Dutch Gov. Wants To Tax Online Media To Fund Print

Godefricus writes "Outrage ensued among Dutch techie and media websites, after a government report advised that the dwindling print media industry should be financially supported by the online industry (Google translation; Dutch original here). The idea is to help the old media fund 'innovative initiatives.' The suggested implementation of the plan is by taxing a percentage of each ISP subscription, and give the money to the papers. The report, which was solicited by the Dutch parliament and written by a committee of its members, specifically states that 'news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.' The report is not conclusive, but from here it's just one step toward a legislative proposal. Both industries are largely privately owned in The Netherlands, and the current government is center-left wing. Who needs an RIAA if you can build one into your government? And hey, why invest in the future if you can invest in the past?"

Comments

Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[SigILL]

The responsible minister already said "no" (Dutch language article and I'm too lazy to translate; learn Dutch you slackers :)).

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[dtml-try MyNick]

"Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times"

Actually, I'm shocked. News on Slashdot that is less then 24 hrs old.
What went wrong?

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[elloGov]

Nederlands is lelijk hoor.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Could be worse.
The news papers will only report about this tomorrow.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[SigILL]

Nederlands is lelijk hoor. [Dutch is ugly]

Come one, you gotta like a language in which "angstschreeuw" and "slechtstschrijvend" are perfectly valid words. It's like Perl (only less regular)! :)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Traa]

Come one, you gotta like a language in which "angstschreeuw" and "slechtstschrijvend" are perfectly valid words. It's like Perl (only less regular)! :)

angstscreeuw = fear scream (one word in Dutch) = 8 consonants in a row
slechtstscrijvend = worst written (one word in Dutch) = 9 consonants in a row

some more fun examples from the Dutch language:
koeieuier = Cow's udder = 7 vowels in a row
Jazzzinger = Jazz Singer = 3 z's in a row

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit, where are my mod points when I need them!

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the eight consonants? And what are the 9? I'll give you that there are seven and eight, and that that's ugly enough, but check your counting.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the eight consonants? And what are the 9? I'll give you that there are seven and eight, and that that's ugly enough, but check your counting.

angstschreeuw (including the H the parent forgot, 'screeuw' is not a word in Dutch, 'schreeuw' means scream) has 8 consonants (although 'ng' and 'ch' are pronounced as one)
slechtstschrijvend (including the H the parent forgot, 'scrijvend' is not a word in Dutch, 'schrijvend' means writing) has 9 consontant (although 'ch' is pronounced as one)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[MRe_nl]

that's because it's spelled "angstschreeuw"
and "slechtstschrijvend", but the "h"seems to have dropped out of both words in his post.

koeienuier?
Jazzzanger or jazzzangeres, maar jazzzinger? it just doen't klink right;).

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Stephan202]

You forgot the hs in "angstschreeuw" and "slechtstschrijvend". Also, "slechtstschrijvend" translates to worst writing (not written). Lastly, the correct word is "Jazzzanger" (with an a instead of an i).

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[xonen]

"koeieuier"

According to new (1996) spelling this is supposed to be 'koeienuier'.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Daily Show Special Report

Jason Jones: Tell me a joke.
New York Times manager: No, that's your job.
JJ: You wanna hear one from me? Okay. What's black and white and red all over?
NYT: A newspaper.
JJ: No, your balance sheet.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[rve]

No, no no, you don't understand at all how politics in Eurostan work.

If a committee proposes something, this means "The government wants it, it is law, reach for your guns!"

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

ZeeÃn.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, zeeën

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[borizz]

Yes, dat soundt belachelijk in mijn ears.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[rve]

Zeeeendeeieren

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[mcvos]

koeienuier?

Gah! Stupid new spelling messing with perfectly funny words.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[mcvos]

I'm afraid there's supposed to be some hyphens in that word according to the latest spelling misform.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[gzipped_tar]

It's like Perl (only less regular)!

"Perl is like French: Everything in you say in it sounds dirty"

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Autoachterruitverwarmingindicatielampje. :)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[mcvos]

The news papers will only report about this tomorrow.

Funny? Insighful! Every time I read a newspaper, I'm surprised I'm reading yesterday's news. I love reading from paper, but as a medium for reporting the latest news, it's obsolete. They should focus more on background and analysis for the factoids you've already read online. (Which is exactly the business model of my current newspaper, which is one of the few Dutch newspapers that's growing.)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[iNaya]

No, it's still "koeieuier" on Slashdot. See subject.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

imagine dutch scrabble. jazzinger on a triple word score!

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[The_Noid]

Rabarberbarberabarbarbarenbaardenbarbier...

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily some great Dutch mind invented the - so those words are usually written like "jazz-zanger" which is a bit less horrible. At least German is worse ;)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[AlXtreme]

They should focus more on background and analysis for the factoids you've already read online.

The problem is that newspapers now have to choose who to focus on: People who get their daily news online, and people who don't.

As more and more people get their news-fix continuously throughout the day (hitting F5 on nu.nl has become an important part of Dutch work culture already) there will be less people that need cleaned-up press releases and there will be more that expect in-depth analysis on topics they saw online yesterday. But currently newspapers do have to cater to both groups.

Until e-readers become viable and open enough, in-depth analysis remains territory of newspapers. But in the end, they will go the way of the dodo.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[mcvos]

The problem is that newspapers now have to choose who to focus on: People who get their daily news online, and people who don't.

That's not the problem, that's the solution. More focused news papers, more accurately tailored to the way their readers read news.

(hitting F5 on nu.nl has become an important part of Dutch work culture already)

Wait, doesn't nu.nl reload automatically every minute or so?

there will be less people that need cleaned-up press releases and there will be more that expect in-depth analysis on topics they saw online yesterday. But currently newspapers do have to cater to both groups.

NRC Next caters specifically to the internet people. They don't do headlines, have all the important "latest news" factoids crammed into the bottom half of page 3, and the rest is background. Quite often background to something that was big on internet the day before (like that Iranian girl).

Although in some ways, NRC Next is more a daily lifestyle paper than a real news paper, which is probably a sign of how futile it is to bring real news when you have to compete with internet.

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[KingBenny]

i was about to rant but the 'no' is ok lol ... someone should explain the benefits of the 'new' media to these ppl. No millions of webpages thrown away everyday on the streets, no webpage that's outdated at the time of print (depending on the author ofc) ... no newspaper that can be read / commented / discussed by thousands of ppl at once ... etc , i'm sure you people know, but someone is apparently missing the point, or just progress-o-phobic (is there a word for that ?)

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

good Dutch, buddy!
talking about counting consonants, which one is, in Dutch, more consonant? "a" or "e"? I guess "e", since is in both funny words at the beginning. Crap, that would screw the counting of the vowels in the 3'd funny word...
I give up

Re:Slashdot is, as usual, behind the times

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Swedish writers and publishers used a spelling systems similar to Dutch before Swedish spelling was, kind of, standardised in 1801. It feels natural when you got a language were most dialects have 200-500 phonemes and you only got 21 characters to use. Most languages have, of course, extended that character set (26(?) in English, 25-38 in modern Swedish (28 according to our school books, but with accepted alternate spelling forms you dont have too use w, z and q outside personal names if you don't want to)), let characters or character combinations be used for many different phonemes and also added things like diacritics and ligatures.

Nowadays our (Swedish) spelling is based on one of our most phoneme lacking group of dialects (roughly only twice as many phonemes as in an English dialect) and our spelling don't even reflect most of the phoneme-combinations in that dialect group. Unfortunately, the lack of expressiveness in our written language are creeping into our spoken language. As an example the spelling reform of 1906 removed spelling with hv (very short and soft h-sound before the v-sound, like "hvete", en: wheat) and replaced it with a simple v (like "vin", en: wine); most younger Swedes never pronounce the h beacause they learned most of their vocabulary from written text or even stop pronounce the h in a word when they see the such a word in writing, without the h, for the fist time.

In a couple of generation we too will probably communicate with primitive grunts and groans, just like the English speaking world ;)

Lobbyists

[MathFox]

Actually it is a report from the newspaper lobby and the responsible minister has already spoken out against the proposal.

Re:Lobbyists

[Godefricus]

No it is not. It is a report from a formal and powerful committee from within the parliament (Commissie Brinkman.) The minister did make an informal comment - thankfully - against this proposal shortly after receiving the report, but we have yet to await his final decisions -- and that of his civil servants et al. This could well be a matter of months.

Re:Lobbyists

[ReinoutS]

Brinkman hasn't been a Member of Parliament since 15 years or so. The other members of the committee aren't MPs either, but journalists.

Buggy Whip Subsidies

[JonBuck]

This makes about as much sense as the government taxing automobiles to keep buggy whip manufacturers alive.

Why link it to online?

[Fuseboy]

Taxing ISPs specifically, seems ass-backwards. If you're going to subsidize an outdated industry (which, hey, is done all over the place) why not fund it out of tax revenue generally, rather than putting a brake specifically on the internet? How about a new tax on cigarettes? :-)

Re:Why link it to online?

[Znork]

Taxing ISPs specifically, seems ass-backwards.

Well, they want to blame someone, and the ISP's are probably as much 'internet' as you get.

why not fund it out of tax revenue generally

Because then it becomes part of the general budget and people start asking why we're spending that much on subsidies. Common strategy in the IP industries; if politicians actually had to justify the costs they'd be downsized in a heartbeat. Of course, calling it 'media production fee' and slapping it on the broadband, or calling it 'copyright' and letting private interests decide the rate doesn't really change the essence or the cost to the economy.

Still, when it comes to the news business, few seem to be willing to face the actual problem; news is vastly overproduced. There is simply so much material to read every day that nobody can read anywhere near even a fraction of very narrow fields of interest. The fact that it costs money to produce news simply isn't the problem; todays more concentrated world has made the readers time the scarce product, a problem that no subsidies will solve.

Re:Why link it to online?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this goes against groupthink, but it may actually be a good thing, at least in the short-to-intermediate term. Online media comes in two distinct forms - firstly, as a branch of traditional media (eg, online newspapers), and secondly, as independent web-only reports (blogs). Now, the blogs are almost exclusively rehashes of traditional media - so if traditional media completely dies, what will the blogs do? That's why it's a good thing in the short-to-medium term to keep traditional media alive. And because traditional media is being harmed by "The Internet", some short-sighted bureaucrat or politician thought "hey, why not punish The Internet" (without realising that content providers /=/ ISPs /=/ "The Internet", or the inherent problems in regulatory CPR).

Long term is a completely different story. My personal belief of what would happen if traditional media collapsed would be one of two possibilities - either traditional media will manage to somehow survive in an online format (despite their content being mirrored by other blogs which may not have whatever inconvenience the traditional media's revenue model has), or blogs will actually implement the egalitarian idea of "many eyes" reporting (blogs reporting on their local scene, and all the interesting stories being scraped by other blogs). The first would mean that news reporting would be just as bad as it is now, but the second could go either way. Either the lack of QC in the original post will mean that the low quality will reverberate in every subsequent repost, OR, people will seek out high calibre scrapes, which will favour high quality original reports (not that quality and popularity are necessarily synonymous in news reporting). Thus a market-driven QC, and everyone's happy.

Re:Why link it to online?

[jcr]

I know this goes against groupthink,

No, it goes against logic altogether.

Things change. Printing news on mass quantities of paper is on its way to becoming a museum hobby, and that's as it should be. The proposal at hand is to penalize a productive sector of the economy to keep people and resources misallocated. There are sentimental reasons for keeping newspapers around, but if it made economic sense to do so, they wouldn't be going belly-up.

I wonder if anyone proposed taxing kerosene to pay idle whalers when people gave up on whale-oil lamps?

-jcr

Re:Why link it to online?

[johannesg]

Taxing ISPs specifically, seems ass-backwards. If you're going to subsidize an outdated industry (which, hey, is done all over the place) why not fund it out of tax revenue generally, rather than putting a brake specifically on the internet? How about a new tax on cigarettes? :-)

I have two more questions:

1. Every day, 3 or 4 completely free newspapers are being spread in every trainstation (and many other places) here in the Netherlands. If "news cannot be free", as the commission claims, does this mean we need to raise an extra public transportation tax to compensate for this free news as well?

2. If the newspapers are being hurt so badly by free news available on the internet, why do they put their own content on the internet? And given that this pain is apparently self-inflicted, why would everybody need to pay for it?

The claim that "news cannot be free" is bogus: news on the internet is paid for by advertising. It is hard to believe that a website such as nu.nl would exist for so long without any revenue. The existence of free newspapers furthermore proves that paid subscriptions are not a necessity for running a newspaper.

Also, the claim that quality journalism is a necessity for democracy is laughable. Well, actually it isn't - it's just that I see too many cut'n'paste jobs of ANP news in too many newspapers every day. This quality investigative journalism of which they speak seems to be a mythological ideal, rather than reality.

Re:Why link it to online?

[mvdwege]

Actually, I wouldn't mind taxing the free newspapers to clean up the mess left by them. They've gotten away with having the municipality and the public transport companies pay for that externality for far too long in my opinion.

Mart

Re:Why link it to online?

[EMCEngineer]

Every time newspapers are brought up, we get the old arguments about how they are dying, out of date, and irrelevant - with lame historical comparisons that don't make sense.

The problem is this - despite well known media failures, the newspaper industry does a majority of the in depth reporting and investigative journalism. The technophiles of Slashdot seem to ignore what we are losing, because they think looking up something online is just as good. When the newspapers die out, who will actually research any stories? Instead you will get a blog by a semi-literate, along with the suggestion to read wikipedia for background information.

Amateur newsgatherers will not adequately replace what we have. TV news is soundbites - no real content, just attention grabbing blather. How many times have you heard something like "This popular xxxxx could be deadly! We'll tell you about it at 10 PM." As for 60 minutes or similar shows, they do some minor analyses, but still fail in many key areas - mainly neutrality and science.

I do not think new taxes are the answer. I do think that when the newspapers die, they will be replaced by something worse - and that will be bad for everyone.

Re:Why link it to online?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's long past time to tax the automakers so we can subsidize the buggywhip manufacturers, who are being driven (pun intended) out of business by these new-fangled horseless carriages! If God had intended Man to drive around without horses, He would have put wheels on our feet! /sarcasm

Newspaper publishers can't figure out how to make money from their product (which is mostly stolen wholesale from other newspapers anyhow, there's no real cost in plagarism), and now they want the barely-profitable-but-orders-of-magnitude-faster competition to pay for their lush lifestyle? Suck it, newspapers. Die in a fire. At least we can read about your death *on* *the* *same* *day* *it* *happens* through the Internet.

Maybe you could sell your newsprint as birdcage liners, and save all that money being wasted on "reporters" who do nothing but cut-and-paste from Internet sources, and on printing, which does nothing but delay the delivery until it's irrelevant.

Re:Why link it to online?

[jcr]

The quality of their work, or the lack thereof is entirely beside the point. The question at hand is whether to rob productive activities to support unproductive activities, which makes us all that much poorer.

If you like newspapers, then great: buy as many copies as you like. Just don't go mugging anyone else to keep them afloat, and we don't have a problem.

-jcr

Re:Why link it to online?

[EMCEngineer]

Your nomenclature is wrong. Newspapers are productive, but not profitable. So you are taxing profitable activities to pay for unprofitable ones.

If you ignore the quality of their work, sure, fire all the employees and never have printed news again. The quality of the work is one of the key points, and is the entire point of the argument. Let's look at your example - "taxing kerosene to pay idle whalers when people gave up on whale-oil lamps"

Kerosene was a better product, and more easily made. It replaced whale-oil for those reasons. The internet/newspaper issue is completely different. The internet is a tool - but it does not replace the primary purpose of newspapers - gathering and distributing news. The internet may greatly speed dissemination of information, but it does not help gather news, and does nothing for accountability or veracity.

A free press is vital to democracy. Letting ours die and be replaced by blogging is going to hurt the country.

I am not advocating for the tax. I AM advocating for newspapers.

Re:Why link it to online?

[jcr]

A free press is vital to democracy. Letting ours die and be replaced by blogging is going to hurt the country.

Just how free do you expect the press to be if it's living on the government teat?

-jcr

The amazon thanks

[chrisreichel]

That's another way to say: Visit your newspaper online and cut a tree.

Re:The amazon thanks

[afabbro]

The Amazon thanks

They planted spruce, fir, and pine in the Amazon rainforest?

Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[erroneus]

What other newer technologies support older ones I have to wonder? I won't say that print media is "out" because I think it is still a very important thing to maintain. After all, once a newspaper commits to print, it can't effectively be changed. It was said and published, for better or for worse, whatever it was it will always be. With digital, there is a risk that few people take into account -- archives and editing. Anything stored digitally can be altered, often without a trace. History of events can be changed to suit whatever interests are pushing their agenda. The best you can do with print is burn it and hope that no one questions why it's missing.

But to tax one medium to support another? There is something wrong with that.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[twidarkling]

After all, once a newspaper commits to print, it can't effectively be changed. It was said and published, for better or for worse, whatever it was it will always be.

Yep, after all, "Dewey Defeats Truman" will always be!

And hey, not like there's ever been forgeries of ancient documents. Got access to a printing press? Whip up your own version of history, and leave it some place safe to age, and hundreds of years from now, you'll mindfuck some archaeologists!

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[Locke2005]

Anything stored digitally can be altered, often without a trace. Ever heard of the Wayback machine? If information is made available for free, and massively redundant copies are made of it, then revisionism is very easy to detect by doing diffs against the copies. You can only run a Ministry of Truth if you control ALL the copies of the information.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[portnux]

What a cool idea! Maybe before that they can tax sneaker companies to support their wooden shoe industry though!

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[Darkness404]

Exactly, and the ministry of truth can only work with print media (or uncrackable DRM) because within the next ~30 years it wold be reasonable to assume that an average hard drive could archive about half of the static content on the web.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[Anonymous Coward]

It fits in one way. There'll be horses long after every car currently on the road is gone and books printed today will out live every computer working today. It's not that one is inherently better it's that they both have there place. Computers suck for long term storage where as paper books can last a thousand years and parchment much longer. Books and papers will continue to serve a purpose for the foreseeable future. Next time the power goes out you'll see the limitations on computers and digital media. I had a blackout a year ago and I wound up reading a book by candle light. I played a movie on my notebook first but the battery was dead shortly after the movie finished and the blackout lasted 8 hours. The book came in really handy. The law was a bad idea but it doesn't lessen books and newspaper's value. One day people will laugh at the old digital days and how archaic it all was but I'll bet there are still books around while they are laughing.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[dimeglio]

I think we already saved thousands if not millions of trees since on-line media came about. Give yourself a nice tap in the back if you didn't print this. We don't have paper-less offices but offices with a lot less paper. I think this is just inevitable industry displacement.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[Baki]

In fact: alsmost yes. New cars are taxed with about 40% "luxury" tax. After the EU has finally forbidden this, it is being abolished over the timeframe of 12 years, but as a replacement new taxes are being invented on car traffic. The enormous amount of tax from cars is being used for many other things, mainly not for roads and car infrastructure.

Re:Dutch Govt to tax cars to feed horses too?

[der_joachim]

Apparently the wooden shoe companies are small but healthy. They sell them to tourists nowadays. Oh, and they have already long fled the Netherlands with its over-the-top tax climate.:)

Explosion in the irony factory...

[mooingyak]

The report, which was solicited by the Dutch parliament and written by a committee of its members, specifically states that 'news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.'

It's a shame those newspapers don't have any means of getting this kind of information out to the public.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[clarkkent09]

It's a shame those newspapers don't have any means of getting this kind of information out to the public.

Well that's kind of the point, nobody's reading them.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[SatanicPuppy]

Not really true. It's just that the vast majority who are reading anything from them, are reading it online.

The trickle of ad revenue from the online sites (assuming the story doesn't get picked up by the AP) doesn't cover the costs of a massive brick and mortar printing and distribution operation.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[Endo13]

Also, that "Whoosh" sound you heard was neither superman nor an airplane.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[DigitAl56K]

News *is* free, the gathering and dissemination of news may or may not be.

Random thoughts:

Conventional news sources ought to reflect on the recent coverage of Iran, which came to us almost exclusively by YouTube and Twitter. In fact, you would have been better off reading twitter's #iranelection topic than watching TV this past week. CNN was late to the game with their coverage. FOX News provided coverage that mainly involved talking heads and the same YouTube clips you could find easily on your own, but out of all networks (and I cringe when I say this) they provided the most extensive coverage of the protests this weekend. MSNBC re-ran docudramas all weekend.

I don't read computing news from printed magazines any more, yet there are a lot of computing-news websites that seem to do alright as web-based mediums. Some made a successful transition to the online world, others faltered. Some still run print editions for those who prefer them. Print, and "old media" in general shouldn't get a free pass. If I was going to have to pay taxes on my internet access (which is ridiculous) I'd rather they supplemented the web-based media I do use anyway. Maybe we'd see less ads that way. (Okay, probably not).

Web based "community"-organized news isn't ready to entirely supplant consolidated professional journalism, but the technologies and communities are evolving, and print-based publishers better realize that their value is in their content and not in their medium.

Re:Explosion in the irony factory...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh to you sir.

Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Beginning Disclaimer: I work for a print newspaper.

This sounds like about the worst idea I've ever heard. We've been living on the gravy train for decades, and as a consequence, we piss away money like it's water. Now things have gotten tight, and we're cutting and cutting deep, and a lot of outlets may go under, but so be it.

This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts. First off, there are very few independent papers left, so you're really talking about bailing out another industry with overpaid CEOs who can't make a decent business decision to save their lives. The same people who really really thought the solution to their industrys internet problem was to give away their product for free. Right. Second, the news media has only one real legitmate function: to inform you about the actions the government is taking in your name. Having the government bail them out is a little bit problematic for that reason.

The industry is changing. It's evolving. It will become something else. Trying to persist the current model is bound to fail, and propping them up with public cash does nothing but compromise their mission and prevent them from figuring out how to accurately make their transition. Jesus, just look at GM if you want to know what public money does to a private company.

Re:Bad idea.

[hedwards]

Well, this is a tad bit different. Over all I do agree with you that this sort of intervention isn't a good idea. At best it's discouraging papers and other sources that are trying to remedy those sorts of problems.

But, by the same token living in a one paper town isn't good. It's the little things like a while back there was an article on a city employee that was seeking the names of those that were taking advantage of the cities GLBT meetings and get togethers. A fairly reasonable request, but the paper opted to gloss over the part where he's a white separatist with barely a mention. That's kind of glaring omission is far more likely to happen if there aren't other viable outlets looking for the best story possible.

I'm not personally sure that losing one or two of the big three would represent a similar threat to the democratic process.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

In half the 2 paper towns these days, both papers are owned by the same goddamn company!

I think multiple competing news sources are a good thing, but I also think, in this country, that the ability to sort and judge good information from bad information is a skill that we are intentionally not teaching our children. On top of that, we are rewarding news sources (Faux News, I'm looking at you) for providing biased and substandard coverage.

That being the case, I'd really prefer to see one decent source rather than a half dozen crap sources.

Re:Bad idea.

[Starlon]

You won't find that. One would prefer one perfect candidate over 12 different candidates with different views on politics, but you won't find that. Diversity isn't all that bad of a thing.

Re:Bad idea.

[f0dder]

Loved GM's idea of spending millions during the NBA playoffs & finals for an ad campaign telling people how they've changed, learned their lessons, and will be a more responsible company. WTF??

Re:Bad idea.

[chebucto]

Newspapers living on the gravy train? Pissing away money? That's news to me; I know some journalists and they get paid at the low end of the professional wage spectrum.

Few independent newspapers left? Overpaid CEOs? This is probably accurate, but it doesn't follow that a newspaper bailout is just about the industry; the individual papers remain, and still serve a purpose, whether or not they're part of a empire at the moment.

Oh, and the CEOs didn't come up with the idea that free content was the solution; they were forced into that. Most newspapers started out charging for their content, and many still do - if not for their current stuff, at least for their archives. The NYT's decision to make all current content free was itself news only a year or two ago.

The only legitimate purpose of a paper is to keep watch on the government? That's absurd.

The industry may be changing, evolving, or even growing a sixth finger, but it doesn't follow that the ads-classifides-susbcriber-box business model will fail. I don't know anyone who _prefers_ to read from an LCD over dead-tree. More than that, news simply does not have to be up-to-the-minute; 99% of the stuff in a paper is fine when its 12 hours old, and some things - like columns - are better after bit of reflection.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

When we started looking for cost cutting measures, we discovered we'd been paying 250,000 a year for phones at a distribution center we'd closed 5 years prior. Nobody'd noticed, because that was pocket change. That's a whole buncha reporters they could have been paying, and that sort of waste was endemic just a few decades ago.

And forced? I don't think so. They ignored the internet, and tried to charge regular subscription prices for online content, and took it in the ass. Then they went too far the other way. They're still lunging around without a real direction, outsourcing ads cutting their own throats by putting up projects that take months to produce, online before the print product is even on the stands.

They try to sell these "online editions" which are basically pdf versions of the paper, and much less useful than the website itself. What a joke.

Classifieds? Classifieds are gone. The revenue is down to 10% of what it used to be, and it's never coming back. Free online classifieds are superior to 15 columns of unsearchable text so small you need a fricking magnifying glass.

No one gives a damn if the crappy newspaper comics page is going to go out of business. No one cares if the extremely scanty gig guide or the cooking/gardening crap that's all available online is gone. Editorial content, somewhat, but that's on the fringe of the regular news content.

Frankly, you sound like you're about 60, and more power to you, you're our core demographic. But trust me when I tell you, that we can't survive if we can't get some subscribers under 30, and they're rare as rare.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Shrug. Right now it's hard to believe that the non-print revenue is going to stabilize at a level that will support even one decent sized paper. If you want more than one, people are going to have to keep paying some form of subscription fee.

Re:Bad idea.

[dwiget001]

Newspapers are mostly bad news anyway. They have, other than maybe the movie listings and classifieds, absolutely no value to me at all.

Heck, even the movies and classifieds are more and more irrelevant due to the Internet.

I even stopped watching TV almost 10 years ago now, don't miss it at all. Back when I had cable, basic cable, 70 channels at the time, I was constantly complaining that there was "nothing on".

I get all my news, when and what I choose, via the internet and local radio. TV and newspapers are totally without value to me nowadays.

Re:Bad idea.

[afabbro]

Classifieds? Classifieds are gone. The revenue is down to 10% of what it used to be, and it's never coming back. Free online classifieds are superior to 15 columns of unsearchable text so small you need a fricking magnifying glass.

I think your overall point is valid. However, the Nickel Ads and similar free classifieds-only newspapers still do ripping business. The local Nickel Ads outfit has four offices in Portland and distributes a dozen editions. Something is propping them up. My guess is that there is still a large segment of the populace that doesn't look online for classifieds, consisting mostly of tradition-bound older people and nondigital poor. Put those together and that's a sizeable nimber of people.

However, the former category is obviously shrinking and the latter category is not going to spend 75 cents for access to a newspaper when they can instead get something like the Nickel Ads for free. And of course, today's digital poor are tomorrows "I just searched through Craigslist on my phone" shoppers.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts."

Well I would tend to agree subsidizing the mostly corporatized newspaper empires is a little nuts.

On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career, and to insure there are substantial numbers of professional investigative journalists digging up stories in the world precisely because it make people sweat who don't wan those stories dug up. They should absolutely all stopping killing trees to print their news, put it all online, and make sure there is a good way to make it available to commuters, but they also need to get paid and right putting it on line for free mostly means they don't make anything because Google is the only one making money on online ads it seems.

I love online news sites, I appreciate what they do, but I like everyone else am too cheap to pay them if I can get their stuff for free. If I can't get their stuff for free I wont go to their site. Google in particular is the one making huge amount of money exploiting all their news gathering and should be figuring out a way to share some of their wealth to keep deserving professional journalists employed, and ideally lettting all the hacks and newspaper execs starve.

It is true there have been massive failures on the part of professional journalists, like Judith Miller and her propaganda campaign for the Bush administration on WMD's used to perpetrate the war in Iraq. Oh hell.... professional journalists failed en masse during the first six years of the Bush regime. But I blame that mostly on 9/11 and an American public that got seduced in to picking flag waving over truth and the press pandered to what the people wanted. Same thing happened after Pearl Harbor and "Remeber the Maine" in 1898.

Its also true the current corporate empires that own most media outlets and employ most professional journalist are scum, like most greedy executives, and are causing many of the problems as you suggest.

But.... I also don't want to see a world where what passes for journalism degenerates in to a bunch of bloggers sitting around regurgitating the crap they found surfing the web, mixed with a heavy dose of opinion and rumor.......... kind of like I'm doing here. I would actually like to see a restoration of investigative journalists who go out and actually dig up the truth, make people uncomfortable who deserve to be uncomfortable, and put it on the web instead of on dead tress.

They should get paid for it, and if they are good at it get paid well.

Re:Bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and it isn't even the same class of companies they're taxing. It isn't so much horse-'n-buggy vs car, it's like you're asking Pentium retailers to prop up the 286 manufacturers. And then there is the thing that they didn't so much get obsoleted like horse-'n-buggy manufacturers, but they largely obsoleted themselves. I used to read newspapers (I've switched papers several times) but frankly the Dutch newspapers had it coming. If you're looking for neutral, investigative yet socially engaged journalism you'd better skip the papers; I think it's safe to say that if you've just read a Dutch newspaper, you actually know less than you did before. And if they are outcompeted by digital media, that just means that they should have gone into that market themselves and subsidising them just rewards bad decision making. Fortunately, the minister allegedly thought the idea was stupid and told the commission: "Ga toch fietsen."

Re:Bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

We can call it the Dead Tree tax.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

This is the real beauty of the Internet based news model.

Unless you are unfortunate enough not to have access to the Internet, you have turned a town with potentially biased news sources into a town with hundreds/thousands/millions of news sources.

Granted, many of these sources are biased, and you have to employ your critical thinking skills to separate the wheat from the chaff, but, you have an incredible amount of exposure to the real world that you would have never found in the one/two/twelve-paper town, and you will have a much better idea of what is really happening, instead of taking whatever view is presented to you.

I'm really kind of glad that the traditional newspaper model looks to be on the way out.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career, and to insure there are substantial numbers of professional investigative journalists digging up stories in the world precisely because it make people sweat who don't wan those stories dug up.

Okay, I nominate YOU to accomplish this. (By the way, TREES are one of the few natural resources that DO grow back.)

I would love to make sure Good Journalism is rewarded, too. The question is how?

The answers lie somewhere on the Internet. What good journalists will be motivated to start news blogs? Who will find them valuable enough to subscribe to them? If no one wants to subscribe, should they pursue advertising? How will they deal with gifted amateurs who don't feel the need to charge?

Subsidizing the newspaper empires is completely nuts! If they can't evolve with the rest of the world, they are doomed.

They should get paid for it, and if they are good at it get paid well.

As I typed indignantly to a content creator earlier today, "You don't deserve to get paid for the stuff you create. You deserve to get paid for the things you create that people find valuable enough to pay you for it." If the newspapers/journalists can't understand this idea, then they need to find alternate means of earning a living.

Re:Bad idea.

[Nefarious Wheel]

On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career...

Ok, blowing all my mods to address this one.

In the company I work for, we use trained journalists, and we use them for one purpose - and it's not writing internal newsletters. We use them because they know how to write. We have a constant need for people to write about stuff we sell and do in order to inform our potential customers. That text needs to be engaging, with correct syntax, punctuation and spelling. Do you know how rare it is in even a large technology company to find people who know how to construct a paragraph correctly, to say nothing of making it readable?

Mind you, they need to know a little about technology. Not a huge amount, but enough to ask sensible questions in an interview.

You might end up being called a "market analyst" rather than a "reporter", but work is definitely there, and it's the same sort of investigative reporting you were trained for. But the pay is probably better and interviews are easier to come by. It may not be the discovery of Watergate, but there's hope for you that isn't spelled Wendy's.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Free papers are an exception to the rule: they really are supported almost entirely by ad revenue, so they can afford to give away personal ads or classifieds just to draw the extra eyes for their paid ads. They don't own their own presses, they usually don't do home delivery, and they tend to have a very small staff, so their costs are very low.

On the other hand, they make very little money, and generally can't afford to do much in-depth journalism.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Is it? Is it really? What town do you live in that the internet really gives a shit about your city council? New York City?

Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers. So, yea, it's great for news...Right now. When those papers go bankrupt, it's going to suck.

The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage. Newspapers completely dominate that niche, even now. That's why small town newspapers are so pervasive: that news isn't available anywhere else, and even a weekly paper has far more actual content than the pathetic little 30 minute news spots the tv stations do...In my experience, the TV and radio stations tend to lift everything from the newspapers anyway (which is getting easier, now that the papers are putting things online so quickly.)

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

Blogs are not the answer. Everyone says, "They'll all go start blogs!" and it makes me want to shake them until the stupid stops.

How many blogs actually make money? Now take all the ones that only do shock and schlock. Yea. I can't think of any either.

Journalism is a professional career. They go to school to learn to do all this crap, and then they go out and practically apply that knowledge. Some of it they do because they love it, but in the end, they're looking for a paycheck and health insurance.

Worse, in-depth stuff can take weeks and months (and, very occasionally years) to research. Who pays their salary during that time? How do their kids eat?

When they do break the next huge amazing story after 6 months of digging through public records on their own dime, how do they get compensated for their time? You going to buy a t-shirt?

Real journalism takes money. This wasn't traditionally a problem, because people were generally willing to fork a modest fee for reliable information. But now the internets have come and saved everyone from the burden of being able to make a living by generating information.

In my experience, journalists are a bit like lawyers. They all want to do the right thing when they're getting started, want to fight for truth, and expose corruption. But eventually, they get beaten down by people who think they're always lying, always dishonest...People who give a quote, and then sue because they end up looking bad.

And after enough of that, they say, "Fuck this low paying shit, I'm going to put this knowledge and experience to work for money." And then they go work for a politician, or a corporation, or a lobbying firm.

So don't worry about the journalists. They'll get paid.

Re:Bad idea.

[wisty]

What is this "real journalism"? Watergate seems like the best example of "real journalism", but that was a leak. Leakers can blog it themselves now, no middleman is required.

A dying print media will make it harder for professional journalists to expose things, it makes it easier for amateurs to get the word out. PR articles will still get sent out as well (by aggregators, not editors).

Tracing things though public records won't happen as much now, which is sad since public records are a lot more accessible these days.

Is the increase in dissemination of insider information worth more than the decrease in paid professionals weeding through publicly available data? I honestly don't know.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

What!?! Do you really believe that the news content on the Internet will just dry up when the outdated news delivery models fold?

I don't. I think we may enter a transition period where it may be slightly harder to find the news, but, you can bet those companies that are shrewd enough to survive, and those enterprising individuals that would have simply started a newspaper way back when, will find a way to get the news out professionally on the Internet.

Those entities will succeed by presenting the news in a manner that people find valuable, and people will pay for it in one form, or another (most likely advertising, and/or subscriptions, just like the old-school newspapers).

No matter how many bloggers/wannabe journalists are out there, there will still be an economically feasible way for real journalism, too. It will be found, and it will do just fine.

If it's really news, it will be available.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"Real journalism takes money."

Another key point, which you alluded to, is investigative journalism takes lawyers, not just for when people suit you for libel but when the powers that be retaliate against you and put you in jail on trumped up charges or for not revealing your sources. You need someone good who is not in jail to work on getting you out. The New York Times has had to mount one major legal defense after another during the Bush administration. Only one I wish they hadn't is if they should have left Judith Miller in jail for ScooterGate because that's where she belongs. Her WMD/Iraq reporting was criminal.

I seriously dread the day when our journalists are all gone and all we have are bloggers. I kind of wish someone with deep pockets like Google would hire all the good ones and put them in a well funded play pen where they could ply their trade without any pressure from execs, advertisers and editors shilling for execs and advertisers, and let them just generate page hits, where they make money or not.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

Not sure if you are trolling or not. If you are.... good one.... and you must really hate journalists. If you are serious I'm pretty sure only journalists who completely suck are going to appreciate you suggesting that they should turn in their careers to write marketing shlock. That is seriously.... cold.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"You deserve to get paid for the things you create that people find valuable enough to pay you for it."

Simply doesn't work in the Internet era. Newspapers only used to work when their wasn't so much competition, and so many sources, and especially because they had a lock on classified ads. Craigslist and EBay destroyed the only business model they had that worked.

People just aren't going to pay for news writing, even if its really good. There are too many free sources, which even if they suck, will beat out any high quality writer who tries to charge. Only place you will pull it off is in business and financial news, and maybe sports. I can see the Wall Street Journal doing it because enough people use what they write to make money that they will pay for it.

Don't think Woodward and Bernstein would have made a nickel if they'd broke Watergate on the web. What they did was priceless because they exposed a completely crooked government and drove it out of power. The irony is classified ads probably paid for them to do it. Same thing happens in the future the crooked government may well get away with it, unless some blogger gets lucky.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

Okay, so what is your alternative? Pandora's box is already open. There is no going back.

Don't you think that there will be more evolutions in the journalism industry? Internet news delivery is a really young enterprise. You have to expect that there will be a real learning curve to deal with (for everyone - Consumers, Publishers, and Journalists).

I think that the general public knows blogs are not the answer. I think they will gravitate towards news aggregation that do a good job of presenting the news that is relevant to them. Those that prove to do a bad job of this will eventually fail.

I think the avenue for the professional journalist is to sell his/her services to the news aggregation companies. Supply and demand will determine what this is worth.

Journalism's future lies in their ability to bring product that the public finds worthwhile to the marketplace.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"Okay, so what is your alternative? Pandora's box is already open. There is no going back."

I proposed it elsewhere. Someone like Google or Craigslist, with deep pockets and who actually makes money on Internet advertising rather than just aggregating news needs to hire the best and brightest journalists and turn them loose to ply their trade whether they make money or not.

"I think they will gravitate towards news aggregation"

News aggregation is only working now because there are still large numbers of newspapers publishing online for free. If they switch to pay per view or go out of business the news aggregaters eventually have nothing to aggregate. Google being a leading news aggregater once again suggests Google should be funding journalists. Not sure Craigslist makes enough money to support any journalists but they kind of owe a debt to society for destroying newspapers and journalism.

I seriously doubt news aggregaters are going to pay enough to keep journalists afloat out of their business model. I think they pay some for access to AP and Reuters but I doubt its enough to support healthy journalism. I doubt Google News makes any money now and the only reason it exists is because its leaching off all the news the online newspapers are giving them for free and which is costing them a lot of money to produce. All the online news sources fold so do aggregaters.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

Sorry if I come across like I'm ragging on you. You bring up some good points. I'll try to give you my perspective on them.

How many blogs actually make money? Now take all the ones that only do shock and schlock. Yea. I can't think of any either.

I responded to a poster below that I don't think the general public buys the blog idea for news either. I think they will depend on Yahoo, Google News, etc. for their news sources. If there is something local that people care about then they may bookmark some blogs that they know are locals, but, I'd be willing to suspect that the local info won't be all that hard to find out about. (Gossip, going to a town meeting, getting involved in your community, picking up the telephone, looking at the school district's web site, etc.)

Journalism is a professional career. They go to school to learn to do all this crap, and then they go out and practically apply that knowledge. Some of it they do because they love it, but in the end, they're looking for a paycheck and health insurance.

Just like every other career in the world (regardless of the Professional qualifier). If you are an assembly line worker that is replaced by a robot, you're pretty much in the same boat. You are losing your job to progress. It sucks, but that's life.

Worse, in-depth stuff can take weeks and months (and, very occasionally years) to research. Who pays their salary during that time? How do their kids eat?

Anyone who has a job where they have to wait weeks, or months, or years, for a paycheck should not take on a job like that without making sure their bases are covered first. This is responsibility, and if they have kids, it is mandatory (or should be, anyway).

When they do break the next huge amazing story after 6 months of digging through public records on their own dime, how do they get compensated for their time? You going to buy a t-shirt?

It depends. Is the huge amazing story related to some pop star that picked their nose in a courtroom during their cocaine trial? I'm not gonna buy the T-shirt. Is the huge amazing story something that is going to change peoples lives with the relevation (e.g. High Court Judge caught taking bribes from Mafia.), then yes, they deserve to sell the rights to their story to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder will likely pay handsomely.

Real journalism takes money. This wasn't traditionally a problem, because people were generally willing to fork a modest fee for reliable information. But now the internets have come and saved everyone from the burden of being able to make a living by generating information.

All enterprises take money. It has alway been a problem, but, the problem is expected, planned for, and overcome. Otherwise, you are not going to remain in business. The Internet has nothing to do with it. You would have the same problem if you worked for an old-fashioned newspaper in your town, if a modern-day, more efficient newspaper came to town. It's called competition, and you either compete, or you roll over.

In my experience, journalists are a bit like lawyers. They all want to do the right thing when they're getting started, want to fight for truth, and expose corruption. But eventually, they get beaten down by people who think they're always lying, always dishonest...People who give a quote, and then sue because they end up looking bad.
.
And after enough of that, they say, "Fuck this low paying shit, I'm going to put this knowledge and experience to work for money." And then they go work for a politician, or a corporation, or a lobbying firm.

This speaks towards the attitudes of people that are on the whole reinforced by our society. I feel bad for people who have to go through this, but I can't say I've met many other people, in many other fields, who don't go through their own version of this...

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

Your alternatives are fine, assuming that those companies choose to get into the business of aggregation for real. Honestly, I think there is plenty of room for new blood to come onto the scene, and do the aggregation business even better. Maybe they will choose to do business directly with the journalists, maybe they will choose to do business with other companies that make a business of buying and selling access to news stories from journalists. Who knows? There are an amazing amount of possible paths that may occur. One thing is for sure, someone, or some company, will come up with a system that works.

Google being a leading news aggregator once again suggests Google should be funding journalists.

I disagree with you on this point.

Google is providing a service to computer users which consists of finding the news stories that they think people will find interesting. For that service, Google makes money from the advertising they sell, and points readers to the news site for free.

As long as the news story is available for free, the publishers should be happy about this, as finding their story would be like finding a needle in a haystack without services like Google's. Unless the publishers have one helluva great advertising program (which none of them seem to have figured out) that drives viewers to their own site, having their story visible from Google is actually driving viewers to their site (allowing them to view their advertisers ads when they otherwise would not likely ever see them). Google could actually charge for this service, and some publishers would pay for it.

Not sure Craigslist makes enough money to support any journalists but they kind of owe a debt to society for destroying newspapers and journalism.

Again, I disagree here. Craigslist, and others like it, have pretty much killed the old-school classifieds, but they have also improved them in significant ways. You are suggesting that Craigslist should be penalized for innovation. I don't buy it. Why don't these publishers take their classifieds online, show advertising, and offer the classified ads for free? Because they wanted to sell them. The market no longer bears this, and they need to compete, or or give it up.

Last I checked, Craigslist does not have anything that even comes close to news, so why is it that they should be asked to support journalists?

I seriously doubt news aggregators are going to pay enough to keep journalists afloat out of their business model. I think they pay some for access to AP and Reuters but I doubt its enough to support healthy journalism. I doubt Google News makes any money now and the only reason it exists is because its leaching off all the news the online newspapers are giving them for free and which is costing them a lot of money to produce. All the online news sources fold so do aggregators.

Do you have any actual evidence to back this up? I don't either.

I think what will happen is that there will be people who step in and recognize the opportunity to provide news on the Internet in ways that will be valuable, and will find innovative ways to make it work. The news model may change drastically, but, the news will be delivered.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

I think the parent post is not trolling. And I don't think that he is trying to insult anyone, either. In this economy, a lot of people are being forced to take jobs that they wouldn't want in a good economy.

It's very similar to the IT job market at the moment. Where former directors with all kinds of degrees, and experience, are being forced by the economy to take regular old sysadmin jobs, and well-credentialed sysadmins are taking jobs on the hell desk. The hell desk schmucks are taking janitorial positions, and the janitors are becoming journalists. (Just kidding on that last one. :))

Re:Bad idea.

[jcr]

I know some journalists and they get paid at the low end of the professional wage spectrum.

Do you mean they get paid less than lawyers or journeyman carpenters?

-jcr

Re:Bad idea.

[jcr]

When we started looking for cost cutting measures, we discovered we'd been paying 250,000 a year for phones at a distribution center we'd closed 5 years prior.

Holy crap! That's the kind of thing that should get your internal auditors replaced.

-jcr

Re:Bad idea.

[Jedi Alec]

The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage. Newspapers completely dominate that niche, even now. That's why small town newspapers are so pervasive: that news isn't available anywhere else, and even a weekly paper has far more actual content than the pathetic little 30 minute news spots the tv stations do...In my experience, the TV and radio stations tend to lift everything from the newspapers anyway (which is getting easier, now that the papers are putting things online so quickly.)

Considering the local newspaper, crappy as they may be, publishes news updates on their websites dozens of times a day...I'd say we've got a decent amount of synergy going on already. And this is in fact in the Netherlands btw.

The big advantage of the web is that I can have the website of my local newspaper and a website with inside information on the goings-on in Iran side by side, keeping track of both the backyard and the way over there at the same time, from the convenience of a lazy chair.

Re:Bad idea.

[SatanicPuppy]

News delivery...Who gives a shit about that? Do you think that the magical news fairy goes out every night and writes up the news? Or are you another one of those people who thinks that Reuters and the AP are somehow detached from local newspapers, so they'll be producing the same amount of stuff even with no newspapers to feed them?

Newspapers create the actual text. They send people to the event, those people write things about it, and those written things...Thats the news. If no one goes, and no one writes about it, it'll still happen, but we'll know fuck-all about it.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"Do you have any actual evidence to back this up? I don't either."

It must be impossible for Google News to make money. They don't put any ads on the site, at least I don't see any. Its a free service leeching off newspaper web sites who are paying for all the content Google is leeching. Maybe Google News will monetize it someday with ads but I doubt they care. As long as they have the river of money coming in from their search and ad business they can do stuff like that for free. As long as the newspapers pay all the bills for the content, Google doesn't need to monetize it.

There is this problem with Google, they are extremely anti competitive whether they intend to be or not. They have a river of money from ads and search and they can do EVERYTHING else for free and destroy everyone else in the markets they are doing for free, because no one else has the river of money from ads and search to put food on the table. Google can afford to do Android for free because their Android team is funded out of their ad and search business, and chances are they are going to put extreme pressure on Symbian, WinCE, Opera, etc in the mobile space. Its kind of like what Microsoft did with browsing, they had a river of money from Windows and Office, they poured it in to IE and crushed Netscape. Anti-trust law was supposed to prevent people from abusing monopolies like that but its been so gutted it never does.

"As long as the news story is available for free, the publishers should be happy about this, as finding their story would be like finding a needle in a haystack without services like Google's."

A. As I said, chances of it being available for free for much longer are not good. Newspapers are either going to fail, switch to a paid subscription model, or slowly fire and strangle all their reporters and end up being blogs. The trend for them turning in to mediocre blogs is already pretty prevalent.

B. Google News is the only one getting anything out of aggregation. Google and Google News is the only thing the consumers are aware of. You click on the link, read the article and leave and you are barely conscious of where you were reading it, or how much it cost them to produce the content. I never see the ads or click on anything else on the newspaper site. Google News gives a pretty big preference to New York Times and Washington Post in their news placement and they are both still failing. Google News simply doesn't help any newspapers. It turns them all in to an undistinguished sea of free news, presented to you by..... Google.

C. At least some publishers are not happy about it all. Rupert Murdoch in particular has lambasted Google News for leeching off the content for free it takes newspapers a lot of money to produce. Murdoch does have a huge stake in the online news industry and may well move the Wall Street Journal to a place Google can't leech it.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

I hope I haven't offended you personally, if so, sorry about that. This is not meant as a personal attack:

"Its a free service leeching off newspaper web sites who are paying for all the content Google is leeching."

You can call it leeching, but, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that the newspaper site is getting a FREE PROMOTION from the link, too.

Google is driving people to your site (which is the hard part of Internet commerce), and it is your job to give that user a reason to say, "Hey, this looks like a good site, I wonder what else is here!"

If you don't accomplish that, how is that Google's fault? That's your failure. No one else's, especially when the viewer is spoon-fed to you.

As long as they have the river of money coming in from their search and ad business they can do stuff like that for free.

I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business, if so, I'm sure it is dwarfed by the advertising side. They are a serious player in the advertising business.

However, you seem to be saying that even though Google, and your newspaper are in the same business, you are jealous of the river of money they are making, but you are not willing to do what it takes to compete with them, or find different ways to do your job.

Your newspaper/news show/magazine's business is Advertising, and apparently, Google is a lot better at it than your newspaper/news show/magazine.

If I am reading between the lines correctly, you are saying that while it is okay for newspapers to have things that attract readers (e.g. Stories, Comics, Sports Pages, Editorials, or whatever other things that are in your paper that attract readers, but don't directly generate revenue), but it is not okay for Google to do other things to attract their readers (searchers)?

That is a double-standard if I'm reading it correctly.

As long as the newspapers pay all the bills for the content, Google doesn't need to monetize it.

If the newspaper is only paying for the content, ignoring (for all practical purposes) how to get users to use their web-site, and keep them coming back, then they are only doing half the job that is required. The company's transition to the digital news world is likely to fail.

I think Google is actually helping the newspaper here, not hurting it.

Anti-trust law was supposed to prevent people from abusing monopolies like that but its been so gutted it never does.

Google may be a giant in the market, and some pretty stiff competition, but, they certainly do not have a monopoly in either the search, or the advertising business.

The sooner that those whose business model is fading can recognize it, and make adjustments to remain relevant, the better chance they have to survive.

As I said, chances of it being available for free for much longer are not good. Newspapers are either going to fail, switch to a paid subscription model, or slowly fire and strangle all their reporters and end up being blogs. The trend for them turning in to mediocre blogs is already pretty prevalent.

You may be mostly right in terms of the past, and current business model. But, I still say that there are a lot of opportunities for journalists, editors, and anyone else who has a typical newspaper type job to roll with the punches, and innovate their way into a new business model that works.

Google News simply doesn't help any newspapers.

I don't see the newspapers clamoring to do much to help Google, either. You are in competing businesses. That's the reality, and I don't think it is unhealthy, it's competition.

You seem to have some stigma about blogs. I think the name Blog is dumb, but there are some really good ones out there. There are some really bad ones, too. They are just websites, created by people.

A lot of people will be looki

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

News delivery...Who gives a shit about that?

The delivery mechanism is the ONLY way you can get the news to the readers. If you don't care about that, then you aren't going to be in the news business long.

Newspapers sell advertising, not news. The delivery mechanism is how your advertisers' ads are seen. This is the most important part of getting the readers to view your news pages (regardless of whether they are printed, or digitally rendered on a screen). You want to sell ads to advertisers in order to make your profit.

News, Comics, Sports, etc. are things a newspaper does to make their subscribers want to receive their printed pages/or view the websites that contain the advertising. These things by themselves generate ZERO revenue. They are simply an expense, but they have to be done to have a product that people actually will pay attention to, and that advertisers will find value advertising in.

The newspapers charge subscribers a token amount for the actual physical copy of the paper. The primary reason they charge subscribers for it is to give the advertisers (who are the real customers) some piece of mind that the subscribers actually care about receiving the paper, and are likely to see their advertisements.

If the paper were free to readers, then there would be no way to measure the advertisements effectiveness because they would have no way to know how many people actually are really reading it, versus how many people just want it to line their bird cage.

It's not like the news will stop happening, and it's not like there won't be people out there reporting it. The names of the employers those reporters work for may change (from a newspaper to a company that has a good distribution model), or they may end up working free-lance, but their jobs won't just magically stop being necessary.

Newspapers create the actual text

No, they don't. They never have. The reporter/journalists create the text, and the editors edit it. These jobs are not going away, they are just going to different types of companies than the traditional newspaper role.

If there is a demand for news, someone will find a way to deliver it, and profit from it.

If a journalist is good at what they do, they will be paid accordingly. Whether they work free-lance, contract, or salaried, is irrelevant. They will be working for the modern-day news service that makes themselves relevant.

So, I really don't see this as much more than a DELIVERY method change, with some logistical changes sprinkled on top.

The companies that become redundant will fail. That doesn't mean the news will stop, and it doesn't mean there isn't a way for people/companies to profit from it.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

The newspapers charge subscribers a token amount for the actual physical copy of the paper. The primary reason they charge subscribers for it is to give the advertisers (who are the real customers) some piece of mind that the subscribers actually care about receiving the paper, and are likely to see their advertisements.

I failed to mention that it is not necessary to charge a subscription fee on the Internet, because you have other methods that you can track whether, or not, your advertisers ads are being seen.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

I just realized that I never addressed your questions in this post.

I live approximately 30 miles south of Phoenix, AZ.

We have a couple of local papers that are just more, or less, wannabe papers (delivered monthly). I read them, however, in the last three years, I can't remember a story that was published, that was anything that I even remotely cared about. Some people may find something interesting, but, if they are actually interested in the reported articles, and want to do something with that information, they will be at least a month late to the party.

I don't subscribe to the Phoenix daily papers, because I don't see much value in them, either. Anything that is a big deal will be on the evening news, or word-of-mouth will get the information out, if it is really important.

To put it bluntly, the local papers (including the Phoenix ones) are pretty much good for bird cage lining, IMO -YMMV.

Any news that is important to me, I will either see on the Internet, by either using Google news, or by specifically searching for more information on a topic that I want to know about.

Almost all print news coverage on the internet comes originally from old school newspapers.

You referenced this in a different post (specifically mentioning the Associated Press, and Reuters) that I failed to address well.

I think that the Internet news sources will still be pulling a lot from, and contributing to, these organizations. The only way I see this changing is if someone finds a better way of being the hub, and begins competing with them.

The one place where internet coverage really really sucks is local coverage.

This is the area that the local newspaper has to figure out how to offer value, if they want to stay alive. This really shouldn't be too difficult, I don't think. But, they will need to change over to being an Internet News Source, too. They need to focus on the local stories/issues, and pursue those exclusively.

As for Local/National/World News and AP/Reuters: (This is just off the cuff. More work needed.)

I don't know about you, but I think it is a real waste to have 10,892 redundant web pages (which take up server resources, electricity, etc.), all picked up from the same AP feed, all showing the same exact story about how the Obama's dog licked its butt. (Gross, but it makes the point.)

One of the reasons I don't like the traditional newspapers version of Internet News is that they seem to think that they all need to have a page dedicated to each story that comes in over the AP. This creates a problem in that every newspaper is competing to get their viewers eyes the same story all of the other newspapers are carrying. That takes up a lot of space, unnecessarily, which is pretty expensive, and you really cut down your chances of selling your advertising.

What I think they ought to do, is get together, create a single website, and share it. They group would publish all of the AP stories that the group determines are important enough to publish on a national/global level.

If there is some sort of concern over monopoly, then create the iABC, iCBS, iNBC equivalents for journalism, and have a small number of groups that compete against each other as the TV networks do.

The advertising prospects for the concentrated website model could be great. The advertising revenue would be divided by the companies who make up that group. They might even assign a team of Global Journalists whose job would be special assignments/territories in the world. The salary would be paid for out of the Advertising revenue.

That would leave each local newspaper/news source free to concentrate on local news, and the content that is specific to that local newspaper/news source is all they would need to worry about. The national/world news would still get reported to the wire services because the local stories will still be uploaded to the news hubs by the local journalist.

If there

Re:Bad idea.

[Nefarious Wheel]

Not sure if you are trolling or not. If you are.... good one.... and you must really hate journalists.

I wasn't trolling, I was stating a fact. And I think journalists are the first and last bastion of freedom, and that the general ability to write well is a necessary characteristic of the civilised. But I also don't believe that a journalism degree means you should starve, if you find your field of work economically compromised at the moment. I was trying to keep the literary gene pool alive, as well as pointing out its importance to a technical industry.

I have a troll, though. Hunter, level 16 on Aman'Thul. Name is "Offtopic". Send him a fish.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

"I hope I haven't offended you personally"

Not sure what makes you think I am... I'm just trying to convey to you that newspapers and journalism are doomed thanks to Craigslist, Google and Ebay but you seem to be in denial of the obvious. I'm not enough of a Luddite to think it can be stopped. I just worry about a world in which we no longer have investigative journalists. We already have too much unbridled corruption in this world. Without journalism at all chances are it will just get worse.

"I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business"

You don't seem to be grasping how the world works which must be why I'm not making any head way with my argument. Google search business IS their ad business. The two are one and the same. Their search business drives their ad business. They have some ad business not search related through Doubleclick but their river of money comes from ads next to their search results.

If you didn't know that explains why you aren't grasping any of the rest of this thread.

"Google may be a giant in the market, and some pretty stiff competition, but, they certainly do not have a monopoly in either the search, or the advertising business."

Google search market share is around 60-70%. Its nearest competitors Yahoo and Microsoft are in the teens. It is a defacto monopoly the same as Microsoft has with Windows.

"I don't see the newspapers clamoring to do much to help Google, either. You are in competing businesses."

Lets see, you want companies who are about to go bankrupt help a company making billions of dollars a year, interesting.

And finally to repeat. Google News DOESN'T help any of the newspapers it aggregates. It drives a little traffic to them but it more than compensate by turning them in to an indistinguishable commodity and it eliminates any loyalty to any particular site among news readers which is deadly to web sites. Google News is cool, I use it all the time, it was an awesome idea in the theoretical sense, but its a simple fact its helping destroy all the newspapers that provide its content along with Craigslist taking all the classified ads. Its kind of a chronic problem that they do things that are cool at an engineering level, but they have a total disregard for the unintended consequences. As long as they have their river of money and are paying their engineers a million bucks for ideas, they will do just about anything, even something EVIL like destroy journalism which is what they are doing along with Craigslist.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

"I hope I haven't offended you personally"

Not sure what makes you think I am...

This is my feeble attempt to apologize to those that I may have offended, as I've realized that I have been coming on way too strong lately, and have realized that I need to tone it down a few notches. Pretty weak, huh?

I'm just trying to convey to you that newspapers and journalism are doomed thanks to Craigslist, Google and Ebay but you seem to be in denial of the obvious.

We are in agreement that journalism, in the form it exists today, appears to be in trouble (If they don't do something about it.)

That you are placing the blame on specific companies bothers me. I would contend that if none of those specific companies existed, there would be others that would be doing the same thing with varying degrees of success, and the problem for journalists would not be much different.

I'm not enough of a Luddite to think it can be stopped. I just worry about a world in which we no longer have investigative journalists.

I think this is where the main disagreement lies. I may be too much of an optimist, but, I cannot imagine that there will ever be a time where investigative journalism will not exist. I think the logistics of the profession will change (mostly how news is delivered to the reader, and who the natural successor to the newspaper that employs the journalists are), but, I think there will always be a need for people who perform the task professionally. I can't see this going away as a significant portion of the population will not accept investigative stories from amateurs (at least not for long).

We already have too much unbridled corruption in this world. Without journalism at all chances are it will just get worse.

This is true, and always will be true, unfortunately. It's human nature. As long as people care about injustices like this, there will be a call for watchdogs (journalists) to get the word out.

There is something that bothers me about this however. Maybe it is just part of the aging process, but the trend I think I have seen as I grow older, is that journalism (due to corporate marketing trends, and tailoring of news more towards sensationalism, to appease the apparently shortened attention spans that people exhibit these days) has been slowly moving away from what it used to be, and becoming less valuable. (I'm not stating this as fact, just my impression.)

"I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business"

You don't seem to be grasping how the world works which must be why I'm not making any head way with my argument. Google search business IS their ad business. The two are one and the same. Their search business drives their ad business. They have some ad business not search related through Doubleclick but their river of money comes from ads next to their search results.

If you didn't know that explains why you aren't grasping any of the rest of this thread.

I think I might be grasping more than you give me credit for, but, I'm not after credit, only a good discussion of the issue, and maybe we can help to spark an idea to solve the problem, somehow.

This is how I see it (I hope you see value in it):

Google search is a service, not a product. It is how they attract viewers, which are their true product, that they sell advertising space to advertisers on the results pages.

That is analogous to a newspaper which runs news stories. This is also a service.

The news stories attract viewers, which are their true product, to sell advertising space to advertisers on their printed pages, or on their websites.

I don't think there is really any distinction between the two, so far, except the services that each provide to attract their product (viewers) are different, but achieve the same goal.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

The whining statement refers to the emotional arguments.

Re:Bad idea.

[demachina]

Newspapers can't compete with Craigslist or Google.

Craigslist took all the gravy out of the newspaper business... the classied ads and left the rest to rot... the reporting. A newspaper could compete with them.... if they fired all their journalists, got rid of all their overhead and did NOTHING but classified ads and stopped being a newspaper. In the old system classified ads were a key underpinning allowing newspapers to raise money to fund their news reporting. Craigslist did in fact dramatically improve how classified ads work, no argument. Its just an unintended consequence that they did it so well they wiped out the main source of funding for journalism.

Newspapers aren't going to compete against Google. Internet search wasn't something they were aware of until Google already owned it. Unfortunately internet search and the web has so dramatically altered the terrain the newspapers are in that through no real fault of their own their business is no longer viable. They can either let Google News continue to leech all their content for free and fail, or lock it up beind a subscription and fail.

You know at this point I don't care since no one else seems to. Its become pretty obvious over the last eight years especially that either Americans don't read or watch news, or if they do they don't understand it or just don't care what their government and corporations are doing to them. Its really OK with me if all the journalists get canned and all the newspapers fold, they mostly haven't been doing their job anyway.

We can all just sift through a million driveling bloggers to try to find our news, or trust our government to tell us what they want us to think, from now on. Let every corrupt politician and corporate executive rejoice, because there wont be any one left to rat them out unless some blogger gets lucky, someone reads his blog and anyone cares. I doubt anyone will care. Our banking system just managed to loot our country out of trillions of dollars, got away with it seems and we are too uninformed to really care.

Re:Bad idea.

[Cross-Threaded]

You are obviously feeling defeated by the situation. I don't blame you.

However, this thread of the discussion wouldn't exist if people didn't care.

I won't beat the dead horse anymore, but, don't give up.

Newspapers. Blogs. Forgetting something?

[nausea_malvarma]

Yet again, the Dutch government entirely ignores the welfare of town criers. This is an insult to town criers everywhere! I demand that the dutch government fund the struggling town crier industry by taxing newspaper sales.

The news ain't free, you know.

Stupid

[gilesjuk]

Did people have to pay car tax to fund horses and carts when cars become mainstream?

Things change, old media dies. We don't listen to music on reel to reel tape recorders anymore, are people trying to preserve such things? nope.

Re:Stupid

[selven]

No, they had to have people walking in front with red flags, which defeated the purpose of having a car in the first place.

Re:Stupid

[SatanicPuppy]

Bad analogy, because the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.

The problem with the possible death of the print media industry, is that they're the only ones who do real, in-depth, reliable, reporting these days...They're the only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.

TV doesn't give a damn: they can fill the same amount of time by giving air time for some fringe moron to sit and spout his own uninformed opinions. And they hardly ever own up to errors of fact in their broadcasts. Can't rely on them for anything but pretty pictures.

Bloggers don't have any real money, and they are completely compromised by a 100% dependence on ad revenue. Newspapers have always cared about ad revenue, but subscriber revenue and numbers were important enough to allow larger papers to effectively ignore the complaints of their advertisers...What were they going to do? Print pamphlets?

Some people think the loss of that in depth reporting is a bad thing. It's going to be worst in local markets: when was the last time you saw your local TV station cover a city council meeting? If someone is zoning the land across the street from your house for heavy industry, you'd probably like to know, but chances are you won't find out about it without newspaper coverage.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Did people have to pay car tax to fund horses and carts when cars become mainstream?

Did cars drive on the back of horses? These analogies that keep being made about "did people have to pay tax when $current_tech obseleted $old_tech" don't have any sway here, unless $current_tech USED $old_tech (without paying for the privilege). Which is what we see in online media.

Scabby news aggregator sites (:-P) don't do an ounce of real journalism (apart from the odd book review) but take income away from the very newspapers (etc) that they aggregate.

Re:Stupid

[Gregory Arenius]

I guess it depends on where you live but where I live there are bloggers who cover city council meetings along with all sorts of other small government meetings. They analyze budgets, they make easy to use crime maps out of inaccessible government records, they fight for government accountability.

The sorts of things that perhaps newspapers once did but no longer do because they cut all their reporting staff and now just have a few editors who put a local slant on news from AP and Reuters. because the readership gained by printing that sort of in depth political news doesn't offset the amount of money it costs to print it. When the newspapers do print articles about these sorts of things its only because they found something they could sensationalize.

I suppose I'd agree with you more if I thought newspapers were actually doing in depth reporting but I really don't feel that they are.

Cheers,
Greg

Re:Stupid

[hab136]

Newspapers have always cared about ad revenue, but subscriber revenue and numbers were important enough to allow larger papers to effectively ignore the complaints of their advertisers...What were they going to do? Print pamphlets?

Subscriber revenues paid for the printing, nothing more. Classifieds were the real money maker. Ads were gravy on top.

Now the classifieds are gone, and ads are down. Sucks to be them.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the possible death of the print media industry, is that they're the only ones who do real, in-depth, reliable, reporting these days...They're the only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right.

I do not agree. I have been a working as a print journalist for more than a decade, and now I am doing exactly the same job, with the difference that I publish the stories for free on my blog. No, it does not earn me anything, but my stuff is being read. And I have a part-time job to support my reporting. And people start offering me money to write books and give talks. Giving away my stories for free is the best choice I ever made.

Re:Stupid

[SatanicPuppy]

Largely agreed, though I'd say, "Subscriber revenues paid for the printing, and the delivery, and a good sized chunk of the physical plant."

It was still enough to give them some independence.

Re:Stupid

[mattsday]

What about the BBC?

They have a public service remit and I get all my news and editorials from them. Whilst they always are accused of bias from all sides of the political spectrum, I find them as good as any national or local newspaper for general news and coverage.

Re:Stupid

[JustinOpinion]

the death of reel to reel wasn't the death of (for example) symphonic music. It was just a transition from one format to another.

But that's just it. We shouldn't be interested in saving reel-to-reel, but rather supporting symphonic music. Similarly, we shouldn't care about saving newspapers, but rather supporting investigative journalism.

We need to decouple investigative journalism from the dead-weight of print media. We need to find a way for journalists to do their thing, and be paid to do it. They can then sell their stories/research/articles to whoever (print media, websites, TV stations, etc.).

[print media are the] only ones who can afford to, because it's fricking expensive to do it right. So far, it's too expensive to support with online ad revenue as well, hence the problem.

I think what you meant to say was that they were the only ones who could afford to. It is demonstrably no longer the case, if they need government money to survive. As such, we need to find another way to support independent investigative journalists.

I don't have the answer, mind you. It will require some serious thought, debate, trial-and-error, and probably a mix of regulation and free-market-magic. But what I am pretty sure of is that it is wrong-headed to support the print media industry just because they were historically the people who funded investigative journalism. Those days are gone. Let's work towards a useful future.

For fuck's sake!

[delphi125]

Internet in the Netherlands is already taxed with 19% BTW (VAT, not quite sales tax), let alone all the other taxes - Water is taxed about 6 times if you count 'em all (at least the rate is 6% after drinking water, what a fucking great silver lining that is).

I can understand the concept of having certain taxes being related to usage - no road tax unless you own a car etc. - but in the Netherlands you pay anything up to 50%+ income tax (which has been pre-taxed by employer's tax), and THEN everything you want after that is taxed extra already.

If - as a nation - you have fucking (50%+) high income tax, then fucking budget it to cover basic needs, like sewers and roads. If you have fucking (19%) high sales tax (more for cigarettes), then fucking use it to cover whatever is being taxed.

I can even live with the idea that old media and new media are part of the same thing, and thus some of the sales taxes on the lot of them might be spent disproportionately on ailing media. But the real problem for the "quality" print media is that every station in the major cities has free print media, which readers can consume during a commute and typically leave on the seats of buses and trams everywhere.

metronieuws.nl and spitsnieuws.nl are getting sufficient print readers to encourage advertisers to read.

Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though.

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Anonymous Coward]

... fucking ... fucking ... fucking ... fucking ... fucking ... Fuck ... fucking ...

Judging from your judicous use of the word 'fuck' in relation to the Dutch tax system, I assume you were a) annoyed to learn that Dutch prostitutes charge VAT too upon visiting the red light district in Amsterdam and b) were pissed of you couldn't deduct said visit as a business expense from your tax returns.

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Locke2005]

Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though. You could always move. Me might even let you into the states, provided you clean up your language!

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Anonymous Coward]

Being Dutch, I felt like chipping in these two bits:

Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though.

- Tax attitude: everyone tries to deduct as much as they can.

- Fuck the Dutch: that's why we have the red light district. Come fuck us as much as you want. You will have to pay for the privilege, though.

(disclaimer: i have no clue what's behind that link. It's probably NSFW though ;)

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though.

Nigel Powers, is that you?

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever been to The Netherlands? It's peaceful, beautiful, educated, and cultured. Their standard of living is higher than ours.

  Maybe their tax rate is a lot closer to 'right' than ours.

Re:For fuck's sake!

[Baron Eekman]

You may be interested in this piece by an American expat in Amsterdam about paying Dutch taxes
(if you can be bothered to login to nytimes)

Summer School Homework

[DirtyCanuck]

Excerpt from a work in progress assignment for my summer university course:

Early conjecture on the future of Newspapers and print media foretold of a future of embraced digital publications. Early literature on this movement includes Digitizing the News (Boczkowski, 2005) which begins by tracing early consumer non-print publishing initiatives to the rise of the internet in the mid 1990s. The books examination shifts to reviews of various online content provided by newspapers in the second half of the 1990s, which varies from direct reproduction of printed newspapers to interactive web based content that complimented the printed news. The book then progresses into examining three specific accounts of newspaper adaptation of the internet. The first example is a Technology section of the New York Times which started as an experiment to test new grounds for online media. The second example is the Virtual Voyager project of the HoustonCronicles.com (Boczkowski, 2005) of which reporters pioneered the evolution of multimedia journalism. The third example provided is the Community connection initiative of New Jersey Online (Boczkowski, 2005) which chronicles the birth of user generated content. This literature came out at around the same time as The Vanishing News Paper by Philip Meyer, which makes various assumptions of the state of Newspapers in the mid 2000â(TM)s and the way they are headed. The book begins with reprisal of early work Meyer did on newspapers being âoein the influence businessâ (Meyer, 2005) rather then the news and information business. His 2nd chapter focuses on the business model of âoeHow Newspapers Make Moneyâ (Meyer, 2005) which focuses on how newspapers are âoevictims of easy money.â (Meyer, 2005). In the 11th chapter, after outlining issues surrounding current models Meyer suggests that the death of Newspapers is near. In this chapter he essentially digs the grave for newspapers and predicts the death of newspapers if action is not taken. In Meyers final chapter he says âoeThe time has come to think about the things that we on the ground can do while traditional news media struggle for survival.â (Meyer, 2005) Giving various solutions to the current track that printed newspapers are on.
These two books show early attitudes that are rather contrasting. While Boczkowski is conscious of the evolution of newspapers and migration to digital media he is still optimistic. His book is more of a glorification of progress rather than a cautionary tale. Meyerâ(TM)s on the other hand is very aware of the inevitability of newspapers if they do not undergo drastic change. These books thus give a capsule for attitudes in the mid 2000â(TM)s with regards to newspapers. One attitude was optimistic and the other a prerequisite of upcoming doom. Which book was more accurate? Only time would tell.

The Contemporary Complexion
At this point it is very clear as to who was right and who was wrong with regards to previously reviewed literature. The sense of urgency illustrated by Madigan and Meyer could have never had so much relevance. With the demise of the economy we see an acceleration of the death of newspaper that nobody predicted. Currently we see some Journals contradicting previous assumptions. Such is the case with The Rebirth of News (Peters, 2009) written in the Spring of 2009 this article in the Economist completely changes its tone from the previously reviewed article. In 2006 the Economist said âoeA cause for concern, but not for panicâ (Martin, 2006) but only 2.5 years later we see mass panic. The latest article stating that âoeMost industries are suffering at present, but few are doing as badly as the news business.â (Peters, 2009) This revelation comes at a time when newspapers are dropping at almost a daily rate. The article goes on the suggest reasons for the demise, including loss of ad revenue and readership. The article however informative still does not address the problems outli

Example of lousy internet news

[Anonymous Coward]

If printed media is replaced by web information of the quality shown in this thread opener then the tax can't be high enough.

Like someone wrote already:
>>Actually it is a report from the newspaper lobby and the responsible minister has already spoken out against the proposal.

It would be nice if the minister also had spoken against some existing tax oddities like Reprorecht, Buma, Stemra, etc. I spare you the details.

Dutch government just propsed another law...

[VinylRecords]

...this time all sales of CDs will go towards the 8-track tape industry and sales of DVDs and BDs will go to VHS and Laser Disc companies.

This is bullshit

[eln]

This is bullshit!

Or, for our Dutch friends, a Google translation:

Dit is onzin!

And then back to English:

This is nonsense!

And, just for fun, to Filipino:

ito ay kalokohan!

And back to English:

This is poppycock!

I think I've made my point.

Re:This is bullshit

[Threni]

My favourite is "out of sight, out of mind" being mangled into "invisible idiot".

Re:This is bullshit

[selven]

Now that the google translate meme started, it can't stop.

man

Through http://tashian.com/multibabel/ once with the Asian languages:

Person
Personnels
Personnel
Staff
Team of employees

Again without the Asian languages:

Equip with employees
Supply yourselves with employees
Refueling same you with the employees

It all goes down from there...

(finish that cycle and do it again)

Ignition of base one of the parity of the employees fills above

Such is the fall of man...

Re:This is bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was "invisible, insane." And most likely apocryphal. That story is at least twenty years old.

Re:This is bullshit

[Heian-794]

And back to English:

This is poppycock!

I think I've made my point.

Actually, "poppycock" covers both the English and Dutch steps at the same time:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-pop1.htm

Clearly this is a word for the multilingual, multicultural, interconnected modern world.

Re:This is bullshit

[Threni]

Well, the one I heard was definitely "invisible idiot". I guess as there's no source you can just choose your favourite.

Question re: Dutch Govt...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what the Dutch citizens want their government to do? Or is the Dutch govt the "master over the people" instead of the "servant of the people" like the way that far too many western Europe countries have become?

Why not create the newspaper equiv of the BBC?

[QuatermassX]

Surely this is a way for government to clip the wings of a struggling section of the fourth estate? Governments - anyone in power - generally does not look all that kindly on aggressive newspapers that speak truth to power and hold governments to account. I'm sure someone thinks this an ideal way to neuter domestic media by hooking it on public subsidy.

Why not tax paper and create a print equivalent of the BBC? One could call it "Truth" or simply "News". Hmmm.

Re:Why not create the newspaper equiv of the BBC?

[Ironsides]

Or maybe, "Pravda"?

Why does this sound so much like the proposal to bail out newspapers in the US

Re:Why not create the newspaper equiv of the BBC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not tax paper and create a print equivalent of the BBC? One could call it "Truth" or simply "News". Hmmm.

We actually used to have that. It was called the "staatscourant", and it was privatized like everything else around here (telephony infrastructure, snailmail service, national railroad network, energy market).

It was fun while it lasted, though. The NS (railroads) at its lowest hit a punctuality rate of 72% (meaning 28% of all trains were more than 10 minutes late) due to mismanagement; the newspapers are going belly-up because they failed to innovate; the companies that operate our energy grid are being bought by international corporations; Internet via telephone line occurs a €10 per month "private tax" because KPN owns every last-mile connection in the country ("it's for maintenance").

Due to the recent credit crunch, two of our banks (abn amro and fortis) were nationalized; no doubt several newspapers will end up being bought by the government, like you suggest; the government is considering partially reverting the privatization of the energy market in order to keep grid maintenance under national control; the railroads are still private, but the NS is under tight supervision by the minister of transport

It's refreshing to see that despite the many shortcomings of many modern governments, that private organizations still are able to outdo the government in messing things up.

Re:Why not create the newspaper equiv of the BBC?

[leereyno]

The problem you had was not private ownership of these things, but MONOPOLY ownership.

An oligarchy is an oligarchy whether it be comprised of the state or comprised of other entities.

Had there been real competition and low barriers to entry into these markets to promote the creation of start up firms, you would not be seeing any of this.

Re:Why not create the newspaper equiv of the BBC?

[SwedishPenguin]

There are some things that just cannot have competition by its very nature. Telephony infrastructure is one of them, railroad and road infrastructure is another. You can have competing operators of these, but competing owners is a difficult proposition. Our (wired) telephony infrastructure in Sweden was sold along with the national telephone company (now known as Telia) and the network is now in the hands of a private monopoly. Luckily the same hasn't been done for our railroad network (yet, you never know, we currently have a right wing government...)
My Internet connection is provided to me by a privately owned operator, but over a publically owned fiber infrastructure that allows equal access to all private operators with the result being that I have the choice of 8 ISPs, 2 cable TV companies and 8 telephone operators over fiber.

Re:Why not create the newspaper equiv of the BBC?

[Jedi Alec]

Surely this is a way for government to clip the wings of a struggling section of the fourth estate? Governments - anyone in power - generally does not look all that kindly on aggressive newspapers that speak truth to power and hold governments to account.

Considering both the amount of political parties as well as the wide spread of political ideologies in our parliament, for every nutcase that would love the above there's an opposing nutcase to scream about it.

Our press is still free to make fun of the government, and whoever happens to be running the opposition loves it that way. Heck, where would Wilders be without the press? (Not gonna link the guy, his haircut is horribly NSFW or anywhere else)

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] fucking [...] fucking [...] fucking [...] fucking [...] fucking [...] fuck [...]

I found your comment very interesting.

Cut to the chase

[Anonymous Coward]

'news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.'

So set up a taxpayer-supported news service ala BBC and CBC.

I admit that won't be without contention, but it's a much better idea that taxing ISP use to support newspapers for pete's sakes. This committee isn't even trying to get at the central issue, they're just trying to prop up a media form the public is abandoning.

I'm glad the minister has rejected it. Now they can get on with discussing how Dutch reporting will need to be supported in our modern reality.

Re:Cut to the chase

[kwark]

"So set up a taxpayer-supported news service ala BBC and CBC." Done: http://www.nos.nl/ Paid for by taxes and commercials, we used to have something similar to the UKs TV license.

Not the format, the content

[hessian]

Before newspapers in their modern form, anyone with a printing press just wrote some opinions and sent them out to the world -- like a blog.

With modern newspapers, we have more accountability than ever before. They vary from amazing (WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, Ha'aretz) to awful, but you can get some very insightful news analysis if you know where to look.

On blogs, not so much, outside of technology and popular culture topics.

The format -- words on a printed page -- isn't as important as the organizations behind them. Newspapers are a newer type of communication than blogs, even if blogs use a newer medium of transmission.

I'm doing the same

[HerrBohm]

If this would succeed, would my chance, of saying that my core business fails because of the internet and that needs to give me money from the taxes to keep my company alive, be any good?

Coming next: milk tax!

[iwulinux]

I should go complain that nobody wants to pay me to hand-deliver milk in glass bottles door-to-door anymore, and see if I can get them to tax milk and give me the proceeds!

Of course, this is functionally the same as the blank CD/DVD "anti-piracy" levy: government intervening to prop up an outdated, failing business model with tax money, rather than letting it die and allowing evolution to take its natural course.

Re:Coming next: milk tax!

[afabbro]

I should go complain that nobody wants to pay me to hand-deliver milk in glass bottles door-to-door anymore, and see if I can get them to tax milk and give me the proceeds!

Milk is already heavily taxed in the USA. We call it "price supports for dairy farmers".

Re:Coming next: milk tax!

[Dynedain]

Coming from a dairy family, I can tell you that's not the case.

Prices are subsidized (not taxed) but the subsidies go to the processors, not the farmers producing.

Dairy farmers in the US right now are receiving 1970 prices with 2009 costs and inflation. Dairies are folding left and right, both large operations and small family farms because demand and prices have crashed. This is why beef has been relatively cheap (lots of herds going to slaughter). Milk demand is typically low during economic downturns (people buy less cheeses, butter, etc, especially in the restaurant market), but this downturn has hit dairies harder than any other.

Re:Coming next: milk tax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not taxed but heavily price regulated until recently. Now it's open loop and milk prices have soared. The union put my grandfather out of the dairy business years ago because he drove his own truck and the teamsters would have none of it!

Re:Coming next: milk tax!

[iwulinux]

I feel I must point out here that my point has been missed rather masterfully.

I think they missed the point:

[Hurricane78]

There is no valuable thing in those "news" anymore. Nobody wants them. They are by definition worth nothing to us. Only propaganda, stuff about Britney Spears showing her pussy, and other distractions from what is really going on. That is why the industry dies in the first place. For once, the free market works, and they want to stop it?

Well. I guess they still have enough friends and employees in government. But this will change soon too.

I don't want to pay twice

[Rashdot]

I'm already paying for my morning newspaper, why would I need to pay for it again via an ISP tax?

Uh, no.

[dwiget001]

Screw that.

If print media cannot survive on it's own, with it's own resources, etc. then too fricken bad.

It would be like, in the days of the first automobiles, taxing them to keep horse buggy manufacturers going. Actually, it's even worse than that.

off-topic: 'road tax' in NL

[Animaether]

Just to note: as of 2018 - supposedly - there will no longer be a 'a road use tax' (note that this is actually a fixed tax cost for any car owner, regardless of whether they drive it or not, and the height depends on the type of car, age, etc. as well as which province you live in), nor an additional tax on purchasing a car (currently: 40% on a passenger car/van, reduced by 1346 (minor details aside)), good for ~3.2B/year for the state - similar to the 'road use tax'.

Instead, people will be paying by the kilometer, which they plan on tracking via GPS and whatnot.. cue the 'potential for abuse' cries - I know, right?
But because this will go straight to the state, and no longer to the provinces in part, the provinces will have to find new sources of getting moneys.. which essentially means raising taxes for eeeeeeeeeeeeeverybody; regardless of whether or not they even have a car.

Of course our gas is also heavily 'taxed' - which will remain. Dur.

Taxes are indeed incredibly high in NL and although we do get quite a bit in return, I can't help but feel that too much of it is utterly wasted on prestige projects, lining pockets, military 'defense', etc. Sadly, it seems it's only going to get worse for the foreseeable future.

Dutch Gov. Wants To Tax Online Media To Fund Print

[TW Burger]

This is like taxing marriage to fund prostitution.

How about a tax on the word "fuck" . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I Water is taxed about 6 times if you count 'em all (at least the rate is 6% after drinking water, what a fucking great silver lining that is).

Well, fuck me over flying fucking backwards. The fucking Netherlands has fucking taxes on fucking water? I fucking thought that if the fucking country didn't have all those fucking brilliant fucking dikes, then the whole fucking country would be under fucking water, and they would be fucking totally fucking fucked over, with no fucking clue what to do with all the fucking water.

Except fucking tax it.

But what the fuck do I know?

And fuck, that fucking story about that fucking Dutch boy, who saved the fucking country, by sticking his fucking finger in the fucking dike to stop the fucking leak?

Well, the little fucking bastard was just fucking trying to finger fuck the fucking dike.

Please mention me in your prayers, before you go to sleep tonight . . . I don't want to go to work tomorrow, and start talking like my rant, above.

Re:How about a tax on the word "fuck" . . . ?

[Anonymous Coward]

We Dutch learn the language from (mostly) American made movies and television series. And Quinten Tarantino is a popular movie maker here as well.

Again, we can put the blaim on the media instead of a lack of common sense!

Re:How about a tax on the word "fuck" . . . ?

[imakemusic]

WTF?! Gordon Ramsey's on slashdot?

Re:How about a tax on the word "fuck" . . . ?

[borizz]

Well, that certainly illustrates the diversity of the word!

/. is wrong here, but whats really scary...

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't something from the Dutch government, but from a commision ("Commision Brinkman") who has given out an advice to the government. So in that aspect /. is not only behind the facts as others already wrote; they got it wrong too.

Second: The person behind this suggestion ("Eelco Brinkman") is one of the more powerful people in the Netherlands. If someone like that comes up with a brain dead idea like this then I call that a very scary development. The government rejected the idea, but not merely out of their own free will. Right now the Dutch governments popularity is near an all time low, and they're trying to do everything they can not to cause any up stirs. Until after the elections anyway.

Now our government has rejected the idea, and its my belief that the uproar caused by this insane plan was the major factor behind it. But what if the elections and the popularity weren't at rock bottom right now? They're clueless enough to push something like this through; especially when one of the results will be more income (taxes) for the government.

A very, very, scary thought IMO. And yes, I'm from Holland.

Re:Dutch Gov. Wants To Tax Online Media To Fund Pr

[mcpkaaos]

That's the best god damned idea ever! If I don't see your name on the 2012 ballot I am writing you in.

Gathering of news stories IS free

[unity100]

citizen journalism is upon us. citizens are filming events LIVE and posting them LIVE as they happen. we dont have to accept what some agent of some paper picks as newsworthy in any given location anymore. we can choose to view and read our own news.

Meet the Dutch MSM, worse than our MSM

[leereyno]

The Marxist Socialist Media (MSM) here in the states is finding it increasingly difficult to convince the public to pay to be lied to.

I guess the MSM in the netherlands is running into the same problem. In true leftist form, they propose that the government extort money from the people to pay for that which the public has disregarded as worthless.

Can't have the plebes going through life without propaganda to tell them what to think and who to hate now can we?

Re:Meet the Dutch MSM, worse than our MSM

[SwedishPenguin]

I don't know what world you're living in but the media is about as capitalistic as it gets. Pretty much all media nowadays is owned by giant and very much capitalist corporations, and it most certainly shows in their reporting in most cases.

On a related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

Buggy whip manufacturers want their slice of the pie too!

Is this like ...

[Skapare]

... taxing DVDs to fund innovative uses of VHS video tape, or taxing laser printers to fund innovative uses of typewriters, or taxing microwave ovens to fund innovative uses of wood stoves, or taxing cars and trains to fund innovative uses of horses and donkeys?

If it can't sustain it's own, it's a failed business model (at least now it is, after it has run its course as an intermediate technology to bring us to where we are). It probably needs to die off and be quick about it.

If there is some specific benefit to keeping it beyond its ability to sustain itself by profit, then tax or charge those who benefit from it. If there is a social case for making sure the elderly who don't get online have a means to get their news, then supplement printing the news for them. Maybe it's good enough to let them fill out a form with a bunch of check boxes which someone can enter into a computer, which then prints stories they are interested in from online sources and deliver it to them.

Libtards Rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxes Are Good! Stimulus! Too big to fail!

Hahaahahahahahaha-- suckers.

here's a concept...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tax online media, to fund online media.

Nitpicking

[Gorath99]

interactive web based content that complemented the printed news

Though I must say your version fit in well with this story. :-)

Re:Nitpicking

[DirtyCanuck]

I have been looking for an appropriate venue to post it. It is a work in progress and any nitpicking is very much welcomed.

I guess the whole idea of studying this came about from the articles on this very site. So for me it only felt fitting. It's hauling in at 30 pages already so I have a lot of refining to do.

Just frigging let it die!

[jimmypw]

Having used to provide technology solutions to the printing supply and production lines i've seen first hand how fragile the system is. Paper mills are currently making a hefty loss, Printing presses are barely scraping a profit.

The entire industry is currently balanced on matchsticks and if one company has to fold the entire industry will come tumbeling down. I for one are pro that and i think these Gov.'s should be too what with trying to reduce waste production and C02. These are 2 things that are not a common intrest of de-foresting, newspaper printing and paper milling (have you ever seen the sludge these things create!).

The fact is that if the entire system is on the verge of being un-economical then its going to shut down by its own choice. So why create a tax to prolong this and essentially waste the publics money.

Wrong headline and summary

[Otis_INF]

The Dutch government didn't state it wants any of this thing. The minister of education and culture asked a committee (with non parliament members!) how newspapers could be supported so they don't go bankrupt but at the same time the government isn't messing with how the papers run their company. He has 8 million euros for that. The committee calculated that that's not enough and advised to tax internet usage a bit so the total sum is larger.

That's it. It's an advice of a committee to a minister who then has to think about what to do with it. As the minister is a well known scientist and well aware of what internet etc. is, I don't think this advice will be made law.

Re:Wrong headline and summary

[mattsday]

Mod parent up.

The number of knee-jerk reactions to reports I see on this site is phenomenal! Democracy works by having all different ideas presented and prepared and then debated! Extending the debate here is healthy, but taking it as implemented law and an indication of a countries culture is absurd!

Someone from the print industry was asked to look in to why their industry was declining. They put together a report for the Dutch parliament and they then debate on it and through their own legislative proceedings decide if they're going to put it in to law. A suggestion this extreme will never get passed without some major corruption going on, so it'll be sidelined and never make it through for a second hearing. Job done, democracy wins and we can continue living our lives.

If we really enacted every single piece of legislation proposed or every single special committee report then we would live in a very strange world!

It's the rule... read more here...

[Anonymous Coward]

in this interesting (Dutch) column, with such beauties as "laagsteactieprijsgarantie" or "Fransekaasliefhebber". We don't like spaces in our words...

Dutch is poetic compared to Welsh

[TapeCutter]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Here's an innovative idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

' The idea is to help the old media fund 'innovative initiatives.'

Here's an innovative idea! STICK IT ON LINE!!!!!

Too big to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again this is an example of how capitalism is now only a joke. If a person was having trouble getting a job because their skills were behind the times they would be told to get off their butt and go back to school. However, if businesses can't keep up with the changes they can force everyone else to pay for this. What happened to survival of the fittest, supply and demand, competition is good/monopolies are bad, etc...? There is no free market. It's nothing but a bunch of super powerful groups trying to hold on at any cost.

It's all the same. Communism failed because it turned to greed with a few people taking everything. Now our free market society is going the same route. But don't forget to factor in a multi-million dollar bonus for the media executives because we don't want to loose the "top talent" that can't exist without public money. They work hard to run industries into the ground and it's not cheap paying for all the houses, mistresses, boats, cars, servants, etc...

Relying on altruism is foolish

[ShadowWraith]

If the newspapers don't make money, journalists and photographers are not paid. If journalists and photographers are not paid, they will not risk going into dangerous situations to learn the truth (remember the two journalists held in North Korea) and the truth will have to come out through amateur bloggers and cell phone pictures, which all of you must admit is often inaccurate or uninformative. News costs money. Perhaps taxing internet use is not the right way to support the news industry, but if people quit paying for papers, some sort of tax will be necessary simply to keep the industry alive in any country. And before anyone replies suggesting it, online advertising revenues will never come close to covering the costs of quality reporting.

Marketers

[Anonymous Coward]

For a counterpoint, see Bill Hicks on marketers. Personally, turning journalists into marketers may pay some bills, but the personal and public affects are being ignored.

Fill in the gap

[s1lverl0rd]

Don't you think that disappearing quality dead-tree newspapers will eventually be replaced by quality bits-n-bytes news sources? There will always be a need for quality news coverage, be it digital or not.