ITV dramatic ambitions left in tatters

You have to feel sorry for ITV, it has made great efforts to develop high quality dramas and change the way it is seen, but before this project really got started the axe has fallen. Some shows have already been cut, and other big budget investments like sci-fi/dinosaur show Primeval, face an uncertain future as budgets are slashed.

Back in 2007, ITV executive chairman Michael Grade promised more innovative and quality drama. And we got it. It was needed. It sounded like the start of a brave new experiment that could lift the overall quality and perception of ITV.

ITV green lit the type of programming that is largely absent from its schedules.

Along came shows such as 'Lost in Austen', yes it was another British costume drama, but it was modern and genuinely fun – not to mention a great success for ITV (it sold in 90 territories worldwide). It commissioned a new version of 'Wuthering Heights' and why not, the British love a bit of high quality moorland doom and gloom and ITV's track record on this is good (its 1996 production of 'Emma' with Kate Beckinsale is good).

Along came 'Primeval' which used the 'Walking with Dinosaurs' technology to put dinosaurs on the streets of London. Bold, with a big budget, and created to compete head to head in the Saturday tea time market against the BBC's revamped 'Doctor Who'.

This year it was followed by a big budget vampire drama 'Demons' with Philip Glenister aka Gene Hunt from 'Life on Mars'. It was a British stab at doing a 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and why not? If you are going to imitate then imitate the best in Buffy creator Joss Whedon -- although why they gave Glenister an American accent when it was clear that he could not master it is anyone's guess.

Flash forward to, well, right about now, and this bold experiment has been undone. Everything it seems is coming under the axe as part of ITV's efforts to slash £65m from its £1bn programming in the face of the downturn.

There have been reports that 'Demons' is to be axed and 'Wuthering Heights', while made, has been sitting on the shelf for a good long while as ITV wasn't sure if it could afford to air it. Although it has been recently reported that it will now air shortly.

ITV has also looked at axing family drama 'Wild at Heart' because it is filmed in South Africa although a reprieve is possible. Yorkshire-based 'Heartbeat' and 'The Royal' are also going.

This week there were reports that 'Primeval', which is now into series three, could be axed as well because of its large budget.

Primeval, which recently parted company with two of its stars Douglas Henshall and Lucy Brown, is currently still on air until May 30 and is awaiting a decision from ITV bosses on whether it will get a fourth season.

It has done really well for ITV and it would be a shame if it lost the show, which is has recently started airing on BBC America, because of budget. There has also been talk of a US film version, another indicator of its success.

ITV, often unfairly criticised for over reliance on the Simon Cowell Reality TV Factor, has made much head way since 2007, but that chapter in its history seems, temporarily at least, to be at an end. And that is a shame.

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No independent future - merger, digital or bust

Someone is sitting around with a slide rule today trying to workout what to do about the Independent. Reports say it is up for sale with a merger with the Evening Standard as one option, outright closure a possibility, and going online only another. But is a digital only future really an option at all?

The Times reported today that Sir Anthony O'Reilly is actively seeking to sell The Independent 11 years after he took control of the title.It follows reports at the weekend of the huge debts that O'Reilly and his fellow investor Denis O'Brien are dealing with.

That means finding a buyer for a title that despite tough cost cutting, is suffering unsustainable losses. This is a point conceded by O'Reilly.

The options are finding investors, find a buyer or close the paper. The strongest current of speculation is that Alexander Lebedev, the Russian oligarch who bought the Standard in January, will emerge as The Independent's owner.

If he does it seems unlikely he will continue to publish the two papers separately, opening the way for a merger that could create a new stronger more stable paper. It is the kind of reshaping of the landscape that the downturn, the decline of print, seems to demand.

If Lebedev did buy it, but decides to keep it separate, the option is to cut further and to possibly only publish it online.

There was some discussion of this last year when I blogged about it following a post by Roy Greenslade.

It is too early to tell how a newspaper making a switch to online only will fare. Will its traffic surge or will those readers without a print anchor cut loose and drift elsewhere.

There are simply not enough examples or data around and that which we do have is flawed.

For instance, just weeks into life as an online only publication, web traffic for Seattlepi.com (what used to be the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) is down significantly, while former rival the Seattle Times got a big boost in online readers, according to Nielsen Online.

However, Hearst is disputing the Nielsen figures and says they are flawed. It claims its internal tracking service show that Seattlepi.com traffic jumped nearly 10%.

Another example we have is a recent Finnish study by Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti, from the University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 'Taking the Paper out of News' they looked at Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat, which has also killed its print edition and gone online only.

Their results showed that (and to their surprise) when Taloussanomat stopped being available in print, traffic to its website did not increase compared to newspapers who had kept a print edition. Six and a half months after going online-only, unique users were down 22% and page impressions had fallen by 11% .

Overall, the pair estimated that readers now spend about 75% less time reading the title online than they did when it was in print and on the web. My suspicion is that the Independent would go the same way. In the near term future at least, these publications could wither - that said, I think it is too early to tell.

Whatever happens could well happen very quickly and I am guessing that the Independent has little future as a standalone publication.


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Fall in US newspaper sales is accelerating

The economy and swine flu is bad enough, but while big stories fill the front pages of US newspapers, new figures show that the rate of decline in print circulation has accelerated since last autumn.

According to a report in the New York Times, figures out on Monday show a more than 7% drop compared with the previous year.

The industry knows where these people are going as well, but it doesn't help. They aren't going away, they are going to the web. As circulation falls accelerated, newspaper website traffic increased 10.5% in the first quarter, but revenue gains have come nowhere near matching that increased audience.

The only paper out of the top 25 in the US to post a circulation increase was The Wall Street Journal, but that rose only by 0.6%, according to the US Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Many of the falls are double digit at newspapers whose future is in doubt like the San Francisco Chronicle (down 15.72%), Houston Chronicle (down 13.96%) and The Boston Globe (down 13.68%).

Top 25 US newspapers by paid average weekday circulation

Title                                                       March 09        +/-  

USA TODAY                                         2,113,725    -7.46%
WALL STREET JOURNAL                   2,082,189    +0.61%
NEW YORK TIMES                              1,039,031    -3.55%
LOS ANGELES TIMES                           723,181    -6.55%
WASHINGTON POST                             665,383    -1.16%
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS                      602,857    -14.26%
NEW YORK POST                                  558,140    -20.55%
CHICAGO TRIBUNE                               501,203    -7.47%
HOUSTON CHRONICLE                        425,138   -13.96%
ARIZONA REPUBLIC                              389,701   -5.72%
DENVER POST                                       371,728     N/A*
NEWSDAY                                               368,194    -3.01%
DALLAS MORNING NEWS                     331,907    -9.88%
MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE             320,076    -0.71%
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES                           312,141    -0.04%
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE             312,118    -15.72%
BOSTON GLOBE                                    302,638    -13.68%
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER                291,630    -11.70%
DETROIT FREE PRESS                         290,730    -5.90%
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER                     288,298   -13.72%
NEWARK STAR-LEDGER                       287,082   -16.82%
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES                      283,093   -10.42%
OREGONIAN                                           268,512   -11.76%
ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION    261,828    -19.91%
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE               261,253     -9.53%


Elsewhere, the New York Times has some personal stories from the heart of the downturn and how some reporters are being hit.

One is that of Todd Smith, a reporter from the St Louis surburbs who was covering a city hall story for the Suburban Journals when a man with a gun and a grudge stormed the building and fatally shot six people, before being killed by the police. Smith was short through the hands, but survived. In April he was laid off.

"I thought my job [as the online editor] was pretty safe," he said. "And yeah, I thought getting shot for the company might be looked at as something important, but I guess not."

There is a happier story from Arizona. Paul Giblin and Patti Epler, former journalists at The East Valley Tribune outside Phoenix, were laid off earlier this year and with a few colleagues started The Arizona Guardian, a news site supported by subscriptions and advertising.

Since then, Giblin and Gabrielson have won a string of awards for their project at The Tribune, including, last Monday, a Pulitzer Prize.

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State of Play - new media versus old

Some cracking reviews of the 'State of Play' movie appearing, which has amongst its many plotlines something of the current clash between new and old media, between print and bloggers, about it. It is almost portrayed as print's last stand as the bloggers charge in.

It has an apparent credulous portrait of a blogger played by Rachel McAdams as Della Frye, who stars opposite the grizzled old school journalist Russell Crowe, who takes on the role of Cal McCaffrey, with Helen Mirren as his editor. She says wanker and buggers a lot. She would wouldn't she, she's a British newspaper editor in America.

It's being talked of as the kind of film that they don't make anymore, about newspapers and conspiracy theories, with nods to classics such as 'All the President's Men' and 'The Parallax View', while remaining thoroughly modern.

The film comes at a crossroads moment for newspapers and a lot of reviewers have talked about how it is a film about the death of old journalism and of newspapers, but at the same time asks pertinent questions about the future of the fourth estate.

The Los Angeles Times says one of the questions that director Kevin Macdonald asks is "what happens when journalists aren't there to ask the difficult questions of politicians?". It's a good question, maybe someone will forward an email to Guido Fawkes.

The LA Times goes onto say that the film "captures the feeling of an industry in transition, perpetually under economic pressures from the outside, while inside a battle for supremacy reigns between the brash but unseasoned young bloggers and the traditional hard-charging gumshoe reporters".

The Times has Crowe as a "newspaperman who has no respect for the ubiquitous internet bloggers and their opinions", but he finds himself partnered with the paper's resident internet "whizz kid, Della" on a story involving his former college friend, the US Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck).

The blogger angle is a nice update from the excellent BBC One TV series even if on the screen there is really little time to explore that debate before we see Della learn to "be a real reporter" from old hand Crowe. Early on in the film when Crowe meets McAdams Della character he says he will have to read a few blogs before he forms an opinion. The New York Times put it like this: "Each has so much to learn from the other. What Della learns, charmingly if none too plausibly, is that some stories lie too deep for blogs and can only truly live on the smudgy, crumply page."
 

But as the Huffington Post has it "Della Frye never establishes an identity of her own, we never really learn what kind of blogger she is, what she likes to write about, or how she feels about the current tug-of-war that exists in the newspaper community."

Maybe in the end in State of Play the battle print and the bloggosphere is not the real one. It is not about a battle of the mediums. That's a distraction and a red herring, maybe a misreading of the world by director Kevin McDonald. The other battle here is the corporation that owns the Washigton Globe and is putting Mirren's editor under pressure to cut costs and turn a profit. We never learn much about them, but one images a Sam Zell type character, the real estate billionaire who snapped up the Los Angeles Times owning Tribune, which is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.


Whatever, it is fun to see a film set in the world of newspapers. The original newspaper setting in the BBC TV series was modelled on the Guardian, although the Washington Globe in the film is modelled on the Washington Post. Well they did give us Woodward, Bernstein and Watergate.

Still The Guardian has its starring role in the third Jason Bourne film 'The Bourne Ultimatium', which also had an investigative reporter at the heart of its plot – even if it were more about bullets, blocks and punches than the more cerebral 'State of Play'.

Old media or new, with The Times calling it "exhilarating, compulsive storytelling" that is "likely to be one of the year's cinematic highlights", it looks more than worth a cinematic visit.

New York Times quiet on charging for content

The New York Times addressed the "chatter" about paid content, but said nothing concrete, indicating that it is struggling to work out a route forward on how to charge consumers for content.

As the New York Times reported a 27% slide in advertising revenues and a $74m loss (with more to come in quarter two) it said it was exploring alternative business models for its website, but display was still the undisputed (if not as gold plated as expected) king when it comes to making money in online publishing.

Janet Robinson, chief executive of the New York Times not only did not indicate which way the newspaper group might jump, but she also reminded reporters that the New York Times had tried twice before to charge. Was she trying to remind the industry that there were salient lessons to be learnt from those experiences and not to expect too much in the future?

"Twice, in the NYT's history, we experimented with charging for online content, first in 1996 and in 2006 with Times Select. We recently looked at the business models of more than 30 different online organizations to examine what was the most effective in generating online revenues.

"What we have learned is that the advertising model we have used at the NYTimes.com has generated more revenue the vast majority of other organisations, including some that are much larger. Our goal is to add substantial new revenue from our users, without materially affecting our leading display advertising business.

"As the ad marketplace, particularly in print, changes, we continue to explore different payment models and other approaches to generate revenues from our online content. We believe the rate of the decline in Q2 will be the same as the previous quarter."

A Shortlist and Sport merger?

According to a report in the Financial Times today, Shortlist and the now defunct free magazine Sport talked at one point about a merger.

The men's free weekly Sport magazine suspended publication last week after its French parent company, Sport Media & Strategy, went into administration.

According to the FT, before its demise, Sport and ShortList held talks over a possible merger but ShortList is understood to have backed away.

You can see it making sense. However, any leap like that, while it brings scale, would also incur extra costs at a time when Shortlist's backers (GLG, the hedge fund; DC Thomson, the Scottish publisher; and French Connection founder Stephen Marks) are sure to be nervous (already dealing with annual losses of £2.7m to August) in the current uncertainty about further exposure.

On paper the combination would have brought together ShortList's 505,970 copies with Sport's 317,257 giving media buyers access to 800,000 large young urban readers. No one else would quite have that audience. Combined, its about five times as large as BBC Three ever got.

The FT quoted Alan Brydon, head of press communication at MPG, saying it would have made an interesting proposition. "They would have an audience of about 850,000 across a Thursday and Friday and that is a very interesting joint sell. But it depends on whether the backers are prepared to do it, whether they are able to."

But right now everything is on hold until we see what happens next. Free magazines cannot rack up losses indefinitely, but if and when the advertising climate improves then there is every reason to expect that the market will bounce back and expand.

The situation is even more acute in the free newspaper market where Thelondonpaper and its rival London Lite are losing money hand over fist.

With the Evening Standard now owned by Alexander Lebedev, you have to wonder how long Associated Newspapers will continue its commitment to London Lite? London can't really support two free evening newspapers. Does it even want to?

Free magazines on the other hand offer more flexibility and more niches to explore. Be it women, entertainment or sport (again). And why not sport again? While Sport Media's effort was good, it was far from being compelling.

Soutar and Shortlist have a three-year plan to become profitable, which he says is ahead of schedule in spite of more "short-term" advertising.

"If you are a mature title with a couple of months visibility, you sweat a little bit but for us that is a marvellous luxury. We are not part of a large and remote company under pressure. It is fair enough to question our business model but we have a critical mass with more than 500,000 copies and a national footprint in 11 UK cities," he told the FT.

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Steve Brill's big idea: putting paid content to the test

Someone had to make a statement about charging for content and media veteran Steve Brill's Journalism Online venture has. It hopes to charge for content online on behalf of newspaper and magazine publishers as well as deal with licensing of content. It's big news. It might be the start of something.

Whether it will succeed is one question, but unlike anything else recently discussed this is a concrete plan of action.

Brill, founder of Court TV and The American Lawyer, working with two partners (Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher and Leo Hindery, of InterMedia Partners and former CEO of cable firm TCI) are to offer newspapers an e-commerce platform (launching in the Autumn), which publications can use to charge in a variety of ways (daily, monthly, annual subscriptions or micro-payments).

Journalism Online says it has had initial talks, and in some cases longer follow-up discussions, with most major newspaper and magazine publishers, as well as online ventures -- no doubt with some of those like the New York Times and Time Inc who have been engaged in the public debate about charging for content.

Brill said that "they have all been extremely encouraging and expressed strong interest". Hmm, okay so none have signed so far as everyone is sceptical, but pretty soon someone will make the leap as there is a compelling incentive (Seattle Post Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News et cetera).

"We think this is a special moment in time when there is an urgent need for a business model that allows quality journalism to be the beneficiary of the internet's efficient delivery mechanism rather than its victim," said Brill.

The way Journalism Online will do this on a practical level is through four key services to publishers. First, Journalism Online will develop a password-protected e-commerce site, which can be integrated into all of the member-publishers websites.

The tricky bit is working out what you charge for. At a guess, publishers are going to experiment with small areas of content and mark them for charging. This could in part resemble what the FT has done with its hybrid free and paid model that could be applied to smaller newspapers and online news sites with their unique local content, as well as larger-city publications with strong regional content, as well as national publications.

"The website will provide a way for publishers of quality journalism to charge whatever they believe is a reasonable amount for their content in ways that are seamlessly convenient for readers," Hindery said. "The only condition of participation is that the publishers have to charge for some portion of their content

More ambitiously, Journalism Online plans to market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the member publishers' content.

That seems like a reach into the future and Brill admits what is called for is a change in mindset. "We will market this feature aggressively, and proudly, because we believe that quality journalism is something that people understand must be supported.

"We've all heard some people say that internet journalism needs to be free because other less-valuable content is free. But we believe Americans know that advertising alone can't support quality journalism – and the truth is that it never has."

Thirdly Journalism Online plans to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with search engines like Google and other content aggregation websites like bloggers, which currently make cash out of other people's content.

For this job it has called in the lawyers, so content scrappers beware. Now it is getting serious. Journalism Online has appointed New York attorney David Boies and Washington, DC. attorney Theodore Olson, who is also former solicitor general of the US.

"We intend to help establish a more stable relationship between referral intermediaries and those who produce, at great cost, the content that is so important in ensuring that the internet remains a powerful way for people to access the most important news and information," said Crovitz.

The last part of Journalism Online's four point plan is to provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue.

That is the last part of the puzzle and the worry. Publishers are rightly concerned that as soon as they put up pay walls, traffic will drop and what advertising revenues they are getting will go with that falling traffic. So sharing ideas, working out what works and what does not work will be important.

"Our members will be engaged in a bold new effort to recreate the journalism business model," Hindery said. "We'll be sharing reports and metrics from the front lines of that battle."

That last line says it all. It is going to be a battle, but clearly one that needs to be fought.

Brill says that he is convinced that readers, who have been paying billions of dollars a year for print journalism, will continue to support journalists by paying a modest, fair price for original, independent, professional work distributed online.

"They realize—as we do—that quality journalism is a vital component of a functioning democracy and free market."

All true, but I am far less convinced that Americans, or anyone else, for that matter, gets it – other than at the more lofty high end of the market. What I am sure of is that some will pay, whether it will be enough to go around is another question.

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After smeargate Labour using social media well

About the same time as the Damian McBride and Derek Draper Red Rag smear story was breaking, I got sent an email about how the Labour Party is using the digital media for something other than trying to launder scurrilous stories about opposition politicians.
 
The party is currently running an 'X-Factor' style competition on its LabourSpace social media website where supporters of various campaigns can quickly and easily set up a place on the site for the campaign and share their ideas with the community. 

Every two months the site has a new contest and the winning campaign gets to discuss their issue with Ed Miliband.
 
One example, and currently topping the poll on LabourSpace, is the National Housing Federation's prepay meter campaign, which is battling those energy companies that continue to impose unfair charges on their gas prepayment meter customers.

The pre-pay meter campaign is currently up against others including Safety for Wheelchairs on Buses; Ban Car-Parking Fees at Hospitals; and Minimum Tax Rates.

It is a really good example of using social media in a simple and effective way. It is the kind of thing that Barack Obama's team did during the 2008 Presidential race when it pioneered using digital media to grow support and involve supporters.

It is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what McBride and Draper were planning with Red Rag.

It seems like a site that Labour didn't really need. What it does need is to continue to develop LabourSpace and take that on, adding more user generated comment, blogs and forums as well as some additional content.

That site should be Labour's social media campaigning hub, which would make it a true rival to what the successful bunch of Tory bloggers and digital strategists have achieved with ConservativeHome.

I've not going to say anything about McBride and Draper here, as I've blogged about them elsewhere on Harry's Place.

But I do wonder what this means for Draper's own site LabourList where he is editor? It's credibility is now severely compromised as some of the comments on the site have expressed.

One said: "LabourList is impotent till Draper goes." While another wrote: "The first step to rehabilitation is to accept what you have done, the Laboutr party cannot do this while you write this sort of justificational tripe and Derek Draper remains in the post of editor for the party's main internet site."

A third posted "Derek Draper must step down from Labourlist immediately. For those that know who is he is the antithesis of what politics SHOULD stand for."

Draper said yesterday that he was considering his future at LabourList and has not been online for 24 hours. His last post on Twitter, however, was on April 6.

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Tales of US newspaper gloom: Phoenix, Detroit and Boston

A few more interesting bits out of the Newspaper Association of America with stories about how badly several newspapers are faring after implementing major changes.

I blogged yesterday about what Google CEO Eric Schmidt told executives in San Diego, but Fortune has a story today about how three newspapers that have undergone tough format changes are doing: not well.

The first was a presentation from the East Valley Tribune, which publishes near Phoenix in Arizona. In January it went from a seven-day paid newspaper to a four times a week free paper with an expanded web presence.

In doing so it cut 40% of its staff when it made the switch, but that wasn't enough and a few weeks ago the East Valley Tribune's owner Freedom Communications asked staff to take five days of unpaid leave.

The Arizona Republic has dubbed these new style unpaid vacations "Fur-cations".

The Fortune piece also gave a few more details on how the two Detroit newspapers are doing following their recent switch from seven day a week home delivery to three.

The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, run under a joint operating agreement between Gannett and Medianews, are now delivered only three days a week and according to Dave Hunke, the CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership, around 85% of the papers' advertising revenue is now generated on those three delivered days.

The future looks grim when you look at the state of Motor City. Hunke listed skyrocketing unemployment, foreclosures and a market where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate as the challenges the titles faced. "We send more children to prison than to college. So we've got quite a problem on our hands."

As for the changes to the way the papers operate it is, Hunke said, too early to tell.

In New York and Boston, there are reports today of how badly the $20m cuts the New York Times Company wants the Boston Globe to make have gone down. Staff at the Boston paper feel pretty much like they are being thrown to the wolves.

As if the rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox's wasn't enough (best not to mention that New York media firm also owns a slice of the Sox and Fenway Park). It is the New York Times today that carries a story about the "mix of resignation and anger" that staff on the Boston Globe have expressed after hearing yesterday that of the pay and benefit cuts and the lost job security that The New York Times Company wants them to accept as the price of keeping the money-losing Globe in business.

The Times said that members of the Boston Newspaper Guild understood the need for cuts, but were shocked at how much the company was asking.

“The company’s demands are outrageous,” said Daniel Totten, the union’s president. “We’re willing to consider some concessions but not the draconian amount they put forth.”

Another report in Fortune with the headline "New York vs Boston: this time it's personal" puts into perspective how importantly the city sees the Boston Globe.

"The Globe helped build our city," Boston Mayor Thomas Menino told Fortune. "The Globe holds people accountable on the issues, and that's important. You might not like it sometimes. Sometimes we don't agree. But they ask tough questions and back it up with data, real data. That's what's important. They're out there doing their work. It would be a real travesty if they weren't around."

The sad truth is for the grand Boston paper that it lost $50m last year and is set to lose a whopping $85m this year.

“They want us to accept those figures without offering any observation of the books,” said Julie Dalton, a copy editor. “People feel like The Times is willing to throw us overboard.”

Blog posts of the newspaper crises

• Ground swell around newspaper e-readers growing
• Schmidt micro payments and subscriptions for newspapers will happen
• US newspaper crises accelerates as Senator bids to keep business afloat
• Free lunch is over says The Economist as Indy talks charging.
• This is not a newspaper website (Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes digital).
• Would you buy a failing newspaper?
• Paid for content high on Guardian wish list.
• Time Inc considers charging subscription fees.
• How US newspapers are failing and the local future.
• Newsday -- beginning of the end for free content?
• Is it time for newspapers to start charging for content?
• Could the New York Times go under?
• The end of print for the Independent

• Read Brand Republic's full coverage of how the downturn is hitting the US newspaper industry

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Groundswell around newspaper e-readers growing

I blogged last week asking whether there was a future for e-papers/e-readers and into my in-box pops an email from the Wall Street Journal announcing new e-reader plans.

The Wall Street Journal Europe has launched an e-Paper service apparently: "the new and fast way of getting The Wall Street Journal Europe".

The launch follows comments made by News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch (also last week) who said the content giant was investing in developing an e-reader, like Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader.

Other newspapers are also looking to go down the e-reader route. Earlier this year e-reader firm Plastic Logic signed agreements with the Financial Times and USA Today to sell and distribute a wealth of content for its forthcoming Plastic Logic Reader.

There are others planning e-reader moves as well. Magazine and newspaper publisher Hearst has also said it is planning to develop a Kindle rival.

It appears that newspaper publishers might be leaning towards some kind of e-reader payment system. They appear to be betting that people might make a micro payment for a really good piece of content on a Kindle or other e-reader. Amazon for instance already charges for some news feeds available for free on the web for the Kindle.

Last week, it was the the Gannett owned Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, owned by MediaNews Group, which were pushing their electronic copies after ditching home delivery (on the biggest news day of the year).

 

The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News papers are also working with Plastic Logic.

Schmidt: micro payments and subscriptions will happen

More newspapers were talking of charging yesterday as Google CEO Eric Schmidt told executives in San Diego that forms of payment for content would come, but advertising would still lead in terms of revenue.

"I think you're going to end up with all three [advertising is the third]," Schmidt said speaking as the closer speaker at the Newspaper Association of America convention.

It's probably the most critical year for the US newspaper industry, with 25,000 plus jobs lots in 2008 and 2009 it is grim out there as this map from programmer and journalist Erica Smith's Paper Cuts blog shows. She has been tracking the decline of the newspaper industry in detail since last April.

As he said that he also told newspapers execs that (what we all know to be true) people will still get most of their online news for free as they do now. "It's very difficult to hold information back".

Schmidt was speaking as Associated Press declared war on the misuse of its content online and said it planned to begin protecting its news and content from misappropriation online. It is planning a series of initiatives including taking legal and legislative action against websites.

You can understand why AP have acted, but it feels a like it is a little too late. While many newspapers have great websites, overall they have been out paced by the growth of technology and news aggregators are a big part of that.

Speaking just before Schmidt spoke William Dean Singleton, chairman of Associated Press and chief executive of the MediaNews Group, said: "We don’t plan for anyone to use our content unless they pay for it. The licenses we do in the future will limit how and where our content is used."

Furthermore Singleton said that the MediaNews Group, which owns titles such as The San Jose Mercury News and The Denver Post (rival to now defunct Rocky Mountain News), would come up with a way to charge for some of their content by midyear, a model that a growing number of publishers are considering.

"It's a balancing act," Singleton said. "We'd like to have a pay wall but we like the traffic we get from search engines."

Back to Schmidt. His main mission in San Diego was to reassure newspapers owners and publishers and try to persuade them that Google is their "friend" and not the bad guy.

It is sometimes difficult to believe this if you own and publish content. Earlier this year Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal said Google "devalues everything it touches". He said Google was great for Google, but terrible for content providers.

Google's search engine does seem to favour some content over others. And there has been much discussion recently the use of excerpts and content scraping where blogs take a lot of content, mostly from newspapers, and republish it.

Newspaper execs were pushing Schmidt on this and he said that, despite the appearances to the contrary, "for general search" Google has been careful not to be biased. Not sure if "general search" is some Google get out clause that no doubt has a large entry in the Google manual.

Schmidt for his part said he was "a little confused" by news reports that singled out Google as a target of AP.

While the "fair use" of excerpts of content is a hugely serious issue for the newspaper industry, Schmidt told the audience that he didn't understand all the excitement AP's announcement caused. "The ultimate resolution of all is this will be determined by how you interpret fair use" adding that he was "a little confused" by news reports that singled out Google as a target of AP – Google does have a deal with AP to licence its content.

On the issue of charging for content Schmidt said he expected the newspaper industry to eventually resemble television, where some content was free, some was purchased by subscription and some was paid for every time it was viewed. However, advertising would, Schmidt said, remain the leading revenue model.

Schmidt also told journalists that if newspapers introduced charges for content Google would not pay them – much in the same way it does not pay the Financial Times of the Wall Street Journal although there content is free accessible in the most online.

"In a scenario where a newspaper had a subscription product, what would Google do? It's highly unlikely that we would buy a subscription and give the content away free. We might be able to help the distribution of that content, but the user would have to pay."

Blog posts of the newspaper crises

Is Twitter really selling up to Google? No

Having sifted the rumour mill this morning, I'm not sure if there are any gold nuggets there. It appears, to me at least, that Twitter is to work more closely together with Google rather than be acquired by it.

There are several reasons why I'm thinking this:

1. The Google buying Twitter story is the second in the space of a few weeks. Most recently it was Amazon.
2. Twitter is at the centre of the real time web, which is about to explode, why sell now?
3. Twitter founder Biz Stone said after turning down Facebook's $500m that they would stay independent
4. There's a huge recession on, is this not the worse time to sell if you don't have to?

Oh yeah, the real time web thing again. Late in the Techcrunch story from this morning, which we have all been reading (actually it is the kicker in the last paragraph) there is a sentence that reads:

"Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine."

See no deal? Or at least maybe no deal. Real time is the big thing and offers many possibilities to marketers and others to monitor and search what people are saying right now. People are very excited about it and it is driving a lot of development and thinking.

Twitter with its search engine, search.twitter.com, is at the centre of that and finally it is possible to see where it might make some money, where it might fashion a commercial business.

It seems increasingly clear that the money making side of things will not come from charging users or companies, but from somewhere in this emerging real time search market.

It seems more likely rather than buying Twitter the two are working closely together to give Google a slice of the real time web action.

Of course, Google doesn't tend (for all its do no evil talk) to play nice with others. It buys stuff or builds great stuff, which is possibly why when news of the two talking about co-operation leaked out people put two and two together and got more than $500m, hey maybe they got $1bn – why not, real time search is the next big thing.

Twitter is in an enviable position, Facebook is aping it and others want it. Having its freedom for a while longer must be an attractive option and so I'll say again that I'm pretty much convinced that these talks with Google are about working and not living together.

And it isn't only real time search the two are talking about, there is a report in Ad Age that says they are working together on streaming Twitter messages or "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. That's another extension of Twitter's real time abilities allowing advertisers to interact with consumers and visa versa.

Anyway, guess we will know soon enough exactly what the Twitter and Google thing is.

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Maxim goes online only, who is next?

Maxim's decline has been as fast as a speeding bullet. Hell, faster. Four years ago it was selling 234,000 copies or there abouts and now it is to become a web-only operation selling nothing. Not even content.

Newspapers and magazines in the US and UK have been falling quick and fast. In the men's market Maxim, Arena and Blender in the US (once owned by Maxim's publisher Dennis) have all gone in quick succession.

mWhat is most interesting about Maxim going is how quickly its circulation collapsed. Going from 234,183 copies in 2005, down to 140,000 in 2006 and 45,000 last year. Most of this was before the problems in the advertising market became pronounced. The advertising collapse is another problem for this struggling market to contend with.

What that means for title's like IPC's Loaded can't be good. Loaded's circulation stood at 95,371 copies in the second half of 2008, down 21% from 120,492 copies for the same period last year. Come August when the next magazine ABCs are due, one thing is clear: Loaded's circulation will have fallen again. Is there an axe swinging above its printed head?

I could see Loaded joining Maxim as an online-only title. Time Inc, which owns Loaded publisher IPC Media, might be looking at charging, but it would be a hard sell to get people to pay for men's content online if we look simply at where we currently stand. At the moment there seems little there that is compelling. So much of the content is available elsewhere - the advent of the iPhone, and the mobile internet generally, offers hot prospects for someone in the men's market if they can get the model right.

The only men's magazine that seems to prosper is Conde Nast's GQ with a circulation of 130,094, a period-on-period rise of 0.1% - although it does that partly through sticking an attractive woman on 10 out of 12 covers (oh and it gives 10,000 copies away). FHM still has a sizeable 272,545, but suffers steep declines come each ABC time and once sold a staggering 700,000.

Maxim and Arena were killed, and others are being killed, by three things: a cultural shift away from traditional lad's mags, the internet; and Short List. Shortlist boss Mike Soutar recently put his hand up and said that his free magazine had contributed to the closure of Arena, which was closed by Bauer Media in March. Fair claim, I'd say. Free content kills, it is certifiable deadly. The way Soutar put it was that Shortlist "had been a contributor" to Arena going out of business. Mike you've got another scalp for the wall.

I've written about this a lot in the past, the lack of a good men's magazine and when it comes to online the problem is, I think, acute. I'm sure Maxim online will pull in an audience as it does already, but carving out a successful distinct persona is really hard when there is so little that separates one lad's mag from another.

That said, I could for instance see Arena work more successfully online. The closure of Arena had been a long time coming. When it finally went it was selling only 29,374 copies. Why didn't Bauer consider taking the title online only? That seems like a mistake to me. I would have thought that Arena, and its also defunct former sister magazine The Face for that matter (if ever there was a media brand that deserved a digital second life, that is one), must have commercial value online. Ciaran Norris has blogged more extensively on this and his post is definitely worth a read.

The last question is what does this all mean for Monkey? The Dennis digital-only men's magazine, which it launched in November 2006, has since been used as the basis to launch a number of other digital only brands.

It has already added iGizmo and iMotor and in this Dennis is ahead of the curve. With the crash in advertising revenues these titles probably hold the future for the men's market. How will Maxim sit alongside Monkey and will Dennis continue with two separate streams of digital investment in its men's portfolio or will it combine the two to make something sharper and more distinct online that has a shot at being heard above the sea of sameness.

 

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Is Twitter becoming like MySpace

Interesting post on Techcrunch asking if Twitter is becoming more like MySpace, which wants to be more like Facebook which…wants to be more like Twitter. Well life's a smorgasbord.

Written by Mrinal Desai, an early employee of LinkedIn, he lists some pretty good reasons why Twitter is becoming MySpace like. I never got on with MySpace, always seemed very cluttered, the connections not very real and overly marketed too. Demographics has something to do with that, but Facebook was a different story. Used it early on, found it worked on a number of levels, and for me still does. On and off.

These are similar points that Desai makes before he gets to question about the MySpacing of Twitter. He has come up with five parallels:

• There is a competition for followers similar to collecting "friends" on MySpace
• Anonymity is normal on both Twitter and MySpace, unlike Facebook
• Fake profiles are proliferating
• Real celebrity profiles are also proliferating, but they are often maintained by someone else for marketing, leading to spam
• Finally, the one most evident visually—services like Twitback and Twitterbacks

I've blogged about some of this as well recently and also referred to the recent New York Times piece that uncovered ghost writers like Annie Colbert who tweets for Guy Kawasaki, Lauren Kozak who tweets sometimes for Britney Spears and Chris Romero for 50Cent.

Chris Romero stuff for 50cent is the best. He had a recent Tweeting classic: "My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends".

Then you have all the fake celebrities. Some of these are serious concerns and I am amazed that anyone would waste their time maintaining fake Twitter accounts. The wonderful Tina Fey of '30 Rock' has 224,000 plus followers, but its not her. What's that about? Might as well have a Fey quote generator.

"If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs."

There's loads more fakery going Twitterside, which like MySpace, as Desai points out, exploits Twitter's anonymity. He makes a point about how MySpace's anonymity worked as a competitive advantage against Friendster, but that isn't really what Twitter is about and the closing down and suspension of some fake accounts supports that.

"MySpace effectively exploited Friendster's technical problems, but so far no one has been able to do the same whenever Twitter sputters. And I don’t think they will. The Achilles’ heel for Twitter is not technology - it is the experience (with the site itself and with other users).

"Does Twitter want to be more like MySpace, which is cleaning up to be more like Facebook, which wants to be like Twitter? Where shall these three meet—in thunder, lightning or rain?"

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