from The Great Debate:
Supporting the past, ignoring the future
By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The opinions expressed are his own.
Western media industries are going through a rapid and often painful transformation today with the rise of the Internet and mobile platforms, the erosion of the largest free-to-air broadcast audiences, and the decline of paid print newspaper circulation.
Despite all these changes, the important and sometimes neglected ways in which governments provide support for the media have remained largely unchanged for decades.
There is a real need to reform our 20th century support arrangements to make sure they effectively serve our needs in the 21st century. Public sector support for the media should not be industrial policy, propping up specific ailing incumbents, but democratic policy, aimed at ensuring that timely, accessible news from a diversity of sources is available to the entire population.
Most media companies prefer not to talk about the support they receive from their government, but all developed democracies intervene in media markets in direct and indirect ways to serve a range of public interest goals.
The most important intervention in much of Western Europe is licence fee funding for public service broadcasting, based on what is basically a ring-fenced tax on households that own television or radio receivers. The United States also provides funding for public broadcasting, but on a much more limited scale and through direct federal and state appropriations.
The good news & bad news about news consumption on tablets
There is some heartening data and some other data that should strike fear in the hearts of publishing executives about how people consume news on tablet devices, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism and the Economist Group.
Let’s get to the rosy stuff first. The survey polled about 1,200 tablet users and 900 people who use them to read the news. It turns out that consuming news — defined as skimming headlines to hunkering down and reading long-form articles – is one of the most popular tablet activities (at 53%) nearly edging out sending emails (at 54%) but definitely whopping social media activity (39%), gaming (17%), reading books (17%) and watching videos (13%).
But the apps aren’t pulling in the most readers. Interestingly, while two-thirds of those surveyed have news apps, about 40% of those polled said they get their news through web browsers compared to only 21% who get their news through apps. For newspapers this piece of information should be a wake up call to keep pricing consistent. (Magazines would fit in this category though most don’t have a decent websites.)
If a publisher is going to charge for an application — and why not? — they should also have some sort of pay strategy in place for the website. Otherwise people are going to circumvent the app and just go straight to the browser for free news. Thus the publication once again misses another potential revenue opportunity.
Now for the bad news. The study found that “revenue potential for news on the tablet may be limited.” Here’s why: Just 14 percent of tablet news users have paid to access the news. Those who have news apps said that being free or low cost was a major factor in their decision to download the app in the first place.
It could simply be that not enough news organization are charging for apps in the first place — once again getting people who are using these new devices in the mindset that news should be free.
Read the full study here.
Live Coverage: News Corp phone hack scandal
Reuters.com is liveblogging House of Commons debate
Factbox on today’s committee hearings: uk.reuters.com
Timeline of events in the hacking scandal so far: uk.reuters.com Who’s who in the hacking scandal: uk.reuters.com
Hearing highlights: uk.reuters.com Analysts views: uk.reuters.com
July 20, 2011
Latest (10am ET)
Liveblogging the House of Commons debate : Reuters
If this phone hacking was being done in England, then it’s also being done in the USA, by Fox News…. They’re the SAME PEOPLE….
Selling the news: Reuters, the AP and Tribune
We and others reported Monday night that our parent company Thomson Reuters Corp is starting a U.S. general news service for U.S. publishers and broadcasters. Though my employer, Reuters News, has been providing general and business/financial/economic news for more than a century, we didn’t have a service before that would rely on a big group of hired journalists and stringers to get busy covering U.S. news in a large way.
You can see our story here, as well as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and paidContent.org stories, for more information. One of the interesting aspects that we didn’t get into in our story is one of the reasons that Tribune Co, Reuters America’s first client, decided to work with our parent company.
Here’s Russell Adams’s explanation, taken from The Wall Street Journal:
In a cost-cutting move this past spring, Tribune began producing modules, or ready-made pages, that are filled with news from wires services and its various properties, and printed in multiple papers. Gerould Kern, editor of the Chicago Tribune, said Tribune expects to begin selling the pages to other publishing companies—something Reuters was open to.
“Clients want to be a syndicator of our content,” said Chris Ahearn, president of media for Thomson Reuters.
The AP doesn’t let papers repackage its content for sale. In a statement, the AP said, “The Tribune newspapers remain valued members of the AP.” The cooperative added: “Our members have rights to use our content in various ways. However, there are ancillary uses of AP content that we cannot allow because they wouldn’t be fair to other members,” the AP said.
I’m curious to hear from our media readers how creative a move they think this is for news outlets like Reuters as well as the customers that my company is trying to enlist. We don’t know the size of the investment in this news service, other than that it’s part of a “multimillion dollar” commitment. We also don’t know the eventual size of the reporting staff (including the freelancers). Still, it’s an interesting move on a number of levels.
From the desk of [your news outlet] and Scribd
The words “Document-sharing website” probably won’t thrill too many people who aren’t stationery geeks. Nevertheless, one such website, Scribd.com, has released a new feature that could make online news reporting a more interesting experience for the journalists and the readers.
But first, a dose of background: Scribd is a website that lets you do all sorts of things in publishing, including selling electronic copies of books. Some of us at Media File use it for a different purpose: embedding documents related to our reporting inside blog posts. See this blog post I wrote about pharmaceutical company Mylan’s legal tussle with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. At the bottom of the page, you can see the legal documents that I wrote about in the blog post and posted by using Scribd.
On Wednesday, Scribd said news outlets The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Mediabistro will use Scribd’s document reader on their sites in the same kinds of ways that I used it on Media File.
Scribd is letting the sites use it for free, sensing what advertisers and publicists like to call a “branding opportunity.” The reader would include Scribd’s name on it, but also the name of the media outlet in question. Think of your personal notepaper that reads, “From the desk of…” at the top.
Here’s more from Scribd’s press release:
The document reader turns nearly all file types — including PDF, Word and PowerPoint — into a Web document that can be shared on Scribd.com and any website that allows embeds. It can help news organizations:
- Embed documents in news stories and add transparency to the reporting process
- Increase people’s time spent reading each story
- Increase brand recognition on and off their website through logos on the reader
- Retain attribution for original document uploads, regardless of where the document gets shared on the Internet
- Increase traffic through links back to the original story
- It also, Scribd said, lets people share the documents on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
this is as answer to Highlander Juan’s comment- don’t you think that any news outlet is basically partisan, how can you possibly recount a fact without having your biases shine thru
Welcome to Turkey, Bloomberg ‘efendim’
It always makes me happy when one of the companies on my beat reminds me that I study Turkish for at least one practical reason. In this case, it’s our rival wire service Bloomberg, which will start broadcasting news in Turkey through local partner Ciner Media. Pronounced, more or less, “Jiner Media,” the company also publishes magazines in Turkey that include Marie Claire, Newsweek Turkey, OK! and GEO.The service will be called BloombergHT for “Haber Turk,” which translates to, “Turkish News.” The service will be a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week Turkish language financial news and business channel that will broadcast on cable and satellite in Turkey and “Turkish Republics.” I have to find out what that means, but I’m guessing it means parts of Central Asia where Turkic languages are spoken.The launch will come later this year, Bloomberg said in a statement on Tuesday. It also said that Bloomberg will retain editorial control over the channel’s business content and will provide Ciner Media with access to the Bloomberg news service and that a website will follow.This news comes months after Bloomberg held a rare round of layoffs and laid out plans to shut down some of its non-English-language TV operations around the world. Bloomberg, as we and others have reported, has been working to broaden its worldwide reach. The company, I have heard from people familiar with its thinking and also from employees, wants to raise its profile outside its hardcore financial industry subscribers and is trying to offer more news to a bigger audience to do it. Pursuing BusinessWeek is one way to do it. Another would be forging more deals like the one in Turkey — let someone else handle the distribution, and you just focus on the news. We might see more of these deals soon.UPDATE: While I’ve been obsessing over whether I’ll get to play Peter Ustinov’s part in a remake of Topkapi, Business Insider noticed some substantial changes on Bloomberg TV’s presentation for the rest of the world. In the world of financial journalism, less really is more, apparently.PS: Efendi = “lord” or “master” or a general “sir” might even do these days. “Efendim” = “My lord,” etc. and is a common form of address. For example, you might call me “Robert efendim.” Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.(Reuters Photo: Istanbul)
I would love Bloomberg to broadcast in Turkish in Uzbekistan as well. We also speak a kind of Turkish.
How to subsidize news without feeling dirty
The U.S. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee hit one of my favorite topics on Thursday: What the government could, should, must (or must not) do to help the struggling news media survive, with the spotlight on newspapers in particular.
I had a look at the testimony and found some fascinating thoughts in the testimony from Paul Starr, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Starr has some ideas for how the government might preserve a free press by extending a hand to the news business — all without using that word that no one wants to use: bailout.
First, the background: Newspapers are in trouble as the Internet destroys their advertising revenue. More people than ever read the news online, and news websites are trying to figure out a way to make money off that because letting people in for free just kills the circulation of their printed products. Some folks have raised the idea of federal, state or local subsidies to help papers — usually in the form of tax breaks — but the Newspaper Association and others say it’s a bad idea because the press shouldn’t be beholden to the government that it’s supposed to be monitoring for abuse, fraud, etc.
Meanwhile, the Obama White House, Justice Department and other federal offices are examining the situation. In Congress, one bill would let some newspapers become nonprofit companies, and another bill that would let businesses book their recent losses over the past five years – something that would get them some extra cash from the taxman.
The association was one of the groups that testified at the hearing. We know how they feel. What I’m INCREDIBLY eager to get your thoughts on is what Starr wrote:
Increasingly, the production of news will require subsidy, and the question is really from where and under what conditions that subsidy will come. The problems that this challenge raises are difficult because of the legitimate concern that any subsidy, whether from government or private philanthropy, may induce subservience and dependency in the press. But we should take encouragement from three experiences.
(He points out that we’ve done it before with eased postal rates for U.S. papers and public broadcasting subsidies, and it’s worked well in other countries, notably Scandinavian ones — take that how you will.)
from Commentaries:
Counter-Revolution?
Rupert Murdoch used News Corp's fiscal fourth quarter conference call on Wednesday to say he wants to be paid ANYTIME his news is read online. Perhaps he was just in a cranky mood, but most of the reporters listening to the call thinks he's going beyond what he's said many times before on the topic.
That's not just for newspapers and websites, but also for his TV news channels, like Fox, and by implication, Sky, when viewed online, Murdoch said. However, when asked if he will be charging for celebrity photos from newspapers such as The Sun or News of The World, it was by no means clear he's figured out how to make visitors pay to view these other than by watching ads.
He said he's prepared to be first among his competitors to do this and considering introducing a paid-content plan for News Corp web sites in the company's current fiscal year that ends in June 2010.
Of course, there's nothing counter-revolutionary about content creators wanting to get paid. It just made the blog posting trifecta work.
(Transcript: News Corp Q4 2009 conference call, Seeking Alpha; Image: The Sun)
See also Revolution and Evolution
The final nail in the coffin. I’m pleased however, his brands are the trashiest out there (Fox/Sun), his readership is foolish and poor. It should make for a good laugh. Was he drunk on this call?
Tuesday media highlights
Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:
Verizon Planning Its Own App Store (Business Insider) Preethi Dumpala writes: “The main idea: Verizon wants to be the company connecting its customers with apps — not necessarily its handset partners. And it wants to avoid becoming an even dumber pipe. Depending on how it’s set up, this could clash with gadget makers’ plans.”
McGraw-Hill might ‘give away’ Business Week for nominal $1 (FT) “McGraw-Hill might reap only a nominal $1 by selling Business Week, according to people familiar with the 80-year-old financial magazine’s record of losses. The publisher has appointed Evercore, a boutique investment bank, to sell the title after deciding it was non-core to a group that owns the Standard & Poor’s rating agency and an educational publisher, two people familiar with the decision said,” writes Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.
Sinclair says it might consider bankruptcy (Baltimore Sun) “The Hunt Valley-based owner of television stations, which depends heavily on automotive advertisers for revenue, said it might be obligated to pay $488.5 million of its total outstanding debt within the next 18 months. The company said it had $1.3 billion in total debt outstanding as of March 31,” writes Lorraine Mirabella.
Minority Broadcasters Seek Federal Aid (WSJ) Fawn Johnson writes: “A group of minority broadcasters asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Monday for financial assistance akin to the aid that has been extended to the financial and auto industries. ”Minority-owned broadcasters are close to becoming an extinct species,” the letter said. “Even in better economic times, minority broadcasters have historically had difficulties accessing the capital markets.”
In other news:
Monday media highlights
Here are some of the day’s stories on the media industry:
‘Tonight Show’ Audience a Decade Younger (NYT) “In Mr. O’Brien’s first month as host, the median age of “Tonight Show” viewers has fallen by a decade — to 45 from 55, a startling shift in such a short time. This audience composition means advertisers can now address almost exclusively young viewers on “Tonight,” and NBC is already contemplating a shift in how it sells the show,” writes Bill Carter.
Springer’s daily Welt dreams of going international – again (Reuters)
“German publisher Axel Springer plans to launch an international weekly edition of its flagship daily, Die Welt, in a 48-page tabloid format starting February 2010. Springer is still mulling distribution options but the paper will likely be available from airlines,” writes Nicola Leske.
Just the Messenger: Mediaite.com Focuses on Celebrity of Journalism (WP) On the newly launched website, Howard Kurtz writes: “Mediaite paints with a colorful palette, even if its hues will appeal mainly to journalists and those who obsess over them. By hiring bloggers who worked for Mediabistro and the Huffington Post, Abrams has put together a sassy critique of media missteps and foibles, an overall take not driven mainly by ideology.”
Cubs sale finalized for TribCo (Crain’s) “Tribune Co. has finalized a deal to sell the Chicago Cubs to a bidding group led by bond salesman Thomas Ricketts. Documents describing the fully financed deal were sent to Major League Baseball over the weekend, a source familiar with the negotiations said Monday. The value of the deal is between $850 million and $900 million, the source said.”
Food Network magazine is media’s next wave (MarketWatch) “Hearst executives are very pleased with the magazine’s progress. The company started out by printing 300,000 copies last fall. Hearst now projects the publication’s rate base, the circulation figure that publishers promise to advertisers, will climb to 900,000 later this year and to 1.1 million in 2010,” writes Jon Friedman.
