Feinstein and Durbin seeking to narrow shield law’s scope

Senators Diane Feinstein and Dick Durbin are attempting to narrow the definition of a journalist in the federal shield law under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning. Their amendment would limit protection from testifying to professional journalists working for “a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical.” Not included: student journalists, amateur bloggers, or even freelancers working without a contract.

Markos Moulitsas had the news last night. I’ve been on the phone this morning with people who have worked on the bill, and the consensus is that Feinstein and Durbin are introducing the amendment out of national security concerns: If the shield law is too broad, they reason, it could afford protection to criminals and terrorists who claim the mantle of journalism. Neither senator’s office has returned my calls, and it’s not clear if the amendment will be adopted at today’s committee meeting.

The version of the shield law already passed by the House (H. 985) defines a journalist in monetary terms, covering only those who gather and disseminate information “for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain.” The Senate has waffled between a similarly professional definition and one that would cover amateurs. The White House, which had dragged its feet on the shield law over national-security concerns, is said to support the broader definition.

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Zachary M. Seward | Dec. 3, 2009 | 10:36 a.m.

Tags: American Society of News Editors, Diane Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Kevin Goldberg, Newspaper Association of America, Senate, Senate Judiciary Committee, shield law, White House

How Steve Brill has adjusted his pay-for-news pitch

Because it’s my job, I’ve followed pretty much everything Steve Brill has said in public about Journalism Online, the pay-for-news firm he launched in April with Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindrey. From the start, they’ve been offering infrastructure and consulting for news organizations that want to charge for access to their websites. But as you’d expect with any new venture, the pitch has changed over time. Here are some tweaks I’ve noticed:

Ditching the term “paywall”

Brill has always been clear that he isn’t advocating a subscription-only approach for news sites. Some content will be free, some will be available only to those who pay. But whereas Brill used to use the term “wall” to describe subscription content, he’s now abandoned that language. “We’re not putting up any kind of a paywall,” he’s been saying, most recently in a heated interview on WBUR. “It’s not a paywall,” he said at a Yale conference last week.

That’s a semantic distinction but one that naturally raises the question: What type of stuff will be subscription-only? I posed that question to Brill at Yale, seeking specific examples, but he wouldn’t say much beyond “unique” and “premium” content. (Steve Outing recently prompted an interesting thread on what, exactly, premium content is.) I didn’t come away with a clearer idea of what his clients intend to charge for, just that I shouldn’t call it a paywall.

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Zachary M. Seward | Nov. 20, 2009 | 3 p.m.

Tags: CNN, Financial Times, Gordon Crovitz, Guardian News and Media, Journalism Online, Leo Hindrey, loyalty, metered model, micropayments, New York Times, paid content, paywall, Poynter, Steve Brill, Steve Outing, subscriptions, WBUR

The once-defunct New York Sun is slowly rising

Seth Lipsky is ever-so-slowly resurrecting The New York Sun as a stripped-down, online-only version of the newspaper he ran between 2002 and 2008. “We plan to build it up,” he told me yesterday, referring to nysun.com.

His most-recent addition to the site is a 20-week run of crosswords by the Sun’s highly acclaimed, former puzzle editor, Peter Gordon. It’s a batch of crosswords that were left unpublished when the Sun folded more than a year ago, and cruciverbalists will have to shell out $20 for the puzzles. “We’re going to look at whether there’s interest and go from there,” Lipsky said.

I first wrote about the Sun peeking over the horizon in April, when society columnist Amanda Gordon (no relation to Peter) returned to covering benefits and parties for the site. Her compensation amounts to a revenue share with Lipsky for the sale of event photographs, like this recent gallery.

It’s notable that Lipsky — whose company, Two SL LLC, now owns the Sun’s name, archives, and website — has only added material that can pay for itself. He’s also published occasional opinion pieces by himself and others. “I want it to be self-sustaining,” he told me.

That will necessarily limit how much can be done with the site, which currently serves low-revenue ads (and some promotion for Lipsky’s new book) to an estimated 64,000 monthly visitors. Still, Lipsky said he hopes to bring more reporting to the site in a mix that might resemble the old paper, “which had a pretty lively national and international beat and culture stuff, too.”

For now, it’s society coverage, various musings on world affairs, and a well-regarded, $1-per-week crossword puzzle — an appropriately motley mix for the once-scrappy news organization with an outsized reputation. Peter Gordon has some other interesting plans for his puzzles, which I’ll write about soon.

Zachary M. Seward | Nov. 18, 2009 | 8 a.m.

Tags: Amanda Gordon, crosswords, New York Sun, paid content, Peter Gordon, photos, Seth Lipsky

Coalition of non-profit news organizations gets funding

The Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit news organizations that met for the first time this summer, is getting closer to launch: They’ve raised more than $500,000, one of the group’s leaders said today.

We first wrote about INN after their meeting in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., where the leaders of more than 20 nonprofits discussed ways they could collaborate on journalism, fundraising, and back-office operations. At a Yale Law School conference today, Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, told me that INN had received funding commitments from a variety of sources, including six-figure donations from the Knight Foundation, Open Society Institute, and Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Buzz Woolley, a one-time venture capitalist who helped found the Voice of San Diego, has also pledged two annual gifts of $100,000. With other, smaller funders, the total amounts to more than a half-million dollars, Buzenberg said.

Lois Beckett explained some of INN’s ambitions after the Pocantico meeting:

The network’s back-office collaborations may include teaming up for payroll and accounting, health care, libel insurance, web development, or legal and other services, as well as creating common templates for time-consuming documents like a memorandum of understanding. The collaborations, in addition to aiding exisiting news sites, could make it easier for startups to enter the field.

At Yale today, Buzenberg put it this way: “We can be the back office. We can create economies of scale.”

Zachary M. Seward | Nov. 14, 2009 | 4:41 p.m.

Tags: Bill Buzenberg, Center for Public Integrity, collaboration, fundraising, Investigative News Network, investigative reporting, libel insurance, nonprofit, Nonprofit Investigative News Network, Pocantico, Yale Law School

NYT’s Keller: “What you can do with less, is less”

When I was in San Francisco for ONA, a kind reader offered a blunt critique of my reporting: “You know, every time The New York Times sneezes, it isn’t news.” He’s right, and yet, here’s another post in which the Gray Lady clears her nose: Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor who’s becoming a regular around here, delivered a newsroom address on Thursday that touched on layoffs, efficiency, and charging for NYTimes.com. Read more

Zachary M. Seward | Nov. 9, 2009 | 12:46 p.m.

Tags: American Express, Arthur Sulzberger, Bill Keller, blogs, buyouts, circulation, CNN, copyediting, Daniel Gross, David Rohde, efficiency, Expedia, Janet Robinson, Jill Abramson, Journalism Online, layoffs, New York Times, New York Times Co., Newspaper Guild, Nielsen Online, ONA09, page design, paid content, San Francisco, Slate, Steve Brill, The Chicago Meeting, traffic, travel

Google News embraces self-identification of content

Some online-only news organizations were upset when Google News began attaching a “(blog)” label to their content two months ago. Others, like me, complained the label was outdated and inconsistently applied.

Now Google News is asking publishers to label themselves. In an update to its sitemap standards announced today, Google News is requesting that publishers explicitly tag content that’s published on a blog. Same goes for press releases, satire, opinion, user-generated content, and any articles that require registration or payment to read. The technical details are here.

Most of those labels will be visible to users of Google News, as they are now. Opinion and user-generated content won’t get a label but will presumably affect search results. And while tagging is voluntary, Google reserves the right to “add such designations to certain articles as necessary.”

I still don’t see why it matters if news is published on a blog or some other platform. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt ventured a distinction yesterday.) But allowing publishers to self-identify their content is a big improvement that should resolve most of the complaints Google News has been hearing — and which have been voiced to me in private. It’s a small issue with much bigger implications for how we consume, sort, and, yes, identify news in the future.

Zachary M. Seward | Nov. 5, 2009 | 7:18 p.m.

Tags: blogs, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google News, opinion, press releases, registration, satire, sitemap, subscriptions, tags, user generated content

Shield law: Definition of a journalist still up for grabs

Thanks to the American Society of News Editors, we can now read the compromise shield law hashed out last week by the White House, news-industry lobbyists, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. There are plenty of moving parts here, but I’ve been focused on the law’s definition of a journalist, as have others. The compromise takes an expansive view, covering amateur bloggers and student journalists as much as professional reporters.

For the most part, the Senate is merely returning to its original definition of a journalist, focused on the craft instead of the business. But there’s an additional line that requires an intent to distribute the information, which seems reasonable enough but could narrow the law’s scope. Here’s the relevant portion of the definition, with new language in italics: Read more

Zachary M. Seward | Nov. 2, 2009 | 11:37 a.m.

Tags: American Society of News Editors, House, Senate, Senate Judiciary Committee, shield law

GlobalPost generating revenue of $1 million in first year

Every future-of-news conference should invite Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project and CircLabs, if only to serve as the scribe. He was, fortunately, in attendance at yesterday’s conference on business models for news, hosted by our friends across Harvard Yard at the Shorenstein Center.

I’m always on the lookout for new data on the news industry, and there’s plenty in Densmore’s extensive notes from the event. In particular, I was interested to see traffic and revenue figures for GlobalPost, the international-news startup that launched in January with a mission to supplant the loss of newspaper foreign bureaus. Josh also jotted down notes that I’m using here.

Phil Balboni, chief executive of GlobalPost, said the company is on pace to generate $1 million in revenue this year and expects $3 million in revenue next year, which would reduce their operating loss by 50 percent. (He didn’t say so explicitly, but you might deduce from those numbers that GlobalPost’s annual expenses are $5 million.) The goal is to achieve profitability by 2012.

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Zachary M. Seward | Oct. 30, 2009 | 11 a.m.

Tags: advertising, Bill Densmore, CBS, CircLabs, freelancing, Global Post, Media Giraffe Project, New York Daily News, Phil Balboni, revenue, Shorenstein Center, subscriptions, syndication, traffic

Bill Keller trying to read the Times “mostly in digital forms”

As he absorbs more responsibility for the digital operations of The New York Times, executive editor Bill Keller is trying something that anthropologists would call participant observation: For three weeks, he’s been limiting his exposure to the print edition and consuming the Times in its various digital forms, “trying to better understand the joys and frustrations of our journalism delivered online,” as he put it in a meeting on Thursday.

John Temple, former publisher of the defunct Rocky Mountain News, suggested in July that newspaper editors spend time exclusively reading news on the web, but Keller (and Times managing editor Jill Abramson) are the first I know who have tried it. I emailed Keller to see how the experiment is going, and he obliged with some observations on comprehensiveness, serendipity, and the “balky and drab” experience of reading the Times on a Kindle: Read more

Zachary M. Seward | Oct. 20, 2009 | 3:53 p.m.

Tags: anthropology, Associated Press, BBC, Bill Keller, comments, David Rohde, iPhone, John Temple, Kindle, New York Times, participant observation, Rocky Mountain News, Times Reader, TimesPeople

What the NYT’s Bay Area Report looks like in print

The New York Times today debuted its Bay Area Report, a two-page, twice-weekly spread of local news that it hopes will boost print circulation in San Francisco, already the paper’s largest market outside the Northeast. The accelerated launch puts the Times ahead of its rival, The Wall Street Journal, in their battle for national print dominance. The Journal said today that its version of a local edition for San Francisco will be out by year’s end.

In an interview with paidContent, Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy said he expects local advertising to pay for the pages. Today’s second page of the Bay Area Report (somewhat weirdly paginated A23B) includes a full-color, half-page ad for Limn Furniture, a high-end retailer based in California. The Bay Area Report’s success will depend on whether the Times can continue to secure that kind of advertising while improving circulation enough to justify the effort.

After the jump, read (or download) the spread that 40,080 subscribers received this morning in San Francisco and its environs. Read more

Zachary M. Seward | Oct. 16, 2009 | 3:39 p.m.

Tags: advertising, Limn Furniture, local news, New York Times, print, San Francisco, Scott Heekin-Canedy, Wall Street Journal