In the future you will most likely see AP going direct to the consumer and competing with the large multiple media outlets such as Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Tribune and NYT who are currently members.
AP is a member-owned organization, and the membership doesn't want AP doing that. Neither does AP CEO Tom Curley, who specifically said it's a bad idea when speaking last month at the Online News Association conference in Hollywood. (He derided Reuters for going down that road.)
USA Today was founded in 1982 by Al Neuharth, chairman of Gannett, which previously was known as publisher of a vast number of undistinguished small newspapers.
In the first year or so most of the staff was "on loan" from Gannett papers around the country, and many even lived in a Gannett dormitory in suburban Washington.
> Didn't it begin with the express business model of having personalized regional editions, with most of the stories being sent via satellite?
No. It began with identical editions printed throughout the country, with complete pages being transmitted via satellite. The pages were composed in Washington. Transmitting full page images via satellite was very new technology.
Previously, nationally distributed newspapers (such as the Wall Street Journal, or the NY Times national edition) were composed "locally" at printing plants scattered around the country from text that was transmitted using teletypesetting technology that dates to the 1930s. (Coincidentally, teletypesetting was pioneered by Frank Gannett.)
There were several things about USA Today that were revolutionary, in addition to the use of satellite full-page transmissions:
* Specific targeting of time-pressed travelers, with stories edited accordingly (short, to the point).
* Radically extensive use of color. The design was extremely controversial at the time.
* A national-identity viewpoint, reflected in detail that carried down to the level of writing style (extensive use of the pronoun "we").
* Brand management that was more like a conventional consumer product (toothpaste, automobiles) than a newspaper.
I don't know why you are having problems with this. Right-click on the "Local folders" icon and select "New folder..." Create as many local folders, and nested local folders, as you want.
Credit for this story ultimately should go to blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis is a longtime journalist, former TV critic, and currently head of the internet division of a major U.S. media company. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FCC's data and followed it up with a searing analysis.
Jarvis is a professional, but anyone can do this. Dig in and report. Many hands make for light work, and all that.
The referenced URL provides access to quite a bit of detailed forecast information. If all you want is current weather observations, you can get that in RSS or the Weather Service's own XML format without the bothersome overhead of SOAP or WSDL. See this page:
A simple search of Google News reveals it was a optical scanner, not a Diebold touchscreen system. Of course, if it had been a Diebold system, we wouldn't have this problem. No one would know the results were screwed, and no recounting would be possible.
Whoa, there. Rick Hasen wrote: "from the point of view of federal election law (as opposed to, say, federal communications law---this is really no different"... and quoting it out of context badly distorts the meaning.
Great tip. However, I still regard it as a bug in Thunderbird that it does not properly interoperate with Firefox, including cookies. I'd report it as a bug if I could find my way to the right Bugzilla.
Sad to say: No, taking photos at an event -- for any purpose, including news -- may in fact be covered by a gray-ink "contract" printed on the back of your ticket. It's similar to a the EULAs in shrinkwrapped software.
Sports sanctioning organizations figured out years ago that they're really entertainment companies, creating "intellectual property."
And they do not want competition. So they create exclusive, licensed arrangements for distribution of this "property." This is why you cannot watch of the BBC's Olympics streaming video in the USA, or any of NBC's video streaming anywhere on the Web.
Newspapers are not allowed to shoot video -- even though many newspapers shoot video these days, for their Web sites.
Some sports organizations have gone so far as to claim ownership of basic facts and try to prevent realtime scoring and distribution of data on the Internet.
My point is that it's not a survey, it's not supposed to be projectible, and therefore should not be expected to be expressed with a margin of error disclaimer. It's an actual count of all users of finite set of sites. Using the term "sample" is misleading; neither WebSideStory nor the PC World article portrays this as anything other than measurement of the WSS customer base. Any projection onto the general Internet population is entirely in the mind of the reader.
Most of the sites actually are very mainstream. The WebSideStory site has a list of their major customers, and while Cisco and Autodesk are included, so are the entire Walt Disney group and SignOnSanDiego.com -- high-traffic general consumer sites that are not exactly aimed at the slashdot crowd.
Margin of error applies to survey methodologies -- ask a sample, project the answer to a larger population.
WebSideStory isn't doing that; their data is continual, actual pageview analysis from their (large) customer base, and in that context a one percent shift is really a one percent shift, not one percent plus or minus something.
It's still small, though, and is yet more evidence that people do not behave rationally.
You're welcome to doubt my credibility, or you could Google my name. I'll address your three points.
1) To clarify, I'm discussing the business practices of U.S. newspapers. The set of U.S. newspapers employing the free/registration Web model is finite and I've looked at every one of their TOS documents. Most do not send advertising email to customers at all. Those that do send emails control the conditions. (Of course it's possible that the policy says one thing and they do another. But people get fired for that.) When a newspaper sends email to registered users, including advertising mail, the process is handled either in-house or through a technology provider such as ExactTarget or CheetahMail. In either case, an advertiser is not given the address. The list is considered proprietary data owned by the newspaper.
2) Been there, done that, looked at thousands of registration entries. I was surprised at first by the general level of honesty, but then, most people really aren't angry, paranoid and nutty, even though it might seem that way on the Internet.
3) Yes. Vin Crosbie has a good, detailed dissection of the weakness of the paid model.
Others already have posted the obvious answer that newspapers make most of their money on advertising, not circulation. I'll add some precision. (I am a strategist for a newspaper company.)
Three revenue drivers traditionally have been coequal for printed newspapers: Classified advertising, display advertising (the big ads on news pages), and circulation.
However, circulation revenues are rapidly declining due to market pressures, and circulation costs (a problem of print distribution, but not of Internet distribution) consume more than circulation sales brings in.
Display advertising has declined about 15 percentage points over the last couple of decades, largely due to retail sector consolidations and Wal-Mart (which does not advertise very much in newspapers). So newspapers are increasingly dependent on classified advertising... which happens to work extraordinarily well on the Internet.
The audience is moving from print to the Internet, so it is imperative that newspapers find ways to serve that audience online (and deliver advertising to it).
On the Internet, the only business model that has been demonstrated to work for newspapers is the open, ad-supported model. The typical paid site gets something like 1.5 percent of the audience of the printed newspaper, while an open site may actually exceed the audience of the print product. So successful newspapers have open Web sites and rely on advertising for support.
Successful newspapers have implemented classified advertising pricing strategies that harvest that Internet-generated value. The single most effective advertising program implemented by newspapers is the "Top Jobs" program originated at sfgate,, which lets key classified advertisers pay extra for exposure on regular site content pages.
Regardless of what slashdot groupthink might dictate, the reality is that local retail banner and tile advertising also works. However, the Internet -- because of its potential global reach -- creates unique problems for local advertisers.
Consider the Washington Post. Its advertising base is local. Its Web reach is global. If you think about that for maybe five seconds, you can see why they have implemented registration. They have to develop two completely independent ad sales strategies -- one based on a global audience (which is why they ask business questions of nonlocal registrants) and another based on a local audience. And they need to be able to target local advertising based on geographic information from registration and also national advertising based on the B2B questions from registration.
It is an article of faith on slashdot that "everybody" lies on registrations. My own data shows under one percent falsification. Perhaps most people are not as dishonest as slashdotters.:-)
As for the whine about "inevitable spam"... please demonstrate where a newspaper has abused the email addresses provided by its users. No newspaper shares those addresses with advertisers. Every news company carefully controls the use of those email addresses -- even the Tribune Company, which requires that you consent to receive ad mail as a condition of site access, severely limits both the number and the nature of the emails. It would be bad business to do otherwise.
When.biz and.info emerged a couple of years ago, I had to spend a six-figure sum of my company's money to register trademarks, placenames, product names, et cetera... primarily as a defensive maneuver. We didn't get a cent of value out of those registrations, but we did have to fight several expensive legal challenges (multiple companies may use a word as a trademark in different contexts, so disputes naturally arise).
In my opinion, these new TLDs were successful only as a tool for driving revenue to registrars and especially Afilias and Neulevel (which administer those TLD's).
Symbian phones can use Palm keyboards. Note that the Nokia 3650 is a GSM world phone, so you can take notes (and send email) from pretty much anywhere.
This speech by Stephen Salyer, president of Public Radio International, is worth a careful read. He says "we face a crisis in public broadcasting that calls for us to reinvent ourselves. We need to change our mission, re-define what we mean by "community" and local service, reorganize our institutions around the needs of public media consumers, and develop new forms of public media organizations that can move quickly and attract private capital."
PRI is a program development/distribution organization that in many ways competes with NPR. It is a spinoff of Minnesota Public Radio. Many of the programs you hear on your "NPR station," such as Marketplace, Sound Money and The World, are PRI programs. PRI also syndicates BBC and CBC programming to U.S. public stations.
Open relays -- legitimate mail handlers that were misconfigured -- used to be major problem. My mail stats show that's not the case any more. I use ORDB. A year or so ago, it stopped a lot of spam. It hardly ever shows up in my logfiles these days.
Most of the spam I'm seeing now is coming through virus-infected computers. These aren't supposed to be mail relays at all. They're generally Windows PCs on cable modems.
Viruses install trapdoor relays on these machines, accessible only by the virus writers, who are in league with spammers. These virus relays aren't being detected by ORDB checks. They may not even be running SMTP on the receive side, for all I know.
I've also noticed that these virus-spammers tend to not use harvested email lists, but rather employ the equivalent of a dictionary attack -- sending email to randomly chosen common first names: anna, brenda, dave, ted, andrew, sam, joe, and so forth. If I were ambitious enough I'd wire some of these bogus names to firewall triggers and automatically blackhole the senders.
Phone numbers already are globally unique, so there is no need to have second-level domain names within a mobile TLD. Having carriers or hardware makers involved is only counterproductive. We don't need any more vendor lock-in opportunities.
On the other hand... globally available free access to MY cellphone for the purpose of delivering messages sounds like an open door for yet more spam. Phonenumber.mbl is just too easy.
For some applications a shell script might be the right tool. Back at the dawn of time (circa 1994) I wrote a "caption contest" for startribune.com in Minneapolis. All it took was a couple of four- or five-line shell scripts. I made a similar tool for weatherman Paul Douglas to update his column and forecasts.
Steven Grimm's uncgi makes it simple, and the resulting process was much smaller/faster/less resource-intensive than disturbing the Perl monster.
I read the bill, and I'm in the news business, and I think it's very bad. The government does not belong in a role of defining what is, and what is not, a legitimate news organization. The freedom of speech and of the press belongs to all the people, not just to a select few, or to specific corporate entities.
Slashdot Mirror
AP is a member-owned organization, and the membership doesn't want AP doing that. Neither does AP CEO Tom Curley, who specifically said it's a bad idea when speaking last month at the Online News Association conference in Hollywood. (He derided Reuters for going down that road.)
> How many years ago was USA TODAY started?
USA Today was founded in 1982 by Al Neuharth, chairman of Gannett, which previously was known as publisher of a vast number of undistinguished small newspapers.
In the first year or so most of the staff was "on loan" from Gannett papers around the country, and many even lived in a Gannett dormitory in suburban Washington.
> Didn't it begin with the express business model of having personalized regional editions, with most of the stories being sent via satellite?
No. It began with identical editions printed throughout the country, with complete pages being transmitted via satellite. The pages were composed in Washington. Transmitting full page images via satellite was very new technology.
Previously, nationally distributed newspapers (such as the Wall Street Journal, or the NY Times national edition) were composed "locally" at printing plants scattered around the country from text that was transmitted using teletypesetting technology that dates to the 1930s. (Coincidentally, teletypesetting was pioneered by Frank Gannett.)
There were several things about USA Today that were revolutionary, in addition to the use of satellite full-page transmissions:
* Specific targeting of time-pressed travelers, with stories edited accordingly (short, to the point).
* Radically extensive use of color. The design was extremely controversial at the time.
* A national-identity viewpoint, reflected in detail that carried down to the level of writing style (extensive use of the pronoun "we").
* Brand management that was more like a conventional consumer product (toothpaste, automobiles) than a newspaper.
I don't know why you are having problems with this. Right-click on the "Local folders" icon and select "New folder ..." Create as many local folders, and nested local folders, as you want.
Credit for this story ultimately should go to blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis is a longtime journalist, former TV critic, and currently head of the internet division of a major U.S. media company. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the FCC's data and followed it up with a searing analysis.
Jarvis is a professional, but anyone can do this. Dig in and report. Many hands make for light work, and all that.
The referenced URL provides access to quite a bit of detailed forecast information. If all you want is current weather observations, you can get that in RSS or the Weather Service's own XML format without the bothersome overhead of SOAP or WSDL. See this page:
h p? state=&Find=Find
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/data/current_obs/seek.p
A simple search of Google News reveals it was a optical scanner, not a Diebold touchscreen system. Of course, if it had been a Diebold system, we wouldn't have this problem. No one would know the results were screwed, and no recounting would be possible.
l e? AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160333/1008
4 21 -098.html
URL:http://www.pal-item.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic
URL:http://www.indystar.com/articles/1/194039-4
Whoa, there. Rick Hasen wrote: "from the point of view of federal election law (as opposed to, say, federal communications law---this is really no different" ... and quoting it out of context badly distorts the meaning.
Great tip. However, I still regard it as a bug in Thunderbird that it does not properly interoperate with Firefox, including cookies. I'd report it as a bug if I could find my way to the right Bugzilla.
Sad to say: No, taking photos at an event -- for any purpose, including news -- may in fact be covered by a gray-ink "contract" printed on the back of your ticket. It's similar to a the EULAs in shrinkwrapped software.
Sports sanctioning organizations figured out years ago that they're really entertainment companies, creating "intellectual property."
And they do not want competition. So they create exclusive, licensed arrangements for distribution of this "property." This is why you cannot watch of the BBC's Olympics streaming video in the USA, or any of NBC's video streaming anywhere on the Web.
Newspapers are not allowed to shoot video -- even though many newspapers shoot video these days, for their Web sites.
Some sports organizations have gone so far as to claim ownership of basic facts and try to prevent realtime scoring and distribution of data on the Internet.
My point is that it's not a survey, it's not supposed to be projectible, and therefore should not be expected to be expressed with a margin of error disclaimer. It's an actual count of all users of finite set of sites. Using the term "sample" is misleading; neither WebSideStory nor the PC World article portrays this as anything other than measurement of the WSS customer base. Any projection onto the general Internet population is entirely in the mind of the reader.
Most of the sites actually are very mainstream. The WebSideStory site has a list of their major customers, and while Cisco and Autodesk are included, so are the entire Walt Disney group and SignOnSanDiego.com -- high-traffic general consumer sites that are not exactly aimed at the slashdot crowd.
Whoa there.
Margin of error applies to survey methodologies -- ask a sample, project the answer to a larger population.
WebSideStory isn't doing that; their data is continual, actual pageview analysis from their (large) customer base, and in that context a one percent shift is really a one percent shift, not one percent plus or minus something.
It's still small, though, and is yet more evidence that people do not behave rationally.
"Good topic for a Psych Major to do a thesis on, but that's about it."
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller
originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html
You're welcome to doubt my credibility, or you could Google my name. I'll address your three points.
1) To clarify, I'm discussing the business practices of U.S. newspapers. The set of U.S. newspapers employing the free/registration Web model is finite and I've looked at every one of their TOS documents. Most do not send advertising email to customers at all. Those that do send emails control the conditions. (Of course it's possible that the policy says one thing and they do another. But people get fired for that.) When a newspaper sends email to registered users, including advertising mail, the process is handled either in-house or through a technology provider such as ExactTarget or CheetahMail. In either case, an advertiser is not given the address. The list is considered proprietary data owned by the newspaper.
2) Been there, done that, looked at thousands of registration entries. I was surprised at first by the general level of honesty, but then, most people really aren't angry, paranoid and nutty, even though it might seem that way on the Internet.
3) Yes. Vin Crosbie has a good, detailed dissection of the weakness of the paid model.
Others already have posted the obvious answer that newspapers make most of their money on advertising, not circulation. I'll add some precision. (I am a strategist for a newspaper company.)
... which happens to work extraordinarily well on the Internet.
:-)
... please demonstrate where a newspaper has abused the email addresses provided by its users. No newspaper shares those addresses with advertisers. Every news company carefully controls the use of those email addresses -- even the Tribune Company, which requires that you consent to receive ad mail as a condition of site access, severely limits both the number and the nature of the emails. It would be bad business to do otherwise.
Three revenue drivers traditionally have been coequal for printed newspapers: Classified advertising, display advertising (the big ads on news pages), and circulation.
However, circulation revenues are rapidly declining due to market pressures, and circulation costs (a problem of print distribution, but not of Internet distribution) consume more than circulation sales brings in.
Display advertising has declined about 15 percentage points over the last couple of decades, largely due to retail sector consolidations and Wal-Mart (which does not advertise very much in newspapers). So newspapers are increasingly dependent on classified advertising
The audience is moving from print to the Internet, so it is imperative that newspapers find ways to serve that audience online (and deliver advertising to it).
On the Internet, the only business model that has been demonstrated to work for newspapers is the open, ad-supported model. The typical paid site gets something like 1.5 percent of the audience of the printed newspaper, while an open site may actually exceed the audience of the print product. So successful newspapers have open Web sites and rely on advertising for support.
Successful newspapers have implemented classified advertising pricing strategies that harvest that Internet-generated value. The single most effective advertising program implemented by newspapers is the "Top Jobs" program originated at sfgate,, which lets key classified advertisers pay extra for exposure on regular site content pages.
Regardless of what slashdot groupthink might dictate, the reality is that local retail banner and tile advertising also works. However, the Internet -- because of its potential global reach -- creates unique problems for local advertisers.
Consider the Washington Post. Its advertising base is local. Its Web reach is global. If you think about that for maybe five seconds, you can see why they have implemented registration. They have to develop two completely independent ad sales strategies -- one based on a global audience (which is why they ask business questions of nonlocal registrants) and another based on a local audience. And they need to be able to target local advertising based on geographic information from registration and also national advertising based on the B2B questions from registration.
It is an article of faith on slashdot that "everybody" lies on registrations. My own data shows under one percent falsification. Perhaps most people are not as dishonest as slashdotters.
As for the whine about "inevitable spam"
When .biz and .info emerged a couple of years ago, I had to spend a six-figure sum of my company's money to register trademarks, placenames, product names, et cetera ... primarily as a defensive maneuver. We didn't get a cent of value out of those registrations, but we did have to fight several expensive legal challenges (multiple companies may use a word as a trademark in different contexts, so disputes naturally arise).
In my opinion, these new TLDs were successful only as a tool for driving revenue to registrars and especially Afilias and Neulevel (which administer those TLD's).
Symbian phones can use Palm keyboards. Note that the Nokia 3650 is a GSM world phone, so you can take notes (and send email) from pretty much anywhere.
This speech by Stephen Salyer, president of Public Radio International, is worth a careful read. He says "we face a crisis in public broadcasting that calls for us to reinvent ourselves. We need to change our mission, re-define what we mean by "community" and local service, reorganize our institutions around the needs of public media consumers, and develop new forms of public media organizations that can move quickly and attract private capital."
PRI is a program development/distribution organization that in many ways competes with NPR. It is a spinoff of Minnesota Public Radio. Many of the programs you hear on your "NPR station," such as Marketplace, Sound Money and The World, are PRI programs. PRI also syndicates BBC and CBC programming to U.S. public stations.
Tax Cut for the Web lists Netscape 6+7 as supported browsers, so it should work fine with Mozilla/Firebird.
If anyone is forcing you to entangle content, presentation and business logic, dial 911.
Try some self-discipline. It's not the language's fault.
Open relays -- legitimate mail handlers that were misconfigured -- used to be major problem. My mail stats show that's not the case any more. I use ORDB. A year or so ago, it stopped a lot of spam. It hardly ever shows up in my logfiles these days.
Most of the spam I'm seeing now is coming through virus-infected computers. These aren't supposed to be mail relays at all. They're generally Windows PCs on cable modems.
Viruses install trapdoor relays on these machines, accessible only by the virus writers, who are in league with spammers. These virus relays aren't being detected by ORDB checks. They may not even be running SMTP on the receive side, for all I know.
I've also noticed that these virus-spammers tend to not use harvested email lists, but rather employ the equivalent of a dictionary attack -- sending email to randomly chosen common first names: anna, brenda, dave, ted, andrew, sam, joe, and so forth. If I were ambitious enough I'd wire some of these bogus names to firewall triggers and automatically blackhole the senders.
Phone numbers already are globally unique, so there is no need to have second-level domain names within a mobile TLD. Having carriers or hardware makers involved is only counterproductive. We don't need any more vendor lock-in opportunities.
... globally available free access to MY cellphone for the purpose of delivering messages sounds like an open door for yet more spam. Phonenumber.mbl is just too easy.
On the other hand
For some applications a shell script might be the right tool. Back at the dawn of time (circa 1994) I wrote a "caption contest" for startribune.com in Minneapolis. All it took was a couple of four- or five-line shell scripts. I made a similar tool for weatherman Paul Douglas to update his column and forecasts.
Steven Grimm's uncgi makes it simple, and the resulting process was much smaller/faster/less resource-intensive than disturbing the Perl monster.
The Washington Post reported this, not Worldnet Daily, which just pilfered the news.
This does not address the copying of news articles. Copying of news articles is already covered by copyright law.
I read the bill, and I'm in the news business, and I think it's very bad. The government does not belong in a role of defining what is, and what is not, a legitimate news organization. The freedom of speech and of the press belongs to all the people, not just to a select few, or to specific corporate entities.