New York Times: Honest work means honest pay

Some people hate The New York Times and some people love The New York Times — but everybody wants to read The New York Times for free. That will largely end in 2011. You probably read that today on the Internet, and you probably read it for free.

The Times said it will let you read some articles per month for free, then make you pay for more. It’s what the Financial Times does. Who said it had to be original? If you subscribe to the print edition, just keep reading it. This isn’t really about you. This is a decision that will, for better or for worse, inform the public that if you want journalists to tell you stuff or entertain you, you need to pay them to do journalism all day long.

Lots of people have opinions on this and lots of people have done the research. Even more people style themselves Internet experts. The one thing they can’t help is sharing opinions on whether news sites should charge or whether they’re not just misguided for doing it — but whether they’re stupid or criminally wrong.

Everybody knows the sins that newspapers committed online. People will tell you: “They should have done it in 1995. They should do this, they should do that. If they do this, they have to give up that. They’re old media, they deserve to die. They’re doomed. They should sell. Too little too late. It won’t move the needle. They’re doing the wrong thing. I have data, do the math.”

Google in China: For most companies, profit trumps human rights

By Robert MacMillan

You can find the clearest statement about what’s happening with Google and its threat to quit China over the country’s human rights record in Xinhua, China’s state-run news service – seriously.

“It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows,” an unnamed official told Xinhua. Here’s another comment from the story: “It will not make any difference to the government if Google quits China, however Google will suffer a huge economic loss from leaving the Chinese market.” That’s from Guo Ke, a communications professor at Shanghai International Studies University.

And that’s what you need to know: Google is taking a stand, challenging China to bring its human rights record into line with what it considers its most important tenet: “Don’t be evil.” Now everyone wants to know if other companies also will discover the ethicist inside them and find a purpose more important than making money for shareholders.

Michael Kinsley and the length of newspaper articles

People are abandoning print newspapers because the articles are too long. That’s what journalist Michael Kinsley says in The Atlantic. Here is his opening paragraph: “One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point.”

It might be more than that.

Editors often say that different kinds of stories must conform to length restrictions. At many print news outlets, editors cut stories to fit into allotted spaces. Other times they commission more words for the same reason. That’s artificial. The way to determine length is to figure out how much room the story needs. Most stories need few words; Twitter tweets are good enough for some. Some stories need tons of words and tons of space. Some stories can be one or the other, depending on how many layers of the story you want to display. The only thing to do is ruthlessly prune that wood. If you end up with bonsai, so be it. If you end up with a sequoia, that might be because it’s what the story demands.

Kinsley hits on the real problem elsewhere in his 1,800-word essay: Certain journalism writing conventions add unnecessary words to stories, which in turn makes them too long. (Reuters editors see stories that exceed 500 or 600 words as indistinguishable from “Gravity’s Rainbow.”)

Dear newspapers: Happy holidays from John Janedis

Take heed and rejoice, you hard-working newspaper elves. Someone on Wall Street thinks that some newspaper companies aren’t dancing quite as close to the abyss as conventional wisdom says.

Wells Fargo analyst John Janedis, never known for going too easy on newspaper stocks, raised his rating on USA Today publisher Gannett to “outperform” and his rating on The New York Times to “market perform.”

His explanation: “After years of downward revenue estimate revisions, it appears as though the newspaper ad market is improving more quickly than we previously anticipated, particularly in December. Given current trends, we now expect approx. high single digit decline in overall newspaper advertising in 2010.”

New York Times and Gannett shares are already rising in pre-market trading on Wednesday morning. They’re thinly traded to begin with and this is a time of generally low volumes anyway. That said, if those shares rise today, it won’t be just because they’re made of helium. I wouldn’t be too surprised if other newspaper stocks rise too. At a time when several U.S. newspaper publishers have filed for bankruptcy, advertising revenues are skidding, people are getting news for free online and no one in the journalism business has found a convincing way to adapt to the changing times, this is a real gift.

from Summit Notebook:

Media executives (mostly) read free news

Here's one of the headlines that we produced at this week's Reuters Global Media Summit: "Media get real about paid-for Web news." In it, we distilled media executives' thoughts on the future of news to this: The romance with free content -- stimulated by global ad spending that reached a peak of almost half a trillion dollars last year -- was over.

Or... maybe it's not over yet. Plenty of media executives, the people trying to find a way to get paid for what they produce when free stuff on the Internet makes that ever more difficult, still read free news. Not all, but some, even though they pay for some of it too. Here are some responses to the question we asked in New York and London: How do you read your news?

Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development at Google Inc (who, despite Google's despised status among newspaper defenders, pays for some of his news):

I read my news in a combination of Twitter, Facebook, Google News and The New York Times. I get my New York Times delivered to my house.  I have it before I wake up. I scan through it. I get my newspapers in planes and whenever I have a sort of down moment, I am following CNN, the BBC, Reuters (aw, thanks!), TechCrunch and a whole lot of other relevant people at Twitter... If I have a free moment at my desk, I will go onto the Google News site to see what's happening in the world. For some reason, I feel as informed as I used to be when I used to read two newspapers every morning.

from Summit Notebook:

Michael Haneke: How to politely dislike his movies

RTL Group Chief Executive Gerhard Zeiler came to our U.S. headquarters on Thursday so we could interview him for our Global Media Summit this week. While we waited for our colleagues in London and Germany to beam in remotely, I asked him about what he and other Austrians generally think of Michael Haneke.

Haneke is perhaps Austria's most well known artist these days, a director whose films ("Cache," "Code Inconnu," "Benny's Video," "La Pianiste," "Le Temps du Loup" and others) contain violent and intense episodes combined with queasy comedy that tend to disturb, shock and dismay his fans and his foes. He also enjoys the distinction of having made "Funny Games," the only film to ever make me physically ill. In terms of his provocative content, think Peter Greenaway, not Steven Spielberg.

Zeiler told me that he used to work for ORF, the Austrian public broadcaster (which just got a cash infusion from Vienna after repeatedly going over budget). Not only did he know Haneke's work, he was responsible for financing it because it's a government obligation. As for the movies? He doesn't like them; the brutality turns him off -- so how do you tell people you don't like the movie that you just bankrolled?

"I tell them, 'It was very interesting!'" he said.

Comcast, NBC Universal pledge support for local news

Comcast has finally unveiled its formal announcement that it plans to take control of NBC Universal from General Electric. Public interest groups and various U.S. government types have been tutting and clucking over whether this media mega-deal would be against the national interest, and few doubt that Congress and the administration will want to review this plan in loving detail.

To that extent, Comcast released a memo on Thursday outlining its public commitments. There are a bunch in here, but this old-school journalist wants to point out above all else that the company said it’s committed to preserving and enriching “the output of local news, local public affairs and other public interest programming on NBC O&O (”owned and operated”) stations.”

That’s a mighty strong commitment to make. Let’s hope that it doesn’t do what many radio and TV stations have done for years to satisfy their government-mandated public interest requirements and stick all that stuff on the air at 5 a.m. Sunday morning. Also, how much more money will they provide?

Here, meanwhile, are some of the commitments, straight from the memo. Print them out and tape them to your refrigerator so you can hold Comcast’s feet to the fire later if things don’t work out as planned. I marked parts in bold:

from Summit Notebook:

A Barry Diller sampler from the Reuters Global Media Summit

Interviewing IAC chief and media mogul Barry Diller nearly always means that you'll get more quotable quotes than you can stuff into one article. He didn't disappoint at this year's Reuters Global Media Summit on Wednesday. Here are thoughts from Diller on a range of subjects from mergers and acquisitions and Comcast to AOL, MGM and marriage.

Q: What are you going to do with the cash on the balance sheet? What's the focus? Are you still being cautious?

A: "I'd say we still are. It's definitely a looming problem. The only thing worse than spending cash stupidly is essentially not to put it down at all, not to do anything."

Q: What would be the right opportunity to buy something?

from Summit Notebook:

Daily Beast staff ‘happy as clams,’ says Barry Diller

The journalists and staff who work at The Daily Beast don't look at life like you other sad-sack scribes out there who are watching your job market wash out to sea with the ebb tide. In fact, they are happy in a particularly mollusk-like way.

"They're as happy as clams," said Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is financing the online news outlet with its editor, Tina Brown. "They wake up every morning filled with possibility."

That's because they are not working at sinking-ship news outlets like most of the rest of their colleagues in mainstream U.S. journalism.

Hear Diller on this, speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit:

from Summit Notebook:

Electronic Arts CEO straightens mom out at Thanksgiving

Restructuring: You shouldn't be afraid to do it, even more than once if you have to, and even if your own family doesn't understand it. Just ask John Riccitiello, chief executive of videogame publisher Electronic Arts. Here's what he said at the Reuters Global Media Summit on Tuesday:

A company that doesn't restructure in the face of that dramatic transformation, I don't know what they're doing. GM had a great decade in the '70s building large cars... They didn't restructure in the face of what was obvious. The music industry kept telling us they wanted to buy albums, and then they tried to sue us. It didn't serve them well. ... We look at the future and we are aggressively embracing it... .

That means taking the big net loss at times, even though as Riccitiello stressed, that was on a "GAAP" basis. That means the bottom line. Still, media businesses tend to look at profit before various charges (often expressed as operating profit or other terms that are comparable to Wall Street analysts' expectations and are said to offer a true picture of a media business's health), and executives sometimes get irritated when you insist on reporting their bottom line performance. Why? Because a massive loss from a writedown or a restructuring shows up in the bottom line, but it is not always a sign of the business's fundamental health.

Yet, people often take it that way if they don't know better -- including people close to home. "My mom took it that way," Riccitiello said. "I straightened her out over Thanksgiving."