Bloggasm

Let’s face it: No matter where your opinion falls on pay walls, nearly everyone agrees that a paywall is a barrier. And even those who firmly believe in the existence of a market for paywalled content agree there needs to be something that entices a reader to navigate past all the free news items and venture over the wall. The success of the Wall Street Journal’s pay wall is often attributed to the fact that it offers valuable financial information that investors can’t get elsewhere. This is why some DC-area newspapers can charge thousands of dollars to lobbyists for subscriptions to their daily policy coverage — it’s so wonky that it’s not touched by more general newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times. Consumer Reports has one of the most successful online subscription bases — 3 million in 2007 — because its in-depth consumer studies are not easily replicated by free online news outlets.

Why then is Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily — which hopes to be the most successful paid news app to date — wasting time publishing four-sentence articles on Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday?

In trying to be all brisk and app-y, The Daily often goes short — too short. On Ronald Reagan’s centenary birthday, for instance, it offered a full-page shot of him headlined “100 FOR THE GIPPER” followed by a three-sentence (total) “article” about the “bipartisan hero” (hmmm). A full-page shot of a bowl of shark-fin soup (“A FIN MESS” — groan) topped a four-sentence (total) “article” about a proposed California ban. Elsewhere, page-hogging infographics aren’t much different from what USA Today pioneered back in 1982, while gratuitously deployed video demonstrates that sometimes pictures can be worth way less than 1,000 words.

It’s unclear whether there really is a market at this point for a subscription-based daily newspaper tablet app. But what is clear is that if such a market exists, it will reward the publication that offers something not offered elsewhere. In other words: Depth. The Daily, in its struggle to find itself, needs to stop thinking like Time Magazine circa 1966 and thinking more like The New Yorker, which is known for its 10,000-word meaty profiles that are incredibly difficult to replicate.

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Ken Doctor explores the newsonomics of AOL’s $10 million acquisition of local news aggregator Outside.in. When the service launched a few years ago I signed up for it and then promptly forgot about it. Until AOL purchased it I had almost forgotten it existed.

As Doctor argues, the Outside.in acquisition is AOL’s attempt to meld its content system with a nimble method of aggregation. The key focus is for Patch to be able to offer quality community journalism on the cheap, hiring only one editor per Patch site and keeping freelance budgets relatively low. By integrating Outside.in into the system, it’ll be able to pull other local content in at a very small cost. I’ve seen no indication that Outside.in was a major traffic driver for news sites in the past, but with Patch it’ll have the injected steroids of original content. Could this be the perfect match?

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In a post today at Gigaom, Ryan Kim explores the success story of Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper (an app that allows you to save articles to “read later”). Arment pushes back against some common notions about new online media startups, chiefly that they need to have venture capital funding and that they have to offer all their services for free. In fact, Instapaper is an example of a startup with no outside funding that is already profitable…meaning if he decides to one day sell the company the lion’s share will go to him:

“If a service can be profitable and breakeven without VC money, you don’t need to take it,” Arment told me in an interview. “There’s no reason for developers to get a lot of users without charging. There’s another path. My goal is to spread that message: charge for something and make more than you spend.”

Arment launched Instapaper as a free website in January 2008 and became profitable later that fall when he first began selling a paid iPhone app alongside a free version. He’s been profitable ever since. Arment won’t disclose his revenue but he said he can cover his expenses and can afford to hire a couple more people if he needed. He left his Tumblr job in September to devote himself to Instapaper.

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Yesterday, the Washington Examiner reported that Arianna Huffington was extremely displeased with the White House Correspondents’ Association, the reason being that in its first year attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the Huffington Post had requested three tables for its guests and only received one. Huffington was so sure she’d receive the requested tables that she had invited 14 “celebrity” guests. But the Huffington Post wasn’t the only news organization to ask for and not receive three tables; World Net Daily, the conservative website, also faced similar news, with two key differences: rather than receiving a single table, it was granted all of two seats, and the news org, which was founded long before HuffPo back in 1997, has attended several dinners in the past. Understandably, its editor, Joseph Farah, wasn’t happy. Today, several websites, including WND, reported that he is suing the association for $10 million.

I spoke to Farah on the phone about the incident and he explained that they had requested three tables to coincide with the publication of a biography of Lester Kinsolving, WND’s longtime White House correspondent. Unsurprisingly, given WND’s right-leaning status and Kinsolving’s affiliation with it, Farah is claiming ideological foul play on the association.

“There’s no question about it,” he said. “I think it’s a slight to both Les and WND. He’s treated like a pariah in the association. He’s treated like a pariah by his colleagues at every briefing. Half the time he’s standing there with his hand up, and the guy from the AP will just close down the briefing. He’s treated with disrespect by journalists. It’s really sad because it’s not uniform, or universal, that they disrespect elder statesmen of the press corp, because Helen Thomas is treated like a queen. She asks questions that are just as bizarre as Les, but because her ideological leaning is to the port side, she’s treated like a queen. And Les Kinsolving, who is not much of an ideologue, to be honest with you, but his association with World Net Daily pigeon holes him, and he’s treated with disrespect.”

According to Farah, a table at the dinner costs roughly $2,500, and WND sent three separate checks knowing there would be a chance that it wouldn’t get all three tables. He claimed that he had an WND staffer hand in the applications the very first day the association opened to them, and that the association, despite not giving WND an entire table, cashed one of the checks. “I’m a business man, and when I cash someone’s check, I deliver the service they want. I don’t say, ‘well you know what, I’m going to give you this other service. It’s not as good, but I’m going to cash your check, and here’s my idea of what you want and deserve.”

Farah said he would have felt less insulted if he’d received no tables rather than two seats, and he called on the association to have some objectivity on how they dole out tables (I have to admit, I kind of agree with him on this one). “What are the standards that you use? Does seniority have anything to do with it? Does longevity have anything to do with it? Does audience have anything to do with it? If you measure by any of those standards, you would assume World Net Daily passes the test, more than lots of other organizations that wouldn’t. What am I to conclude from that?”

The dinner takes place on May 1. Obviously, WND isn’t likely to collect $10 million before then, but I asked Farah what result he’d like to see from the lawsuit. He hoped for some kind of “temporary restraining order,” or for the association to grant them a table.

However, one thing is for certain: WND will not be using the two tickets that have been allocated to them. “I’ve told them kindly that I’m not interested in two tickets, and will not accept them, and so, you know, I don’t know what happens. They still have not returned our money.”

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Earlier today, I wanted to send an email to Steve Krakauer, who blogs for Mediaite. The only problem? Mediaite, like thousands of other news websites, only includes a general contact info email address for the entire site.

Compare this to Gawker, which provides email addresses for all its bloggers, so if there is a blogger that is covering a particular beat or story, I can contact him directly.

It’s annoying and frustrating that something so common sense could allude so many people in the news business. It’s evidence of the dinosaur mentality of news organizations, that it never occurs to them that the crowd can lead to valuable scoops and feedback. Shield off your journalists, keep them away from the masses.

I, on the other hand, have my contact info plastered on my blog, and I can’t tell you how many valuable connections I’ve received because of it.

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For my PBS MediaShift piece this week, I interviewed a Temple University Professor who wrote a paper juxtaposing the volume of media criticism before and after the rise of the web, arguing that a wealth of effective media criticism has arisen in the last decade. I also spoke to Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and Newsbusters’ Matt Sheffield about major media stories they’ve driven and how they’ve forced news organizations in some cases to alter their coverage.

In this week’s NPR’s On the Media, co-host Brooke Gladstone interviewed NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who has written about past disasters, most notably in his 2002 book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Gladstone asked him about the media’s coverage of the recent swine flu outbreaks, and during this interview Klinenberg told this anecdote:

Well, my favorite story, in fact, involves The New York Daily News, which sent one of their reporters around the streets of Manhattan in a surgical mask and they had him cough to see what kind of attention he would whip up. [BROOKE LAUGHS] And, of course, lots of people looked and thought, this is a weird thing.

But the best part of the story is that there was a British TV crew that had come the United States to capture how Americans were responding to this enormous outbreak of swine flu, and they stopped the guy and said they wanted to film him.

So here – [BROOKE LAUGHS] – this is a defining moment of a media event. It should be taught in media studies courses for eternity. You get the reporter who becomes the symbol of how Americans are acting, even though no one else on the streets is doing this.

So let’s review. A news outlet, unsatisfied that there isn’t enough panic in the streets due to swine flu, sets out to create panic about the outbreak on its own. And in the process of trying to create panic gets targeted by another news outlet who is out in the streets searching for panicked Americans.

Klinenberg is correct, when a historian writing on early 21st century epidemics covers the swine flu, this story will nicely represent the vapidness of the media when it comes to covering disaster situations