Yesterday I wrote both here and on my home blog about two different types of advertising campaigns that both use video to engage us as a way to promote their products. With both posts I was trying to show that as much as we might rail against advertising there are companies that get the fact that they need to change how they approach the consumer.

While both those examples were centered around video there are some companies in other advertising mediums who are getting this change in attitudes as well. If this latest campaign from Levis Jeans is any indication they are one of those companies. Along with their ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy, and photographer Ryan McGinley Levis wants us to remember that the US was built by people with a pioneering spirit.

Along with their print campaign they have also created a commercial to go along with it that uses the poem “America” by Walt Whitman.

hat tip to My Modern Metropolis

John Hartigan, the Chief Executive of News Ltd, the Australian arm of News Corp has joined in with his colleagues in the United States today in bashing Google and bloggers.

In a wide ranging lecture about how News Ltd was better than the rest and how original content has a future, Hatigan’s attack on Google nearly copied the exact same wording as that used by his company colleagues in the Unites States. “The most profitable sites, in fact the only ones making serious money are the sites that aggregate news, like Google and Yahoo” said Hartigan. “They pay nothing for content produced by newspaper journalists but make money by supplying it in easily searchable forms online.” At least he didn’t use the word parasite.

Of course the fact that News Ltd can easily remove their content from Google tomorrow, and that they encourage linking via social sharing buttons on each story may have been missed by Hartigan, but facts should never get in the way of a good story…well, if you’re the head of Australia’s largest tabloid newspaper publisher at least.

Then he went after blogs and independent sites, despite News Ltd itself running a sizable number of blogs (indeed I’m reading the speech notes from Andrew Bolt’s blog)

Almost anyone can start one of these sites, with very little capital, no training or qualifications. Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

And just to be clear: News Ltd doesn’t publish blogs…oh wait, not only do they publish blogs, they’ve actually signed up bloggers to write for them.

You know though that the bash is going to be serious when someone starts quoting king luddite Andrew Keen, and Hartigan managed to offer a range of quotes from Keen…oh wait, I thought only bloggers didn’t provide original thought and quoted others extensively.

“Citizen journalists, he says, simply don’t have the resources to bring us reliable news. They lack not only expertise and training but access to decision makers and reliable sources” Hartigan says of Keen, while in the same speech noting on their coverage of the Victorian bushfires was:

Who can forget the images of the fireman sharing his water bottle with the Sam the Koala, perhaps the iconic image of the tragedy? The images that appeared on television around the world carried the water mark not of Seven, Nine or Ten but of heraldsun.com.au.

Except that the image was published online until The Herald Sun picked it up. Double bonus: the picture was taken by a firefighter, not a professional journalist. Citizen journalism at work? Lets ask Hartigan:

The fires were an example of how journalism should directly touch readers and not always remain detached on the sidelines. Alongside traditional reporting from the scene, we had incredible eyewitness accounts from readers, including amazing pics and video.

Hang on, now I’m confused. Hartigan says citizen journalism isn’t worth shit, but then he boasts how The Herald Sun used citizen journalists to supplement its coverage.

I think though the best line was when Hartigan tried to claim that the problem with newspapers in the United States and the UK was circulation, or as Andrew Bolt said, Hartigan noted “that the crashes in circulation seen in the US and Britain have not been seen here.” That may be true in the UK, but it’s not true in the US. Yes, some papers have declined, but the overall trend hasn’t been that great. The real reason newspapers are in trouble in the US and UK is a crash in ADVERTISING, figures easily confirmed by the relevant industry bodies in both countries. The trend started before the recession, and was driven in a large part by online alternatives. But hey, why let facts get in the way.

I’ll repeat what I wrote on June 16: if Hartigan really believes that Google and others are stealing from News Ltd, then take the News Ltd out of Google. It’s one line in a Robots.txt file. If Hartigan refuses to, then he has ZERO credibility on the subject of Google.

There’s nothing like a good dose of rhetoric to galvanize the troops to fight the enemy. It doesn’t matter if there is any truth in the rhetoric. As long as you can do everything possible to demonize the enemy the truth isn’t something that need to worry about.

A perfect example of this demonizing rhetoric was the recent speech by Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton, who is also the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event. In his speech Hinton referred to Google as a giant vampire sucking the blood out of the newspaper industry.

“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

Source: Crain’s New York Business :: WSJ publisher calls Google ‘digital vampire’

As much as it might satisfy old media to believe that Google’s sole purpose it to destroy their business nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion. If one steps back from this kind of inflammatory rhetoric for even a second and consider how Google makes their money you would see the first stake piercing Hinton’s argument.

Google makes its money from advertising. The advertising usually appears at the top of the return results or along the right hand side of the page. Those ads are suppose to be geared towards matching any search term supplied. Now look at this graphic of the Google News page

Funny, I don’t see any advertising on the top part of the as shown here, and neither do ads show up any where else on the page. So explain to me just how Google is making any money from displaying links to news headlines that go directly to the news site where the article originated at.

The argument that the newspaper industry likes to use is that they aren’t seeing an effective enough click through rate on stories that show up on Google News.

The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites.

Source: Editors Weblog :: Google News and newspaper publishers: allies or enemies?

Emma Heald at Editors Weblog goes on to say that the newspaper’s are only seeing a click through rate of about 10% because they say that readers are only scanning the headlines and passing up on reading the full story on the newspaper site. Well DUH! do they really think that every person reading a newspaper reads every single article in a newspaper?

Not likely. Most people when reading something like a newspaper will typically scan a page for headlines of a story that might interest them. If they don’t they turn the page. Trying to use this as an argument against Google News only goes to show the inflated sense of self-importance that newspapers have of themselves. They are deluding themselves if they think that people buy a paper and then without fail read every single article.

The other point that newspapers like to flaunt is that they need subscription money from people that want to read their content in order to survive.

Who are they trying to kid with this?

Let’s look at the subscription argument from two points. The first is that even in the print version of newspapers subscription, and news stand prices, the amount of money earned is, and always has been the smallest part of their revenue stream. Newspapers primary income comes from advertising, the majority of it specifically from classified ads. Trying to now make the case for subscriptions being the sole way for newspapers to survive online is digitally stupid.

The other part about the subscription argument that fails the logic test is that people will be willing to pay multiple news providers for basically the same content. Excuse me but how many people do you know that have multiple subscriptions to newspapers? To think that peoples behavior online would be any different than their offline behavior is another sign of digital stupidity.

The newspaper industry is so locked into trying to bring an antiquated business model into an online world that doesn’t operate the same way that it is trying to blame anyone, and everyone, for their failings. Instead of stepping back from the whole situation and looking at this new world with fresh eyes the industry is only going to contribute to its own demise.

Just as we think that people are beginning to understand how things work on the web along comes idiots like this. It was ridiculous when an organization like the Associated Press (AP) said that bloggers and the such were going to have to pay to be able to quote from any AP articles if the quote was over a certain number of words. Now it seems that PR firms and news monitoring services in England are going to be facing an effort by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) to impose a license fee for any links shared with customers.

This is according to a post at the Press Gazette by Matt Wardman where he wrote

According to a circular sent to members of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and seen by Press Gazette, the NLA will be introducing a new form of licence from 1 September to regulate "web aggregator services (such as Meltwater) that forward links to newspaper websites and for press cuttings agencies undertaking this type of activity".

From January 2010, the licence charges will also apply to PR practitioners and "other organisations forwarding links to newspaper websites as part of their commercial activity".

The CIPR states that this will apply to "almost all newspaper websites excluding News International titles and the Financial Times".

NLA managing director David Pugh today confirmed the introduction of the new licence extension governing weblinks.

Do these people just not get it? The idea that they really think that they can actually make some-one pay a license fee in order to send links in an email is beyond stupid – it’s moronic.

Good luck with that.

Emails between disgraced South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and his Argentinean mistress obtained by The State Newspaper have been published online today, despite the newspaper having obtained the emails in December 2008.

The emails, dated July 2008 clearly show Sanford was in love with his mistress, with the two making arrangements to meet and sharing sweet words. You can read the emails on The State website here.

Putting the Sanford scandal aside for one minute, there’s another serious issue here, and that’s the relationship between Sanford and The State newspaper. Why did a McClatchy owned newspaper sit on a big story like this for 6 months when they had hard evidence that the Governor was undertaking an affair, but better still (and here’s the public interest angle) was arranging to meet his mistress while on, or as an extension of public trips. The emails even include Sanford discussing a trip to see John McCain during the Presidential campaign. It beggars belief that the newspaper didn’t publish the story until now.

Likely yet another example of how the so-called free and fair mainstream media are nothing of the sort.

The Dutch Government is considering a proposal to tax internet access to prop up the local newspaper industry.

The report, compiled by a Dutch Parliamentary committee, proposes a 6% tax on ISP fees which would go directly to heritage media. The report claims that “news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.”

It’s not clear from reports whether the proposal will become law, but local web companies and internet users are rightly outraged by the proposal.

(via Slashdot)

Actor and writer John Hodgman (known from The Daily Show and Apple ads) was the headline speaker at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C last Friday.

The theme of his speech was “nerds” and how President Obama could qualify as a nerd. There is no doubt that John Hodgman qualifies as a nerd. His speech last 14 minutes, but its worth every second. His speech is hilarious!

UK based citizen journalism agency Demotix has signed deals with some of the world’s biggest media outlets to supply images from the protests in Iran.

Demotix acts as a middleman between citizen journalists and the media, collating and marketing content and images submitted by citizen journalists. Demotix licenses that content to media outlets, splitting returns 50/50, with citizen journalists retaining copyright over any image submitted.

The idea of on-selling citizen journalist contributions isn’t a new one, and a couple of companies over the years have tried and failed in this space. Demotix though didn’t go down the traditional celebrity picture path a number of other sites have tried, and instead focused on world events and geographic spread, particularly in places that may offer limited access to Western media. The strategy has delivered in Iran, with Demotix offering pictures that can’t be matched by the mainstream media. Companies currently paying for content from Demotix include Reuters, AFP, EPA, The New York Times, The Telegraph, El Pais and a range of other newspapers.

It’s great to see Demotix succeeding here, and it’s a bonus that those on the ground in Iran will be able to gain some compensation for putting their lives on the line to take pictures. The bigger picture though could be one of serious humble pie for mainstream media, who is often extremely quick to belittle the value of citizen journalists (including bloggers and amateur photographers), but are now forced to go cap in hand for access to content from them.

Clark Hoyt, the public editor over at the New York Times web site published an article on Saturday, June 20 that I’m having a few problems with. Well, I guess using the word ‘article’ would be a bit of a stretch, since it’s just an unbalanced advertorial that is not clearly marked as an ad.

At the beginning of the article, Hoyt pulls no punches. He talks of how the newsstand price of the NYT went up significantly while the size of the paper and some of it’s coverage decreased. He quotes concerned readers showing their dismay at the publication’s pay-more-for-less changes, then goes on to reassure readers that this is a good thing, that quality will actually increase and that readers will get used to it.

Then comes the current financial situation facing all newspapers and how the last uncharged-for content is fully accessable online to anyone with a web enabled device. That’s where they will turn to next. Hey, if people are going online and reading the NYT for free, we want their money and we’ll put up a paywall to get it.

And, you’ll be getting prime online multimedia content because they’ve had to hire and train an army of videographers who’ll have tons of the latest news up, that you’ll only be able to see online, after paying.

But Hoyt does it with finesse. He can write, I’ll give him that.

Page 2 is where he drops the real bomb, though, with this:

Times executives are studying possible ways to charge readers for online content, an increasing focus in the industry as the world moves to the Web.

Which, if you noticed, drops the bomb first and cleans up after it in the second part of the same sentence by trying to justify the price increase. Everybody else is doing it so we are too.

He then spends the rest of the article using the classic sales copy tactic of having everyday readers just like you sell the new price increases with testimonials, conveniently filling in information between them to put the story in perspective.

NYT readers, they’re going to be charging you for online content, because everyone else is doing it, and you’re going to like it, because everyone else likes it.

The article is just too much. It’s thinly veiled advertising that should be marked as such. In fact, the only things that differentiate it from one of those direct marketing minisite letters is that it doesn’t have a huge red headline, or a big BUY NOW! button at the end… yet.

Legendary American news reader Walter Cronkite is said to be gravely ill and near death.

A report from Media Bistro suggests that CBS News has begun updating Cronkite’s obituary in preparation for his death. The same report notes that although Cronkite has been ill for some time, his health has recently taken a turn for the worse.

92 year old Cronkite started his career as a war correspondent, before being signed to CBS by the legendary Edward R. Murrow. Cronkite landed the anchor job at CBS Evening News on April 16, 1962, a job he held until his retirement in 1981.

Another day, and another breakout among newspaper publishers of lets blame Google for our ills. Today’s round comes from the United Kingdom, where Trinity Mirror CEO Sly Bailey, with the support of the Guardian Media Group’s CEO Carolyn McCall attacked Google at a UK Government inquiry into the future of media, saying that “That’s our copyright, and they don’t spend a penny on journalism at all—they just make money from ours.”

Lets put aside for a minute that Google ads appear on the Guardian website, and that the only content Google republishes in full is paid for, licensed content from AP (they do indeed “pay” for journalism.) Facts rarely get in the way of a good Google bash, and the call is always the same: Google steals from us, Google is a parasite, Google should pay for linking to our content. It’s a line I should note that has already been used by newspaper publishers in the United States, and I’ve heard the same thing from a former newspaper editor in Australia.

So lets just pretend for a minute that Google really does steal content from newspapers. I emphasize the pretend, because it’s not true, but hear me out.

If the newspapers truly believe that Google is stealing, then surely they should prevent it happening? If you’re being robbed in the street and you have the means to defend yourself, you’re going to defend yourself, right?

Here’s where it’s time for newspapers to put out, or shut up about Google, because they themselves have the power now to act, and it’s remarkably very simple. If you’re ever speaking at a debate or function where newspapers are attacking Google, take note of the next three lines:

Open up the sites Robots.txt file. It’s a text file, and needs no fancy editor.
Insert the line: User-agent: * Disallow: /
Save the file back to the server.

That’s it. Any newspaper site with this line implemented in their robots.txt file will be completely unindexed from all major search engines, including Google.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? I bet given 5 minutes I could teach my 6 year old son to do that.

So why isn’t the newspaper industry taking action and taking themselves out of a search engine they themselves claim is stealing from them?

That would be a case of the newspapers wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Newspapers won’t admit it, but they desperately want the traffic Google provides them, and I can’t blame them for that. But this idea that Google should pay for the privilege of sending them traffic is obscene in any sense of the word.

I sincerely hope that newspapers who believe that Google is stealing from them remove themselves from Google’s index. Only then they might discover that instead of stealing from them, Google is in many cases is helping them make the switch from print to online only. If they don’t prove that, at least there can be no more suggestions that Google is stealing from them. It’s really very simple, and doesn’t need Government intervention to work.

To those newspapers that won’t take themselves out of Google’s index but continue to blame Google for their ills: I hope every person who reads this calls you out for the stupidity and hypocrisy of your argument.

A rally is planned outside the Ed Sullivan theater in Manhattan on Tuesday following calls by Sarah Palin supporters to “fire David Letterman.”

Letterman drew a considerable amount of outrage after a controversial crack at Yankee Stadium that Bristol Palin was “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez- during the seventh inning. He further got right-wing panties in a knot by likening Palin’s look to that of a “slutty flight attendant” during one of his “Top Ten” segments last week.

The movement even begat a website, Fire David Letterman, and a mission statement:

Our Mission Statement: David Letterman Must Held Be Accountable For His Disgraceful Statements

In addition to shameless abuse of the Caps Lock key, the site also frustratingly, deliberately misconstrues Letterman’s joke to be about Willow, not Bristol Palin. That simple misdirection plants the joke firmly in the “inappropriate comments about the underage” category (Willow Palin is 14), likely to sway advertiser opinions on the matter.

While it is unlikely such a cultural icon will be unseated so easily, the movement has drawn some high-profile supporters. Palin superfan John Ziegler has predictably joined the fray, and New York State Minority Leader Brian Kolb is also calling for Letterman’s firing.

John Ziegler, of HowObamaGotElected.com, made waves after a heated interview with Contessa Brewer on MSNBC.

The interview never really manages to get underway- Ziegler hits the ground swinging and never seems to move past his rage over David Letterman’s “slutty flight attendant” comments and allegations that A-Rod knocked up Bristol Palin. Hey- at least Letterman didn’t say stewardess. That would have been offensive!

Ziegler is the creator of Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected, a film that cost him $200,000 to produce. In the film, Ziegler posits that the media bias for Obama and against rockstar of the right wing Sarah Palin unfairly won the election for the young Senator from Illinois.

On his site, Ziegler has this to say about his mission:

“I think I ought to be the Right’s Michael Moore, with far more facts and far less fat. I know I can fill that role, and I know I can help the movement.”

If he really wishes to be heard, though, Ziegler might want to learn how to listen. His contentious bit with Contessa Brewer ends with Brewer admonishing crew to “cut his mike!” And I thought that was Bill O’Reilly’s line…

Ah good old Rupert Murdoch the king of News Corp decides to share with us his prognostications about where newspapers could end up 10 years down the road. The short form for those of you in a hurry – communications, and this includes newspapers, is changing totally and because we are moving into a digital age we will see big changes coming to the newspaper industry.

Duh!

For the fuller version here is the ‘print bite’ from PaidContent

- On digital papers: Within ten years, I believe nearly all newspapers will be delivered to you digitally, either on your PC or a new—on a development of the Kindle, shall we say. … Something that’s quite mobile, you can take around with you.  Communications are changing totally.  We’re moving into a digital age, and it’s going to change newspapers.  But if you’ve got a newspaper with a great name and a great reputation, and you trust it, the people in that community are going to need access to your source of news. What we call newspapers today, I call news organizations, journalistic enterprises, if you will. They’re the source of news.  And people will reach it if it’s done well, whether they do it on a BlackBerry or a Kindle or a PC. … I think people will miss a great deal not getting everything that you get in the newspaper.  You may not read everything in it, but your eye catches things, and you learn things you didn’t expect to learn.  And I think we’ll get back to that when we get these mobile readers that you carry whole newspapers on them.”

And just to flesh out your day here is a portion of his interview on Fox Business (which he owns)

It’s nice to see old rich people catching on to the way things are changing isn’t it?

Management versus employees – it’s old story but in the case of the Boston Globe it could been the possible death of yet another newspaper. The Globe, which is owned by The New York Times, has said that it needed to come up with $20 million in annual savings in order to keep the paper running. The most recent negotiations with the Boston Newspaper Guild, the union representing the Globe workers, sought wage concessions and benefit cuts. the threat being that if they didn’t get the concessions from the Guild that the paper would resort to implementing a 23 percent wage reduction for all Guild members.

In a vote last night the Guild members voted 277 to 265 against a new contract that included the concessions. This morning the Boston Globe published this following statement:

We are disappointed that in a very close vote of 277 to 265 the Boston Newspaper Guild did not ratify the Globe’s final proposal. As we have stated, the $10 million in cost savings from this multifaceted proposal is essential to The Boston Globe’s financial future.

This evening we have sent a letter to the Guild stating that as a result of the rejection of this proposal, we have reverted to our alternative Final Record Proposal which provides for a 23% wage reduction for all Guild members. This will secure the $10 million in costs savings needed from the Guild, and will allow the Globe to reach the targeted $20 million in savings needed from all our major unions.

Since the parties are at an impasse, the Globe will implement the wage reduction effective next week. We have told the Guild that we are available to meet any day this week to review implementation of the pay cut.

We regret having to take this action, but have no financially viable alternative.

The comments on the posted announcement are probably not exactly the encouragement that the paper or its staff would like to see as most of what I read could be summed up by this comment:

Good Bye Globe, don’t let the door hit you on the way out - Frank

Sacramento, CA  morning drive show ”Rob, Arnie and Dawn”  has ceased broadcasting until June 11th following advertiser and listener backlash due to a controversial segment bashing transgender and cross-dressing teens.

Chipotle, Snapple and Sonic are among nine advertisers withdrawing crucial business from the show in protest of the May 28th broadcast. During the show, co-host Arnie States said:

“If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes. I would throw a shoe at him.”

Host Rob Williams concurred.

“A boy who wears a dress is a freak. He’s a nut.”

The pair went on to admonish transgender people and their supporters to “stop hiding behind research and laws.” It bears repeating that some studies indicate gay, lesbian and transgender teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.

In a headache-inducing, all-caps statement made on their website, the hosts had this to say for themselves:

WE PRESENTED OUR OPINIONS ON A VERY SENSITIVE SUBJECT IN A HATEFUL, CHILDISH AND CRUDE FASHION; AND THEN, GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO RETRACT THOSE REMARKS, WE DEFENDED THEM.

SINCE THEN, YOU, OUR LOYAL LISTENERS, HAVE MADE IT CLEAR TO US THAT WE WENT TOO FAR. THE RESPONSE HAS BEEN OVERWHELMING. NONE OF YOU SAID THAT WE COULDN’T HAVE OPINIONS, YET SO MANY OF YOU SAID THAT THE WAY WE GAVE THEM CROSSED THE LINE. FURTHER, YOU SAID THAT OUR ATTEMPT TO MASK OUR COMMENTS AS “JOKES THAT WOULD BE UNDERSTOOD BY OUR AUDIENCE,” WAS UNACCEPTABLE. I WOULD SAY NOW THAT IT WAS WORSE THAN THAT, IT WAS COWARDLY. YOU HAVE MADE THAT CLEAR.

A study on behalf of Nielsen’s Council for Research Excellence has claimed that the consumption of online video is massively overstated, and accounts for only a fraction of all video viewed.

The Video Consumer Mapping Study found that 66% of all video is still consumed via live television, and that online video only accounts for 1% of all video viewed. The study claims that consumers tend to overstate how much time they spend on because “it seems new and cool,” where as watching TV doesn’t have as much social cache so people tend to under-report how many hours they watch.

The results come at the same time comScore video data for April shows a 16% increase in video watched online vs the month before. comScore found that 16,785,432,000 online videos were watched in the United States from 151,652,000 unique users.

Whilst it would be easy to suggest an ulterior motive to the results, particularly given a strong representation of media companies on the Council for Research Excellence, the study has a far more substantive range of verifiable flaws.

The initial consideration is how the data was gathered to begin with. The study used “American media consumers, primarily former Nielsen TV People Meter panelists.” Former is the key word there, because TV panel data is gathered through “people meters,” electronic devices that record viewing habits. In theory, it’s difficult to understate TV viewing when there’s an electronic device gathering data on what you are watching; and yet this study specifically picked people who didn’t have the devices.

Then there’s the problem of sample size and location. From the study:

[the study included ] a final sample of 952 observed days. This included 376 individuals in the Core sample from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia and Seattle. Observing those people twice yielded 752 observed days. In addition, for the Media Acceleration portion of this research, 100 people were observed twice and yielded 200 observed days in the Indianapolis DMA.

376 or maybe 476 people in total (it’s not clear if the 100 are originally counted in the 376). The results of 476 people are the key behind a finding that online video is overstated, and some of the United States largest markets, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and even Austin, Texas (all four known for their tech communities) were completely ignored.

People who play with statistics will always argue that you can use such a small sample size to come to such conclusions, and that may be true to a point. But does a sample so small and geographically limited really reflect the overall market in the United States? Does the sample size fairly support a conclusion that goes against what every other survey and study is suggesting?

Of course it doesn’t, but that was hardly the point to begin with. This study was funded indirectly by media companies, and was to consider the following statements (direct from the study)

- The 30 second spot is dead
- No one under the age of 30 watches TV, They’re all streaming video on the internet.
- No one watches live TV, Everyone is Recording TV shows on their DVRS

Really outrageous propositions to begin with, and you don’t need a $3.5 million study to show that none are true. If you start a study with such outrageous suggestions, its little surprise then that you end up with an outrageous, and ridiculous result.

If you want to read the study, you can download it here (pdf)

The $1.75 million Huffington Post investigative journalism fund is under attack by a journalist signed up by the fund on the grounds that The Huffington Post couldn’t adequately edit her work.

Freelance Wall Street reporter Teri Buhl tells Business Insider the Huffington Post fund is having trouble “getting any content out” and that they “lied about having their site ready and a having a business editor to edit my work.” Buhl goes on to whine that the editors for the fund had no business editing experience, and that the head of the fund Nick Penniman doesn’t have print experience, hence “he has no idea what he’s doing to try and cover the econ crises.”

Business Insider claims it’s a rocky start for the fund, but that’s only true if you accept that the fund mistakenly hires snotty journalists who need their hands held and are incapable of functioning without the intense participation of an editor. As we know, that model is working great for newspapers in 2009.

The Huffington Post investigative journalism fund needs to add the following question on the application for writers: are you capable of looking after yourself? If not, please do not apply.

A lot of attention is paid to the floundering newspaper industry when the big name papers start talking about shutting down. When it comes to the news lifeblood of small town America not much attention is paid to when those town’s newspapers are forced to close their doors. As we rant and rave about the importance of journalism it is the small towns that feel the loss of their eyes and ears of what is happening locally.

At a time when more that 10,000 journalism jobs are disappearing from US newspapers alone it is easy to forget that part of those numbers are small town jobs. Much like Clarke Virginia where The Clarke Courier, publishing a weekly newspaper since 1869, closed its doors last week.

The Courier wasn’t closed because of a lack of readership as it has a paid circulation of 2,240 but rather the same problems that are plaguing its big city cousins – declining, or vanishing, advertising dollars. This is the same problem that will be affecting a growing number of small town newspapers as they struggle to keep their lights on. The sad part about this is that the wire services and web aggregators like Google News aren’t interested small town news, for them it is all about taking things national or international.

It may not seem important in the larger scheme of things but for the 14,000 people of the county in Virginia that The Clarke Courier kept informed they have lost a window to their community.

[hat tip to Marc Fisher – Washington Post Voices]

Just as the newspaper industry is facing a collapse of their business model so to is the music industry. While it is the falling advertising spending on traditional print media that is severely hurting newspapers it is also the digital world that is biting into the profits of the music industry and their trade groups. As things like CDs begin to go the way of vinyl and cassette tapes the music industry is desperately struggling to find new ways to increase their profits.

Royalty payments have in the past been what the music businesses considers to be a secondary revenue stream. That is beginning to change not just in the US but right around the world as the music trade groups responsible for collecting royalties step up their blood sucking game. In the US we are seeing the introduction by Senator Conyers Jr. of a new bill in congress that would see a change in how royalties are paid in the United States.

Currently radio stations only make royalty payments to the songwriters, this law would change it so that radio stations would have to pay royalties to record companies and artists.

“The thing that draws people to radio is the music, and performers don’t get any of that” revenue, said Michael Huppe, general counsel at SoundExchange, an organization that collects royalties for record companies and artists when music is performed on U.S. Internet and satellite radio services, which are required to pay such fees.

Source: New York Times

Of course Huppe doesn’t acknowledge the incredible amount of free advertising that artists, and record companies, get because of all the free airplay they get. This move though is similar to one that is moving throughout the world as more music trade groups in different countries are pushing for more and higher royalty payments from an increasingly number of different types of businesses.

An example of this is a recent push by the Phonographic Performance Co. of Australia which has gone after nightclubs to increase their current royalty payments of 7 cents per person, per night, up to 84 cents this year and $1.05 in a few years.

“We looked at this and thought, 7 cents just doesn’t seem right, when people are paying 10 to 15 dollars to get in and at least 5 dollars for a drink,” said Stephen Peach, chief executive of Phonographic Performance Co. of Australia, which collects the fees. “Without music, there wouldn’t be a nightclub.”

As with Huppe in the US Stephan Peach seems to ignore the fact that all that music being played in nightclubs is free advertising for their represented artists and their masters record companies. In order to further increase their money collected Peach is recommending that similar organizations around the world follow their example and begin going after: fitness centers, restaurants, and television broadcasters.

I wonder if these idiots will ever figure out that all they are doing is killing the golden goose by this type of blood sucking behavior.