If there was a bright spot in the latest quarterly results from the New York Times, it’s the fact that the newspaper’s metered paywall has attracted almost 325,000 subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee for the site. Despite all the celebrating from the pro-paywall camp, however, that bright spot was more than overshadowed by the other dark clouds in the numbers — including the fact that print advertising revenue continues to decline, and the paper’s former online jewel About.com got whacked by Google’s algorithm updates. Anyone who takes on the job of CEO at the media company is going to have to start thinking creatively about its business, because all the easy money has already been made.

Although the paywall and related print-subscription deals helped boost circulation revenue by almost 5 percent in the NYT’s media group — which includes the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune — and digital advertising revenue was also up by about 5 percent for the quarter, neither of those things were able to compensate for the continued drop-off in print advertising. Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of million.

Paywall revenue isn’t even close to making up the gap

The New York Times didn’t provide any helpful charts that would make the reality of this situation more obvious, so one blogger decided to come up with his own. Paul McMorrow, an editor at CommonWealth magazine, put together a chart that shows the contrast between the NYT’s advertising revenue, circulation revenue and its total revenue:

According to newspaper-industry analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT is probably pulling in about million or so from its digital paywall — or “metered access,” as the paper likes to call it, since you get to read 20 articles for free before you get hit with a request for your credit card. But that’s not even close to being enough to make up for the decline in ad revenue, both print and digital, which dropped by 7 percent in the quarter.

One of the biggest problems for the Times is that its former online star About.com, which the company bought in 2005 for 0 million, has seen both its profitability and revenue-generating ability implode in the wake of an update to Google’s search algorithm — a change that was designed to penalize what the company called “low quality” content sites, or what some call “content farms.” In the most recent quarter, the NYT said About’s revenue fell by 26 percent, and profit fell by a staggering 67 percent.

As McMorrow’s chart shows, the Times is still far under water in terms of revenue, despite the benefit of its paywall. As I’ve argued before, there’s nothing wrong with having a paywall — although in many cases it amounts to building a wall of sandbags around the print newspaper edition, which provides most of the ad revenue — but if a paywall is your only strategy for responding to digital disruption of the media business, then you are almost certainly doomed, whether you are the New York Times or not.

Which way will the new CEO go — towards the past or the future?

So what should a new CEO be looking at to revitalize the NYT for a digital age? Ken Doctor suggests that the paper needs to look beyond just subcription revenue and focus on how it can target those 325,000 digital subscribers — since it knows who they are and where they live, and it already has their credit-card numbers.

I would take it one step further, however, and suggest that the new CEO think about some of the suggestions about “reverse paywalls” that have been made by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, and also by former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti (who is now at the Wall Street Journal in a digital role). The main principle behind this idea is that regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.

The NYT has taken a few steps towards trying to build relationships with its readers through what I’ve called the “levelling up” process that it recently added to its comment section, where readers can achieve preferred status for good behavior. Those are the building blocks of a relationship that the paper could use to its own benefit in all kinds of ways, many of which could generate new sources of revenue — real-life events, for example, which has been one of the things that has helped turn The Atlantic around, or a line of e-books based on the newspaper’s original reporting.

Another thing the NYT could — and should — be thinking about is what the role of an information provider is in the digital age. Is it to act as a gatekeeper for certain kinds of data and try to reimpose the scarcity that used to exist in the print era? Or is it to find partners to distribute that information in as many ways as possible, and to think of the paper as a data platform, as The Guardian has with its open-platform project? One way looks to the past, and the other to the future. Which way will the NYT go?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users jphilipg and Giuseppe Bognanni

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Digging your 3D TVs, video game consoles and laptops? Thank the past — the New York Public Library is here to remind you that streographic entertainment has been blowing minds for over 100 years, and has the animated gifs to prove it. The Library recently introduced Stereogranimator, a web app that taps into the institution’s large collection of historical stereographs and allows user to convert them into wiggling GIF animations and 3D anaglyphs. The program was inspired by “Reaching for the Out of Reach,” a manual labor of animated stereographs started by San Francisco artist Joshua Heineman. The library currently has over 40,000 pairs of stenographic images just begging to be converted to depth-suggesting wigglepic. Interested? The link is below, friends — go ahead and create your own psudeo-3D view of history. Too lazy to make your own? Fine, read on for a shaky and colorful look at an orange tree.

Continue reading NY Public Library turns stereographs into animated GIFs, reminds your 3D TV of its roots

NY Public Library turns stereographs into animated GIFs, reminds your 3D TV of its roots originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ripples continue to spread from a recent Oregon court ruling involving a blogger who was sued for defamation, and argued that she should be covered by the state’s “media shield” law. The judge decided that she didn’t qualify as a journalist, which in turn reignited the old debate over whether bloggers are (or can sometimes be) journalists. Some have argued that instead of this question, it’s more important to define what journalism is, and ensure that it remains protected. But in many ways, that is even harder to define than who qualifies to be a journalist.

To recap the case, Crystal Cox — who refers to herself as an “investigative blogger” — was sued for defamation as a result of some blog posts she wrote about a company and its CEO. The judge who heard the case looked at Cox’s blog and ruled that she wasn’t a member of the media, at least for the purposes of Oregon’s media shield law, because she wasn’t affiliated with any traditional media outlets. This caused a wave of outrage in the blogosphere from many (including me) who believe that bloggers can be journalists regardless of whether they work for a mainstream media entity.

We shouldn’t be protecting journalists, but journalism

In the wake of the ruling, several bloggers — including Kashmir Hill at Forbes and David Carr of the New York Times — noted that Cox’s behavior went way beyond what most journalists (professional or not) would describe as journalistic: among other things, she created domains aimed at tarnishing the reputation of her targets, and then apparently sent an email to the company offering her services as an SEO consultant to repair the reputation she helped destroy.

As Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic pointed out, this allowed journalists everywhere to heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: “She’s not a journalist; she’s just a crazy lady with WordPress! We don’t need to protect her.” But this avoids the real question, said Rosen — not who is or isn’t a journalist, but what is journalism and how do we make sure that it is protected? The framers of the U.S. constitution weren’t concerned with journalists, she said, because they didn’t even exist yet as we know them. Instead, they wanted to protect free speech regardless of who engages in it.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen has made a similar point: we should be talking about protecting journalism, he says, not just trying to figure out who is a journalist. But how do we define what constitutes journalism? The judge in the Oregon case tried to come up with some qualities that he said Cox didn’t exhibit, including:

• proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
• keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
• mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
• creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others
• contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story

All of these are excellent examples of things that some journalists do — but there are plenty who don’t, and practices are all over the map. The point about confidentiality alone is probably ignored by more journalists than adhere to it (not to mention the confusion over the exact meaning of phrases like “off the record,” “on background” and “not for attribution”). Should licensing bodies be giving tests, the way they do for doctors and lawyers before they are accredited? Some think they should. Josh Stearns of the non-profit group Free Press, who has been tracking journalists arrested during the crackdown on the Occupy movement, argues that actions should speak louder than labels.

How do we classify “random acts of journalism?”

Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire about the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, noted that he wouldn’t meet many definitions of a journalist because he isn’t actually a reporter — and I doubt that he maintains detailed notes of the conversations he conducts with people in the Arab world over Twitter, or discusses confidentiality agreements with them in depth. He also does a lot of “assembling the writings and postings of others,” as the judge put it. But I don’t think anyone would argue that what Carvin is doing isn’t journalism.

When a Pakistani Twitter user posted observations about the Osama bin Laden raid while it was happening, a debate sprang up about whether what he did qualified as journalism, and Carvin argued that there are more and more examples of what he called “random acts of journalism,” where someone happens to be in a certain place and provides on-the-scene reporting — or takes a photo of a plane that has landed in the Hudson River, for example.

Are these people journalists? Not really. But what they are doing is clearly one of the crucial elements of journalism now — as journalism becomes an ecosystem that anyone can become part of, rather than a static concept associated with a specific group of professionals and a specific group of platforms. Learning how to work within that process, to add journalistic skills (however we define them) to the streams of information that are flowing over us, is more crucial than ever, regardless of what we call the people who do that.

I think we have to resist the temptation to restrict our definition of journalism, just because there is some bad journalism out there (something there was plenty of before the internet and blogging came along). As Jay Rosen argues, journalism gets better when more people do it, and we should think about how to make that easier, not harder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Yan Arief Purwanto and Petteri Sulonen

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While Android and iOS continue to control the top of the smartphone market, we keep wondering when an ascendent third-place challenger will appear. New data from Nielsen helps explain why placing a strong third may be tough. Nielsen says that in the U.S., Android and iOS account for 71 percent of all smartphones in use, which leaves little room for competitors. But among smartphone users who downloaded an app in the last 30 days, the competition is even more lopsided: 83 percent used either an iPhone or Android.

Now, on a surface level this might seem intuitive considering how many apps are available on the two platforms. But the figures show that the top two operating systems account for a bigger chunk of app downloads than their relative footprint would logically suggest. Competitors also have apps, but these two are the leading destinations for people who are eager for mobile software.

That shows why it’s hard to break into the top of the smartphone market, which is dominated by what the New York Times‘ David Pogue calls “app phones.” It’s not enough to have elegant hardware, you have to bring a very vibrant and broad app market to consumers, too. That’s partly why iOS and Android are sitting pretty: they offer a lot of very compelling apps that make money for developers, more so on iOS but increasingly so on Android.

For competitors like BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 to compete, they need to really bring the app heat as well. Both are working hard on doing so, but it’s hard to close the distance when iOS and Android have such a lead. And that lead also benefits Google and Apple through app lock-in, in which consumers may be reluctant to leave a platform because they have a lot of apps and data tied into one operating system. Getting someone to switch to a new platform requires a big commitment from a user, who has to know that the apps they want will be waiting for them on a new platform and that the transition, which may involve losing data, will be worth it.

Of course, the app market and the growth of the platforms are somewhat intertwined. Developers like to place their bets on the biggest and most profitable platforms and a big library of apps can help sell a platform. For someone who’s starting behind on apps, or whose device sales are fading or sluggish, it’s tough to break that cycle after it’s well under way. I think Windows Phone 7 probably has the best shot at escaping the downward spiral and gaining some momentum, but looking at the competition through the lens of the app advantage, I think it will be a harder road for Microsoft then the rosy projections painted by Gartner and IDC, who predict WP7 displacing iOS by 2015 as the chief rival to Android. The app ecosystem is a key factor to achieving that uptake.

Nokia chief Stephen Elop said as much when he announced that the move to Windows Phone 7 for Nokia smartphones was led by the need to compete on ecosystems. But I think it’s tough to keep building that ecosystem when you’re not selling that many phones. Nokia’s introduction of new phones will certainly help, but consumers are still going to see more apps on Android and iOS. And developers are going to need to see a lot more momentum before they really support WP7. There is hope for WP7, based on a recent Appcelerator/IDC developer survey, which found that WP7 was pulling away from BlackBerry as the third most popular smartphone option for developers. But WP7 will also have to vie for developer attention with the Kindle Fire, which is now the top Android tablet in the minds of Appcelerator developers.

I still hope that we’ll see more than just a two-horse race in smartphones. And it’s certainly possible we will see WP7 and BlackBerry rise to the challenge. But they’re going to have to offer competitive app marketplaces for consumers and developers. The emergence of HTML5 web apps might offset some of the existing advantage, but even if it does, it will likely take a while to really get going. For now, Android and iOS, with their app advantage, are enjoying the view from the top, without much fear of tumbling from their perch.

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When PayPal went public in 2002, then executive vice president Reid Hoffman, spent some of his winnings on investing in an early round of Silicon Valley’s first solar thin film startup Nanosolar, according to an article in the New York Times. Hoffman, of course, later on founded LinkedIn, which went public in May of his year, but Hoffman hasn’t seemed to continue that sort of interest in funding early stage clean power and cleantech companies.

Those early shares of Nanosolar that Hoffman bought are likely worth a decent amount at this point. Other seed investors at the time included Spring Ventures investor Sunil Paul, Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Benchmark Capital.

Nanosolar was reportedly worth billion at one point in 2008 when it last raised money, but I’m not sure how the company is valued now. As the demand for solar panels, particularly one’s not made of silicon, has dropped dramatically this year, and thin film solar companies have struggled, I wouldn’t be surprised if that valuation has dropped, too.

Back when Hoffman made that investment in Nanosolar, then colleague at PayPal Peter Thiel bought a Ferrari with his earnings, says the New York Times. Thiel has gotten a lot of attention recently for calling cleantech investing “a disaster.” 

So who was right back then: Thiel or Hoffman? Will Nanosolar struggle like its peer Solyndra has, going bankrupt partly due to cheap Chinese solar panels, and making Hoffman’s seed investment worthless? (And idealistic compared to Thiel’s sports car splurge). Or will the company be one of the solar leaders and add more cash to Reid’s coffers if it gets bought for a high amount of goes public?

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Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package, although most are trying hard to build an online readership as well, or experiment with iPad and Facebook apps (not to mention paywalls). But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today  appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking “open platform.”

USA Today has had an API (an “application programming interface,” which allows outside developers and services to access its content) for some time now, as many other newspapers such as the New York Times  do. But like most of those other media outlets, the terms of the USA Today content API said it could only be used for personal or non-commercial uses, which meant the range of applications that could make use of the paper’s content was extremely limited. Now, the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that the newspaper has changed the terms of its API, and will allow commercial licensing of its data, with no rate limits or data caps for these “premium” licenses.

Opening up a relationship with outside developers

The paper’s APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data — which is made up of public data, but has been collected by USA Today and made available in a more usable format than the original government version (although most of its APIs require non-commercial use, the New York Times allows commercial use of its government-info API, which is also made up of public data). Stephen Kurtz, VP of digital development at USA Today, told the Nieman Lab that most of the developers interested in using the paper’s APIs for commercial use are “mom-and-pop” shops, or a couple of guys in a garage, mashing up the content they get with other sources — such as combining USA Today movie reviews with data from Netflix. Said Kurtz:

We encourage that, and they give us good feedback of what they’d like to see and how they would like the API to grow. So for us, it’s very symbiotic.

This is a smart way to think of what an open API accomplishes. It’s not so much that it’s going to generate huge sums of money for a newspaper that offers it, but it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself — and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback. For The Guardian, which launched its “open platform” approach last year, the opening up of its API was very much an extension of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s belief in what he calls a “mutualized newspaper,” one in which readers and those outside the publication help on both the journalistic side and the development side.

Those outside the paper have good ideas too

As Chris Thorpe, then the Guardian‘s developer advocate, described in an interview with me last year when the open platform launched, the paper’s API allows for access on several levels: one is the original free level, which allows anyone to use the data for personal or non-commercial purposes; the second is a commercial license, which allows developers to make use of the API provided they agree to accept advertising within the content; and the third is a “bespoke” arrangement, in which developers can request specific data and work with the paper to build a service or app — and then share in the revenue generated from it.

The British paper has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. For example, Thorpe has a prototype of a site he calls the “Later Today” Guardian: the site takes the newslists that the newspaper recently made public, which detail which stories it is working on for a particular day, and then maps them against the stories that the paper actually produces. Not only that, but it also notes which ones are in the process of being updated, so readers with useful information can contact the author via Twitter or email.

It’s great that newspapers like the New York Times have “labs” like Beta620, where their staff can experiment with different formats and services based around their content. But one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API? That’s a worthwhile attitude that more traditional media outlets could benefit from. Embedded below is the video interview I did with Thorpe when the open platform launched.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Arvind Grover and George Kelly

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