Internet and the logic of interaction and information

What can I say, Internet participants have probably violated every informal logic fallacy.

As a review...

Informal Fallacies

Arthur C. Clarke and the Internet

"Tech Time Warp of the Week: Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 1974"

by

Cade Metz

March 22nd, 2013

Wired

The year is 1974, and Arthur C. Clarke is standing inside one of those cavernous computer centers that held the massive machines of the day.

He’s joined by an Australian television reporter with a gloriously enormous set of sideburns, and the reporter has brought his son, who’s about 5 or 6 years old. As those massive machines hum in the background, the reporter looks down at his son and asks Clarke what the boy’s life will be like in, yes, the year 2001.

Clarke — the science fiction writer who teamed with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to give the world 2001: A Space Odyssey — is up to the task. And then some. He says the boy will grow up to find the internet.

He doesn’t call it the internet. But he says that even before the dawn of the twenty-first century, the boy’s home will include a computer console — something much smaller than those massive machines humming in the background in 1974 — that provides “all the information he needs for his everyday life: his bank statements, his theater reservations, all the information you need over the course of living in a complex modern society.”

The boy, Clarke says, will take this console for granted, much like the telephone.

Clarke’s prediction originally aired on Australian television as part of a science series called Perspective, and you can see it in the video below. The interview happened a good 20 years before the internet went mainstream, but Clarke’s vision is pretty much on the money.

The reporter also asks the famed futurist whether we’ll become overly dependent on our computers, and though Clarke acknowledges there are some dangers here, he says our machines will also provide a new kind of freedom.

“They will make it possible to live really anywhere we like. Any businessman, any executive, could live almost anywhere on Earth and still do his business through a device like this,” he says. “It means we won’t be stuck in cities. We’ll live out in the country or wherever we please and still carry on complete interactions with other human beings as well as computers.” Our cities haven’t exactly shrunk. But we’re certainly able to connect with each other from wherever we might be.

Looked at today, the interview is particularly powerful because it takes place amidst those enormous computers of the mid-1970s. We see spinning tape drives and punch-card readers and cabinet-sized printers — equipment that’s such a far cry from the home consoles of the future that Clarke describes.

Arthur C. Clarke [Wikipedia]

Northern Lights...Internet feed 3-14-2012

Watch a Live Feed of Tonight’s Northern Lights

Soooooo, did the black out work?

"The Internet flexes its muscles with blackout"

Thousands of websites go dark to marshal opposition to federal anti-piracy bills.

by

Andrea Chang and Jim Puzzanghera

January 18th, 2012

The Los Angeles Times

In cutting off access to thousands of websites for a day, the tech industry flexed its political muscle with a don't-mess-with-the-Web campaign that highlighted its vast reach and how indispensable the Internet has become.

The sweeping blackout to protest federal anti-piracy bills sparked frustration and confusion Wednesday but had its intended effect — disrupting the usual flow of the Internet while mobilizing opposition among online users and lawmakers.

More than 10,000 websites participated in the strike against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, bills that opponents say could lead to censorship online and force some websites out of business. Some, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing, shut down for the day, while others such as Craigslist and Google protested by blacking out parts of their sites and urging users to sign online petitions and contact members of Congress.

Shortly after midday, Google said 4.5 million people had signed its petition. Meanwhile, Wikipedia said 5.5 million people had clicked through the blackout message on its home page for information on how to contact their local lawmakers.

"We're pretty staggered by that number," said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation. He said the site was advising users to call lawmakers instead of emailing them after getting reports that congressional inboxes were flooded and servers were facing capacity issues.

The impact of Wednesday's action raised the possibility of a bigger and broader Internet strike that could lead to a virtual information blackout. The biggest Internet companies such as Google and Facebook did not shut down — they could have lost millions of dollars in advertising revenue — but expressed their support online.

"Technology has grown as a part of our lives and the companies now have something of value that they can withhold in terms of services, which is a shift in the overall political landscape," said Colin Gillis, a technology analyst at BGC Financial. "Is this spawning a new level of activism? I'd say absolutely yes."

Despite unprecedented publicity ahead of the strike, many Internet users were caught off guard.

"I support what they're doing, but to be honest, I would have preferred to see more what Google did: Leave the service available but make a point," said Burbank resident Robert Rose, 45, who was irritated when he couldn't access some of his favorite websites. The marketing consultant vented on Twitter, writing "BlackoutWorking."

With millions flooding Capitol Hill with emails and calls, some supporters of the legislation publicly backed away.

Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) withdrew as co-sponsors of the Senate bill. Meanwhile, Reps. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) said they were pulling their names from the companion House bill. Some other lawmakers also said they would not support the bills, endangering the push to quickly pass the legislation early this year.

Backed by Hollywood and media activists, the two bills aim to crack down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies, music and counterfeit goods. But Web companies argue that the proposed legislation is about more than piracy and digital copyright protection. They say the broad language of the bills would thwart free speech online and could stifle the Internet economy, hurt the creative process and drive up legal costs.

"Given the legitimate vocal concerns, it is imperative that we take a step back to allow everyone to come together and find a reasonable solution," said Hatch, who had been a strong early supporter before the backlash. He called for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to back off plans to hold a key procedural vote on the bill Tuesday.

Some senators' websites were inaccessible at times Wednesday. And the House saw double its normal Web traffic, said Dan Weiser, a spokesman for the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer of the House.

In the offices of Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River), the phones were chirping every couple of minutes Wednesday afternoon.

"Every time the phone rings, it's SOPA," Lungren spokesman Brian Kaveney said. One staffer answered about 50 calls alone on the issue Wednesday, dutifully writing down each person's name, ZIP Code and viewpoint, with a promise to forward the information to Lungren.

The office received about 100 calls by midafternoon on SOPA, five times the number of the previous day. Almost all callers opposed the bill, but a few simply sought Lungren's position. He supports the goals of cracking down on foreign piracy websites but has problems with the legislation and wants to slow down the process.

Internet users also flooded social media sites to urge one another to take action. The protest spread offline too, with hundreds of people joining rallies in San Francisco, New York, Washington and other major cities to voice opposition to the bills.

Supporters of the legislation say the Internet companies are misconstruing the bills and drumming up hysteria that is ill-founded.

"I realize some people are nervous because of misinformation about this bill, but I am confident that ultimately the facts will overcome fears," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who has been working to address concerns about the bill. "Contrary to critics' claims, SOPA does not censor the Internet."

Last week, the Internet companies and online activists persuaded the White House to wade into the dispute. While calling for consensus legislation to stop online piracy by foreign websites, Obama administration officials said they would not support the most controversial provision of the two bills — allowing Internet service providers to block access from the U.S. to foreign piracy sites.

Now President Obama could face backlash from some of his traditional backers in Hollywood over his administration's stance. Two senior entertainment executives and Obama donors, who declined to speak on the record, said Wednesday that they would not give the president's reelection effort further financial support because of his position.

Most sites that were blacked out Wednesday contained links to pages with dire warnings, such as Reddit's: "There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet."

Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, said there were about 30,000 viewers on the social news community at any given time during the site's 12-hour shutdown.

That was "far less than we usually get," he said. "But 30,000 people looking at one single page with links to take action is pretty impressive."

"Google says 4.5 million people signed anti-SOPA petition today"

January 18th, 2012

by

Deborah Netburn

The Los Angeles Times

When Google speaks, the world listens.

And today, when Google asked its users to sign a petition protesting two anti-piracy laws circulating in Congress, millions responded.

A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company's anti-SOPA petition today.

Not too shabby.

The petition, which was available via a link from Google's homepage, states that although fighting online piracy is important, the plan of attack described in the SOPA and PIPA bills would be ineffective.

"There’s no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the Internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs," the petition reads. "Too much is at stake -– please vote NO on PIPA and SOPA."

The search engine frequently delights users by toying with its homepage logo, but on Wednesday it did something it had never done before: it blocked out its logo completely.

A link below the blackout read "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" and lead to a page with the petition.

Of course, Google's anti-SOPA and PIPA petition is not the only one out there on this day of mass online protest. As of this writing 1.458 million people signed a similar petition at the activist website Avaaz.org, and Fight for the Future said that between its two sites, Sopastrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org, at least 350,000 people have sent emails to representatives in the House and Senate.

A graphic put out by Google shows that before today's coordinated protests, 3 million Americans had signed various petitions against the two bills.

In other SOPA number news, a spokeswoman from the popular blogging platform WordPress, said that at last count, 25,000 WordPress blogs had joined the SOPA and PIPA protest by blacking out their blogs entirely, and another 12,500 used the "Stop Censorship" ribbon.

Today, the White House Blog reports that 103,785 people signed petitions through the We The People website asking the president to protect a free and open Internet.

"SOPA and PIPA bills: old answers to 21st-century problems, critics say"

The SOPA and PIPA bills are an attempt by the music and movie industries to hold on to outdated business models, critics say. But finding compromise on anti-piracy laws could be tough.

by

Gloria Goodale

January 18th, 2012

The Christian Science Monitor

In the face of an Internet rebellion, both senators and members of the House of Representatives are backing away from two anti-piracy bills now making their way through Congress.

But the protests of Internet giants such as Google and Wikipedia, with some essentially shutting down for a day, go beyond the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), consumer activists and academics say. The protests are a call for Congress to reconsider the way it fights digital thievery.

In short, critics say, Congress is looking for a 20th-century answer to a 21st-century challenge.

The intent of the SOPA and PIPA bills is to cut off access to sites that distribute copyrighted material illegally. But critics say it is a heavy-handed solution that won't solve the problem and could quash the sharing and collaboration that fuel innovation on the Internet.

The deeper problem, they suggest, is that the music and film industries simply haven't adapted quickly enough to the new realities of the online world, and are instead trying to use Congress to prop up outdated practices.

“Consumers want easy access to content and many are willing to pay for it – so the onus is on businesses to meet these demands,” says Anjelika Petrochenko, general manager at LiveJournal.com, a site that hosts online bloggers, journals, and discussion threads.

While there are exceptions, she says, “SOPA/PIPA legislation is a poorly written excuse for intellectual-property owners to hide their own inability to adapt.”

Industry leaders disagree. In a statement Wednesday, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said that sites participating in the blackout are "irresponsible" and "resorting to stunts that punish their users." Chief Executive Chris Dodd, a former US senator, said the blackouts are an "abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace.”

The concern among critics of the legislation is that broad-brush strokes by Congress could damage web ventures that seek to find innovative ways of distributing content in the digital realm.

“SOPA will prevent innovation in order to prevent piracy," says Vince Leung, cofounder of the social media site, MentorMob.com.

Napster was shut down for free file-sharing, he points out, “but Apple/iTunes was an innovative and inexpensive way for consumers to purchase music.”

Rather than shutting down services which provide jobs, efficiency, and value to their users, he adds, “the SOPA supporters should think how the business model needs to change with the times.”

Faced with the protests, supporters of the bills have begun to respond. Sens. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, Jon Cornyn (R) of Texas, and Roy Blunt (R) of Missouri have distanced themselves from the Senate bill, PIPA.

While Senator Rubio says he remains committed to fighting piracy, he wrote on his Facebook page that he has "heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government's power to impact the Internet."

The statement from the MPAA suggests that finding common ground could be difficult, if not nearly impossible, says Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation.com, a business services firm that helps startups launch.

Nevertheless, the reality is that neither party may be wrong, she adds via e-mail. “They just have to work together (a nearly impossible feat)…. No one likes piracy, but the potential impact of SOPA is far more broad than the legislators likely anticipated.“

The biggest challenge, she notes, is that “the two sides are not speaking the same language.”

"SOPA: Shouting in the Dark"

by

Amy Davidson

January 18th, 2012

The New Yorker

Sometimes it can be easier to think in the dark, or easier to yell. The blackout today of the English-language Wikipedia pages, and Boing Boing and a string of others, had that effect. Even Google averted its eyes, or at least its icon, covering it with a black strip. The action was a protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the Protect I.P. Act; Nicholas Thompson explained this morning why both are very bad ideas—masses of restraint that, in the name of protecting intellectual property, would cause an entire marketplace of ideas to seize up and then fall apart. The protest itself was an act of faith in politics as it is meant to be practiced. Until now, as Thompson points out, whether a legislator supported the bills or not tended to have little to do with ideology and very much to do with campaign donations. By shutting down the sites, the tech companies weren’t exerting economic pressure on anyone; they were setting up a black backdrop for a placard that said, in short, read more, and then write to your legislator. There was some information Wikipedia freely gave out today, in the conviction that it would be put to use: if you entered a zip code, you go to the names, contact information, and Twitter handles for your congressman and senators. That is all good to know.

So did it work? So far, so good: three Senators, Marco Rubio, John Cornyn, and Orrin Hatch, and a clutch of congressmen have changed their positions. Hatch said that the bill had turned out to be “not ready for prime time”—in a few years, will anyone know what hours, and what medium, that expression originally referred to? It has the markings of a future lexicological trivia question; for now, though, it is simply a reminder that many conflicting eras and interests are represented in this fight.


Some darkness on the Internet

News publishers keep pushing for fees

It appears that the movement by big news publishers to charge for online information is attempting to find strength in numbers [of individual publishers]. It categorically won't work. The Wall Street Journal has been cited for the success of such a venture but...

"Analysts are skeptical that any efforts to collect online subscription fees, or even small payments for individual articles, will amount to a significant new source of cash for newspaper publishers. Specialized financial publications, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, have succeeded because they provide timely access to valuable information traders need to make money. It's not clear there's any willingness to pay for more general information about sporting events, entertainment or local news."

That is a unique situation demanding a subscription service for those that are willing to participate to aid them in making financial decisions. But would one pay to read Roger Ebert's film reviews?

Overall, it will fail and these publishers will be in a worse situation.

"News Corp. pushing to create an online news consortium"

The media giant, advocating a model that would charge for news distributed online and on portable devices, has met recently with major publishers.

by

Dawn C. Chmielewski

August 21st, 2009

The Los Angeles Times

As newspapers across the country struggle with declining readership and advertising revenue, News Corp. executives have been meeting in recent weeks with publishers about forming a consortium that would charge for news distributed online and on portable devices -- and potentially stem the rising tide of red ink.

Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has positioned News Corp. as a logical leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which boasts more than 1 million paying subscribers. He is believed to have met with major news publishers including New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

"The reality is that unless a lot of people who produce news act in unison to start charging for content, then individually they will fail," said Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaper columnist and editor and consultant on new media ventures.

News Corp.'s solution is the latest proposal to publishers seeking to wring money from Internet readers to offset double-digit drops in print and online revenue. Steve Brill's Journalism Online initiative garnered attention this spring when it announced plans to create the tools to allow publishers to collect fees for digital distribution, and recently announced that more than 500 newspapers had joined.

Others who have been offering competing approaches in meetings with news executives include Borders Books and Webvan co-founder Louis Borders, according to people who have attended the briefings.

The notion of charging for digital access to news, either online or on devices, has been gaining momentum ever since the Associated Press' annual meeting in San Diego in April. William Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP and chief executive of MediaNews Group Inc., railed against the "misappropriation" of news on the Internet -- a reference widely interpreted as a swipe at search giant Google Inc.

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," he said. "We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore."

Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Thomson added to the invective, saying Google and other news aggregators who believe that content should be free are "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet."

The hot rhetoric has yielded to more cold-eyed assessment of how to make money from the digital distribution of news. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch said in an analyst call this month that he hoped to "build significant revenues from the digital delivery." News Corp. is among the world's largest newspaper publishers, as the owner of the New York Post, the Times of London and nearly two dozen papers in Australia.

Industrywide, ad revenue fell 28% in the first quarter of 2009, according to the nonprofit Newspaper Assn. of America. Researchers like the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism say half of that decline can be blamed on the poor economy, as auto dealers go out of business and retailers close or cut back. The rest can be attributed to structural changes buffeting the industry, as readers and advertisers go online.

Although newspapers have made major strides in building online readership, the revenue hasn't followed. Internet ads account for just 12% of a newspaper's revenue, according to the association.

"This, after 10 years of effort," said veteran newspaper analyst John Morton. "The only positive thing to be said for online revenue for newspapers is it's going down less rapidly."

Analysts are skeptical that any efforts to collect online subscription fees, or even small payments for individual articles, will amount to a significant new source of cash for newspaper publishers. Specialized financial publications, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, have succeeded because they provide timely access to valuable information traders need to make money. It's not clear there's any willingness to pay for more general information about sporting events, entertainment or local news.

"It's probably going to be small dollars," said Edward Atorino, media analyst at Benchmark Co. "For a big media company, it's going to add a little bit to a giant pile."

Mutter, the new media ventures consultant, said efforts to erect pay walls around news stories are doomed because such barriers are so easily breached by anyone who knows how to cut and paste a document.

Instead, he said a consortium, such as the one that News Corp. is proposing, would be more effective if it were to create a single online registration for readers to use across all news sites and track the stories each person reads. When married with geographic and demographic data, this anonymous reader information would be valuable to advertisers seeking to reach a particular consumer.

A consortium of newspaper publishers is bound to attract scrutiny from federal regulators, who would seek to determine whether it reduces competition, said antitrust attorney Robert W. Doyle Jr., a partner in the Washington law firm of Doyle, Barlow & Mazard.

"The antitrust concern arises if there's no pro-competitive reasons why they have to get together," Doyle said. "If there is a pro-competitive benefit, that's weighed against the anti-competitive problem of allowing competitors to get together."

Murdoch, who built a media empire from a single newspaper in his native Australia, has been in search of a solution to the industry's broken business model. The search has led to meetings with representatives of ventures like Journalism Online as well as makers of e-readers, those portable devices whose screens simulate the appearance of ink on paper.

Like other newspaper publishers, Murdoch has been frustrated with Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader, in part because of the unfavorable terms offered by the online bookseller, which keeps 70% of the revenue from digital subscriptions and owns the relationship with the reader. He has been interested in finding a way to distribute news to multiple devices.

Miller, who joined News Corp. in April to oversee the media company's digital strategy, has taken charge of this initiative. He talked about the need to support premium journalism in Pasadena last month, at Fortune magazine's Brainstorm: Tech conference.

In an onstage interview, Miller hinted at a broader role for News Corp., which has gained expertise in managing subscribers to Dow Jones Factiva's business information service, and whose Wall Street Journal Online has a subscriber base that could be leveraged to sell subscriptions.

"In looking at all of News Corp.'s assets, it's clear that we're in a unique position to play a key role in creating new business models that will support premium journalism on digital platforms," he said.


"New York Times" weighs in again on Murdoch

Editorial footnote.

What justification can these publishers make? After all, the investment in materials is minimal...no ink, paper, or electricity to run the presses. The support staff is minimal. And they are placing a high value on journalistic writing that many times has proven to be erroneous.

"New York Times" weighs in again on Murdoch

"For Murdoch, It’s Try, Try Again"

by

David Carr

August 10th, 2009

New York Times

Does Rupert Murdoch have one more revolution in him?

The man who took over newspapering in Australia and Britain, and upended the cable news business here, planted a new flag last week, pronouncing that, contrary to popular reports, information does not want to be free; it actually wants to be paid for.

Given the amount of skin he has in that particular game, Mr. Murdoch made quite a splash last Wednesday during an earnings call for the News Corporation.

“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting,” he said. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news Web sites.”

With characteristic confidence, he added that “I believe that if we are successful, we will be followed by other media.” Yes, perhaps when the change takes place over the coming fiscal year, he will be greeted by the sound of hearty applause from his fellow media companies.

Or he may just hear crickets chirping.

Certainly he is not alone. Many news organizations are wondering how to delicately perform some kind of cashectomy on digital consumers. The pay wall idea is neither new nor untried. Just last Monday, The Daily Gazette in Schenectady, N.Y., moved behind a wall.

The New York Times seems to be having a bit of a change of heart as well. After dumping TimesSelect two years ago, the newspaper is exploring various models on the Web, although nothing as firm or far reaching has been announced, and a spokesman for The Boston Globe told The Associated Press on Friday that the newspaper was “heading toward some sort of consumer pay model.” But there was something vaguely oracular and final about his statement, as if saying it might make it so.

Setting aside the execution risk of such a plan, it’s difficult to tell how serious Mr. Murdoch is, given his history of grand statements that were only that. Perhaps he was making an unsubtle effort to change the subject during a bleak earnings call for News Corporation: fourth-quarter operating income, adjusted for certain items, dropped more than 30 percent and after taking $680 million in charges, mainly from the unit that houses MySpace, the company reported a net loss of $203 million.

In the fourth quarter, the company’s newspaper division reported that operating income decreased $167 million from the same period last year. Hence the pivot toward consumers: “We’re hopeful we can build significant revenues from the sale of the digital delivery of newspapers’ news content,” he said.

Finding Mr. Murdoch shouting from the top of a pay wall is a bit of a head scratcher, given that after he bought The Wall Street Journal less than two years ago, his first order of business seemed to be changing that newspaper’s paid Web model to free.

“We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million to 15 million in every corner of the earth,” Mr. Murdoch said to shareholders in November of 2007. Executives at the property he bought convinced him that it would be a bad move, and so The Journal’s paid model is now held out as a way forward for much of the industry.

Digital media have not generally been a sweet spot for News Corporation. Sure, WSJ.com and The Times of London and The Sunday Times (in London) have good Web interfaces, but the digital version of The New York Post is frustrating enough to seem as if it were designed to push the consumer back toward print. And given its clear lead on television as a franchise, Fox News’s clunky and uninspired Web site compares very unfavorably to its cable brethren.

Mr. Murdoch may lack a consumer’s perspective on the digital matters. Michael Wolff, the owner of Newser.com and the author of “The Man Who Owns the News,” a biography of Mr. Murdoch, maintained in a blog post last week that Mr. Murdoch had, as of a year ago, never browsed the Web by himself. And while you don’t have to possess a knack for brain surgery to run a hospital, the organic activity of surfing offers this object lesson: when you bump into a wall, you tend to go elsewhere.

But it may depend on the wall. The Financial Times has had some success with a metered approach and may add in an iTunes-like menu for buying individual pieces. And The Wall Street Journal uses a leaky wall that allows sampling, but extracts a convenience charge for those who want easy access to the entire package. Both models have the virtue of continued visibility on search engines while potentially converting those who stop by.

No one expects Mr. Murdoch to erect a barrier around his entire enterprise. News Corporation has the kind of scale and robust media brands that will allow the company to experiment with bundling various kinds of content along topical or geographical lines to see what will click. (The Guardian newspaper of London has reported that News Corporation will use The Sunday Times, a high-quality bit of newspapering, as a beta test, creating a stand-alone site that will have some sort of pay model.)

The problem, both for Mr. Murdoch and the industry at large, is that it’s dangerous to generalize the success of The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times with paid subscriptions on the Web to other media properties. Those newspapers contain useful data, with a network of alerts and specialized features that make them extremely valuable to people who need up-to-the-minute information to do business.

While I am a sucker for a Page Six item revealing that Paris Hilton has achieved détente with a former frenemy, I’m not about to pay for that information. Much of the news that News Corporation produces is already a commodity by the time it hits the Web.

The deeper problem for Mr. Murdoch and every other newspaper owner is that although the revenue picture for newspapers has changed considerably in the last two years, the consumer is still stuck on zero when it comes to what he or she will pay for the vast majority of content.

“Nothing has changed in terms of the consumer expectation,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research. “What has disappeared is the belief that you could have a news business that is sustainable as an advertising-only proposition.”

Regardless of what others do, Mr. Murdoch has some work to do with consumers. When word came down in Australia that Mr. Murdoch would be expecting fees from readers of news.com.au in the coming year, readers rained invective and ridicule on the idea, including a commenter identifying himself as Alan Gilbey:

“Now let’s see. Delete bookmark. Navigate to different news site. Create new bookmark. Rupert who??”


Rupert Murdoch's plan--wrong!

Rupert Murdoch's plan--wrong!

Rupert Murdoch has stuck his foot in his mouth by wishing to charge for online journalism. Murdoch is a communication mogul in print media [New York Post, San Antonio Express-News, Star, The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd., The Sun, The Times], television venues [Fox News Channel and Star TV] and other media sources. Print media revenue is down and newspapers are folding. More people gather their information from the Internet and Murdoch wants to start charging for access. He wishes to follow suit as many of those online journals and article repositories that charge a high-priced subscription or per article fee. Good luck Mr. Murdoch.

"Murdoch Mans Up"

by

Eric Etheridge

August 6th, 2009

The New York Times

Sure, everyone talks about charging for their online content. But does anybody ever do anything about it?

Rupert Murdoch, stand and deliver.

"We intend to charge for all our news Web sites," Murdoch announced yesterday.

"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," Mr Murdoch said.

"The increase we have seen in our Wall Street Journal subscription proves to me that the market is willing to pay for that quality."

About time, says Fred Wilson at his blog, A VC:

We can talk until we are blue in the face about whether people will pay for news or not. Talk is cheap. Actions are not. So I'm eager to see the experiments begin.

Wilson's not being sarcastic. He's more optimistic than most future positives about content sites finding a way to charge their readers, and even has his own vision a "freemium model" he thinks might work ("I like the model where the more frequent a visitor is, the more is required of them"). Still, he wonders if there are models that will work for every online node of Murdochworld.

It's not clear to me that newspapers like The Sun, The Times, and The Post will be able to make the WSJ's model work. And that's what interests me. What will News Corp do for those properties? And will it work?

Most others are straight-up dubious, though many hedge their skepticism by invoking Murdoch's mad skills, which are apparently best described as "savvy": "Don't ever count Rupe's media savvy out," says one. "It's never wise to challenge Rupert Murdoch's media savvy," says another.

Others are not so careful. At the Guardian, Jeff Jarvis says, not for the first time:

Newspapers have had 15 years since the launch of the internet browser to reimagine and rebuild themselves for the reality of the post-Gutenberg age. But they didn't. Now they are trying to reclaim old business models for a new media economy — a link economy, I call it, in which links give content value. Cut yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the internet and its real value.

Also at the Guardan, Matt Wells, says the Murdoch's announcement is "a sign that the news industry is running out of options."

The old business model – cover price plus ad revenue – is bust: blown apart by the loss of classified to online networks and collapse of cover-price revenue due to falling sales. The hoped-for cash from online advertising has not materialised, at least not on the scale that would support the kind of journalism practised by the likes of Murdoch's papers, or for that matter the Guardian.

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick offers three reasons why he thinks Murdoch will fail.

1. [The] other sites [in Murdoch's network] don't have the qualities that make some people willing to pay for the WSJ. The quality isn't as good and the direct monetary benefit is not nearly as clear.

2. Most of those other sites have much clearer (free) competition.

3. Nowhere at all does Murdoch talk about actually giving people a reason to buy. All he's saying is that if they put up a paywall, people will pay. Sure, a few might, but it’s a small number, and doing so will stagnate any sort of growth, piss off advertisers, and allow competitors to take a giant leap forward — all in one shot.

Professional Murdoch chronicler Michael Wolff says the publisher's paywall plan will be an "uphill fight," and "probably even greater than it might appear" because both Murdoch and his company are so techno-backward.

Not only is he, among all media executives, the most technically disinclined (actually, totally illiterate), but his company, of all the big media enterprise, is the most technically backward and maladroit. He may now employ more reporters than anyone else in the world, but they use the oldest computers. He may have some of the world’s most trafficked news sites, but they are also the slowest and most inept. Technology, at News Corp., has always been regarded as one of those things, like fancy hotels, or long-form writing, that are not part of the company culture.

Murdoch's pronouncement is but one of several big-foot moves of late as the major media players choose sides in the great pay-versus-free grudge match. Late last month the Associated Press, a key member of the Pay Up! team, introduced a much-criticized and somewhat confusing (or deliberately misunderstood, depending on whom you read) scheme to "detect unlicensed use of its content." Murdoch hit the same note yesterday: "We will be asserting our copyright at every point."

On Tuesday, Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, fired back at the A.P. and came out as a proud member of the Link Lovers: "I believe in the link economy."

The Internet isn't killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven't been keeping up. . . .

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies — they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.

A better approach is to have a general agreement among community members to treat others' content, business and ideas with the same respect you would want them to treat yours.

If you are doing something that you would object to if others did it to you — stop. If you don't want search engines linking to you, insert code to ban them.

I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.

The Link Lovers made another key acquisition last week, when NPR introduced its revamped site, with a stated goal of emphasizing "written reporting over audio reports" — as in free written reporting.

"I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online," says NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller.

It's almost like there's mass delusion going on in the industry — They're saying we really really need it, that we didn't put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let’s do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn't work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we're all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I'm sorry to say.

If all the current and future members of team Pay Up! had a choice about who should be the head pinky-locker, it would probably be Murdoch, a man of maximalist ambition and success.

As Michael Wolff observes, "Owning the world's biggest news business is exactly what he set out to do, and … that is pretty much what he achieved."

There is, simply, no one who produces more news than Rupert. Quantity is what he does. On this basis and with this approach, he is now losing his shirt. But he cannot conceive of the world in any other sense than one in which his news outlets are not the most emphatic and powerful and lucrative.

Who else but Murdoch should lead the Pay Ups! in the great and glorious final battle against the Linkers? Charge!

Journalism errors do occur Mr. Murdoch as pointed out by the Los Angeles Times regarding the passing of Walter Cronkite. If one had to pay for that obituary would not they have been cheated?

Murdoch said "Quality journalism is not cheap...." Consider the following for the communication media does and will make errors.

"Cronkite blunder a revealing look inside New York Times"

Alessandra Stanley's many mistakes point to a double standard when it comes to high-profile writers. More of the Times' high level of self scrutiny is a step in the right direction.

by

James Rainey

August 5th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

I have to admit it would be fun to join the rollicking beat-down of the New York Times and Alessandra Stanley that has followed the chief television critic's egregiously error-ridden tribute to Walter Cronkite.

Wasn't the public fascinated, after all, to learn that Stanley and the nation's Paper of Record managed eight mistakes in an almost 1,200-word tribute to Uncle Walter? Didn't many in the news game enjoy a moment of schadenfreude, seeing such a tart critic of shoddy TV journalism with her own flank exposed?

But sweet payback has more to do with emotion than reason.

In fact, the botched Cronkite appreciation and the brutally frank corrective actions (including last Sunday's scathing deconstruction by the paper's public editor) expose both a chronic weakness and a persistent strength inside the New York Times, America's most important journalistic institution.

The Times has a bad habit, revealed by the Stanley critique and in recent years by the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller incidents, of letting a few well-connected journalists run amok. At the same time, the Times has shown the strength to subject itself to a level of self scrutiny that some (in a Web Age when corrections of grievous errors come labeled as "updates") would not even pretend.

The New York Times, in short, needs to enforce its high standards more uniformly, regardless of whose byline appears at the top of the story. But its TV critic's latest stumble down Error Alley is hardly evidence, as some would like to suggest, that journalism's top brand has been hopelessly compromised.

I come to this mixed verdict, in part, after a conversation with the newspaper's former public editor, Byron Calame, who told me that "a lot of New York Times editors don't feel, in their gut, they have the right to challenge veteran and star reporters and columnists the way they need to."

But Calame, now retired after a couple of years as the Times' internal watchdog, added: "I still think it's an amazing newspaper. They do a lot of things right. So I don't think this is some sort of huge hole they can't pull out of."

The Cronkite appraisal felt like "a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash," as one editor put it, because of the prominence of the subject and because the newspaper had plenty of time to prepare for the ailing newsman's death.

Yet in her piece, Stanley, who previously worked as a foreign correspondent and covered the White House, misstated the dates of the first moon landing and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She had Cronkite covering D-day from the beaches of Normandy, instead of high overhead in a B-17.

Calame's successor and the paper's current public editor, Clark Hoyt, attributed the mistake-filled Cronkite appraisal to "a television critic with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant [but] were not."

He suggested that tougher scrutiny by editors and better communication could have prevented the errors. No doubt.

But I think Hoyt paid too little attention to Stanley's special standing at the paper.

In fact, several people who work at the Times told me they are troubled that Stanley is a star whose continued accuracy problems seem to provoke no apparent discipline.

Her failings became serious enough a few years ago that the paper assigned the TV critic her own personal copy editor -- a fact noted in Hoyt's assessment.

Calame wrote in 2005 about what he said was a cut-and-dried inaccuracy, in which Stanley accused Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera of grandstanding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The TV critic wrote that Rivera "nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way," so he could help an older woman into a wheelchair. But Calame reviewed the video and saw no nudging.

Rather than agree to a correction, however, Times Editor Bill Keller defended Stanley for "writing as a critic, with the license that title brings." In other words, Rivera was showboating, so he had nudged his way into the story figuratively, if not literally.

Both of the Times' former public editors -- Daniel Okrent and Calame -- told me their critiques produced sharp rebukes from Stanley.

Okrent -- who once criticized the critic for tone, not accuracy -- remembers her as "extremely defensive and hostile," while Calame said she attacked him as a nitpicker.

Those reactions and Keller's somewhat tortured defense of his TV critic tell me that Stanley was one of the entitled ones. The Times is the Times in part because writers such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman -- and to some extent others like Stanley -- think big and write with brio.

They enhance their names, and the paper's, by staking out novel ground.

But ultimately, the Times remains the nation's premier news outlet because it has a high regard for facts. That is why even the paper's harshest critics -- in their blog postings and cable TV reports -- spin off facts they first learned in the Times.

"One thing that sets a serious newspaper apart from most other institutions in our society is that we own up to our mistakes with corrections, editor's notes and other accountability devices, including the public editor's column," Keller said to me in an e-mail Tuesday.

Hoyt's column suggests that the Cronkite errors will lead to Stanley again getting "special editing attention." But as Times-watcher Craig Silverman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, it would serve the critic and the paper better to correct the problem closer to its root by getting Stanley in "a training program that helps her stop making simple factual errors at such an alarming rate."

Stanley acknowledged the mistakes in the Cronkite piece as "my fault," also telling Hoyt: "There are no excuses." She did not respond to an e-mail requesting further comment.

Keller declined to say whether his lead TV critic might face corrective measures. He rejected the notion that the Times' big names get to play by different standards.

"Stars or purported stars are obliged to get their facts right," the Times editor said. "Editors are obliged to edit everyone without fear or favor. Period."

Since it's not so clear that lesson has become ingrained deeply enough with everyone in the organization, it makes sense that the paper keeps an independent public editor on the payroll.

I hope the Times decides to keep the position when it comes up for review next year.

The dirty laundry hanging out the window this time was particularly unsightly. But it also suggests the owners have some determination to keep the house clean.

Here is the New York Times obituary...

Here is the New York Times obituary...

Deceased--Walter Cronkite

China..."1984" style?

"China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs"

by

Andrew Jacobs

June 9th, 2009

The New York Times

BEIJING — China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.

The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC's starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

The rules, issued last month, ratchet up Internet restrictions already among the most stringent in the world. China regularly blocks Web sites that discuss the Dalai Lama, the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, and the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. But free-speech advocates say they fear the new software could make it even more difficult for China’s 300 million Internet users to access uncensored news and information.

"This is a very bad thing," said Charles Mok, chairman of the Internet Society, an advocacy group in Hong Kong. "It's like downloading spyware onto your computer, but the government is the spy."

Details of the new regulations, posted Monday on a government Web site, were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Called "Green Dam" — green being a foil to the yellow smut of pornography — the software is designed to filter out sexually explicit images and words, according to the company that designed it. Computer experts, however, warn that once installed, the software could be directed to block all manner of content or allow the government to monitor Internet use and collect personal information.

PC makers who serve the Chinese market, among them Dell, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, said they were studying the new rules and declined to comment. But privately, industry executives in the United States said they were upset by the new rules, which were issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology with no consultation and no advance warning. Beyond the nettlesome issue of abetting government censorship, they said six weeks was not enough time to shift production on such a large scale. "Many of us are going to take it in the neck with this mandate," said one executive. "It has put people into five-alarm mode."

More than 40 million personal computers were sold last year in China, one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Despite the slowing economy, industry analysts expect that figure to rise by 3 percent this year.

A group of industry representatives met with American officials Monday to express their displeasure with the new rules, said Susan Stevenson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. "We view any attempt to restrict the free flow of information with great concern," she said.

Zhang Chenming, whose company, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, helped create Green Dam, said concerns that the software could be used to censor a broad range of content or monitor Internet use were overblown. He insisted that the software, which neutralizes programs designed to override China's so-called Great Firewall, could simply be deleted or temporarily turned off by the user. "A parent can still use this computer to go to porn," he said.

Although the directive is somewhat imprecise and suggests that manufacturers can provide the software as a compact disc, it also says that it must be installed on computer hard drives as a backup file.

"The wording may be intentionally vague but the message is clear: we have no choice in the matter," said one computer executive.

Industry experts and civil libertarians say they are worried the software may simply be a Trojan horse for greater Internet control. The software developers have ties to China's military and public security agencies, they point out, and that Green Dam boasts that the project has the backing of Li Changchun, the country’s chief propaganda official and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party

The software will be provided free, paid for by the government, and according to the official Green Dam website it has already been downloaded 3.2 million times. That number includes thousands of schools that were required to install the software by the end of May. The site claims that Chinese manufacturers, including Lenovo, Inspur and Hedy, have already agreed to install 52 million sets of the software on new computers.

In recent months China has tightened its Internet restrictions, including an "anti-vulgarity" campaign that has closed down thousands of pornographic sites but also shuttered nonsexual sites, including some of the most popular bulletin boards and blog hosts. China already employs more than 30,000 censors and thousands who "guide public opinion" by flooding bulletin boards with comments favorable to the Communist Party.

Last week, as the 20th anniversary of the military crackdown on Tiananmen approached, the government blocked a host of Internet services, including Twitter, Microsoft’s live.com, and Flickr, a photo- sharing site. Youtube has been inaccessible here since March.

This is not the first time that foreign companies have been enlisted in government efforts to police the Internet. Google already blacks out politically sensitive results yielded by its popular search engine, Microsoft allows censors to block content on its blog service and Yahoo was widely criticized for turning over information that was used to jail a journalist.

Even beyond ethical concerns, those who have tested the new software describe it as technically flawed. One American software engineer said it leads machines to frequently crash. Others worry that it could leave millions of computers vulnerable to hackers. So far, at least, there is no version for the Apple and Linux operating systems.

On Monday, Green Dam's own website offered a hint of discontent over the filtering software. On the bulletin board section of the site, several users complained that pornographic images slipped through or that their computers had become painfully slow. "It seems pretty lousy so far," read one posting. "It's not very powerful, I can't surf the Internet normally and it’s affecting the operation of other software."

By Monday night, however, most of the comments had been deleted.


2+2=5