Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper Execs Hold Secret Meeting To Discuss Paywalls
Techdirt got wind of a secret meeting by newspaper execs, complete with antitrust lawyers, to discuss how to proceed on the issue of implementing paywalls going forward. Of course, if newspapers decide to all lock away their content that just means the rest of us will have a bunch of great journalism talent to pick from soon thereafter. "You may have noticed a bunch of stories recently about how newspapers should get an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude -- working together to all put in place a paywall at the same time. That hasn't gone anywhere, so apparently the newspapers decided to just go ahead and try to get together quietly themselves without letting anyone know. But, of course, you don't get a bunch of newspaper execs together without someone either noticing or leaking the news... so it got out. And then the newspapers admitted it with a carefully worded statement about how they got together 'to discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of news gathering that will serve the American public.' And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved."
We all know paywalls won't work. However, the alternative is worse: if newspapers don't find a way to make money online soon, they'll start seriously blending advertising inside news content. I don't want that to happen!
One idea, based on what I have seen work abroad, is to mandate, for a limited time, a fee of $1 on all Internet connections. You could then use that monthly credit to subscribe to whatever content you chose. That would inject millions in the content economy. If what you want is free music, use your credit for that. If you want to read the New York Times, fine.
After a few years, phase out the fee (hum...). By then, people should have gotten used to it and you get a smooth transition to people using micro-payments for content. Any better ideas?
--
FairSoftware.net -- fair jobs for iPhone developers and graphic designers
*ring ring* ...
NY Times Editor: Marcus? Hi, it's Bill Keller from the New York Times and since we're all in agreement that today we put our paywalls, I just wanted to call you up and thank you again.
Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, Bill, we gotta do this--I mean, we just can't sustain without this revenue *snicker*.
NY Times Editor: Alright well, I'm calling because it's 10am now EST and we had all agreed that at midnight EST our papers would switch over to paywalls.
Washington Post Editor: Yep. That's right. *snort*
NY Times Editor: Yeah, well, your paper is still accessible without a paywall.
Washington Post Editor: What? Oh, man, hah, must be a bug. I'll get right on that!
*click*
Two hours later.
*ring ring*
NY Times Editor: Yeah, Marcus? It's Bill from the New York Times again, it's noon, still seeing a paywall on your site, what's up?
Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, it's a bad bug, we can't figure it out--might take weeks. *laughing in background*
NY Times Editor: Really? Well, we haven't had a single person sign up for our paywall and I'm looking at an ad online right now that says, "Washington Post: Because Information Wants to be Free." And, uh, I also am reading some comments on blogs about only idiots will ever use the New York Times from this point on. Am I on speaker phone?
Washington Post Editor: Bill, it's time I came clean. In the newspaper business, there are sheep and there are sharks
My work here is dung.
... to try to save a dying business model.
The reporters can always get day jobs and keep their writing game up at wikinews.
"How can we make ourselves even more irrelevant than we are now?"
---don't make me break out my red pen.
Sounds like a non-story to me. Or does the article submitter imply that whenever companies get together, they should invite the press and make it a fully open meeting?
Yeah, so they want to get paid for their work. Might as well spin this as: "Capitalism 2.0: Your time ain't free".
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Charging for stuff" is not "a" business model, it's business. What's not a business model is giving free rides. Something's gotta give.
to be fair, I'm not convinced that 'day jobs' will let reporters REALLY do research.
problem is, almost no local paper does research anymore and its only the 'biggies' that can afford it. the biggies are also the ones we cannot trust as they are too much in bed with the subject they are trying to do research on! its a big mess.
smaller independants are more trustable but their budgets are down to near zero now. so where do we get IN DEPTH stories from?
answer: we don't. the gov will soon control the data flow and news flow (in our lifetimes, we'll see this).
we are witnessing a change in info flow but its not all good, folks.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Do you think they will still allow Googlebot to crawl their web pages? If so I see nothing wrong with changing my user agent. Then again for the most part I listen to NPR and read the articles on their website. Support public broadcasting!
I call it "The Kindle does Cable:"
1. Stop printing news on paper.
2. Give out electronic devices that update automatically and wirelessly
3. Bill the users of those electronic devices a small but non-trivial monthly rate (say, $14.99 with a 2-year subscription)
4. Offer other publishers access to your platform for much larger sums. So a subscription to your paper also includes a subscription to the local sports magazine, dining guide, etc.
5. Work out a deal with Craigslist to deliver local classified ads for free.
They want their failed business model back.
Blame it on the greed and entitlement attitude of the average person. They want it all but don't want to pay for it. As a result, control falls to the organizations with a big enough hand to survive via other means.
As for the GP, you're an idiot. A journalist that can't focus on the subject at hand is worthless.
It's become trendy to say that bloggers do much of the work of the media and that is simply delusion. First of all, nearly all blog entries (including a large fraction of those on this site) are built around a link of a publication which employs its writers. Bloggers do a great job adding bits, contextualize and bringing together info, but they are most often not the generators of solid base information they work with. So if we really do lose newspapers we are not going to have the People's Republic of Blogistan stand up and replace them with real reporting, we're just going to have gasbaggery in its place.
Now the newspaper industry as a whole needs plenty of creative destruction on top of that. Now that news can freely travel across the country and the world, there's no need for every paper to have Washington bureau and foreign correspondents, and consolidation is much needed there. Likewise the stupid forays of the 90s into "new media" and the debt-fueled expansions also call for some of these business to go under. But that's about restructuring companies and an industry, not replacing paid professionals with everyone's favorite opinion.
My hope is that the newspapers will force the issue on micropayments. I would gladly pay $1, maybe $2 a day for a combination of stories from the Washington Post, NYT, LA Times, my local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on occasion some random others that I learned about from some blogger. I absolutely will not pay $20/mo to each of those. So if they can figure out a joint payment scheme that makes sense, I'm all for that. Double bonus points if they can use it to make their archives affordable and not priced for company and institutiional use.
I work for a newspaper company and we are going through this exact thing right now. The newspaper industry has gotten used to seemingly endless financing and now sites like Craigslist and Google are doing a better job at what makes newspapers money.
There is no money in journalism. The money comes from classifieds and sponsorship. Now that people can easily get their news from just about anywhere companies are not as willing to shell out major payments for newspaper ads.
Don't get me wrong, a paywall is a TERRIBLE idea but the news industry isn't cheap and people take it for granted. What other ideas are out there to keep news journalism profitable?
Yes, because great journalism talent will put their work on the web for free. /sarcasm
Remember, journalists have bills to pay and need to eat just like you. You wouldn't work for free, and neither will they. If they can't make money as journalists, they will get jobs doing something else. Seeing as great journalism is a full time job, there will be a major reduction in the quantity of quality journalism. But, crappy journalism with continue unabated.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
As an longtime consumer of printed media, I really have no problem paying for a subscription to a daily newspaper and a few magazines on subjects I care about. Back in the day, the primary benefit of a subscription was home delivery ("Never miss an issue!") and a discount off of what it would cost to buy the publication on the street.
So what are the possible benefits now? I can think of a few things that would make subscribing worthwhile:
- Access to articles -- this is the porn/academic journal approach where you can only see the good stuff if you pay. This only works if what you offer is REALLY good and not available elsewhere.
- Freedom from advertising -- I would pay $10/mo to NYTime Company today if they would stop putting animated ads and buttons on their pages.
- Convenient access -- this is the Kindle approach, where your subscription grants you access to well-formatted content from mobile or dedicated devices. This only works if the content is truly well-formatted, which it is often not on the Kindle. This is more or less the iTunes model, too, because you pay a small premium for the tight integration of content and device.
- Affiliation -- this is the public radio approach: you support the station, they send you t-shirts and other crap that allow you to identify in public as a supporter. Commercial media are kind of blind to this, but it has worked really well for some organizations for a long time.
Can a room full of newspaper execs come up with actual reasons why we should subscribe like this? I dunno. I doubt it. I suspect they will put up paywalls, but then continue to show annoying ads, ignore mobile devices, and botch the affiliation angle like they always have. Bankruptcy comes to all dinosaurs sooner or later. If they could learn from Slashdot (which has an *excellent* subscription scheme) they already would have.
Rupert Murdoch, speaking out on the news business, stated today that "the Internet free access model is clearly malfunctioning, as I don't make enough money from it. We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us."
Media commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. "How can we hold governments' feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?" Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls.
Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its "fair share" for so parasitically leading people to newspapers' websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. "We feel this is completely unfair," said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, "as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss." Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Ever see the footage from those ten cameras after ten different network editors have had a go at it?
One source, one series of questions... you'd think it would be one story, right? Wrong. Each network will edit the footage to say what they'd prefer it to say.
Anyone with an S-Band satellite dish who's spent time watching "wild feeds" - network uplinks of raw footage - who's then watched the finished product rolled out on the news a few hours later can confirm this. It's one of the reasons Bob Dole got trashed in the '96 election - media coverage just flat-out favored Clinton.
Drop the number of reporters and cameras down to one and you still have the one source, the one series of questions... but instead of being told the story ten different ways, you're now being fed one single pre-approved opinion.
There's no way that's a good thing.
I happen to work at a small(ish) rural newspaper that has an online edition. You can get the edition free if you pay by the year or have a 3 month auto-pay account. Otherwise you have to pay to either also get the online edition, or just get the online edition. It has been fine that way for seven years.
Everyone likes the New York Times, but if it's behind a paywall, everyone will go read Yahoo News instead. Right?
Everyone likes World of Warcraft, but since it's behind a paywall ($15/month!), everyone plays MapleStory instead. Right?
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times, and many more than that read it for free. 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
There's nothing wrong with paywalls, so long as you can make your product attractive enough to pay for.
Yes the man in a small war torn African nation dodges bullets, manages to scrape together a bowl of polluted water and rice and then runs down to his local internet coffee shop to hop online and post to his blog.
Seriously, no, important news does NOT occur obligingly where everyone has an open internet connection and the ability to use it.
I'm sure the buggy makers fought to keep their market share once the automobile industry started to dominate the market and we all know how well that worked out. CNN makes a metric buttload of money from ads online as probably do a lot of other news and pseudo news organizations. Newspapers can wall up their content instead of going to an online ad based revenue stream and kill themselves off altogether. The bottom line is news happens and there will be free sources to view it such as CNN. I'm not ever going to pay for online content.
You are confusing two separate issues. You don't need ten microphones to have ten "takes" on the facts. One mic is enough--sell the raw feed to everyone to spin as they please.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I may get modded down for this opinion. And I am to an extent playing Devil's advocate here.
Maybe monetizing this content isn't such a bad idea. One of the biggest problems with "big media" is that they answer to their advertisers and sponsors. These are the folks that pay the bills. With content being distributed free (beer), there is absolutely NO incentive for these organizations to put out a product that is anything more than a vehicle for advertising revenue.
So, fine. Monetize it. I'm willing to pay for a truly independent press. If the newspapers continue to spew crap, then people won't buy it. But maybe, just maybe, if these so-called professionals actually put their mind to it, they could publish material worth paying for. I pay for content all the time. The Economist, WSJ, New Yorker, Harpers. I do so because it is worth it to me. And these are writers that put out good work and they deserve to get paid. Maybe the newspapers could put out content worth paying for.
If there is anything I'm worried about its not monetization of newspaper content. It is whether these organizations have the vision to actually execute a transition to an Internet world. The whole buzz about Kindles and the NYT indicates they may be --starting-- to get it. But one beauty of free markets is that if they don't do it, someone else will.
I
Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research, investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.
The problem is they stopped working as independent watchdogs years ago. They have been promoting their own agenda for years while claiming to be neutral. The original newspapers were biased and proud of it. They came out and told you what they stood for and didn't pretend to give the other side a fair shake.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times, and many more than that read it for free. 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
Demographically speaking, those groups don't often overlap.
The 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly somewhat raised the bar for allowing privately-brought anti-trust suits to proceed, but its standard seems to be met here if they do actually implement pay walls, so a suit could at least go to trial. In Twombly, a suit against the Bells was thrown out because it only alleged parallel behavior (not itself illegal) and a claim of conspiracy to carry it out not backed up by any allegations specifying why the plaintiff had any reason to believe it actually was coordinated. Here you can state a sufficient pleading easily: if they simultaneously introduce pay walls, you have parallel behavior, and you additionally allege that they had a meeting at which they discussed carrying out said parallel behavior in concert. Not sure that alone would allow a plaintiff to actually prevail at trial, but it should at least allow a suit to go forward investigating it if this happens (assuming the newspapers don't get a Congressional exemption).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
but some newspapers will die. The world is changing, and what made lots of money in the past, makes less money today. Some news outlets will still find a way to be profitable, but it's a shrinking pie.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
there's your investigative journalism replacement
http://consumerist.com/
if you are a journalist, start your own blog if you have enough star power, or join a collective of investigative reporters and if the site is useful enough that it generates huge traffic, enjoy your adsense income
the traditional newspaper is fractionating into its various columns, sections, and star power reporters, each developing their own pioneering site on the web. the internet IS the newspaper
money will still be made, power will still exist, influence will still be felt, trust will still be earned. but the traditional forms of the mass media news- not just newspapers but also television, will be blended into a puree and new mutant forms will grow into being
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This story is nonsense from start to finish. Yes, some newspaper execs got together and discussed paywalls. Big deal.
There is nothing illegal about that. I realize everyone on Slashdot thinks of himself as an antitrust expert, but industry people do this all the time. Credit card companies have trade associations, and so do banks, car dealers, fast food franchisees, and book publishers.
"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.
Omigosh! An industry conference! But if we call it a "quickie conclave" it sounds sinister...
In which they discussed ways their members might adapt to the market! Stop the presses! Wait - they apparently had some legal counsel to make sure they weren't breaking the law! Wow!
This story is sensationalist nonsense. There is truly nothing to see here. The best part is the guy from the Atlantic whining about the decline of journalism, while simultaneously providing an example.
Advice: on VPS providers
AP Content is all over the place. Most people weren't aware of how much of their daily news was filled by AP until the internet made it apparent. The WSJ has been successful as a pay model because 1) they create a significant amount of their own content, and 2) People want to read it. When you look online, the local newspapers aren't just competing with each other - they are competing with the TV news as well. With 4 sources coming up with the same stories, the reader will turn to the source they are most familiar with. When that source turns out to be too noisy (either with bad content, too many ads, poor layout), people will leave. There are other places to go. The papers aren't losing money because they can't make money online - they are losing money because they don't understand the marketplace they are attacking. They want "more revenue, more visitors" so they put up more ads, shock articles, and spam (pardon me, astroturf) other sites. Instead they should be thinking about things like visitor retention and how to attract long term customers.
The internet in the beginning was about how to make information more accessible. Too big a focus on commerce is bad.
If, say, the LA Times - with their vast library of news from the last 100 years made their archives publicly accessible from day 1, they would be one of the most popular sites on the web. They would be consistently cited, consistently searched, consistently visited. Instead they decided to charge a few bucks an article for their archives - and while they made a few dollars - the focus on monetizing rather than informing resulted in a lost opportunity to increase their company value by 20,000%.
---This problem cannot be solved by technology.
Oh, it absolutely can. Current transaction costs are exacted by Banks and credit companies. Their merchant fees are insane, something on the range of .5-2$ + 3%. And banks have straight 2-4$ fees for anything money handling. If a digital microcurrency could be made using strong crypto (1995 paper by RSA guys showed how to do it), then we could cut out the banks, other than trading in and out of the microcurrency.
---Sure, you can make a system that reduces the seller's transaction costs to near zero, but all this work has completely ignored the buyer's transaction costs. With micropayments, you're asking your customers to spend more time managing their micro-account than the product you're selling is worth.
Do you honestly think that transaction management of costs ranging from .01 cents (yes, 1/100 of 1 cent) all the way up should be done by a person? What're you smoking?
Your "PayBox" is a forwards and backwards counting micropayment machine. You make the rules on what you allow, and what you deny. You set warnings when certain thresholds are met. You make the general rules, or use preconfigured ones. You can override these "rules" by warning you what the rule break does.
Eventually, everybody would be able to use a micropayment architecture, including massive media. It'd be rather nice if we create the content, and have a very small, nonzero price that we actually pay for our surfing.
---Suppose I have a micropayment account which charges to my credit card each month. I read all the articles I want because, hey, it's only a few cents. One of these days I'm going to look at my statement and the total for that month will be over $100 -- more than I intended to spend.
Your financial rules would have stopped that before you "saw the bill".
---Micropayments are not good for the customers, and unsurprisingly, people have not been willing to pay them.
You're right they're not good for customers, because money handles make is impossible to throw a 1$ at a website for good information without spending 5$ to do so.
Im investigating a business that does precisely this: enables people to make money.
It's been suggested before but the only way the 'traditional' news media can compete is if they use technology to their advantage. By the time the newspaper is printed most of the information is stale. The perils of a connected society.
Now a subscription to a Kindle-like device that provides current information and also has investigative stories would be a winner. Timely information, serious reporting, targeted advertising, the whole deal. Publication costs would be minimal and they could expand on what they already do.
The old model is broken and will continue to be broken as long as there's instant access to information. Notice I didn't say news because newspapers aren't about news any more. They're about information. Angelina Jolie's latest shoe purchase isn't news. It's information but there's no way it should be on the front cover of anything that calls itself a newspaper.
If the price was right I'd get a subscription to my local paper using a Kindle. There's lots of things in there that I'd like to know and it would be darn handy to have a classified ad with me when I had time to call or a list of the yard sales I want to visit.
But they can't get their heads out of the business model that worked 100 years ago nor do they see the opportunities for this kind of change.
The New York Times ditched its paywall a couple of years ago. Apparently people would rather read Yahoo News.
Exactly. The problem that mass media is facing right now is how many stories about Octo-Mom do we actually ***want*** to pay for?!?! Who wants to pay to read the latest ***breaking news*** about some missing white chick from B.F.E.? How much are people willing to pay to be constantly scared about Swine Flu? Maybe if MSM actually produced some worthwhile stories that we'd actually want to read, they wouldn't be in this problem in the first place. But lately, 90% of the garbage they produce isn't exactly worth reading in the first place. So it seems like we're seeing Darwin's Natural Selection process at work in the journalism industry right now,...
What about treating news like a public service? Have it publicly funded and held accountable with a model similar to how the BBC news operates in the UK?
The problem I see is that most newspapers are just glorified repackaging of newswire services with the odd local story and some opinion pieces that serve the owner's political agenda. That was all fine and well in the past, but the culture and technology has moved on and old business model is as dead as a downtown blacksmith ranting about how cars are damaging his horseshoe repair business.
Agreed. Why should I care if the media as it exists now fails? Something will evolve to replace it that works. I'm sure that the 'messengers & criers guild' had similar meetings once the first printing presses started cranking out daily papers, why would this be any different? Of course the people with vested interests are having secret meetings. Their monopolies that they have worked to carve out are threatened.
Human technological advancement is a history of the 'new' dragging the 'old' out in the street and beating its brains out with a dull rock. It's always messy, and anyone tied to the 'old' never makes it easy.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Everyday the local metropolitan newspaper (in my case the Boston Globe) provides coverage of dozens and dozens of events...
Do they? Or do they just buy a AP or Reuters story, chop it down to 2 paragraphs and print it? Because pretty much every story I see in newspapers is just rehashed AP news.
They might cover local news, but how much local news is truly 'news worthy'?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I canceled my subscription to the local paper in 2006. Here's the letter I wrote to them:
I have decided not to renew my N&O subscription. I have been wavering for a few weeks. After having been a subscriber for many years, my "automatic" renewal came into question because of a number of factors:
- A change in delivery person a few months ago has resulted in late deliveries, wet paper deliveries, and no delivery in one case. I do not care to wonder when, if, or in what condition my paper is to arrive each day.
- Your "innovative" use of stick-on ads on the front page is offensive.
- Your lack of editorial or other coverage of the president's willful and systematic destruction of constitutional checks and balances, with congressional complicity, leads me to believe that you are asleep, don't care, or otherwise not doing your job.
- In contrast, the ink spent on the local hockey team was huge - massively excessive in comparison to the many ways in which this nation is destroying itself.
- Your paper's increasingly tabloid look and feel is unbecoming a serious newspaper. You seem to be descending to the level of the failed Durham Herald, or USA Today ("News Lite").
- The daily changes in how things are collated makes it harder to identify and discard the many parts of your paper I don't care to peruse, mainly classified and inserted ads and sports.
- Finally, the long-standing placement of tear-off ads running the length of the comic pages most Sundays has been a source of continuing irritation.
In short, my message to you is that if you want my business, you would do well to stop annoying me. If you make substantive changes in any of the above areas, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, I hope you can make a living from your happy hockey fans.
If that were true then Fox News would have folded years ago...
I somewhat agree with your point, but I recommend caution about praising mainstream media too much...
A few days ago, a hurricane (cyclone) struct eastern India and the nearby region. Over 100 killed and millions strongly impacted. Being a highly agricultural region, this event will have long lasting effects for the farmers... [crops don't like salt!]
Try to find one mention of it in Yahoo news. You can't!!! Not even in the Asia section...
Yet, Yahoo faithfully reports that 6 people were killed in a South American earthquake... Yes, this is also tragic, but how did this get picked up and the other event not?
Yahoo pulls from many major news sources... They aren't the only game in town, but are pretty big nonetheless...
newspapers are supposed to provide. If we're going to be informed, we need paid boots on the ground at the routine school board and other government agency meetings and corporate board of directors meetings and press conferences.
Note that I said routine. The meetings where interesting things are expected to happen will have plenty of people tweeting out of them and plenty of blog postings afterwards. Sometimes, routine turns into 'all hell breaks loose' and then, it's a very good thing there's a reporter there if there is one. But if nothing much happens, a reporter can build relationships with involved parties who can explain the context and the players when things are no longer routine and there's a story to cover.
However,given the decreasing credibility of the mass media, (WHO told us that the War on Iraq was a good idea by parroting Bush Administration propaganda?) and the increasing awareness that the media news agenda is dictated by people whose interests and ours have nothing in common, of course you're going to find fewer and fewer people willing to pay for the product.
Paywalls will hasten the demise of every publication that doesn't provide anything worth buying. Not only due to direct effects, but google isn't going to provide a whole lot of reader eyeballs to content it can't access, and blogs aren't going to be pointing people at content their owners don't find worth buying on the average.
We need new business models that will subsidize "beat reporters". I hope they evolve, but I'm pretty sure that they won't come out of corporate-owned media. How can you get paid for local reporting without a corporate owner?
Tech Public Policy stuff