MediaFile

From the desk of [your news outlet] and Scribd

Robert MacMillan

Oct 7, 2009 12:30 EDT

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.

Financial Times finds new way to save newspapers

Robert MacMillan

Feb 1, 2009 13:55 EST

Maybe the real headline should be, “Financial Times finds old way to save newspapers.” It’s called the lawsuit. As reported by Cityfile:

You know we’re in a deep recession when even billionaire financiers can’t afford to pay for subscriptions to the Financial Times. In what will go down as one of the more bizarre (and unintentionally hilarious) lawsuits we’ve seen in quite some time, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group on Wednesday for sharing an FT username and password instead of setting up separate accounts for its employees. Yes, an unknown “senior employee” at the colossal private equity firm “authorized the initiation and repeated renewal of an individual, personal subscription to FT.com” and then distributed the login details to company employees so they could all join in on the fun. (The court documents list the username as “theblackstonegroup” and the password as “blackstone,” although FT says it has since “disabled the credentials to mitigate damages.”)

The New York Post gives us the background on why the situation is absurd on its face:

Blackstone’s penny-pinching ways stand in stark contrast to the way Schwarzman lives. Two years ago, his wife threw a $3 million 60th-birthday party for the buyout king that featured 500 guests, and included a performance by Rod Stewart. A Wall Street Journal story chronicled Schwarzman’s fondness for $40 crab legs and for running up weekend food bills of $3,000.

For MediaFile’s part, we see another tool that U.S. newspapers can employ to enrich their depleted coffers. Newspaper publishers usually wait for one among them to step forward and take action before falling in en masse (cutting dividends, laying off workers, etc), and we wonder why the lawsuit route should be any different.

Yes, there are differences between the FT and most U.S. newspapers. The FT charges hefty subscriptions to read the paper in print and online. (Online subscriptions run $179 to $299 a year, as the FT’s complaint states). That means there is a monetary value to “sharing.” Most U.S. newspapers charge nothing, but require registration.

Think about it this way, newspaper websites depend upon the information they glean through registration — including how many people have registered — to set rates that they charge advertisers. If the entire municipal staff in Anytown, Kansas, is sharing access to the Kansas City Star, it’s presenting a distorted picture to the paper, which then presents a distorted picture to advertisers. With ad revenue in free fall and the possibility that some big-city papers might die within weeks, it seems fair to imagine that a trip to the courthouse could result.