Category: Uncategorized

The trouble with micropayments for news

I said pretty much all that I have to say about paying for online news last month, when I criticized David Carr’s suggestion of “an iTunes for news.” But the notion of micropayments — click and, say, a penny or a nickel or a dime is automatically deducted from your bank account — has suddenly gotten a boost. Unfortunately, the idea is a non-starter.

Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine, and Alan Mutter, a respected news-industry blogger, have both come out in favor of micropayments. Isaacson even made it on to “The Daily Show” last night, trading quips with Jon Stewart. All this comes amid an ongoing meltdown in the newspaper business. It’s gotten so serious that a number of publishers have started a rah-rah PR campaign called the Newspaper Project, the purpose of which is to — well, it’s hard to say.

So rather than repeat what I said a month ago, I’ll simply call your attention to a splendid op-ed in today’s New York Times by Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, who points out that the news in newspapers has always been free:

Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc.

And by the way, I once owned one of the Slate umbrellas to which Kinsley refers. If it hadn’t fallen apart at the first gust of wind, I might have it still.

I’m as concerned about how to pay for the news as anyone, but I think it’s pretty clear what doesn’t work.

Photo (cc) by Bill Ballantyne and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

The hypocritical Shepard Fairey

As one of my students, Marc Larocque, puts it, “Shepard Fairey is a hypocritical scumbag.” That’s really the only proper reaction you can have upon learning that Fairey, who’s fighting a copyright complaint lodged by the Associated Press, has himself charged an Austin artist with copyright violation for doing exactly the same thing.

The artist, Baxter Orr, took Fairey’s iconic image of Andre the Giant and put a respiratory mask on it — precisely the sort of “transformative” use that Fairey is relying on in his own repurposing of the AP’s Barack Obama photo to make his Obama “Hope” poster. Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman has all the details.

Fairey is up to his neck in it at the moment, filing a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP and defending himself against vandalism charges brought by the Boston police. I still think his Obama poster is protected under the fair-use exception, as I wrote last week. But so is Orr’s Andre the Giant image. These are nearly identical cases, and it’s amazing that Fairey doesn’t see it that way.

Update: Gee, Fairey’s problem with Orr couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Orr seems less enamored of Obama than Fairey does. Could it?

The last time the Huskies won the Beanpot

I’ve been meaning to give a plug to Outta the Pahk, a new sports blog by Jeff Goldberg, the former Hartford Courant sportswriter who wrote the terrific Jim Rice story I mentioned on Jan. 13, the day Rice made the Hall of Fame.

Today Goldberg offers a bit of Northeastern trivia: he was the last reporter for the Northeastern News to cover a Beanpot championship. Goldberg writes:

Led by Kevin Heffernan and goalie Bruce Racine, who later had a cup of coffee with the St. Louis Blues, the Huskies not only won the Beanpot by beating BU, they also took the Hockey East title at the Boston Garden, knocking off New England powerhouse Maine. Those three games proved the only three I ever got to cover at the old Garden, a thrill for a sportswriter of any age, let alone an 18-year-old.

The Huskies can do it again tonight. And, just as it was 21 years ago, it’s Boston University that’s standing in their way. Huntington News sports editor Nate Owen will be live-blogging the game here.

Heck of a job, Arthur

No offense to New York Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña, but his story today on the New York Times Co. should be seen as the Times Co.’s best case for itself rather than as a tough-minded forensic overview. So in that respect it offers some interesting insights into how Arthur Sulzberger Jr. assesses his reign as chairman of the company and publisher of its flagship newspaper.

And yes, for the most part, Sulzberger thinks he’s doing a hell of a job. Pérez-Peña writes:

Newspaper industry analysts say that despite some published alarms to the contrary, the company has positioned itself well to ride out another year of recession, maybe two. The company still operates at a profit, and analysts say it might have gotten by without the [Carlos] Slim loan, but could not afford to take the risk because borrowing could be even harder in six months or a year.

“But,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at Benchmark, a research firm, “I think they’ve put The New York Times out of danger.”

And did you know that Times Topics is now a competitor to Wikipedia? No, me either. And Jimmy Wales makes three.

There is no mention of whether the Times Co. would like to peddle the Boston Globe, the subject of near-constant speculation around here.

Pérez-Peña does point to some shortcomings. And the most eye-opening is this: between 1997 and 2004, the company bought back $2.7 billion in stock, a number that is now nearly four times the company’s entire market capitalization of about $726 million.

“[I]t outweighs the prices of all the other second-guessed moves combined,” Pérez-Peña writes, “and it would be more than enough to ensure the company’s security for years to come.”

All that aside, I suspect that Pérez-Peña’s fundamentally sunny take on his newspaper’s future is more accurate than the doomsday scenarios put forth in recent months by Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley and Michael Hirschorn of the Atlantic.

At least I hope so.

See you at the NEPA convention

Social Media for Journalists

I’ll be at the annual New England Press Association convention this afternoon, leading a workshop on blogging and social media for journalists. Thanks for the help many of you gave me, and I hope to see some of you there.

Above is the slideshow I’ll be using. My goal is to move through it quickly and get into idea-sharing, since I expect many of the participants will have at least as much to offer as I do.

AP’s copyright complaint a likely loser

You can’t judge a copyright case ahead of time. But based on the facts, I’d say the Associated Press’s copyright complaint regarding the Barack Obama “Hope” poster is a loser. The AP is seeking compensation because the artist, Shepard Fairey, used a photo taken by the AP’s Mannie Garcia.

“Fair use” — the doctrine under which you can use a copyright-holder’s work without permission and without paying for it — specifically allows for works that are “transformative.” That is, if you build upon someone else’s work rather than simply passing it along unaltered, there’s a good chance the copyright police aren’t going to bust you.

That was the principle in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc., a 1994 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 2 Live Crew were in the clear with its parody version of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman.”

In 2001, the California Supreme Court ruled that an artist who made “Three Stooges” T-shirts was not protected by fair use specifically because they were not transformative — they simply used images of Moe, Larry and Curly without any alteration. It seemed clear from the court’s ruling that if the artist had had, say, printed “Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld” (or “Clinton, Gore and Rubin”) on the T-shirts below Moe, Larry and Curly’s pictures, then he’d have been covered by fair use.

In the recent dust-up between GateHouse Media and the New York Times Co., GateHouse officials said they wouldn’t have minded if the Boston Globe’s Your Town hyperlocal sites included blogs that linked to GateHouse content. What GateHouse objected to was the Globe’s automated lifting of verbatim headlines and ledes — again, no transformative element.

The AP says it hopes its case Fairey can be settled without a lawsuit. I’m sure that’s true. The AP’s lawyers may be counting on Fairey’s paying money to make this go away rather than be subjected to negative publicity.

But if this goes to court, my money’s on Fairey.

Dennis, Callahan* and homophobia

People regularly tell me about the homophobic rants on “Dennis & Callahan,” on WEEI Radio (AM 850), but I rarely catch them in the act during the two- or three-minute increments in which I listen to them. I only stay when they’re actually talking about sports.

So let me pass along the BC Heights’ account of their loathsome shtick from earlier this week. As Adam Gaffin puts it: “I’d almost think Dennis and Callahan are closeted but … That would be an insult to gay men.”

*Update and correction: WEEI is so proud of the segment that it put the audio online. As it turns out, Gerry Callahan was out sick that day.