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September 18, 2007
Consent Decree with the Open Web Shuts Down Times Select"That's the decision in Web court accepted by the New York Times. Dismisses all courses of action against Google. Times agrees to drop Times Select, which was a barrier to Google--and the blogosphere--working the right way."I recommend the obituary for Times-Select that Jeff Jarvis published. The thing dies at midnight tonight, about 47 minutes from now. “With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.” He thinks Murdoch will tear down the pay wall at the once-mighty Wall Street Journal; and there are signs that Murdoch thinks he will too. “TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media,” says Jarvis, “the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.” I think real value is in weaving yourself into the Web. “Conversation” is blogger’s shorthand for that larger idea. Charging for columnists only made sense as a political action within the conflicted state of the Times, a compromise among contending factions and a show of support for certain ideas that spoke to parts of the base. “People will pay for Times journalism because Times journalism is much better than what those people can get for free…” spoke to the newsroom base. Times-Select made sense in that world. The professional premium had to be established. The Wall Street Journal had done it by charging for its web edition. The Washington Post was comfortable staying free and finding more of the Web it could like. The New York Times was to have its own strategy; this became Times-Select. Staci Kramer at PaidContent.org has the view from the Times, provided by Vivian Schiller, a Senior VP and General Manager of NYTimes.com. She sounds cool and collected. Schiller insisted, as she and other NYT execs have said before that TimesSelect was on plan, was bringing in $10 million in subscription revenue and was successful: “This is what is really important—it did work. It’s just a matter of as compared to what.” That’s the decision in Web court accepted by the New York Times. Consent decree with the open Web. Dismisses all courses of action against Google. Times agrees to drop Times Select, which was a barrier to Google—and the blogosphere—working the right way. The decision says you can try to charge, and some people will pay, but there is more money and a brighter future in the open flow of Web traffic, a lot of which is coming sideways into your content stack because Google sends you tons of users via that route, not through your pearly gates of news, also called a home page. Just as RSS sends stuff from the middle of the stack out. When every barrier you create to their participation with your product weakens your revenue stream, which is tied to openness, you’re in the world of the consent decree. Advertising tied to search means open gates for all users. It means link rot cut to zero, playing for the long haul in Web memory and more blogs because they are Web-sticky. (For other reactions see Scott Rosenberg here, Steve Johnson here, Doc Searls here and Mark Potts here, then again.) Case watchers are advised to pay close attention to Times journalists blogging for the brand. John Markoff’s snooty verdict in 2003 “…it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio…” has been overthrown. Paul Krugman has debuted his blog: Conscience of a Liberal. Keep an eye on linking practices throughout the site: more Web-centric (good) or still Times-ified (bad.) When I got word that the case was settled and the lights would go out on Times Select, I went back to my post from two years ago, Charging for Columnists. It held up pretty well. “”If one faction wanted to go the Wall Street Journal’s pay wall route, and another wanted to remain free like the Post, then TimesSelect is not a hypothesis for how to succeed on the Web, but just a mid-point between competing theories.” The mid-point, a political compromise more than a publishing strategy, has collapsed. That post usually makes the first page of results for a Google search of “times select.” PressThink has its own version of search optimization, and occasionally it works. Write a post that’s a good guide to the broader discussion online because there are many voices and perspectives linked into it, as well as “the news.” Give the post a title and subtitle that anticipate basic search terms. (“Charging for Columnists: Notes and Comment on the Launch of TimesSelect.”) Over time it will weave itself into the Web, and become one of the reference points for debate. Multiple points like that add up to Web authority, and a second traffic source from search. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 says NYTimes.com is ahead of other sites in “realizing the value of premium content by opening it up to the web’s link-based economy.” When the Times bought About.com it brought an open-to-search mentality into its organization, and it’s paying off. (About 80 percent of About’s traffic is from search.) Times Select was always in conflict with that. The reasons why were captured in Simon Waldman’s guest post at PressThink, The Importance of Being Permanent. (Jan. 2005) As the director of digtial strategy and development for the Guardian Media Group (UK, but soon to launch in America), he had come to realize that the professional premium is better located there. Etch yourself into the Web as a record of key events. Waldman spoke lines the Times has accepted in its consent decree abandoning “Select.” Permanence is about ensuring you have a real presence on the Net. It is a critical part of having a distinctive identity in an increasingly homogenous landscape. It is about becoming an authority and a point of reference for debate. It is about everything we want and need to be. Now they want to be a part of it. Not a good sign, then, that pay wall logic lives on in the archive policy the Times has adopted after Times-Select. Staci Kramer had this: “Much of the NYT’s archives—the past 20 years and the public domain years of 1851-1922—will be opened… Some content from 1923-1986 also will be available for free but the primary use of those years will be for e-commerce.” From World War One to the end of the Cold War it makes sense for the Times to charge? Well, I guess they didn’t consent to everything. There are still executives at the Times company holding out against the logic of the open Web. For these people it’s truly midnight in the cathedral of news. The Times has decided it’s better off in the bazaar. And Dan Gillmor thinks they will do very well there: Presumably, each article will have a perma-link. If so, watch what happens. The Times’ stories — many of which are definitive moments of journalism — will become the de facto primary sources for people around the Web, and around the world. On topic after topic, the Times story (or stories) will move near or to the top of the search engine rankings. They will become more valuable for keyword and other advertising once people click through to the actual stories. I just got a notice about Times Select in my email. “Dear Times subscriber…” It explains the change thusly… Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment… (There’s also an FAQ.) That’s the strategic direction to which the Times, an evolving newspaper, has now given its consent.
Posted by Jay Rosen at September 18, 2007 11:13 PM
Comments
Next step is to get online newspapers to stop charging for content that is more than a week old! Every blogger who's ever posted a link to a story that goes dead -- and every reader who's ever tried to follow one of those links -- knows how frustrating that can be. For every penny the papers earn with that I'm sure there's at least a dollar lost from potential ad revenue. Posted by: Georgia NeSmith at September 19, 2007 1:54 PM | Permalink Agreed. There are lots of good reasons that the Times writers need to join the national conversation -- especially pre-election. Further agreed that the Times Select product, while meeting financial goals of $10M in new revenue annually, was flawed, confusing readers, which is never a good thing. What I think is getting left out of the TS Termination aftermath is how to allow readers to help pay for the journalism they want. It appears a full-armed embrace of web advertising -- without any support from readers -- is the path the Times and others are taking. Sure, Web advertising will continue to grow well, though its rate of growth will slow as well. And yes it may generate more than that $10M. But that's only part of the question. No matter how much (or little) ads generate around news, we'll all be wholly dependent on the whims and trends of advertising to determine how much reporting is done by whom. I think that means that publishers (both old and new) representing the public interest -- the industry formerly known as newspapers -- have to find a way to allow readers to help pay for the cost of reporting. One way will be the NPR-like membership model (like what MinnPost is trying in the Twin Cities). Maybe that replaces subscriptions and "circulation". But, one way or the other, publishers have to find away to let readers back into the paying picture, both for reasons of funding the enterprise and reinforcing the notion of "public interest." Posted by: Ken Doctor at September 19, 2007 2:40 PM | Permalink Not exactly a segue, but speaking of "paying", Dan Rather is suing CBS for ruining his reputation. Anyway, your prayers have been answered. Discovery will allow all those ties to the Bush admin and their set-up of an innocent Mary Mapes and Lucy Rodriguez will now see the light of day. Plus, reporters can start digging. Man, are you guys going to have fun. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 19, 2007 4:48 PM | Permalink There's a middle ground: Posted by: Bill Densmore at September 19, 2007 9:33 PM | Permalink Oh boy. Dan Rather on one side versus Sumner Redstone, Richard Thornburgh and George Bush on the other. Was ever a game more loaded ? Rather must have some secret desire to become a grease spot on the highway. Still, as Richard says, discovery might be interesting --though not in the sense that he thinks. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 19, 2007 9:59 PM | Permalink Man, are you guys going to have fun. damn, and I wanted to be the one to tweak Richard about this... I was even going to sign it Commander Chaos aka Butters! Having read the actual filing for the lawsuit itself it looks to me like Rather has a pretty decent case. And I gotta disagree with Steve... I don't think that Rather has much, if anything, to worry about in terms of discovery. But Redstone/Viacom/CBS have a LOT to worry about -- especially since Rather apparently has sources inside the Viacom boardroom... Posted by: p.lukasiak at September 19, 2007 10:05 PM | Permalink We're not using this thread to tak about Dan Rather. I will try to do a post on it next day or two. From the looks of it, the story will be around for a long, long time. This is from a comment I left at Scott Rosenberg's site... Hi Scott! Okay, so if I read you correctly you think I am being somewhat cavalier by celebrating the demise of Times Select without worrying about where the lost revenues are going to come from. Maybe I am being cavalier; if so that’s something I should correct. But can you give me some help correcting it? Specifically, what I should I do to “come to terms with the bottom line of the journalism business today.” As you probably know, I don’t disagree at all with your analysis: Online revenue is not making up for lost print revenue gained under monopoly conditions. Web advertising will grow but not at anything like a replacement rate. Reyling on one revenue stream–web ads–is risky; and when there is a downturn, as we know there will be, the results are likely to be very ugly. While print revenue is slipping away, it doesn’t appear possible to charge online, whether you’re Slate, The Chicago Reader or the New York Times. An economic model that would pay for news staffs of the same size is nowhere to be found. And so after I acknowledge all that–and I do acknowledge the bitter truth of it–what am I supposed to do, as a writer and observer of the scene…. I mean to show that I am not being cavalier, to “come to terms” with the bottom line in financing good journalism? Should I work on diminishing people’s expectations of what journalism can in the future be? Would that be helpful? Should I put my hands on my hips, declare real journalism expensive, and ask other people, the people crowing about the Internet: hey, where’s the money going to come from? Should I be thinking up new revenue opportunities for the people at news companies who get paid to think about revenue opportunities? Should I be grabbing venture capital and spending it on business models I have no reason to think would work? I should not sugarcoat it; that much I get. Don’t (cavalierly) assume that Web revenue will pick up the slack when so far there is not much evidence that it will. Don’t portray the demise of Times-Select as a triumph for the Web when it’s really just the sad end of a misguided strategy that was ill-matched to the Web. I get that. I do. What I don’t get is what you have in mind by coming to terms with the bottom line in the journalism business today, by meeting it “head on.” I guess I don’t know how to do that. So I have done thing I do know how to do: warn against legacy media thinking, discredit the curmudgeons who are anti-Web or willfully ignorant of it, denounce dumb ideas like “make Google pay reparations,” describe as best I can how I think the Web works journalistically, and try to figure out how a combination of pro and amateur might create new firepower, since there is no economic model for the old firepower. That’s my version of head-on. It is neither satisfying nor adequate; that much I know. I agree with you that it does not look like a solution to anything. But it’s the only course I could figure out for coming to terms with where the business is. There seems to be some deeper coming to terms that you wish to see happen. Can you give us a hint? Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 19, 2007 11:02 PM | Permalink I don't have a dog in the Rather case in the sense I'm rooting for one side or the other. I'm interested in the discovery. How many document examiners expressed reservations? Any e-mails saying, as Nifong did in similar circumstances, "we're effed"? Having known that Mary Mapes was on this for five years, didn't anybody think to be a bit careful with an obsession? Did Rather really want to admit, or assert, that, after all his bloviating about being a shoe-leather journo that, for this story, he was just reading the words? I give it 60-40 that Rather was fooled by not looking too closely at a story he desperately wanted to be true. In other words, the real perps made this stuff up and fed it to a chump they knew would swallow it. I'm interested in discovery as it relates to CBS. CBS is one reason of three I don't watch the single-digit channels for news. The other two reasons are ABC and NBC. They are, as p.l. says, the ones with the most to lose. If a big-time news outfit would pull something like this, what else are they doing? One of Rather's friends needs to get a couple of double manhattans down him and lead him off to a cottage in Maine someplace. Since you guys will be ignoring the Janes report about several dozen Syrian and Iranian techs and engineers killed trying to put a VX warhead on a SCUD, this lawsuit will have to suffice for the run-up to the eating season. Note to self. Lose ten pounds. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 19, 2007 11:05 PM | Permalink I share Prof. Rosen's fear that, without a predictable revenue stream, the enormous amount of reporting that traditional journalism has gathered together will suffer. Problem is that, in the process of gathering it and presenting it, there was too much incompetence, ignorance, corruption, and dishonesty. The number of people who have chosen to not listen at you is not dropping merely because you are no longer considered trustworthy. That sped things along considerably. The 'net's influence would have been felt eventually. It would be good to figure out some way to keep the reporting going, but it will be hard to convince people to pay for something they find untrustworthy, no matter the medium by which it is presented. Then there is the little matter of convincing people to pay for what they can get for free, because the 'net is parasitical on journalism. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 19, 2007 11:40 PM | Permalink The New York Times will now be the Wikipedia for news, as they should have been all along--the first or second google result for all event-related queries. Posted by: Thomas Locke Hobbs at September 20, 2007 1:23 AM | Permalink TLH. I presume you mean to include the lack of credibility the wikipedia has in certain areas....? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 20, 2007 7:32 AM | Permalink Scott Rosenberg answered my questions thusly.... By "coming to terms" with the realities of the business he means remaining conscious, throughout all our celebrations and explorations of the Web’s new freedoms and possibilities, of two things: One, that we’re living through one of history’s big industrial transformations, and those transformations always carry a human cost, and it’s often very convenient for those who benefit from such transformations to put the human cost to the back of their minds. Two, that it’s worth acknowledging that as of right now, it looks like the “newsroom of the future” — whatever it is and however it evolves in this new media space — might well be one with lower wages, less job security and fewer overall paying jobs than the newsrooms of the past. It might also be a place with more freedom, more room to innovate, more surprises and more discovery. Sound. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 20, 2007 9:08 AM | Permalink "Jay and other see greater value in the "linked web" -- where search engines and cross links magnify the readership and authority of a source like The Times." – Bill Densmore, from his link "The New York Times will now be the Wikipedia for news, as they should have been all along--the first or second google result for all event-related queries." – Thomas Locke Hobbs Wow. Scary thoughts those. I would view those limiting results as a step back to the world of “If we haven’t chosen to cover it (or link to it), it’s not News.” From today’s NYTimes, “NBC to Offer a Free Video Download Service.” Posted by: Kristen at September 20, 2007 9:48 AM | Permalink In a somewhat related story, Paul Krugman ventures into Jay Rosen's beat with this blog: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/what-i-hate-about-political-coverage/ Posted by: William Ockham at September 20, 2007 10:15 AM | Permalink Courses of action? Posted by: R Rainey at September 20, 2007 10:51 AM | Permalink Jay, I know you don't think Google should pay but the thing is that they *have*...and I doubt they would have done it if they thought there was any legal way to just use the stuff without paying... although sharing the profits may be the only way to keep the info (and the profits) coming in for the long run: "INTERNET SEARCH engine Google is understood to have reached deals with several large UK news groups over carrying their content on Google News. The deals are reputedly being kept strictly secret for fear that Google will end up having to pay for similar licences with all of the 4500 news services it carries on its news aggregator. It now seems that Google has accepted it has lost the argument over carrying stories without paying for them." Link. Delia P.S. thanks to Tim for that link! (one of his previous posts) D. @Richard Yes, I'd say it includes the inaccuracies of Wikipedia. For many stories, Wikipedia is a more accurate source than newspapers because people are continually updating a given page. You can end up on a story in the Times (or any other news site) that's hopelessly out-of-date and not know it. I went back and looked at how the Times handled corrections on the more egregious cases-- Judy Miller and Jayson Blair. Many of those stories don't have any indication that they have been called into question. In others, the disclosure is buried on the second page. Rocky. Problem with wiki is that the updates need not be done with an eye toward facts, but in order to promote an agenda with non-facts. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at September 20, 2007 3:42 PM | Permalink Interesting. So the Times is moving from having subscribers pay for access to the OpEds (where's my refund, NYT?) to having search engines pay for access to the database. So the model shifts to one where the advertising dollars go to Google (perhaps instead of to news outlets) and Google uses it to buy access to the information, which it then delivers to end users for free. So, like, man -- information wants to be free? Somebody tell the RIAA. In the new infoworld, free is more economically viable than expensive.
Posted by: Richard B. Simon at September 21, 2007 1:24 PM | Permalink |
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