AP Style: All hail Caesar, but no longer on C-section

AP stood its ground for years on the traditional spelling of Caesarean section, going back to the roots of the word (though as you can see from Wikipedia and alt-usage-english, those roots are mighty cloudy). No more.

The wire service as of today has converted to the now more widely used cesarean section.

Also note the new one is lowercase.

Settlement in linking case that could have made bad law

So the New York Times/Boston Globe and Gatehouse Media have settled their little tiff over the Globe's linking from its hyperlocal sites to stories on Gatehouse's Wicked Local sites.

Nobody admits wrongdoing, and both sides slink off into the night without exchanging checks, each to instead pay its own barristers.

Good. It was a bad case that had the potential to make very bad law, although at least one commenter thinks it still could have bad karma. David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center thinks judges could interpret it as the Globe saying that what it did was wrong.

That may be a little stretch. More likely, we're going to see a scramble to get a bunch of barriers up on news sites to prevent scraping by others. That's the sum of this case: the Globe agrees to play nice and abide by Gatehouse's electronic barriers -- although in the Globe story it sounds a bit snitty about the whole thing:

The settlement reflected the reality that GateHouse can technically block Boston.com's computer program from retrieving stories for conversion to links from GateHouse's Wicked Local blogs, which cover dozens of communities across Massachusetts. GateHouse had not previously established an effective barrier to prevent such scraping of its stories.

Gatehouse, it should be noted, said from the get-go that it had established such barriers and that the Globe's Boston.com was ignoring them.

What the Globe appears to give up here is merely a bit of automation. It still, according to its article, can deep-link to Wicked Local articles, but apparently it will have to come up with its own wording -- it can't scrape headlines or ledes. (It also is going to take down all it has scraped so far.) So it probably won't be splaying those many links across its sites. But it certainly could encourage its writers to include more in their stories, etc. And I suppose it could hire a few low-paid stiffs to manually fashion new headlines and link wording, if it wanted.

Boston has posted the text of the agreement (pdf).

Canary in the coal mine

I found this chart over at What They Think - a publishing industry blog and news center - fascinating.


You need to listen to the narration that goes along with it. Don't fixate on the dismal newspaper industry news represented by that blue line at the bottom. But look at what some of these lines say.

For instance, yes, the latest economic problems have aggravated newspapers' problems, but they clearly were cutting long before this latest recession -- as early as the first quarter of 2006.

And, as "Dr. Joe Webb," the narrator notes, if you take a look at graphic design production workers, they were being pared back as early as the first quarter of 2008. And ad agencies began their slide in late 2007.

All in all, it seems to say that a bunch of people in this business knew what was about to come - perhaps not as severely as it has. So maybe it's time we revise, a bit, the prevailing narrative that things were at least OK until those dastardly subprime mortgages imploded. Clearly the folks reading the economic tea leaves were seeing something before that implosion. There was a canary in the coal mine here; did anyone here it croaking?

(Interesting in the narration is the conclusion that the growth business out of all this is PR.)

The Phoenix of Micropayments

Desperate times breed desperate "solutions," and here's one we haven't seen for a while -- micropayments. The Phoenix arose from the ashes yesterday in David Sarno's L.A. Times Tech blog.

Sarno picks up a different facet of the meme started by David Carr of the New York Times, who suggested we need something like iTunes payments for the news. (Scott Rosenberg responded to that by noting there already is such a thing, Google Ads, it's just that they don't bring in the massive amounts of cash media houses are used to.)

Let's let Clay Shirkey, a longtime micropayments opponent, as quoted by Sarno, tackle this one:

Shirky said ... last week he received an unusual number of calls from reporters asking him about the theory, suggesting to Shirky that desperate newspaper types are “rummaging around” for revenue ideas. “I haven’t talked to anybody about this stuff since the last recession,” he said. “I don’t get any interest except when it’s a Hail Mary play.”

Sarno has the other side, too, Columbia U. professor William Baker:

[Baker] is more optimistic about micropayments and chose a metaphor to mirror Shirky’s Hail Mary. “There’s a potential rainbow here,” he said. “Normally no one would take this risk because it’s a scary jump. On the other hand, the economy is so terrible now that it may force some entities to try.”

I used to think micropayments might be an answer, too, just as I thought e-ink was going to be a solution to how to deliver the "newspaper." Then, I sat back and let that long-ago economics edycashun I paid good money for rattle around in my brain. Admission: I also read and reread Chris Anderson's "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business."

And while I don't think everything will be free, journalists of all stripes should read and re-read the article and its points, such as this:

This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.

The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.

Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year.

But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.

The "penny gap" isn't really a gap, nor is it a yawning chasm or a canyon or even the distance from Earth to the moon. It might as well be the distance from the Milky Way to the farthest known galaxy.

I'd love to see micropayments work -- and maybe they would for some very select (as in Times Select -- it did have subscribers, after all, before going free) subset.

But all this shows me is that the business "model" for news and information is going to be a vastly complicated affair, far removed from the "order takers" that too many newspapers had become. It's been said here and elsewhere that the model will mean aggregating many small and often-changing streams -- heck, they may just be rivulets -- of income. I don't think the mainstream media is ready to deal with that yet. (For instance, the decision by CBS to shut down Wallstrip and some of the commentary over that. (registration required) Yet, in the future, 14,000 users a month might be a damn good "rivulet." Bottom line is that CBS probably paid way too much for the site (rumored $5 million). But it was using old-media metrics. And if you can't shift creative gears and monetize a site that pokes fun at Wall Street in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in decades, much of it caused by the Street, what does that say? For one thing, and maybe I missed them, I don't remember seeing any "Wallstrip" promos next to the econ segment on the evening news.)

I recently asked an executive editor on a panel why he supposed we needed or could find a business model at all. Of course, he looked at me as if I had arrived from Mars - or more likely that far-distant galaxy. But ponder it, folks. We may well not find a business model, at least not one at all resembling what we know now, and were we not to find one would the information ecosystem adjust. Yes -- the business ecosystem might turn wan, but the overall information ecosystem seems rather robust, even when it's not leeching off MSM.

But desperate times breed desperate people and proposals.

We've gone through the denial and anger stages of grief. (Clearly, some of the recent missives from the industry have been filled with anger as layoffs have mounted.) I think we're in the bargaining stage. We've had depression, but are we headed for an even deeper depression if we realize there may not be a sustainable model as we know it? Will there ever be "acceptance," and what, really, will that term eventually mean?

Global Post live

"Global Post," the new venture into international reporting online, has gone live.

To keep the costs down -- aside from being all-digital at the moment -- GP's model is to work with foreign correspondents in-country who already have other projects in the works.

On the revenue side, founders Charles Sennott, an experienced foreign correspondent with the Boston Globe, and Philip Balboni, former head of New England Cable News, have a three-legged model that's becoming more common: advertising, premium content subscriptions and syndication to other sites and, one would assume, a news industry struggling to maintain its own content.

Here's wishing them the best of luck.

Patrick Thornton has a wide-ranging, pre-launch interview with Sennott at Beatblogging.org. You can download or stream the audio.

A bit of dissonance over newsroom integration

At the Editors Weblog, there 's a long list of praises about integrating traditional and online newsrooms.

But in the middle of it, are some dissonant words from Epsen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of Norway's Verdens Gang Multimedia.

The entire package is well worth reading.

Jarvis sees silver lining

At the Guardian, Jeff Jarvis writes today about what he calls "history in the making," as the editor of the L.A. Times tells him that online advertising revenue is "now sufficient to cover the Times's entire editorial payroll, print and online."

Jarvis says that's the case at at least one other paper, and goes on to write: "What this tells me is that we are on the cusp of the moment when online revenue could sustain a substantial digital journalistic enterprise without the onerous cost of printing and distribution. Hallelujah."

Yes, this is significant, but pardon me if I remain a bit less enthusiastic.

First, what does "editorial payroll" entail? Does it include benefits, which can increase costs 30 percent or more? We need more information there.

Second, it's nice that it covers the editorial payroll at a severely shrunken operation (cut from 1,200 to 660, as Jarvis notes). But even at 660, there are significant support costs -- facilities, support staff, ad staff, supplies, taxes, etc. Certainly they are much less than running a billion-dollar printing plant. But they are nonetheless significant.

It's this gap that I fear will the hardest to cross. You can cut those costs only so much, as countless other industries (current example: automakers) have found out. In other words, an online site might have to throw off 50 percent more per editorial employee to cover the other overhead. (I'll let people like Alan Mutter, Rick Edmonds or Steve Yelvington, who know with greater precision such figures, fill in the blanks or tell me if I'm shooting blanks.)

So let's not get out the noisemakers just yet.

Connecticut papers sold

With two Connecticut papers just 10 days from extinction, the former publisher of BostonNOW, Michael Schroeder, has stepped up to buy them and three weeklies from struggling Journal-Register.

BostonNOW, a freesheet, had a meteoric rise and just as quick a fall as its investors pulled out.

Wonder what Lucas Grindley will have to say about the new venture.

Meanwhile ....

The Tulsa World lays off 28, 26 of them from the newsroom.

AP on Obama tax cuts - clear as mud

OK, is it just me (well, no, because Neil Holdway brought this up first on the ACES discussion board), but it seems AP really muddied the numbers in the Obama tax cut story.

I found an article by Stephen Ohlemacher that goes as follows:

Obama's proposal to stimulate the economy includes tax cuts of up to $300 billion, including more than $100 billion for businesses.

But then:

Obama's tax package also targets individuals, providing a $500 tax cut for most workers and $1,000 for couples, at a cost of about $140 billion to $150 billion over two years. The individual tax cuts may be awarded through withholding less from worker paychecks, effectively making them about $10 larger each week.

Another provision brought to the negotiations by the Obama team would award companies that hire new workers a one-year tax credit at a total cost of $40 billion to $50 billion over two years. Businesses also would get additional incentives to invest in new equipment.

No way I can get that to add to $300 billion.

If we assume the $40-50 billion referred to in that last graf over two years corresponds to the $100 billion referenced earlier, (And it's not even clear from the wording "another provision ..." that it should or shouldn't be the $100 billion referred to earlier) then

• you go from $240-$250 billion over two years (assuming the $140-$150b individual cut is spread over the two) to
  
• $380-$400b (assuming the $140-$150b is a yearly figure).

And then that odd wording "a one-year tax credit over two years" ....

Sounds like a calculator and some further editing were needed on this, or am I missing something?

If Parker can do it, you can too

Wendy Parker, longtime and now former sports and Web type at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has been blogging for a while at Ink Drained Kvetch about doing journalism after newspapers.

Good stuff, and you really should check out this week's exhortation on why, if you have not embraced the Web, it really is time to give it a spin. Watch the video ...

Looking for a job?

Well, the FBI's hiring.

I get a daily e-mail from the agency, and today's says it's going to hire 2,100 professional staff and 850 special agents this year.

I'd feel better knowing some folks with journalism backgrounds had some of those spots.

Here's the link for info.

Converging a newsroom

Here in the j-education business, as in many news organizations, the struggles continue about creating "converged" newsrooms.

Kent State has brought its student media newsrooms together, and it has produced a great multimedia site on the "shotgun wedding." You'll find a lot of good insight on here, from the observation that you can't dictate it top-down (d'oh) to good suggestions for equipment and software.

The only thing missing is how to do it without having a 2,000-plus-square-foot new empty space for the newsroom, a luxury many schools and commercial newsrooms don't have.

(If you don't want to page through the Web site -- you should for the multimedia -- there's also a full PDF version of the report - 11.9MB.)

More copy desk consolidation

This time at Media News's L.A. newspaper group.

It seemed like a good idea ...

In print.

Unfortunately, this example from The (Colubmbia, S.C.) State shows what's wrong with shovelware in a Web 2.0 age.

Look at the last line.

There is no "related story on this page" and -- it's the Web, dang it -- there's no link from that to the related story elsewhere on the site.

Newsrooms have got to learn to fix things like this. Yes, it may be hard the way they are set up, but it is imperative because it signals an operating mentality.

(Not so) Happy New Year

To start out 2009, the Guardian's Roy Greenslade has some brutal predictions -- mostly UK oriented, but you can find a lot of U.S. truth, too.

At least one major regional owner will go under. Even if there is no further consolidation, there will be "accommodations" between rival publishers. More, many more, local titles will be closed or merged. More freesheets will vanish. Needless to say, more journalists will lose their jobs. As for the national newspaper industry, it is probable that a couple of publishers will throw in the towel. I somehow doubt that their titles will vanish altogether, but that must be a possibility too.

He hits the bull's eye at the bottom of the column:

Meanwhile, and here is the rub, necessary online innovation is being stifled. There is a lack of genuine inventiveness about how to forge a new form of journalism, because companies are too focused on dealing with commerce. Many regional and local paper websites are so clunky that they cannot hope to gain new audiences, let alone retain the current ones. Staff required to "service" print and web on a 24-hour basis are not given the time and space to experiment and there is precious little encouragement from managers who are interested only in bottom lines.

Similarly, many national paper websites are chasing ratings rather than innovating - in the long term, building trust and credibility is far more important. The importance of online journalism cannot be stressed too often. It is foolish to call it the future because the future is now. ...

It is also sobering to realise that even if a national paper were to close - whether the Independent at one end of the market, or the Daily Star at the other - rivals will not benefit much. When Murdoch pulled the plug on Today in 1995, when it was selling almost 600,000 a day, the majority of readers vanished into thin air. Now, of course, they will vanish into cyberspace.

The fight that counts in 2009 is the one for online eyeballs seeking news and informed comment, not for the passive audience handed a freesheet with the minimum of journalistic merit or public benefit.

Patrick Smith at Paid Content:UK, a Guardian subsidiary, is as brutal, if not more so.

And a commenter on that site points to "Five Fatal Flaws that are killing local Internet Plays" by Dave Chase (the commenter credits Jeff Jarvis, but it was Chase's I found). Chase says, as I have written, that at least half the job of "saving" newspapers - in whatever form - is retooling the sales staff. But he gets into a lot more specifics.

I know firsthand from our work in Hartsville that his No. 3, inability to quantify the value of the audience, is a big problem, as is the mismatch in selling skills, or as he calls it, "Farming Hunters."

Uncle Jay explains 2008

Just enjoy. I actually think it's a little better than Jib Jab's this year.




And to all a wish for a health and happy 2009. Anything's got to be better than '08.