but e-commerce agent, Amazon, did post a profit in 2002.

The entire content industry is in upheaval. Transformative technology, free public classified sites like Craigslist, the impact of the economy on advertising and fundamental changes in consumer habits, add up to new rules and shifting business models.

“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content, and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning,” Newscorp’s Murdoch says.

One thought is that e-readers may ’save the goose,’ holding the line for charging at the handheld device portal.

“It’s a continual process of advertisers taking over and supporting media, and a continuing dilemma: denying the right of professionals to be paid for what they do. People go to The Huffington Post and feel they’ve read the NY Times. The propositions that worked historically for radio and TV were ported to the Internet and they just don’t work there,” Turow says.

Selecting a CMS: Developing Usage Scenarios

By: cmswire.com

In this article I describe how to define some practical usage scenarios which you will use to shape the product evaluation process.

[Read More and Discuss]

Wired Magazine Shows Off Its Planned IPad Edition

By: adage.com

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — As the Apple iPad and countless other devices approach, many magazine publishers are working furiously to make sure they can play on the new platforms.

[Read More and Discuss]

Content Factories Crowd Online Ecosystem

By Sheila Shayon

The proliferation of crowdsourced publishing platforms on the Web is being heralded as the next generation of a content publishing/syndication platform. There’s room for both amateur experts and professionals, and it’s a burgeoning marketplace for content distribution discoverable through search and attractive to advertisers. One thing for sure, the ecosystem of Web content is evolving dramatically right under our fingers.

The content contributors are compensated with varying models of up-front payment and ad revenue. The analytics and metrics to measure the value of the content against ad dollars are more robust than ever, and in turn, the targeted, niche audiences are of increasing if elusive value to advertisers.

All that said — critics are labeling these companies content mills. Prevailing wisdom questions whether five to fifteen dollars for a well-researched, well-written article, with references and illustrations, is even remotely fair. Is the majority of content indeed that well-written and researched?

The brands in the space see themselves as complementing traditional media by offering more depth and granularity. Critics see them storing up content on the back of cheap labor to partner with media companies, attract advertisers, and leverage publishers with an arsenal of thousands of contributors and millions of pieces of content - for profit.

DMB spoke with three of the brands — arguably the largest, AOL, the oldest, Associated Content, and the one most focused on a meritocratic model, Helium.

Seed.com
SEED.com is AOL’s premium, low-cost content management system which assigns, buys and distributes work for its 80 Web properties.

AOL’s newly launched site, Owl.com, is described as “a living, breathing library where useful knowledge, opinions and images are posted from experts the world over.” Owl crowdsources freelance work submitted on movies, books, health, sports, money, parenting, computers and more.

An “expert” is anyone who gets approved through SEED. The articles are mostly how-to advice, and contributor’s fees are low: Fighting Travel Fatigue: 10 Ways to Battle Jet Lag and Finding the Perfect Red Lipstick, for example.

Add to the mix, StudioNow, acquired in January, and AOL is poised to integrate a fully functional video creation platform into SEED, and launch a national network. “Our core focus is the consumer. At the end of each day, the question is have we offered the most relevant and useful recipe of news and entertainment to the consumer,” says Bill Wilson, president, AOL Media, for the last nine years. “We finally have a marriage of art and analytics, the technology platform and the expertise.”

“Producers” are paid anywhere from $20 per article to $100-plus. “We’re hiring passionate writers, drawn by the immediacy of Web publishing and the feedback loop from consumers. There’s a new level of participation on offer,” Wilson says.

Jeff Levick, AOL’s president, Global Advertising and Strategy, “Our strategy with advertisers is to be co-creators. We know the areas of content ahead of time, and we want to work with our advertisers to maximize high engagement. Search is provable and transparent, but display is evolving. We can’t wedge display into search ROI.”

AOL recently announced that David Eun will join the company as president of AOL Media and Studios, replacing Wilson, effective March 1.

Wilson summed up what his team has built: “Supply is not an issue, it’s demand that’s growing. But fragmentation is our friend. Brands do matter, and ours let the consumer quickly cut through the clutter. We’re focused on original, high-quality, scalable content.”

Levick adds, “The pace of adoption is so much faster today, and marketers need to learn how to keep pace with the changes of the consumer.”

AssociatedContent.com
AssociatedContent.com, (AC), based in Denver, Colo., is one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web with an audience of 8.2 million unique monthly visitors. It’s also been around longer than most - five years. AC describes itself as ‘The People’s Media Company,’ and accepts articles from amateurs and professionals.

“We consider ourselves the most democratic, open publishing platform in the Web content ecosystem,” says Patrick Keane, CEO. “We have 300,000 individual contributors, 60,000 topics, and process 3,000 pieces of content a day.”  Its elixir - content curation, keyword taxonomy and user rewards, has successfully grown its Web traffic. “We offer great elasticity to the content, we don’t want to govern interests or passions - just be an effective and efficient content engine.”

AC offers upfront payments for certain articles, ranging from $1 to $20, and contributors receive monthly payments based on page views. AC supports contributors by driving Internet users through search to the right content, and then further monetizing it through targeted ads.

“The incredible scale we have achieved has validated the model of an open and data-driven content platform,” Keane says. Asked about the appellation - content mill, he replied, “I’d rather be called a content factory - achieving efficiency and scale. Content mill is a 19th century term leftover from the dead tree crowd.”

Serving up content to advertisers remains the driving engine behind all crowdsourced sites. “We chose to invest in content that works for advertisers rather than a subscription or pay wall model,” Keane continues. “Advertising is a much higher margin business, and we’re working on the creative challenges of display. That said, search is the oxygen of the Web, and the arbiter of content success.”

Helium.com
Helium.com, launched in October 2006, and claims to be the world’s largest community of writers having published more than 1.5 million articles on 170,000 unique topics. Monthly visitors include more than 4.5 million people, and content topics range from careers to home and garden, parenting, politics and more.

According to president and CEO, Mark Ranalli, “Our roots are different from all the others in that our value proposition is human intelligence. We pull value out of the Web network platform and are appreciators of the capability of the endpoint - people.”

In addition to usual contributor tasks, Helium writers earn money by securing writing assignments with publishers through Helium’s freelance Marketplace, competing in writing contests and engaging in debate around issues and causes important to them. “Ours is a meritocracy model, we have over 150,000 writers, and 10,000 of those most capable get filtered up to the top as unique experts,” Ranalli says. “We’re like a co-op for the writing community. We’re more interested in quality than scale.”

The company recently announced that publishers such as Rand Publishing and Hearst Corporation are leveraging Helium.com to select writers for newspaper community stringers and even nonfiction book titles. If Helium  licenses content to other publishers, the contributor gets a cut of the sale, and revenues are shared based on traffic, article quality and advertiser interest.

Article payments range from 50 cents to $2.50 per article. A dollar is earned if you write an article on an empty title — empty titles are articles Helium wants based on visitor feedback. “There are 220 million websites out there today, with more content than anybody can consume. Readership is not the problem, economics is.”

The only consensus in this third act of the Internet is that traditional media is under severe pressure to reinvent itself in a Web culture that offers every user virtually unlimited content, broad access and immediacy, transparent search, niche-ization granularity and brand agnostic content — for free, for now. And that the right tools to maximize ad dollars are not yet firmly in place. “Story is now commodity,” AC’s Keane says.

The old days of terrestrial content, credentialed journalism and omnipotent editors has been replaced by algorithmic criteria such as keywords and seasonality, and a burgeoning, hungry class of amateur experts.

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