Category: Uncategorized

Building an online news business

Steve Outing has a smart piece in Editor & Publisher on why newspapers can’t charge for access to their Web sites. His arguments are familiar, but he’s pulled them together nicely. Three points he makes are especially worth thinking about:

1. Newspapers that attempt to charge for Web access are opening themselves up to local competition. Outing specifically mentions local television stations. But most large cities have an even more logical candidate: a news-oriented public radio station, such as Boston’s WBUR (90.9 FM).

2. Information does not want to be free. News Web sites may have lost the paid-content war, but there’s no reason news organizations can’t charge for other forms of digital delivery, such as cellphone applications, Kindle and the like.

3. It’s the community, not the content, that has real monetary value. Outing says he’s particularly interested to see what New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has in mind, as Keller is talking about various benefits that would accrue to those with NYTimes.com memberships.

Maureen Dowd odds and ends

As the Maureen Dowd plagiarism story continues to wind down, a few stray pieces:

  • Despite Jack Shafer’s splendid suggestion that Dowd offer a full accounting of what happened in today’s column, she instead weighs in with an insipid imaginary conversation between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Gah.
  • Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, whose words were appropriated without credit by Dowd in her Sunday column, says he “never thought it was intentional,” and “that’s pretty much the end of it.”
  • The New York Post has picked up my Guardian column on the matter. Sure, I’m getting a kick out of it. But I’m also less than thrilled to be drafted by Rupert Murdoch into his ongoing pissing match with the Sulzbergers.

Business as usual on Beacon Hill

Sharp commentary today from Jon Keller and the Outraged Liberal on the near-certain prospect that the Legislature will raise the sales tax by 25 percent.

As I’ve said before, we probably need a significant tax hike. Since the late 1980s, there’s been a disconnect between our demand for spending (mainly in the form of local aid) and our willingness to pay for it.

But to move ahead on a major boost in the sales tax (from 5 percent to 6.25 percent) without making some real changes in the government pension system, and without insisting that public employees make the same kind of sacrifices in salary and health benefits that private-sector workers are making, is unconscionable.

It’s also business as usual.

House Speaker Robert DeLeo, in a recent op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, argued that the Legislature is on the way to reforming the way it does business. I hope that’s the case.

On the other hand, we all know that when the pressure is off, people tend to slide back into their old habits.

This is a great opportunity for Gov. Deval Patrick. Let’s hope he can rise to the occasion.

Is Dan Totten a hero or a hack?

Jason Schwartz has a good profile of Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten, posted at Boston Magazine’s Web site. Totten and his members are the last remaining obstacle to the New York Times Co.’s plan to extract $20 million in union concessions at the Boston Globe. Key excerpt:

Should his members vote to send him back into the ring with management, he could very well emerge as the hard-spined hero who had the gall to stare down the Gray Lady. Of course, if he fails, he’ll be branded the foolhardy union hack who hastened the end of the Boston Globe as we know it.

Schwartz’s story is loaded with nice details, nearly all of them from anonymous sources. Funny, but just the other day I was having an e-mail debate with a reader objecting to what Slate’s Jack Shafer likes to call “anonymice.”

The Totten profile is evidence that though anonymity may be less than ideal, it’s absolutely necessary when reporting on Boston’s paranoid media scene. I know whereof I write.

GateHouse zings the Globe

The online-content war between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media may have been settled out of court last winter, but resentments apparently linger. The Globe’s Boston.com site has a local-search function that lets you find content from other sites. Check out the description in this Patriot Ledger video at Boston.com.

New site covers arts on the North Shore

Check out Art Throb, a new online project covering the arts on the North Shore. Looks pretty ambitious. The lead Throbette is Dinah Cardin, among other things the former arts writer for GateHouse Media’s North Shore Sunday. According to the mission statement:

Art Throb is an independent publication and a collaboration of many talented writers and photographers. Our funding comes from a combination of sponsors, donors and grants.

Joel Brown said hello to Art Throb last Friday.

More evidence that the post-newspaper era will not lack for journalism of all kinds, whether there’s a financial model or not.

Dowd was just talking with a friend

I don’t think New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd committed a hanging offense. But I continue to be troubled by her explanation of how she came to lift a paragraph from Josh Marshall’s megablog, Talking Points Memo.

OK, so Dowd was “talking” in a “spontaneous” manner with a friend, as she put it to the Huffington Post. Fine. I had decided to assume for the purpose of moving on that by “talking” she meant “e-mailing.” It would be completely believable if she had copied and pasted from a friend’s e-mail who had volunteered to help her write her column. Lame, but believable.

And yet here is what she told a blog called the Nytpicker, via e-mail:

no, we were going back and forth discussing the topic of the column and he made this point and i thought it was a good one and wanted to weave it in;
i just didn’t realize it was josh marshall’s point, and we’ve now given him credit
my friend didn’t want to be quoted; but of course i would have been happy to give credit to another writer, as i often do

I don’t see how you can possibly construe this as an e-mail exchange, especially when, as you will see, the Nytpicker had contacted her a second time trying to clarify exactly how Dowd had managed to reproduce Marshall’s rather lengthy graf almost word for word. Hey, she was just talking with a friend. Right.

(Via an e-mail to Media Nation citing National Review’s Media Blog, which in turn got it from DailyKos.)

Dowd’s modified limited hangout

Jack Shafer points out in Slate that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd deserves credit for not going into hiding, not whining and not claiming that what she did wasn’t plagiarism. I’ll give her that.

In an e-mail to Media Nation, Shafer also fingered an attribution I’d messed up in my Guardian column, which has now been corrected. I’d misattributed a Dowd e-mail to the wrong source. Thank you, Jack.

NU students report on Egyptian dissident

Northeastern journalism students touring the Middle East have broken some important news.

Kate Augusto, Danielle Capalbo and Nick Mendez report that Ayman Nour, a leading political dissident in Egypt, has decided to return to prison and finish his sentence in order to dramatize what he calls the Egyptian government’s ongoing lack of respect for democratic values.

The Boston Globe’s Worldly Boston blog has picked up on the news.

Nour was released earlier this year, with the government announcing that it was responding to Nour’s poor health.

Our students are traveling with journalism professor Carlene Hempel and political-science professor Denis Sullivan, who directs both the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development and the International Affairs Program.

Please check out the group blog, as well as the individual student and faculty blogs that are linked from the main page.

Photo of Nour by Nick Mendez.