Why the Future of Online Media Just Might Be in Estonia

Everyone knows that the media (the Chronicle included) is going through some major changes. We’ve got newspapers folding (and not in the usual way) left and right. We’ve got ads that don’t quite translate into online revenue, and online journalism sites that can’t seem to charge money, or at least seem to largely exist in the non-profit model. NPR’s On The Media has been covering this nonstop. There have even been Congressional hearings about it.

But ok. The media is dying. There’s even a Twitter account with that exact name.

So what’s a newspaper do to? Micropayments? The public radio model? There’s plenty to choose from.

But what about the anti-Google approach: pulling content offline?

That’s exactly what Estonia’s biggest newspaper, Postimees, is doing. This EPIC 2014-esque model is particularly curious given that Estonia is such a wired country. Yes, you might know it better as e-Stonia. (You know, they invented Skype, perfected Internet voting and got cyberattacked back in 2007.)

Starting this Monday, Postimees will stop full publication of its articles online. Its rival, Eesti Päevaleht, is going to follow suit within the next few months.

Then, the plan seemingly is to put those articles behind a paywall.

But here’s where this plan might actually work where other online paywalls have failed: it’s happening simultaneously in a small, semi-exclusive, market. (Heck, if I was Estonian, maybe I might throw down my kroons for some of these articles.)

If something like this happened here, I might not like it, but honestly, if that were the easiest way to get my daily fix of journalism every day I just might do it. I’m a 27-year-old journalist who loves newspapers. Heck, I was a paperboy as a child for (defunct since 1998) The Evening Outlook in Santa Monica for a couple of years.

But the fact of the matter is that I’m going to get my news for free on way or the other, so long as its easier than paying for it. The Wall Street Journal charges for access — I wasn’t reading it anyway. Oh wait, but there’s a free (and legal) workaround. TimesSelect? There was a way around that, too. But iTunes proved that if you can make it easier to buy music than to pirate it, then that’s what people will do.

But ok, what if all my favorite papers like the Chronicle, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times started, all at once, charging for their content. Maybe then I’d consider forking over some cash.

Now, Estonia is a small country with a small readership. The entire Estonian-speaking population worldwide is roughly one quarter the size of the Bay Area. We’ll find out soon enough if a product with a limited audience can succeed with this strategy.

Thoughts on the newspaper industry

The Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn, January/February 2009:

But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400 million in debt. With more than $1 billion in debt already on the books, only $46 million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, January 7 2009:

The good news is we could purchase [a newspaper]. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.

I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I’ve been using is ‘merge without merging.’ The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don’t have to do it on exclusive basis.

Ethan Zuckerman: “The Middle East is the most conflict-ridden, tense, deadly part of the world, right? Well, uh, no.”

Ethan Zuckerman:

BBC reports the death toll from the second intifada at roughly 4000. Iraq Body Count offers an estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq between 39,000 and 43,000 – a study from Johns Hopkins projects a much larger number, 100,000 by October 2004. Marc Herold at UNH projects between 3 and 4,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan from October 2001 – June 2004. Military casualties include 407 coalition casualties in Afghanistan and 2,564 coalition deaths in Iraq. Using the JHU study’s controversial (but, in my opinion, highly defensible) calculation, the Middle East has seen at least 111,000 military and civilian casualites in the past decade.

A recent study in the Lancet projects 3.8 million deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, using estimation techniques to compare death counts prior to and following the years of war in DRC. Estimates of deaths in Darfur begin as low as 70,000 and go up to 350,000. Ongoing conflicts in northern Uganda have displaced 1.6 million people and has a likely death rate that exceeds that of Iraq during the first months of the US invasion. In total, it’s likely that, over the past decade, at least forty times as many people have died directly or indirectly from violent conflict in central Africa as have died in the Middle East.

Interested in News from the Lebanon-Israel front?

Try The Daily Star or Ha’aretz.

Daily Star : LEBANON UNDER ATTACK
Israel targets Lebanese air bases, Kuwaiti nationals among dead and UN prepares envoy to Region

Ha’aretz : One rocket fired from Lebanon hits central Haifa Two Israelis killed, 120 hurt in rocket attacks
Rockets slam into towns Nahariya, Safed, Carmiel
Hezbollah gunners continue shelling communities across northern Israel; two people critically wounded in latest strike on Safed.

NYT Redesign Comments

I’m a fan of redesigns, particularly on the web of sites that I love. If you haven’t seen it yet, NYTimes.com has now been redone. I like the new layout, the new font, and the buttons at the top.

What’s missing?

For starters, the “blogged” button is the right idea, but only comes halfway. I want to know which blogs are talking about the NYT articles. Just telling me that some article is the most blogged is sort of meaningless. NYT would do well to take a page from The Washington Post which has a Technorati link in the middle of each story that tells you who is talking about the article.

In related news, the NYT is looking for a “futurist“. Really.

Three Great Minds on Journalism

Sam Freedman, CBS News; March 31, 2006:

Instead of providing the ultimate marketplace of ideas, however, cable TV and the Internet have become the ultimate amen corner, where nobody ever need encounter an opinion, much less a fact, that runs counter to what he or she already believes. To treat an amateur as equally credible as a professional, to congratulate the wannabe with the title “journalist,” is only to further erode the line between raw material and finished product. For those people who believe that editorial gate-keeping is a form of censorship, if not mind control, then I suppose the absence of any mediating intelligence is considered a good thing.

Michael Kinsley, Slate; March 31, 2006:

No one seriously doubts anymore that the Internet will fundamentally change the news business. The uncertainty is whether it will only change the method of delivering the product, or whether it will change the nature of the product as well. Will people want, in any form—and will they pay for—a collection of articles, written by professional journalists from a detached and purportedly objective point of view? The television industry is panicky as well. Will anyone sit through a half-hour newscast invented back when everyone had to watch the same thing at the same time? Or are blogs and podcasts the cutting edge of a new model for both print and video—more personalized, more interactive, more opinionated, more communal, less objective?

Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker; March 27, 2006:

Part of the pleasure of “The O’Reilly Factor” is knowing that O’Reilly is a guy with a temper, and he might lose it. He reddens, sits up, and presses the guest, who may begin to stammer helplessly (in which case O’Reilly usually pulls back), or to backpedal and make excuses, in the manner of Richard Rosenbaum (in which case O’Reilly keeps boring in), or to insult O’Reilly (in which case O’Reilly may begin yelling—the big payoff). He’s the beat cop for the American neighborhood, who may have been a little excessive at times, may occasionally have run afoul of Internal Affairs, but law-abiding folks trust him because they know he’s on their side. His liberal guests are like suspects he’s pulled over: in the end, he’s probably just going to frisk them and let them go with a genial warning, but if they try anything, well, he carries a nightstick for a reason.

NYT Ethics Breaches, Small and Big

Small (Slate):

When an ethics cop carries tweezers in his holster instead of a .44 Magnum, it’s a safe bet the crimes he’ll pursue will be cosmetic. New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame conformed to this profile yesterday (Feb. 26) by using his column to give the paper’s eyebrows a vigorous plucking in his exploration of the “thorny question” of whether its news staffers can accept companywide discounts for goods “without creating the appearance of partiality.”

Calame produces no example of favored editorial treatment for any of the 88 companies that offer discounts to New York Times Co. employees on the company’s internal Web site. Still, he worries that discounts on cars, home mortgages, flowers, beauty spa treatments, and more, when collected by news staffers, “are often perceived as ‘freebies’ that can erode credibility with readers.” (Of the company’s 11,965 employees, about 1,200 reporters, clerks, editors, editorialists, columnists, and photographers work on the Times editorial side.)

I’d fret about eroded credibility, too, if the discounts amounted to much of a bribe. But they don’t. Take the car discounts offered to Times Co. employees—$925 off a Saturn, $10,660 off a Chevy Tahoe, and an offer to purchase a Hyundai for $100 over total invoice. Such straight discounts are meaningless unless a base price from which the discounts will be calculated is given. As for the Hyundai offer—$100 over invoice—it isn’t necessarily the best deal you can negotiate for the carmaker’s vehicles.

Big (SF Weekly):

I was working on my laptop last week when it suddenly appeared: the dreaded spinning pinwheel of death. It’s a multicolored rotating ball that signifies one’s Apple computer has momentarily frozen. The pinwheel spun, and spun, and spun. It turned out my hard drive had crashed. My tech friend Ted examined it and said that my five years’ worth of computer files might be lost unless I took the drive to a place called DriveSavers in Novato, which specializes in rescuing data from hard drives that have stopped working.

I didn’t end up recovering my data.

But I did retrieve some fascinating information thanks to my conversation with a DriveSavers sales rep, who tipped me off to a story involving the age-old journalistic quandary of swag — the free goodies and services companies incessantly press upon journalists in hopes of getting positive press.

DriveSavers frequently provides services to people involved in fields such as movie and music production, whose lost files can be worth fortunes. And the standard DriveSavers fee for a successful data-recovery operation is $2,700, far too rich for my blood.

When I told the DriveSavers sales representative that my drive contained mostly text files because I was a journalist, the sales rep said that a CBS journalist had recently been “comped” free disk-retrieval service as part of a story he’d done on the company, and that I might want to write a story about DriveSavers, too. I got a story all right, but not the one DriveSavers had in mind. It turned out the sales representative was referring to a situation in which New York Times columnist David Pogue, who is also a contributor to CBS News and National Public Radio, received $2,000 in free personal-data-recovery services from DriveSavers in connection with pieces Pogue did for all three news organizations. Pogue wrote the stories after his own drive crashed, entombing his voice message and e-mail files.

“I think what I wrote in the column puts it best: ‘This unfortunate event was, perhaps, my opportunity to review a service I’d always wondered about,'” Pogue told me, by way of explanation of his free-service arrangement.

ComputerWorld Antarctica

Yesterday, I was perusing the site of IDG, the parent company of my employer, Macworld and I found this line:

From our name to our presence today in 85 countries and on all 7 continents, IDG is truly a global company.

7 continents? Does IDG have an Antarctica bureau that I’m not aware of?

I posed the question to my co-workers and Paul Boutin. He and my boss’ boss, Jason Snell, came up with the same answer:

ComputerWorld Antarctica

Except that the bureau is actually in Australia, so I’m not sure that counts. Still cool though. Really cool. 😉

The Man Who Sold the War

Rolling Stone:

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information — overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized “to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS” — an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. “SCI” stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. “SI” is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. “TK” refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. “G” stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and “HCS” means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

. . .

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an “Information War Room” to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon’s “proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations.”

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive “media mapping” campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered “critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism.” According to the contract, Rendon would provide a “detailed content analysis of the station’s daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships.”

The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was one to “coerce” foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to “punish” those who convey the “wrong message.” One senior officer told CNN that the plan would “formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation.”

. . .

In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. “In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again,” he says. “It was ‘What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?’ We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what’s on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what’s going to be on the news. They’ll take that in a heartbeat.”

Good Riddance, Judy Miller!

See Jack Shafer’s slaughtering of Judy Miller for why.

NYT:

The New York Times and Judith Miller, a veteran reporter for the paper, reached an agreement today that ends her 28-year career at the newspaper and caps more than two weeks of negotiations.

Ms. Miller went to jail this summer rather than reveal a confidential source in the C.I.A. leak case. But her release from jail 85 days later after she agreed to testify before a grand jury and persistent questions about her actions roiled long-simmering concerns about her in the newsroom and led to her departure.

In a memo sent The Times staff at 3:30 p.m. today, Bill Keller, the executive editor, wrote, “In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great prize winning journalism.”

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, said: “We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle,” adding, “I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well.”

Ms. Miller could not be reached for comment.

Lawyers for Ms. Miller and the paper negotiated a severance package, the details of which they would not disclose. Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position. Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper’s Op-Ed page challenging the allegations against her. The Times refused that demand – Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, “We don’t use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another” – but agreed to let her write the letter.