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From Paper to Persona: The White Paper

2011-04-16T09:58:00.001-04:00

From Paper to Persona:

Managing Privacy and Information Overload;

Sustaining Journalism in the Attention Age

A White Paper for the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI)

By Bill Densmore [1] http://www.papertopersona.org

RJI Fellow, 2008-2009 rev. April 17, 2011

ABSTRACT

The challenge of meshing privacy, trust, identity and information commerce in a common system with the potential to help sustain journalism has been undertaken conceptually by a researcher at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Reynolds Fellow Bill Densmore has written the report: "From Paper to Persona: Managing Information Overload; Sustaining Journalism in an Attention Age." The paper calls for the creation of a public-benefit Information Trust Association. It would -- within the limits of existing antitrust law -- convene publishers, technologists, foundations and the public to create a system for exchanging small bits of content -- a sort of microaccounting system -- among multiple independent publishers. In Densmore's "InfoValet" system idea, public users would be able to choose from a plurality of information agents from which to open a one-ID, one-bill account that would work to purchase information broadly.

Densmore also sees the Information Trust Association as making and enforcing protocols governing users' "persona" -- personal information -- and allowing consumers to barter that information for value across the same microaccounting, or “value exchange,” system. The ITA will guide not run this trust, identity and information commerce environment – sanctioning and enabling multiple competitive businesses. The banking industry might play a role in the back shop processing.

Densmore sees all this as necessary as news organizations switch from producing products -- newspapers and broadcasts -- to a service -- helping users to find the information -- in any venue – which they need to be informed, effective citizens.

In this role, Densmore writes, publishers will have to rely less on a mass-market advertising and undifferentiated markets, learning instead to understand and deliver the personalized information needs of individual users. This will require that each publisher be able make money referring their users to each other’s content -- hence the need for the microaccounting and a public-benefit collaborative among publishers.

Densmore asks: Who will create this collaboration?

The full report is linked from: http://www.papertopersona.org

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mass-market advertising no longer supports the values, principles and purposes of journalism.

An emerging Attention Age – characterized by an economy, which treats human attention as a scarce and valuable asset -- is transforming the information business. It’s raising public concern about an escalation of intrusive, privacy-challenging marketing. For the institutions that practice journalism, this new economy and concern represents a chance to survive beyond the era of mass-market advertising, by becoming “information valets”[2] for their readers, viewers and users. Trust, access, identity and value are core issues, affecting convenience, privacy and personalization. This attention economy[3] invites new collaboration among news, advertising, publishing, entertainment, technology and philanthropic services. To survive in the Attention Age, news organizations --- legacy and new networks – must:

Have the flexibility to continue to operate closed, proprietary, “siloed” systems for their own users.

Offer a convenient, trustworthy, personalized service for individuals to find and transact for information vital to their daily lives. The value should be given or received, depending upon whether the individual needs the information or a marketer needs to reach the individual.
Create and participate in a new openly governed system for consumers to go outside their chosen “silo,” connecting and exchanging value with other content with identity and privacy under consumer control. (See: Four-Party model)

Challenge and solution handled separately

The first half of “From Paper to Persona,” observes and assesses the challenge to publishers and journalism posed by the Attention Age. Section two advocates one possible solution.

In less than a decade, we have moved from a world of relative information scarcity -- access restricted by a variety of technical choke points -- such as presses -- to a world of information abundance. The typical user’s challenge is not how to access information, or even how find it, but how to sift, personalize, trust and make sense of it. The next newsroom will originate news, aggregate news from others and deliver this to individuals based on their persona[4] – a unique combination of age, sex, race, income and education, their values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles and their physical location on earth. So the defining challenge for 21st-century news organizations is no longer managing proprietary products, but helping us manage our privacy and our own attention to ubiquitous data – “information overload.” It argues publishers must cultivate personalized, one-to-one relationships with users, provide them customized information -- and get paid for doing so.

“From Paper to Persona” provides evidence that:

Information has come unbundled, and no copyright laws will change that
Journalism is expensive, and mass-market web advertising alone will not sustain it.
Sustaining journalism requires rethinking mass-market advertising, and news as a service rather than a product.
Advertising is giving way to targeted, permission-based, direct marketing
Publishers in the old gatekeeper role won’t control the marketing loop
Consumers are aware of privacy and the value of their attention
Trust and identity are building blocks of the new information ecosystem

Part two of “From Paper to Persona,” proposes a solution -- establishment of a public-benefit initiative to neutrally specify and referee a new marketplace for trust, identity and information commerce. A world-focused Information Trust Association (ITA) initiative would be guided by publishers, broadcasters, technology companies, account managers, trade groups and the public. It would present a common playing field where consumer privacy is respected, business rules are transparent and the consumer can easily move among competing options. Whether as a new entity or the initiative of an existing public-benefit organization, the ITA’s non-equity governance structure would recognize the interests of at least four parties: (1) end users, (2) rights-holders and publishers (including authors, artists, information providers and aggregators), (3) neutral authenticators, loggers and aggregators of transactions (the ITA or its contractors) and (4) information agents, or “infovalets” -- account managers (banks, telecommunications companies, publishers, billers etc.) whose primary allegiance is to the user. The initiative could:

Contract with or license with one or more for-profit entities, funded by investors, to operate elements of the shared-user network for trust, identity and information commerce. The network should be compliant with and supportive of all existing Internet protocols.
Vest greater choice, control and economic value of their privacy and personal information in the hands of individual citizens.
Simplify the open, competitive exchange of value among users and information suppliers.
Guarantee one-account, one-ID, one-bill simplicity from any of multiple participating trust/identity/commerce providers (“InfoValets”).
Assure the trustworthiness, and neutrality of enabling technologies.
Operate transparently within existing antitrust law to provide a platform for competition, which benefits the public.
Establish voluntary privacy, trust and identity standards
Research, test and commission key technologies
Sanction protocols for sharing users and content
Foster and govern multisite user authentication service
Support web wide tracking and billing for “atomized” content

The Internet infrastructure as we know it today is not up to these tasks. When a clear institutional leader emerges to lead, convene and launch the ITA, it can be. o

CONTENTS

The subheads and enlarged, boxed excerpts on many pages should allow the reader abbreviated access to concepts and recommendations. In addition, a two-page executive overview, opportunities for discussion, and links to updates or references may be accessed from a wiki-format website maintained by the author -- http://www.papertopersona.org

1. Assessing the Opportunity

· The end of mass markets

The overview

· Brokering attention, sharing persona

· The end of walled gardens

· Losing control of the network

· From product to service

· Display online: $100B in a several years?

· Atomized content and the iPad – opportunity or threat

· What won’t support news – mass-market advertising

· Blurring of advertising and marketing

· Shift to audiences, not “sites”

· From atomization to clearing house

· Business model collapse: Scarcity to sense making

· The hourglass and the cylinder

· From social good to enlightened personal tastes

· When publishers no longer own the pipes

· In whom do we trust – “persona”

· Public trust through engagement

· Public responsibility – Not passive reception

What might work?

· The Next Newsroom and Chris Peck

· Citizens as journalists – new opportunity

· Reaching out – some examples

· The experiments – clues to the next newsroom

· Privacy – Necessary component of personalization?

· U.S. v. Facebook Connect – the de facto identity card?

Summing up and recommendations

2. Making the Marketplace

· Trust, identity and commerce

· Paying for news – stories or convenience?

· A new overlay – the shared user network

· Possible answer: The member association?

· Considering antitrust

· Why news organizations need this

· Privacy as a service

· Entrepreneurial opportunities

Conclusion: Next steps for news

Final recommendations

APPENDICES

· Author’s note / acknowledgements

· Bullet points: A case for an Information Trust Association

· ADDENDUM: Nine trust associations that established beneficial networks

· Document links

PART ONE/THE CHALLENGE

Assessing the Opportunity

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google Inc., spoke in July 2010, at a London conference hosted by The Guardian newspaper. From the dawn of humanity to 2003, Schmidt said, five exabytes of information were generated. The same amount is now generated in two days. The pace of change is so fast, said Schmidt, “it’s hard for me to keep up and I have done this for my whole life.”

Think about the first Wikileaks disclosure of 76,000 pages of allegedly leaked U.S. military cables about Afghanistan – all apparently considered classified intelligence. The Pentagon was said to have had more than 100 analysts poring over those documents to see what damage may have been done by their release. The Pentagon and the news media both have the same challenge with the Wikileaks disclosure – how to make sense, for their own differing purposes, of so much information.

Today, as Google’s Schmidt points out, The Pentagon’s problem is effectively a problem for all of us. It’s information overload delivered at hyper speed, soon over 4G networks at 50-megabit speed. In the attention economy, value is created not as easily in the info itself as by those who sift, digest, cull, extract and interpret torrents of information so that it can be usefully understood.

The end of mass markets

We are living in a world now where the terms publisher[5] and broadcaster are somewhat anachronistic. The key for people formerly known as publishers is not to aggregate a mass audience and then sell undifferentiated information and advertising to them. It’s to cultivate customized, one-to-one relationships with consumers on an automated basis, so you can provide them the information they particularly need when they need it, customized to their needs, and be able to provide customized, sponsored information and get paid for doing so.

The biggest challenge for citizens and businesses is finding – and sharing — relevant, trustworthy, valuable, actionable news and information hidden in a sea of bits and bytes. So it seems pretty clear that the path to continued relevance for the reporting work of former newspaper companies (in whatever form they takes) will have to be about finding and sharing information that is trustworthy – and finding a way to receive value for doing so. But the value is in the curatorial work, and the new insights, which result, not the raw information to start with. Which is more valuable, the flour or the bread?

The Attention Age

So we are now in the Attention Age. In it users seek an experience which values their time and attention, providing them access to the information they need . . . from anywhere . . . quickly and easily. Before the Internet, this was a role served pretty well by daily ink on print. Today the product embodiment of that idea -- the newspaper is failing to keep up to the task. We are moving toward a new paradigm, part aggregator, part content creator, part social network and we are searching for a name for the service -- for lack of a better term, this author calls it the information valet and it has been the focus of his research as a Donald W. Reynolds fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism since fall 2008 -- and earlier, with the founding in 1994 of what has become Clickshare Service Corp., which has a potentially related patent. The work at Missouri also lead to the creation of a company called CircLabs Inc.

A. OPPORTUNITY: THE OVERVIEW

1. Brokering attention, sharing persona[6]

In 1995, Scott Kurnit left the Prodigy Internet Service and started up a new venture called The Mining Co. Ten years later, he sold it to The New York Times Co. for $410 million. The rechristened About.com has been one of the highest-margin businesses that the nation’s premier newspaper company owns. It uses mostly free-lance writers -- experts in their fields -- to produce web-based “news you can use” on thousands of topics – and runs advertising matched to the topics. It was an early example of using the audience to generate content, of which Facebook is a popular corollary.

On Valentines Day, 2011, Kurnit was preparing to launch with nearly $40 million in venture capital “AdKeeper” – a service that lets consumers tag ads for further examination wherever they see them, and store them in a “Keeper” – a personalized website – for later viewing. Kurnit’s company will make money charging advertisers when consumers view the ads later in their “Keeper.” A key investor in AdKeeper – the New York Times Co.

Kurnit hopes his “AdKeeper” button will become ubiquitous on web advertisements. But he also hopes his company could become an early example of the Attention Economy. Because AdKeeper will gradually assemble a profile of the ads – and content pages – its voluntary users visit. And with that, AdKeeper will be able to help users find other information relevant to their interests – news and feature content, not just advertisements. Kurnit promises this ad and content matching will occur only with the user’s permission.

AdKeeper is based in New York. Across the continent, in Palo Alto, Calif., Facebook Inc. began in early January to tout to its users “Facebook Instant Personalization.” If you have a Facebook account, Facebook has begun delivering to a group of about a dozen test partner websites the information you publicly post – your name, location, friends activity and such – instantly – when you arrive at one of the test websites -- Bing, TripAdvisor, Clicker, Rotten Tomatoes, Docs, Pandora, Yelp, and Scribd. As a result, you’ll see things on these websites that relate to your Facebook identity. An early investor in Facebook was Microsoft Inc., owner of Bing.

AdKeeper and Facebook have each identified the key opportunity in the new Attention Age – helping users to find, share and use in a sea of information the bits that matter to them, when they matter. Newspapers and broadcasters once did this with the best-available technology. They owned the “network” -- presses and the broadcast licenses. Now the network is quasi-public – it’s the wired and wireless Internet. And so long as the people who own the “pipes” – Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and a few others – are forbidden to content-discriminate over who uses them – publishers and broadcasters will no longer have functional monopolies. They must compete on service.

2. The end of walled gardens

In the old Information Age, the newspaper or broadcast station could build silos of content valuable enough that consumers would stay put for the experience. In the new era of the ubiquitous network – these silos are no longer compelling. In the 1990s, it was popular to describe the online, dial-up, off-web experience of America Online users as “a walled garden.” Gardens are wonderful – the pathways are marked, the beds organized, the seasons demarked and the transition to the fields or forests around clear. But surround the garden with a moat or wall, and those inside are trapped, unable to move at will between the organized, curated, trustworthy world of the garden and the open, free, serendipitous, unexpected natural world outside. In the Attention Age, the opportunity for people formerly known as publishers is to be gardeners and nature guides – and to get paid mostly for that work, not so much selling plants.

In an attention economy, value is created by those who sift, digest, cull, extract and interpret torrents of information so that it can be usefully understood. Information creators need for their digital works, and their customers to be part of the mix.

3. Losing control of the network

In Boston, at the Berkman Institute for Law and Society at Harvard University a group of technologists have been working for several years on Project Vendor Relationship Management. Their core idea is that the Internet has disrupted the idea of “customer-relationship management”. Why should the vendor be directing the relationship? Shouldn’t the customer be doing so? So one thing we may need to develop is a system that transfers rewards – both monetary and otherwise – in a uniform way across the web. Think of it as airline frequent-flier miles taken out to a grand scale. A number of efforts have been tried in this arena over a decade, but none has achieved scale. Something will likely begin to in the next few years.

AT&T in the 1980s ran advertisements about us being in the "Information Age." We are beyond that now. Information is so plentiful it has little value in most contexts unless is can be assembled, assessed, curated, edited, extracted, described and made easily accessible as knowledge. In the Information Age, value was created merely by connecting users with an ever-increasing supply of real-time data for entertainment purposes and to make business and life decisions. In an attention economy, those who sift, digest, cull, extract and interpret torrents of information so that it can be usefully understood create value. In addition, the elements of our “persona” have commercial value when they can be appropriately shared. That’s why it can be said that we have moved from AT&T’s pronouncement of the Information Age (which by the way benefited a network “pipe” provider by encouraging the exchange of ever more bits and bytes), to an Attention Age, where value is created by getting the right information in the right form to the right person at the right time. And in this new economy, getting someone's attention is increasingly difficult. And our attention has value. In the Attention Age, a new class of information valets will help us to manage our attention and share it – in exchange for value.

From product to service

Newspaper companies produced a product -- the paper – and all of their services were focused on that one product. Now they have to return to considering the core service they provide, and understand that the physical product where they have provided it is increasingly obsolete at doing so. The service was providing a network for commerce, news and entertainment for physical communities. They need to learn how to do it better than Facebook. Now the service is managing an existing network for commerce and news for physical and virtual communities. And their natural dominance in their old physical markets is eroding as virtual competitors – taking advantage of the embedded network called the Internet – reach into newspapers’ geographic territories to provide commerce and news services.

The display advertising market -- $100 billion online in several years?

If companies, which own U.S. newspapers want to stay in a growing display advertising game, they are going to have to do so by focusing online, trends suggest.

Already, Google claims to sell more online display advertising than the entire combined U.S. daily newspaper industry. On Feb. 28, 2011, a top Google Inc. executive predicted the global online display-advertising marketplace could top $100 billion within several years. “We really believe the overall market is a at a tipping point,” said Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president for product management, and he said the company had 1,000 engineers around the world working on it. He said the online display ad market is currently at $20 billion to $25 billion, of which Google has about $2.5 billion.

Google’s estimate for U.S. display online advertising is larger than an April 13, 2011 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP -- firm’s annual survey for the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It said total U.S. web advertising rose 15% to $26 billion in 2010, passing all other classes, including newspaper print advertising (at $22.8 billion), for the first time. U.S. search advertising, dominated by Google, grew slightly more slowly (to between $12 billion and $12.4 billion) but remains 46 percent of the total online, and online display advertising is growing fastest.

By comparison, the Newspaper Association of America[7] reports that all U.S. newspapers combined sold $2.7 billion of online advertising in 2009, down from $3.1 billion 2008 and $3.2 billion in 2007. Similar newspaper print advertising totaled $24.8 billion in 2009, down from the historic high of $47.4 billion in 2005. This collapse in newspaper advertising revenue has been accompanied by a companion decline in newsroom staffing, as U.S. Federal Communications researcher Stephen Waldman detailed in a Feb. 28, 2011 talk to community foundations at a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation gathing. Given Google’s estimated 83-percent share of global search advertising, these figures mean Google sells 3-to-4 times more U.S. search advertising alone (at least $10 billion) than the entire U.S. newspaper industry’s online advertising efforts – and the gap is widening. Google says its online display efforts are almost equal to the entire U.S. newspaper industry.

eMarketer Inc. estimated in Nov. 2010 that total U.S. online ad spending marketplace (all types) was $25.8 billion in 2010, and would grow to $40.5 billion by 2014. [8] That represented 15.3% of total media ad spending in 2010 and eMarketer predicts it will comprise 21.5% of total media ad spending by the end of 2014. Online display advertising will be 39.3% of total online ad spending by the end of 2014, eMarketer estimates, up from 34.4% at the end of 2010. Finally, eMarketer thinks U.S.-only online display advertising spending will be at $15.92 billion by end of 2014, up from $8.88 billion at the end of 2010. In January 2011 eMarketer estimated that Google sites in 2010 held 9.6% of the U.S. online display advertising market (banners, video, rich media), compared with 16.2% for all Yahoo sites, 13.6% for all Facebook sites and 5.3% for all AOL sites. Google’s share had tripled in a year; Facebook’s doubled, Yahoo was unchanged and AOL dropped. But the overall share of these top four sites went to 44.7% in 2010 from 34.2% in 2009, eMarketer estimated.

Is there a way for legacy media to turn online advertising to its advantage? Yes, by changing its thinking about advertising from creating and selling to a mass market. Instead, media must market 1-to-1, understanding each user’s information needs and then delivering to them. This will take a new approach and a new voice,[9] not just a new device like the iPad.

Atomized content and the iPad – opportunity or threat?

Last year, when Apple introduced the iPad, publishers initially thought they saw the answer. Because the iPad is a proprietary platform, they thought it might allow them to regain control of their packaging, because they could package subscription “apps” in highly graphical, interactive formats. But wait -- already there are graphically elegant iPad apps like Fluent and FlipBoard, which are aggregating atomized content . It’s disconnected from an information product and remixed, repurposed and re-combined in different ways by different users at different times and for different purposes. They are doing so in useful ways – and this isn’t being done by publishers but by technologists. On the web, Google has done this same thing with the permission of a small group of publishers, with its “FastFlip” service. Will publishers’ drive to own the package – as they were used to owning the press? Will they overcome or be overcome by consumer drive to get our information where we want when we want and from whom we want? Bet on the consumer – and on HTML5. The middleman – entities formerly known as publishers – will have to assemble custom services for individual users. That requires a payment marketplace for atomized content. That would turn atomized content into an opportunity not a threat.

The Apple iPad may not be nirvana for publishers, anyway. There is a roadblock between them and full control of their product on the iPad and . . . it’s Apple. Apple claims up to 200 million credit-card accounts of customers from iTunes and the Apple Store. Right now, if you want to put advertisements in your iPad application, you have to give a percentage to Apple. So publishers are learning that now that they don’t control the presses, they are having to deal with a new middleman who wants to control the press and get a piece of the action – between 30% and 40% of ad revenues. Apple probably won’t be able to sustain such markups as other tablets come out. But the principle is established – he who owns the customer account relationship gets a piece of the pie. With the iPad, Apple takes control of the network, and becomes the press.

Does this make Apple a new information valet? We’ll consider that question in Part Two of this paper.

What won’t support news – mass-market advertising

If there’s an urgent need sustainable business models for authoritative journalism, they must work for a new world of distribution in which content objects – stories, video, clips, even snippets --- are “atomized.” The uses have to be tracked, so that the content creator can decide how to be compensated – by users, sponsors or both.

In the old days, publishers and broadcasters gathered millions of people and then presented those "eyeballs" to mass-market advertisers in magazine, newspaper and broadcast products. We called this advertising. Now publishers will provide customized services to users, one user at a time, helping you find products and services you need more smartly, and by invitation. We might call this advisor-tizing, or an information-valet service. Kurnit’s AdKeeper is an early example. The role of "publisher" may become less important, at least in the sense of owning the marketplace of users. It's becoming more a function of helping the user create their own connections.

The evidence is mass-market advertising will no longer pay for news, in the conventional sense, or rescue journalism alone. But it can be replaced by a new form of marketing that we’ll call “advisor-tizing” – a new focus on permission-based service to the individual.

Marketing “is shifting from a mass marketing one size fits all to a more tailored approach," says Karen B. Feldman, an IBM researcher, who spoke at a Dubuque, Iowa, newspaper summit in September, 2009. "This is a fundamental shift in the way the advertising industry works."

Already, Google has shifted from a mass market of one-to-many to a mass market of many to one, she said. "It has huge implications for how advertising is bought and sold, how you target consumers and the analytics of how you find those consumers." In one important insight, Feldman said IBM research found that "despite privacy concerns, we found in our global survey that consumers were overwhelmingly willing to exchange information about themselves for information they considered to have value . . . including more relevant content or advertising."

Blurring of advertising and marketing

Feldman said the downturn for newspapers is secular, not cyclical, and the advertising downturn is speeding up, not slowing down. Feldman said in the past advertisers trusted newspapers and television. Now a new breed of marketers are going after vehicles where they can understand the audience better and measure the return on investment. Web advertising is on a path to exceed newspaper advertising, she said then. Feldman sees a transformation of mass advertising – which has reached consumers indirectly via publishers and broadcasters – into one-to-one marketing – which goes direct. The opportunities that remain for publishers are to address consumer needs through relevancy, integration and choice – once business models and capabilities are in place.

In the fall of 2009, we spoke to the CEO of a major New York ad agency. He was lamenting that it has become so complicated to place advertising. There are too many channels and too many buys. He is in his 50s so he can hang on. Advertisers can now go direct to their customers, and they want to know who they are. What do you call a message that is delivered just to you, when you requested it, on a customized device, not by a publisher but as the result of a recommendation from a friend? Is that advertising? Or is it just a sponsored message? It used to be that advertising was part of marketing, because businesses needed media to reach their customers. But now they can reach their customers directly via the Internet. Do they need as much advertising anymore? And if they can market to us all directly, we might ask the question – what is our attention worth?

Delivering audiences, not sites; ad CPM pie splinters

In the advertising industry, two trends make it clear that the old publisher role is becoming marginalized if the publisher sees his role as only delivering content in products or on websites. These trends are best illustrated by three slides, which were part of a June 8, 2010 presentation by Tolman Geffs, co-president of Jordan Edmiston Group Inc., a media mergers-and-acquisitions expert. In that and an earlier presentation, Geffs says the “audience ecosystem” for advertising has splintered. No longer does it involve just the advertiser, an agency and a publisher or broadcaster. Now there is an array of infomediaries – data providers, ad exchanges and others – who each collect a portion of the net “cost per thousands” of interactive advertising.[10] In “Geffs’ slide, he says an advertiser might pay $5/thousand, but the publisher may only see $1/thousand of that stream. “There is going to be a land war over how margin gets redivided in the audience world,” says Geffs. “You’re left with a buck for the publisher. It is an interesting picture, I think you would all agree.”

The other trend cited by Geffs, more and more online advertising is placed based upon the audience the advertiser wants to reach – across multiple sites --- rather than based upon reaching a particular publisher’s website. The advertiser is \making the observation, Geffs said: “Now I can target my audience in other – cheaper – places.

Taken together, these two trends help explain why publishers must become Information Valets who help manage the demographic profiles and interests of their users. That's because increasingly they must be willing – and able – to share their audiences across the web – and make money doing so. Some of the larger newspaper publishers appear to be embracing the infomediary role, at least for advertising. For example, QuadrantOne, the joint venture of Gannett Co. Inc., the New York Times Co., Tribune Co. and Hearst Corp. In an April 4, 2011 announcement headlined: “Publishers Bid to Take Back Control of Online Ad Ecosystem,” Quadrant One said it had formed a “private online advertising exchange for premium publishers.”

The QuadrantOne announcement is evidence that publishers are prepared to engage in aggregation of user profiles alongside the advertising industry, says Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based privacy watchdog group. Chester’s view is that this might help sustain journalism – but that it must be done openly and with the consumer’s consent. Chester was among participants in a panel on advertising and privacy at the National Conference for Media Reform April 9, 2011 in Boston. In a foll0wup interview with this author, he argued publishers and media activists need to get up to speed on network technologies. He said:

“I'd like to think if you told the user exactly what was going on and gave them opt-in control, I think there's a market for that. I think you have to explore not only the contradictions but also the tensions between personalization and ‘anonymization.’ People like this personalization stuff. So you are going to have to compete on that level and that requires the data. I think we need to come up with sustainable, public-interested news organizations. This thing could generate lots of revenues between the advertising and the marketing and subscriber donations for serious news. But I think we need to practice it, we need to try it.”

From atomization to clearing house

Thus the technology, which permits the atomization of advertising – individual ads following consumers across web and mobile sites -- could potentially be applied to the movement of news as well. At the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, a former daily newspaper publisher Martin C. Langeveld and Prof. Randall Smith are preparing to do research to assess what new business models for news will be created by a world in which atomized content bits can be distributed into a network of new information services governed by means of a digital rights and payments clearinghouse.

And in October, 2010, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley told publishers meeting in Texas that the cooperative owned by U.S. daily newspapers would spin off its News Registry research-and-development effort to a new entity to operate it as a “digital-rights clearing house.”

These new services and research – story aggregators and accounts on the iPad, plus the emerging ideas about “content clearing houses” – pave the way for an information environment where customer relationships and content are increasingly personalized. This, we will show, points to the critical need for publishers to maintain and acquire one-to-one, account-based relationships with users. And to help them access information from anywhere – to create a conversation about the community, not just about the story, and make it all convenient and simple and with a set of value exchanges – so former publishers can become part of a something we might call a news social network.

4. Business-model collapse: From scarcity to sense making

The business model of mass media – dependent upon the functional monopoly of a scarce, central printing press or a scarce, government-issued broadcasting license – is dying. In less than a decade, we have moved from a world of relative information scarcity -- access restricted by a variety of technical choke points -- such as presses -- to a world of such information abundance that the average user's challenge is not how to access information, or even how find it, but how to personalize, save and make sense of it. Thus an opportunity and task for news organizations in the 21st century is less managing access-restricted proprietary information, and more helping the public manage our attention to ubiquitous information, much of it available for free.

The hourglass and the cylinder

This sort of paradigm shift can be expressed with a chart that we call the hourglass vs. the cylinder. In the 20th Century, moved as if through an hourglass. No matter how many information providers or users, there was always a technological pinch point that forced for economic reasons an editing process – the cost of a big printing press, the speed of a modem, cost of adding pages, or limited hours in the broadcast day. And these barriers to entry – in the hourglass it’s just gravity -- made it difficult for the consumer to send information back up the hourglass pinch points to the information provider. In the 21^st century, information moves about as if in a cylinder. Now bandwidth -- the "fat pipe" -- is no longer the most significant constraint. The capital cost of a centralized printing press or the scarce broadcast license is not needed. The real constraint is peoples' ability to digest the huge volume of information coming down the pipe. So users have to join more than ever with editors in deciding which information they will receive.

Actually, the cylinder should be displayed on its side. That’s because there is no longer any reason to depict the information provider as "higher" than the information consumer. In fact it won't be at all clear much of the time who is the consumer and who is the provider, since those roles can reverse as easily as they do during a present-day voice telephone conversation. The Internet as we know it today is not very good at helping with this task.

From social good to enlightened personal tastes

In her 2010 book, "Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America's Appetite for News," Northwestern Medill School of Journalism Prof. Rachel Davis Mersey argues that imposed social-good model of journalism is dead ("give people what they need to know"); that instead news purveyors need to figure out how to understand communities and individuals and meet their information needs as expressed by the communities themselves, rather than divined or assumed by the editor. She argues that mass-market pandering with entertainment/celebrity coverage is not actually what individuals and communities want -- that was just the easy way for the old mass-market driven journalism organizations to try and maintain circulation and viewership. Mersey says concentrating on serving the individual is the way for journalists to best serve their varied audiences -- and democracy. She says people will accept more of what they "need to know" from a source that gives them "what they want to know." In the book, she asserts:

When you really understand someone’s tastes, you can get them to eat whatever you think is best for them. It is all in how you prepare and present it. The same principles apply to news. The identity-based model of journalism is not about dumbing down the news. It is about serving individuals so well that they are getting what they want and what you—the journalist—think they need. In some ways then it may seem that the identity-based model of journalism is not too different from the service principle of the social responsibility model of journalism. But the important distinction is that the identity-based model of journalism focuses on serving the individual while rejecting the notion that general-circulation news has value.

Continuing to operate on the assumption marketers will always need publishers and broadcasters is not a sustainable strategy. There is plenty of data showing that growth of U.S. print advertising volume has slowed, stopped and declined. At least during 2009 and 2010, advertising rates for mass-market “banner” type advertising on the web were in decline. Physical pages or broadcast time slots do not limit advertising inventory.

5. When publishers no longer own the pipes

Because publishers and broadcasters no longer own the “pipes” – the delivery mechanism to reach their users – their own advertisers can now end-run them. In January, the giant consumer electronics retailer Best Buy disclosed it was launching its own online magazine – a potential canary in the coal mine for newspapers, which depend upon Best Buy and other national advertisers for lucrative pre-printed inserts. Advertising Age online described the “Best Buy On,” initiative in a Jan. 3, 2011 article.

Nieman Labs blogger and former newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld writes that:

“Preprints are the last category where newspapers are able to maintain some pricing power, keeping rates up, and have not lost much volume except as a result of circulation declines and sometimes store closings and consolidations. By and large, the major retailers with the notable exception of Wal-Mart still need that weekly preprint distribution to maintain store traffic. In many areas newspapers run TMC distribution systems in which they get paid to distribute to non-subscribers as well as subscribers, so in those cases even the readership loss is not impacting volume, although typically TMC distribution has higher costs. But clearly even this segment is vulnerable. The Associated Press has developed iCircular as an alternative newspapers could operate to distribute circulars on tablets; but in any significant switch to tablet distribution (possible once tablets hit 50% or more of households), retailers would not need newspapers as intermediaries and could reach consumers directly.”

Technologists continue to innovate with one-to-one marketing. The online site ReadWriteWeb reported in January 2011 that Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories." When a Facebook user clicks on a commercial link within Facebook, the company will turn that into a unsolicited recommendation for the product and display it – with the clicking users name – as an advertisement on the user’s friend’s pages. Said writer Sarah Perez: “This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application.” The ad will display your friend's name, photo, a picture and link to the relevant Facebook Page or application, plus any likes and comments.

In whom do you trust – identity or ‘persona’

As Mersey’s book asserts, news organizations have to get smarter about the needs of their users. One opportunity is to become the trusted companion who helps former readers to manage their identity, information preferences and needs across the public network. We might call the collected data which describes a user’s demographics, preferences and activities the user’s identity. Because the user might wish to present different attributes of identity under different circumstances, we might think of this data as a source of multiple “personas” -- presentations of self, depending upon context. As individuals we have interests, and we have attributes that define us demographically, psycho graphically and socially. On the web today, we are not in control of our identity presentations, or personas. Advertising networks, and multiple websites, with incomplete information, manage them. The next news organization needs to be adept at helping users manage the elements of their identity and use them selectively depending on the circumstances. You might reveal more to your doctor that to your Facebook friend. There’s a potential role for news organizations helping to filter what you share and when you share, and what you receive in return. That's a new opportunity. Selling stories isn't much of a business anymore once decoupled from old-fashioned advertising -- and if the stories aren't unique or moneymaking. Could there be a business in helping people identify, store, share – and sometimes protect -- elements of their virtual persona?

Public trust through public engagement

A colleague of this writer asked: "Would I trust the local editor or publisher with my "persona" the way I might my priest, lawyer or doctor?" That is a profound question for journalists. If we had once earned that trust, at the community level, we have lost and must earn it back. For editors to remain relevant they must figure out how to practice, as retired Seattle Times Executive Editor Mike Fancher puts it, "a new ethic of public trust through public engagement," reestablishing in many ways a trust relationship with citizens – and certainly when helping safekeeping and use personal preferences and interests. That trust would have to include not dipping into the persona when it suits editors for purposes of a story.

At Minnesota Public Radio, the Public Insight Network (PIN) managers grapple with this issue. PIN invites listeners to provide personal contact information and details about their professional or personal expertise. MPR then asks their own listeners to be sources of expert information about stories. But suppose a PIN member became part of a story? For example, what if the accused shooter of Arizona congresswoman Gabriella Giffords had a PIN account? Would MPR go in and report on it? Absolutely not, says Linda Fantin, who directs the network. "Everything sources tell us is confidential unless they give permission for their insights to be broadcast, published, shared publicly or with other news partners." Fantin says MPR would resist a subpoena for any such information.

Editors will grapple with such questions, as they become information valets.

Public responsibility: No more passive reception

Mike Fancher’s ethic of engagement, illustrated by the MPR initiative, suggests an important corollary – the public needs to be engaged, too, in our participatory democracy. A ubiquitous, standards-based Internet makes this potentially more logistically possible than ever, yet more intellectually challenging for editors, producers and reporters accustomed to more top-down, one-way environment.

“Information overflow requires us to take an active approach to media, in part to manage the flood pouring over us each day, but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we see,” writes University of Arizona Prof. Dan Gillmor in his new book, “MediaActive.” He adds: “Being passive receivers of news and information, our custom through the late 20th century era of mass media, isn’t adequate in the new century’s Digital Age mediasphere, where information comes at us from almost everywhere, and from almost anyone.”

Henry Jenkins, a former MIT professor who has moved to the University of Southern California, wrote a 2007 book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. It popularizes the idea that information technology -- the ability of the network to allow real-time exchange and sharing among multiple people physically removed from each other (with serious games and other applications) – is creating a new sort of participatory culture. Before mass media, we received our news on the village square, gossip that we verified. We’re coming full circle. I now get news by watching the feed from my friends on my Facebook page.

So our Attention Age presents new opportunities for sustaining civic journalism, if news organizations will reinterpret their role to include engagement as custodians, agents, advisors and information valets for the public.

B. OPPORTUNITY: WHAT MIGHT WORK

What might work for the next newsroom

The loss of mass-market advertising as a support system for journalism forces a re-invention of the newsroom’s mission and culture. Let’s consider how that reshaping will look, and how the newsroom “voices” must change.
Starting in 1995, this author began writing that “ newspapers were going to face a train wreck once fat pipes came into the home and people could go anywhere for information.” Newspapers would need to learn how to make money referring people to information from anywhere, sharing both users, and content. Today, that is still the challenge. Do we “abandon the news” -- or embrace it, baking it into the new Attention Economy?

Newspapers and radio stations used to be the best daily window on information we need to get through the day and be engaged citizens. Now we have many more options. And the biggest challenge for citizens and businesses is finding – and sharing — relevant, trustworthy, valuable, actionable news and information hidden in a sea of bits and bytes. Aided by a trust, identity and information commerce network, next newsroom services may focus on finding and sharing. They must provide insight, knowledge and community. And tools to save time and add convenience. Then readers won’t abandon the news, or newsrooms, just newspapers.[11]

The next newsroom should allow you to manage the information you get or give according to the persona you wish to project at that time. That way the publisher – the new infovalet – might find for you information relevant to your needs and interests. By providing a publisher information about where you live, what you do — or the topics that interest you, users can help the publisher advise you about more relevant, actionable products or services.

Next newsroom services might be able to:

· Make recommendations based upon the pages or resources you are viewing

· Remember things you have said you are — and are not — interested in

· Reward you for your attention and interest

· Help you share offers with your friends

· Recommend a story or resource to friends.

· Accept recommendations from friends

· With permission, see what friends are reading and watching

· Efficiently exchange ideas and insights with professional journalists

· Follow streams of favorite authors, producers, performers and publishers

· Aggregate all your recent “tweets” or “wall” postings

· Present personalized offers from businesses nearby

Facebook – the next newsroom?

Measured by these bullet points, is Facebook already an example of a “next newsroom”? It’s an intriguing question. (See Page 18)

Chris Peck, the visionary editor of The Commercial Appeal, the daily serving Memphis, Tenn., developed a prototype plan for The Next Newsroom in 2008. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/nextnewsroom. The Next Newsroom could be a service organization -- like a law or accounting firm -- and it will be paid accordingly. For now, it will be extremely difficult to convince people to pay for such a service. But as the years go by, it will be seen as an absolutely indispensable way to get through the day. People will become as reliant on their news-sharing agent as on their doctor, lawyer, accountant, teacher or business colleague, or for their water, gas heating or phone service, all of which are services for which we pay on a project or metered basis.

Larger cities will have competing "newshares" offering what we might call an information valet services. They will compete in part an on technical ground -- which does the better sort, who finds the real gems, and who provides premium information at the right price bundle. Advertising will be part of all this, but it will be an option -- if you are willing to receive advertising, the cost of your "Newshare" will be less.

So imagine now if you are actually PAID in some form for your attention when you look at a marketing or direct-sponsor message. That payment could be a credit to an account that you can then use to purchase premium information. It would be an ebb and flow of info-currency, depending upon whether it is information you want -- or information someone wants you to have.

In the news social network, each user is also a potential contributor. So there is a built-in capability to produce content and get paid for it. The marketplace will find some equilibrium between production of original content and sharing and recycling of existing content. Some infovalets/newshares will likely be specialists at finding and sharing; others at producing. Where there are "market failures" -- not enough investigative reporting, for example – philanthropic solutions will potentially emerge to fill the need, as they do now.

CITIZENS AS JOURNALISTS –
THE NEW OPPORTUNITY?

With the hourglass pinch points gone, the communication pipes available to all, and the work of the journalist increasingly including personal engagement with the custom information needs of users, what of the role of the “citizen journalist”?

The term is an imperfect attempt to describe a new class of observer and participant in the public sphere.

Citizens using available free tools to operate in the role of journalist represent a fundamental shift in the way information necessary to a democracy is transmitted. It is diminishing the role of professional editors as "gatekeepers" and arbiters of public dialogue. A story of consequence will emerge in spite of the inability of the traditional media to unearth it or cover it – or the desire of governments to censor it. This is good in the sense that it means a worthy story cannot easily be censored by omission. However, is may also be bad, in the sense that unsubstantiated gossip and rumor can elevate to a level perceived as "news," and affect the public sphere in potentially harmful ways. It makes necessary a new role for the traditional journalist -- that of an information valet -- a trusted consultant to the public, helping sift news from nonsense and present each in appropriate context. Now the citizen has easy access to either -- and needs help understanding which is which. Services like NewsTrust.net, begun by Fabrice Florin, allows the public to rate the reliability and quality of news sources. This will gradually be seen as a vital service.

Citizens practicing journalism are not a threat to traditional news organizations. The threat to the media industry is the end of the "pinch points" of expensive presses and limited broadcast licenses. So long as the Internet remains relatively inexpensive, egalitarian and unregulated -- and so long as the suppliers of Internet "pipes" are obligated not to discriminate in their carriage terms on the basis of content (so called "network neutrality") -- the physical limitation on information conveyance from one to many, and from many to many, is gone for the conceivable future. As we’ve noted earlier, this is undermining mass-market advertising as a business model and requiring media companies to rethink how they do business to become more focused on meeting individual information needs. The rise of citizen journalism is not a critical factor in this disruption. It's enabled by it, that's all.

One effect of citizens practicing journalism is a contribution to information overload. There are now so many sources of information on so many topics it is difficult to find time for original thought or analysis. There are now so many sources of information on so many topics it is difficult to find time for original thought or analysis. We are literally drowning in information. Hence the need for the information valets. News organizations should be in partnership with citizens who are practicing journalism. In fact, they always should have been. For much of the last 50 years, they were able to make a lot of money and grow without partnering with citizens. Now they will have to, or die. It simply means these news organizations must rethink their relationship with their audiences.

The public needs guides and services -- information valets -- which report on the quality and reliability of news sources. This measure of trustworthiness has been the value of brands in the mass-communication era. Over many years, the public formed an impression of the reliability of such brands as The Associated Press or The New York Times or a network news operation, based upon many years of familiarity with their reporting. As new brands emerge, that sense of reliability is unknown and untested. The reliability of Matt Drudge is evolving, as is that of the Huffington Post, after its merger into AOL. What Drudge does, and what HuffPost bloggers do, is similar to a political columnist, who in the print world would be termed a journalist. If what they do is less independent, fact-based reporting and more curation of existing sources, do we need to redefine the concept of journalism to include them?

Experiments: Searching for clues to the next newsroom – at Facebook?

The creation of – or search for -- the next newsroom has barely begun – and it may be found in unlikely places. On March 11, 2011, Joshua Gans posted a commentary on the Harvard Business School Blog in which he argued that Facebook may arguably now be the world’s largest news organization because, as he put it: “News organizations do two major things, commercially speaking: They use news to grab attention and then sell that attention to advertisers.” One of the things Facebook users post to their “walls” is links to news articles. And in a sense, news about your “friends” lives is news to you.

The news ecosystem is changing so fast that picking winners would quickly be out of date. Although we’ll work at it from: http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Persona-experiments. But here are some to watch, besides Facebook, in news curation, aggregation and charging.

· Quora – A social network built around the idea of posing and answering questions.

· Intersect – Created by a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, allows participants to create chains of stories that are sorted and rooted in place and time.

· Zite – A new “digital magazine” for the iPad that allows a user to provide topical preferences, then assembles related news from public web sources.

· Wikipedia – Still evolving the idea of user-generated news – even though it set out to be an encyclopedia, WikiPedia often is faster than any news organization at creating richly linked and contextual pages about breaking news events.

· The New York Times/NPR – Each leading the way in becoming platform-agnostic news organizations – one a broadcast non-profit, the other a commercial newspaper. In another 10 years, will they be fully competitive?

· Newstrust – The first attempt to invite the public find and rate the quality and trustworthiness of news and news sources.

· Newsy – Real-time analysis of multiple news sources assembled in a review-like format to a multimedia platform.

· Huffington Post/AOL – Dismissed as an “aggregator” by mainstream media, Huffington Post now claims hundreds of editors and reporters and millions of page views. Is it sustainable without linking to the work of legacy media and will it pay for that work?

· Google – Same question as HuffPost – will it pay for the news? HuffPost and Google are already paying millions to The Associated Press and other wire-service sources (the amounts are confidential). Is it enough?

· Ongo – A joint-venture of the New York Times Co., Gannett Co. Inc. and the Washington Post Co., the first baby step by major news organizations to collaborate on a “news portal” in the iPad environment.

· Next Issue Media – A joint venture of the first largest U.S. consumer magazine publishers is intended to develop a common presentation platform for tablet devices.

· iTunes Store – With over 200 million credit-card accounts logged in, arguable the largest marketplace for digital information on the planet. Will Apple be able to keep growing, or face objections over its penchant to keep control of the user experience?

· Google OnePass – A competitor to the iTunes Store, an effort to help publishers charge for content.

· Spot.us – A non-profit San Francisco-based startup testing the idea that readers will voluntarily contribute to a pool supporting pitches for specific news stories. Like U.S. public radio fund-raising, Spot.us challenges the assumption that subscriptions or micropayments are the only way besides advertising to support quality journalism.

· Clickshare Service Corp.[12] / Journalism Online Inc. (acquired by R.R. Donnelly & Sons) – A pair of competing companies, one 10 years in business (Clickshare), one two-years-old, which are testing “paywalls” for news-related content online.

Privacy – the necessary companion to personalization

There’s rapid growth in public discomfort around the undisclosed use of personal information, such as information about sites visited or transactions completed, by third parties. This may result in significant attempts at regulation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and others to limit the sharing of consumer information among advertising and other networks. This will create an opportunity for a new type of “infomediary” which will act as a representative of the consumer in the brokering and use of personal information in exchange for value.

For nearly a decade, technologists from major companies like Google and Microsoft have been meeting under auspices of an organization called the Identity Commons to explore ideas for the protection and sharing of personal data across the web. Google is also a major supporter of the Open Identity Exchange. Some of the participants or supporters of both groups have been working with the White House and U.S. Commerce Department on roles for the government.

To date, however, there has been no apparent link between these efforts and news industry or journalism.

Since consumer use of the World Wide Web advanced in the mid-1990s, the public has become gradually aware of a fundamental tradeoff between privacy and personalization. This paper argues that news organizations must offer a personalized service to users -- that the mass market has less and commercial value. To do so, however, means knowing something – instantly – about the attributes and interests of each user.

Newspapers have had home-delivery subscribers and newsstand readers. Just by knowing their address, they could infer things about the home readers; they knew little about the anonymous newsstand readers. On the web, no one is completely anonymous. Every device connected to the Internet has a unique identifier – an Internet Protocol number for a session, at least, and perhaps a unique machine identifier. As we all join social networks or other web services requiring a “log in,” we provide more information that may allow us to be identified as a unique user. So what’s the trade off? Now hundreds or perhaps thousands of independent services on the web know where we are located and perhaps even who we are.

Thus, to engage in offering personalized service, news organizations must meet the challenge of acquiring and using – at least temporarily – sensitive demographic and preference information from their subscribers. To do this means adopting a consumer-facing, consumer-enabling privacy attitude and infrastructures.

Concern about privacy is a modern policy issue. In small-town colonial America, indeed in any small community – town, school, and workplace – we expected to surrender most of our privacy in our day-to-day activities. We knew, in a general sense, who was aware of what we were doing, and we had a pretty good idea of what they could or would do with that knowledge. In the physical world, we can manage what is known about us by where we work, play, live and with whom we associate. In the Attention Age, information about our online “personas” has no physical boundaries. And we really don’t know who is following our activity.

Legislative opening bell: Kerry-McCain “bill of rights”

Most of the current efforts to tackle Internet privacy as a policy issue appear designed to restore a sense that the individual can control when and how personally identifiable information is released – as well as who can use it and for what purposes. On April 12, 2011 Sens. John Kerry and John McCain introduced a commercial privacy bill of rights act designed to thread the need among the interests of major social networks like Facebook, advertisers, web publishers and consumers. Almost simultaneously, four private-rights groups objected to key provisions of the 44-page proposal, including: Lack of a “do-not-track” approach, and giving too much enforcement power to the Commerce Department, rather than to states of the Federal Trade Commission.

The core objective of the Kerry-McCain bill – of any privacy enhancing effort – is to increase consumer choice and knowledge of the personalization-privacy tradeoff. In the Attention Age, there is now a business opportunity for entities – the Information Valets – that help the public manage their persona. (Also see, Privacy as a Service, Page 33)

Uncle Sam vs. Facebook Connect as de facto identity card?

In June 2010, a Commerce Department unit released a white paper on the subject, in an initiative spearheaded by a White House advisor on cyber security, Howard A. Schmidt. The report called for designating a federal agency to lead the public-private sector efforts to implement the blueprint, and for the federal government to lead the way in the adoption of secure digital identities. On April 15, 2011, the U.S. Commerce Department released its “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace,” which calls for one ID, which works at multiple web sites.

Whether one likes the idea or not, a role for government in assuring a reliable identity system on the web would be in stark contrast to what is happening now. With over 500 million registered users, Facebook now manages more digital “identities” than any state driver’s license facility, any single bank, or most governments, a prospect that worries some observers. “Although it's not apparent to many, Facebook is in the process of transforming itself from the world's most popular social-media website into a critical part of the Internet's identity infrastructure,” Simson S. Garfinkel, a privacy expert, wrote in the Jan. 5, 2011 edition of the MIT Technology Review.

Paul Trevithick pioneered creation of digital type fonts in the 1990s and now runs an Internet startup, Azigo Inc. focused on helping users manager their online identity. Trevithick is blunt in his assessment of the situation: A decade or more of multiple, uncoordinated, industry and academic efforts to develop an agreed specification for user identity management on the web have been a failure. He includes his own "information cards" effort, which he has worked with Microsoft on for a few years. Trevithick says the result is that Facebook Connect is becoming the de facto identity standard for the web -- one company, a closed, proprietary system where Facebook has all our data, with little or no rules about how they use it. Trevithick can't fathom why many big companies are blithely encouraging their customers to use Facebook Connect for all their online identity needs.

The politics and business of “do-no-not-track”

Within a marketplace, which includes dozens of online advertising networks, data aggregators and real-time bidding and demographic-trading exchanges, the four largest beneficiaries are like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL Inc. Two of them, Google and Microsoft, also make and give away the two of the three most popular web browsers – Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. These browsers are the technology which allow so-called “cookies” – text files store on user computers – to help with the tracking of consumer viewing habits on the web.

In late 2010 Microsoft announced that version 9 of its browser would include an optional “do-not-track” request that could be manually invoked by the user. A website would be under no obligation to honor the electronic “do-no-track” request, but at least a consumer can uniformly make the request. Microsoft’s decision was characterized as a breakthrough, because it represent a loss for the company’s web advertising divisions and a win for its browser developers, who sought to be competitive in the privacy arena with the Mozilla Corp., make of Firefox, the No. 2 browser after Internet Explorer. Mozilla, owned by a non-profit foundation with no direct advertising ties, too the lead on adding the “do-not-track” request function.

On April 13, 2011, Apple announced it would mimic Firefox and Microsoft and add “do-not-track” to the Safari browser it gives away on Apple devices. As of this writing, Google – the dominant beneficiary of online advertising – has yet to offer “do-not-track” as a standard part of its fast-growing Google Chrome browser, although the company reportedly offers a “Keep My Opt-Outs” add-on which will let users request their data not be used for ad targeting.

Opponents of the Kerry-McCain bill say that leaving “do-not-track” as a consumer-invoked option with no legal force in inadequate. They want the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to be able to make rules requiring web marketers to respect a do-not-track request as a matter of law. The resolution of this dispute involves likely billions of dollars and the future of the way interactive advertising is tracked and sold. If “do-not-track” becomes law, it would overnight create a strong need for “Information Valets” who broker sensitive personal information on consumers’ behalf.

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
PART ONE: SUMMING UP

Journalism is expensive, and mass-market web advertising alone will not sustain it. Rather, news organizations must become adept at “advisor-tising” – permission-based sharing of commercial messages with individual users based on their expressed interests and needs. Publishers charging only for their own content without making it part of a shared-user network put up walls that destroy the brilliant utility of the open web. Newsrooms must rethink the nature of “voice” to become interactive, participatory and collaborative.

In short, sustaining journalism requires rethinking the very notion of advertising, and of news as a service, not a product.

Thus in the Attention Age, the news and broadcast industries must:

· Migrate from an historic role as the most-trusted consumer information source to the “information valet” -- a ubiquitous curator, advisor, authenticator and retailer of personalized news, entertainment and service information from anywhere.

· Aggregate for advertisers and sponsors audience measurement and selected demographic data optionally provided by unique users whose identity persists across a federated network. The network should track, aggregate, sort and share revenues, including payments to users for the use of their “persona.” The user should be in control of the data use and flow concerning them.

· Put in place technology for the optional sharing of content by subscription or click with dynamic, variable pricing and bundling options.

Revenues and advertising will be shared, but each owner-user of the collaborative will retain complete control of its existing customer (reader/advertiser) base, including name and account information. Demographics will be shared only based upon the opt-in permissions set by consumers and the joint business rules of the collaborative owners.

The initial form is likely to be a news-based social network, with strongly relevant content, absolute control for users over their demographic and financial data, and a means to share, sell and buy content from multiple sources with a single account. The network will support news content creators by delivering high-value commercial content to end users; and will enable a two-way flow of payments or reward points in consumer accounts.

“Information valets” might anchor such networks – trusted agents who help consumers manage their privacy and take control themselves of their online identity –- their “persona” –- out of the hands of product- or service-selling vendors. But the establishment of such a network entails making some key decisions about how trust and identity are established -- maintained. So far, public and private efforts in this area have not coalesced on any common solution. In the next section, “Making the Marketplace,” we’ll propose governance and operating structure for assembling the solution.

PART TWO/SOLUTION

Making the Marketplace

TRUST, IDENTITY AND COMMERCE:
THE INTERNET’S MISSING LINKS

So far, we’ve argued that news organizations are, increasingly, all in a service business. How will they get paid? Service businesses are based upon ongoing trust relationships, rather than the single arms length purchase of a product. In these relationships, you know your customer and their needs. The three building blocks are therefore trust, identity and commerce.

TRUST
Trust is the basic building block of human and business relationships. Without it, commerce is not possible because people/companies will face uncertainty. Trust can be direct (one-to-one) or proxied. Most of our trust relationships are proxied, and they are generally based upon historical knowledge. The basic Internet does not support trust because connections (relationships) can be "stateless" and ephemeral. There have been many "hacks" to overcome this (such as website Secure Certificates), but the core problem evolves from the fact that interactions are via a wire or wireless, not in person.
IDENTITY
When the TCP/IP protocol was developed, the network was designed to assign an IP number to a given machine on the network. In order to get on the network, you just had to be able to do so through a connected machine. And so that meant other users of the network were also just machine "nodes." You could know positively what machine you were connected to, but not WHOM you were connected to. There have been many "hacks" for this, too, the principal one being user name/passwords, which is great but not perfect. Identity can best be verified in a trust environment (see trust, above) where there is an ongoing relationship with some entity that will certify to the network that you are whom you say you are such as in research papers. That's why organizations that have long term, financial relationships with people (such as banks or newspapers with subscribers and the like) are in the best position to help certify identity.
COMMERCE

We think of commerce as involving money. But there are other forms of commerce. You can trade on your reputation. You can barter your privacy. But unless trust and a method of assuring identity are present, you are at risk of having your money, your reputation or your privacy misappropriated without your knowledge or consent.

Paying for the news – stories or convenience?

If the news ecosystem requires a focus on service rather than a specific product, then what will consumers pay for – stories or a larger experience? A study by Next Issue Media, the magazine consortium studying digital adoption trends, forecast that e-reader, or digital magazine editions read on tablet computer devices, will generate more than $3 billion in new, annual advertising and circulation revenue by 2014. The study assumed that other vendors, including Google, would develop e-readers devices of their own besides the Apple iPad. The assumption of the Next Issue Media-financed study is that the experience of consuming news and information on tablet devices will be different from print. There is actually a rich history of success at asking people to pay for information delivered electronically:

Throughout the 1980s and earlier, until the World Wide Web achieved scale, Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve, The Source, Delphi, Lexis-Nexis and countless other “online services” billed for access and specific articles. But when the U.S. news industry began using the web from 1994 forward, it quickly abandoned efforts to charge, because it looked like a faster, easier route to prosperity was to sell advertising instead. Attempts to introduce charging systems on the web itself floundered because of this. Given the choice between free and paid, consumers chose free.
What’s different today?

· Advertising competition on the web has driven down prices, leading most publishers to believe it is not a sole source for revenue.

· As discussed earlier, advertising is itself evolving to one-to-one marketing, changing the technologies and likely incumbents. Google now sells more advertising than any legacy media company.

· Free information is so devalued and so frequently untrustworthy that the public is now looking for alternatives that save time, promise reliability and are always available from multiple platforms.

Appeals for micropayments in Auletta’s book from Stanford, Google
In his 2009 book, “Googled: The End of the World As We Know It,” New Yorker writer Ken Auletta wrote: “A free web is not always free.” He continued:

“The Web needs another revenue stream. The Internet grew to adulthood as a largely "free" medium but only by using the advertising-reliant model pioneered by radio and television broadcasting. As Stanford President Hennessy had told me, echoing a heretical thought I encountered more and more while reporting this book. ‘We should have made a micro-payment system work.’ Free works for Google search. It will work for other sites. But it does not work for most content businesses. Whether the right model is micro-payments, or subscriptions, or pay-for-services, or some combination of these is less important than making an effort to end advertising dependency.

“Even Wired editor Chris Anderson, who once more forcefully advocated that free was the perfect model (his 2009 book is titled, Free), has been intellectually honest and amended his position. Blaming the deep recession, Anderson appended a ‘Coda’ chapter near the end of his new book in which he wrote that he now believes ‘Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid.’ [Google then-CEO] Eric Schmidt also shifted his view on charging for content on the Internet. ‘My current view of the world,’ he told me in April 2009, ‘is you end up with advertising and micro-payments and big payments based on’ the nature of the audience.”

Who will create this trust, identity and information commerce framework? In July, 2010, Google Inc. submitted comments to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on the agency’s discussion draft on policy recommendations for journalism. In the Google comments document, Google’s policy analysts wrote “the current challenges faced by the news industry are business problems, not legal problems, and can only be addressed effectively with business solutions.” The Google comments continued: “The ultimate solutions that will result in a new online equilibrium for the news industry cannot, however, be mandated by changes in the regulatory framework or a change to the copyright laws. The solutions, instead, must be driven by the industry itself . . . . ”

The following proposal answers Google’s call.

THE NEW WEB OVERLAY

Proposing a shared-user network for
trust, identity and information commerce

The Internet wasn't conceived or engineered with any protocol for settling information transactions or handling incremental billing of digital objects or quality-of-service. It is expected to now perform in these areas. Some of the same objections to “national identity cards” create First Amendment and privacy concerns when the government proposes to play more than an advisory role in managing web identity or management. However, many news industry experts consulted in our research recognize that a payment protocol which afforded one-ID, one-password, one-bill access to information, with payments aggregated and settled to legacy payment systems would be transformational in handling a world of “atomized” – disaggregated, multi-source content.

What’s needed is a new overlay on the existing web, compliant with and supportive of existing web protocols, which specifies uniform methods for exchanging information about user identity, trust and the exchange of value in commerce – an “easy pass” or passport or digital calling card. An Information Trust Association (ITA) can bring together these three vital threads – trust, identity and commerce. Unless they are woven together, the Internet will fail to embody the best relationships of the physical world. They are inseparable building blocks of a free market for digital information.”

Who is available to forge that protocol and cause its adoption? Technical standards bodies seem ill equipped to efficiently handle the task. Unilateral action by the very largest technical players (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL) could be regarded as suspect by the major publishers and banks. Action by the bank/credit-card orbit might be challenged by content owners and user representatives.

Any approach "owned" by a small group of equity investors is likely to meet one of two fates:

· Either it will be sandbagged by enough competitors such that it will fail to gain critical-mass acceptance. An example: Abortive efforts by competing technology companies to develop a standard for short-distance wireless device communications until the formation of the BlueTooth Special Interest Group association.

· Or, it will have such a compelling consumer offering that it will grow exponentially, creating a functional monopoly and outsized pricing control. Examples: Google and online advertising; Facebook and social marketing.

So establishing the system is a non-trivial assignment, because of the challenge of finding a balance between chaos and inadvertent monopolization. If the entities doing so are not governments, then private capital must play a role and be rewarded for doing so. We propose this be done in a two-step process:

This system . . . platform . . . clearing house . . . should uniformly exchange payments for the sharing of text, video, music, game plays, entertainment, advertising views, etc., across the Internet. It could, for example, manage background -- wholesale -- payments for content that is repurposed for advertising gain by bloggers, collecting, sorting and settling copyright and other value exchanges among users, publishers and aggregators. Consumer users should have a choice of providers – agents – for accessing services, with one account and one ID providing simple access to multiple resources.

There is an urgent challenge for journalists to find a way beyond mass-market advertising to underwrite – and profit from -- the free flow of civic information. The ITA concept suggests business opportunities for entrepreneurs. Trust, identity and commerce are the core issues. The ability to trust who you are dealing with, what they are doing with elements of your identity, and that fair compensation can be exchanged for value received. Such a system will produce important benefits for users including convenience, privacy, personalization and relevant advertising. Some of these issues have been addressed in other venues by the credit card and telecom industries. The intention is to seek the best knowledge about analogous historical practices, and then convene and foster the right solutions for the future. While many of the conveners of the ITA would come from the perspective of journalism’s vital role in sustaining participatory democracy, the challenges and opportunities affect the nation’s public information infrastructure broadly.

This user-centric system for sharing trust and identity, and for exchanging and settling value (including payments), for digital information should allow multiple agents -- 0r “infovalets” -- to compete for and serve customers. These customers will have varied topical interests and varied personal appetites for sharing demographic information about themselves in exchange for something of value. It needs a free, open market for digital information -- and attention.

The mission of the Information Trust Association could be to help sustain, update and enrich the values and purposes of journalism through collaboration among news media, the public and public-focused institutions. Major technology, publishing, advertising, consumer and philanthropic organizations might underwrite ITA. It would then guide the creation of new standards and a platform for exchange of user authentication and transaction records. That would enable a competitive market for information, respecting and enabling consumer privacy and choice.

Elements of the publishing and information industries are converging and evolving such that no existing trade organization, by itself, has the credibility to make broad policy that sticks. What’s needed is a new non-profit association that handles trust from the perspective of the needs and privacy of users, journalism, publishing, entertainment, finance – and perhaps even health. Because an identity and trust framework for the web should be flexible enough to handle all levels of trust and identity, from news reading right up to secure exchange of health records or even national-security secrets. It can start with the low-risk stuff -- like news -- but ought to be thought out from the perspective of permitting the more critical stuff as it becomes stable and

understood.

Very generally, this R&D collaborative will need to address issues of content ownership, copyright protection, personalization, privacy, advertising and content payments in a networked media environment. Solutions that are broadly applicable across journalistic, publishing and entertainment enterprises will require the existence of a neutral organization that can responsibly address and mitigate antitrust issues. Think of it as akin to establishing the gauge of the railroad, or the grid frequency of alternating current, but not the size of boxcars, the schedule or price of freight, or electricity.

Like common-gauge railroad tracks, a stock exchange, interstate highways or our standard, 60-cycle continental electric grid, this platform should create a level – but competitive -- playing field – for the things sought by speakers at a December 2009, U.S. Federal Trade Commission forum:

· The "gold-standard" measurement of user-access to web resources sought by Scripps newspaper executive (and 2010 Newspaper Association of America board chairman) Mark Contreras at a 2009 U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearing.

· The opportunity (but not the requirement) to charge for content sought by News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

· The user-controlled, personalized advertising, which will allow Arianna Huffington's AOL-merged Huffington Post to thrive without charging.

· And the accountability to users for their privacy sought by the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester.

A possible answer -- the member association?

What should be the corporate for of the Information Trust Association?

Could the answer be a member association, similar in many respects to the origins of Visa? Until it became a public-stock company two years ago, Visa comprised four non-stock companies aligned under the Visa International Services Association. [13] The Visa companies employed about 6,000 people worldwide: Visa International Service Association; Visa USA, Inc.; Visa Europe Ltd; and Visa Canada Association. Together they comprised the Visa International Services Association.

This model is actually familiar to newspaper publishers, who formed The Associated Press in 1848 as a news-gathering cooperative and have continued to govern it under the Membership Corporations Law of the State of New York, without stock and without profits, raising "assessments" each year to match the operating requirements of the service. Neither of these organizations, however, recognizes in any formal way the interests of the consumers of the service they offer. Visa did not recognize in its governance structure the rights of merchants, and its member owners converted Visa to a public-stock company in 2008.

An Information Trust Association will need, if it is to find broad support, to recognize in its governance structure the interests of at least four different constituencies: rights-holders

(authors/artists), publishers (information providers/aggregators), account managers (banks, telecommunications companies, publishers, billers etc.), and end-users.

As we have spoken over three years with publishers, telecommunications companies, ISPs, banks, researchers and consumers, we have heard universal acceptance of the notion that one-ID, one-bill access to digital information anywhere represents "goodness" -- and equally universal skepticism that we or anyone else can scramble the chicken/egg, content/audience-owner mix. Somehow the realization has to form in the marketplace that the need for an information commerce clearing association is so critical, and the solution so obvious, that a critical mass of participants will agree simultaneously. The largest publishers are waiting for this to occur, but are afraid to sacrifice market share or risk exposure to legal challenge by taking the first steps (and also to some degree concerned about the impact on the dominant model of advertiser-support of information delivery). The idea behind the Information Trust Association is to legitimize and direct the start of that rapid coalescence or phase change.

Major technology, publishing, advertising, consumer and philanthropic organizations could underwrite ITA. It would guide the creation of new standards and a platform for exchange of user authentication and transaction records which enables a competitive market for information, respecting and enabling consumer privacy and choice."

LINK: SOME IDEAS ABOUT A JTA / ITA STRUCTURE

Considering antitrust

The government and private antitrust prosecutions of Visa and MasterCard served notice that the public interest requires significant consideration of the competitive aspects of any effort to collude around the formation of an information-payments structure.

The proposed Information Trust Association would develop protocols and standards, and authorize the operation by private contractors of a cooperative authentication and logging service – a “clearing house” for managing trust and identity of users, and the recording and financial settlement of system transactions among business participants. The authentication and logging service is a “trusted third party” who is known and trusted by information vendors, user “infovalets” or information agents, and end users.

The trusted third-party need never know the name or unique identifying information of the user. Nor may it intervene in anyway with the setting of prices. Information vendors set a wholesale price; service providers pay that wholesale price and then "retail" the information to their end users at whatever price they wish -- above or below the wholesale price they are charged. These are entirely market functions. A cooperative authentication and logging service need never "own" any information; it merely notes and processes settlement data provided by a wholesale seller and a retailing buyer. University of Missouri Law Prof. Thomas Lambert considered antitrust issues involving industry collaboration in a June 24, 2010 talk at a conference in Columbia, Mo. In the talk, Lambert said it is often considered within the law for competitors to agree upon technical standards, which will facilitate market expansion where pricing and service options are not considered or shared. Standard-setting is usually pro-competition, he said, where it reduces transaction costs and increases choice for the public and where the total marketplace is more valuable to the public interest than the sum of its parts. The threshold question a court might consider is: Are the standards necessary to make the market work? Competitors need to be certain they do not seek to discuss or agree on anything that isn't necessary to make the market work.

Collaboration necessary to establish the system needs to occur around issues such as transmission protocols, field sizes, attributes and contents, levels of authentication and security and optional service features. There need be no common discussion or understanding regarding price or the acquisition or use of personal information. Consistent with the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case (Associated Press et al. v. United States, 65 S.Ct. 1416, June 18, 1945) forbidding The Associated Press to blackball from membership a competing newspaper in a founding member's home city, access to the facilities of Information Trust Association authentication and logging services must be open on an equal basis to all classes of competitors.

Why news organizations need the shared-user network

As news consumers migrate from print or broadcast online, the percentage of time they spend on news-oriented websites is in the low single digits. Services should allow place-based news organizations, legacy or new media, to deepen and extend their service by branding and providing an always-on stream of headlines, recommendations, social-networking opportunities and commercial messages to the opt-in user throughout their online session. For newspapers and local broadcasters, this creates the opportunity to earn a larger share of online “timespend” through profile-driven customization highlighting local- and topic-specific information. Results: More effective advertising and the opportunity to experiment with subscriptions.

It will need a platform for trust, identity and information commerce to work: http://www.tinyurl.com/infotrust

Google or PayPal handle commerce, but not elements of identity beyond what’s necessary to get paid. Facebook is moving to handle identity, but might not be trusted for commerce, and faces looming regulatory scrutiny because of its dominance. None of these players (yet) have a core connection to civic information or journalism. Each might migrate services into news or information aggregation, identity management or payments. A trust, identity and information commerce framework would allow them -- and legacy news organizations -- to do so across a common playing field where consumer privacy is respected, business rules are transparent and the consumer can easily move among competing options.

Microaccounting –
Aggregation for two-way payments

What's then needed is a microaccounting system, which is a "door that swings both ways" -- to use a term coined by Martin Langeveld, a veteran New England daily newspaper publisher and co-founder of CircLabs Inc.

Sometimes, as a user, you’ll be rewarded for looking at, downloading or doing something. Other times, you’ll be asked to reward a site or vendor or former publisher for providing you information or insight that helps you with your life chores, your business your my recreation. A third possibility – you might be paid for offering original writing or other content into the news social network. A microaccounting system can keep track of these debits and credits and settle them periodically to the banking system. Services like Spot.us, can present the offers that are worth paying for -- or being paid for.

Thus, still to be established – the system that records all the debit/credit activity across multiple websites and aggregates them for settlement to the banking system. The system should not require that users pay-per-click, although that feature should be an option. It should allow users to be part of a subscription network, in which the user pays a flat monthly fee (perhaps bundled with their print or online news subscription) and the collaborating content owners settle access by each other's users to resources in background.

Privacy as a service

But the competition for mass-audience advertising on the web is such that it seems hard to imagine sustainable rates will ever support the amount of original reporting the United States has enjoyed for the last 50 years. Audiences are now atomizing and the only future for advertising is in presenting targeted messages to individual users. This means the entity that earns the right to receive value for advertising is going to be the one that does the best job of understanding and then servicing the needs of an individual user — including privacy. In the information-service economy, your information valet will be paid for arranging your attention when you look at an ad, and that payment will be a credit to an account and will offset your purchase of premium information. This represents an ebb and flow of attention and info-currency, depending upon whether it is information someone wants you to have, information you want -- or information you provide.

Entrepreneurial opportunities

Vint Cerf and his colleagues engineered and specified TCP-IP as the standard protocol for moving bits and bytes across the Internet. It was a standard – like the power grid or railroad gauge -- that has been a foundation for higher-level innovation and “network neutrality.”

An Information Trust Association could establish voluntary standards for sharing user information and commerce across TCP-IP networks. Just as with Cerf, his colleagues and TCP/IP as a platform standard, the specification of protocols and operating rules for the Attention Age news social network, guided by the non-profit ITA, would unleash some predictable – and also unforeseen – entrepreneurial opportunity. Here are three possibilities:

· One or more entities might emerge to handle the authentication, exchange, logging, sorting and settlement of access events across the web or mobile devices.

· Others might provide a foundation for consumers to barter the information they own – demographics, preferences, writing, observations – seamlessly across networks. Doc Searls calls these examples of The Fourth Party.[14]

· Others might enable settlement of accumulated charges to the banking system.

· Still others might be able to improve the security and portability of medical records.

CONCLUSION: NEXT STEPS FOR NEWS

What needs to happen now?

Throughout this paper, we have asserted these points:

· Information has come unbundled, and no copyright laws will change that

· Journalism is expensive, and mass-market web advertising alone will not sustain it.

· Sustaining journalism requires rethinking mass-market advertising, and news as a service rather than a product.

· Advertising is giving way to targeted, permission-based, direct marketing

· Publishers in the old gatekeeper role won’t necessarily be in the marketing loop

· Consumers are aware of privacy and the value of their attention

· Trust and identity are building blocks of the new information ecosystem

· A new kind of information valet service can earn value finding what you need

Single-site charging for content puts up walls that destroy the brilliant utility of the open web. An Information Trust Association could establish voluntary protocols for a free market for digital information that support and extend existing web protocols.

The news industry may participate in a new Information Trust Economy by:

· Migrating from its historic role as the most-trusted consumer information source in print broadcast or web to a ubiquitous advisor, authenticator and retailer of news, entertainment and service information from anywhere.

· Aggregating for advertisers opt-in audience measurement and selected demographic data by unique, authorizing users whose identity can then persists across a federated network that also tracks, aggregates, sorts and shares revenues.

· Putting in place technology for the optional sharing of content by subscription or click with sophisticated, dynamic pricing and bundling options that eliminate walls.

· Conveners must step forward to establish an Information Trust Association that is global in perspective. The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri has laid some groundwork through the “Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy,” and “From Gatekeeper to Information Valet,“ series of events.

· Government and private users of the Internet and public mobile networks can assess whether they can achieve more freedom, convenience and trust by supporting a collaborative, transparent, independent effort to create a free, open, four-party market for digital information, rather than a closed, three-party market controlled by a dominant private entity.

The news industry needs to provide a service in which consumers can have one account at their home-based former-newspaper or broadcaster and use it to acquire information from multiple websites, with one-account, one-ID, one bill, privacy-protected simplicity. The system shouldn’t just enable purchase of content by users, but also allow marketers to pay users for their attention -- viewing ads or other sponsored resources.

The system should not require that users pay-per-click, although that feature could be an option. It should allow users to be part of a subscription network, in which the user pays a flat monthly fee (perhaps bundled with their print or online news subscription) and the collaborating content owners settle access by each other's users to resources in background.

MAKING THE MARKETPLACE:

RECOMMENDATIONS

News providers need a way to increase the range of services they offer their readers, users and customers in order to support the values, principles and purposes of journalism. They need to be able to serve as the gateway – the InfoValet™ -- for more of their users’ information and service needs through an emerging social network. Most now realize that advertising alone may not support the ongoing newsgathering efforts that comprise their unique competitive advantage.

They need an application of Internet technology that allows companies to sell digital information to each other's customers without having to share the names, addresses or credit data of those customers. With such technology, news competitors can have a level playing field – a free market for digital information -- to compete on product, pricing and service across new markets and even new continents.

Until now, publishers tried to limit access to non-owned information and keep their audience on their own site (an impulse which contradicts the technological capabilities of the web and the desires of consumers not to be “boxed in”). A new set of rules and protocol could give publishers economic incentives to cooperate in selling information, offering product information and exchanging users through an automatic, wholesale-retail, transaction aggregation.

Public benefits paramount

While helpful to publishers and other information sellers, the overriding intention of the market-forming efforts should be public benefits that:

· Vest greater control and economic value of their privacy and personal information in the hands of individual citizens.

· Simplify the open, competitive exchange of value among users and information suppliers.

· Guarantee one-account, one-ID, one-bill simplicity from any of multiple participating trust/identity/commerce providers (“InfoValets”).

· Assure the trustworthiness, and neutrality of enabling technologies.

We conclude with three recommendations:

1. Undertake an Information Trust Association initiative

A public-benefit initiative with the working title of “Information Trust Association” should be initiated by a founding meeting held during 2011. A clear institutional leader must emerge to lead the convening and launch it.

Foundations, publishers, broadcasters, technology companies, account managers, and related trade groups should undertake to define and seed a global marketplace for digital information through a shared-user network enabling mutual trust, identity and commerce. The marketplace convener should undertake to define – and license -- standards, protocols, systems, services or technologies that, in whole or in part, contribute to the support or advancement of journalism, communities and participatory democracy.

The initiative should contract with or license with one or more for-profit entities, funded by investors, to operate elements of the shared-user network for trust, identity and information commerce. The network should be compliant with and supportive of all existing Internet protocols. It should support a large number of competitive information agents or “InfoValets” -- Fourth Parties[15] beyond the (1) users, (2) sellers and (3) system managers -- who assist users with their accounts, information and commerce.

Elements of the initiative might be undertaken by existing organizations, both profit and non-profit, coordinated by an “Information Trust Association” (ITA) that also assesses issues of user identity and trust – “persona” – necessarily intertwined with information commerce. A digital all-content clearing house or collaborative, such as envisioned by The Associated Press, could work closely with an ITA.

Besides commercial beneficiaries, a representative list of useful collaborators and supporters might include be the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the Google Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open Networking Foundation, the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, the MIT Media Lab, the Annenberg Innovation Lab and Center for the Digital Future (both at USC), the Craigslist Foundation, the Identity Commons, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, the World Wide Web Foundation, The Associated Press, the American Press Institute, the Media Management Center, the Nieman Foundation and the Berkman Institute (both at Harvard University), the Poynter Institute for Media Students, the Online News Association, the Software & Information Industry Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Advertising Federation, the Online Publishers Association, the American Newspaper Digital Access Corp., leading journalism schools, world and U.S. state press associations.

The ITA could also:

n Champion consumer choice and user-centric privacy control

n Establish voluntary privacy, trust and identity standards

n Research, test and commission key technologies

n Sanction protocols for sharing users and content

n Create, foster and govern multisite user authentication services

n Enable web-side microaccounting and subscription settlement

n Support web wide tracking and billing for “atomized” content

2. Operate transparently within existing antitrust law

In the United States, ample precedents exist for industry cooperation which does not violate antitrust law when it promotes the creation of standards or marketplaces which increase rather than reduce consumer choice. An Information Trust Association initiative should operate transparently within these precedents, without the need for any special consideration by U.S. or world monopolies authorities.

3. Stand for the proposition that journalism matters to democracies

Well sustained by traditional business models, America’s journalists saw little need to measure or document a relationship between participatory democracy and independent, fact-based reporting on civic issues. The Pulitzer Prize and dozens of other news-media prizes, awards and citations are necessary but not sufficient, because they are not focused primarily on reaching the broad public. The revenues received by the ITA from the licensing or providing services not needed for operations, technical research and development should sustain public-focused news- and media-literacy efforts that document[16] – and even create -- trustworthy “journalism that matters.”

Too big a challenge? It can’t be

The infrastructure for privacy, trust, identity and information commerce will not just happen. It will take a thoughtful, sustained effort by foundations, scholars, publishers, broadcasters, technologists, lawyers, governments, banks, entertainment companies and the public. For at least 15 years, the author has heard news industry executives dismiss the possibility that a new open marketplace for digital information could emerge because (a) it was “too big an idea.” We might once have said that:

a. Building and flying a 900,000-pound aircraft such as the latest Boeing 747’s was too big an idea.

b. Coordinating for multiple tasks the power of 200,000 networked individual computers (one estimate of Google’s infrastructure) was too big an idea.

c. Processing 81 billion transactions a year (up to 300 million/day) among 29 million merchants and 16,000 financial institutions worth $3.8 trillion (as Visa did in 2007-2008)[17] was too big an idea.

These ideas evolved over time, as may the work of an ITA, once begun.

On March 14, 2011, the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism’s 2011 State of the News Media annual report observed that beyond shrinking ad revenues print and broadcast mass audiences “a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year.” It continued:

“The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future . . . And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.”

Two years earlier, in a story about PEJ’s 2009 "State of the News Media" report, Time Magazine's M.J. Stephey wrote March 16, 2009: " . . . [I]f solutions aren't obvious, the report's overall message is: Will the future leaders of journalism please, please stand up?"

In a March 30, 2009 talk at the NewsVision Conference, Vivian Schiller, then CEO of National Public Radio said: "We need many news organizations to keep our country strong. We need to help each other. We need to partner, we need to experiment and we need to accept and agree that we will continue, we will not accept failure and we need to keep trying and trying different models until we get it right."

It's time for the world’s information creators, aggregators, technologists and citizens to stand and create an open playing field for privacy, trust, identity and information commerce. o

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The author acknowledges the support of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), and its program of one-year research fellowships, without which this paper would not have been possible. RJI graciously awarded him a one-year fellowship in 2008-2009 to work on “The Information Valet Project.” Densmore has been an ongoing consultant to RJI, and is a cofounder of CircLabs Inc. and founder of Clickshare Service Corp., which holds a relevant patent. A member of the Journalism That Matters collaborative and director of the Media Giraffe Project at UMass Amherst, he is a career journalist, entrepreneur and researcher on the future and sustainability of journalism. He may be reached at Densmore@mediagiraffe.org / http://tinyurl.com/densmore / Twitter: @infovalet

The author’s general knowledge of media innovation comes from work as director of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a former U.S. reporter for The Associated Press, trade media and as publisher of weekly newspapers. In 1997 and earlier, he wrote that “newspapers are going to face a train wreck once fat pipes came into the home and people could go anywhere for information.” Newspapers, he wrote, would need to learn how to make money referring people to information from anywhere, sharing both users, and content.

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Beyond the essential financial and logistical help of the RJI, specific thanks go to Phil Aucutt, Joe Bergeron, Roger Gafke, Dean Mills, Martin Langeveld, Elizabeth Osder, Chuck Peters, Randy Picht, Greg Schermer, James Shaffer, Norman Sims, Paul Trevithick and Jeff Vander Clute – plus the author’s father, also Bill Densmore -- for healthy skepticism, particular research advice or draft paper editing assistance. As important have been the contributions of time from hundreds of experts interviewed in the publishing, journalism, technology and education spheres over the course of this research and, especially, including those who participated in one of three “Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy,” gatherings supported by RJI in 2008, 2009 and 2010, listed here:

“Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy,” Dec. 3-5, 2008:
PROGRAM LINK / PARTICIPANT LINK
“From Gatekeeper to Information Valet,” May 27, 2009:
PROGRAM LINK / PARTICIPANT LINK
“From Blueprint to Building,” June 23-25, 2010:
PROGRAM LINK / PARTICIPANT LINK

Making the new digital market:
A case for the Information Trust Association

PROBLEM – No viable way to sell content on the web

Services are proprietary, inconvenient, expensive
Solution requires collaboration on federated authentication
Also requires ability to aggregate charges among multiple sites
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple could “make rules”
But their leadership would be opposed by others

SOLUTION – Public/industry collaborative establishes framework

Make/create a free, open market for digital info exchange
Like Visa, ICANN, 60-cycle power, railroad gauge, FAA, N.Y. Stock Exchange, CableLabs
Non-stock, membership, possibly program-related investments
Can start, invest in or contract with for-profits
Self-sustaining through transaction fees

POSSIBLE CONVENOR – Reynolds Journalism Institute at Univ. of Missouri

Ground work laid (“Blueprinting the InfoValet Economy”)
Run from “neutral turf” – the Midwest
The nation’s first journalism school; telcom expertise
RJI has facilities and staff to host operation
Mizzou Advantage facilitates law, business, IT, journalism collaboration

TASKS – A safe haven for collaboration / standard-setting

Careful avoidance of antitrust problems
Enable dynamic pricing competition, mixing “atomized” content
Extend OpenID to include transfer of “persona,” commerce
Specify transfer protocols; “box car”
Specify base terms of service for public users
Establish info exchange rules (like stock exchange)
Certify compliance (like Underwriters Laboratories)
Managing cross-licensing (like BlueTooth Association)

ADDENDUM

Trust associations that established beneficial networks: Nine examples

The intrastructure that will allow for trust, identity and information commerce – the just-in-time flower view – will not just happen. It will take a thoughtful effort by publishers, technologists, scholars, lawyers, governments, banks, entertainment companies and the public. How might this happen?

In thinking about how you create that universal web trust, identity and commerce infrastructure, its useful to think about analogies in other industries. Here are eight:

Marketplace trust assurance – Underwriters Laboratories for electrical equipment
BlueTooth SIG (association) for making mobile devices able to communicate wirelessly
ICANN for making the Internet’s domain name service work
CableLabs for engineering that benefits the cable industry
Continental railroads deciding on uniform track widths for interconnectivity
The U.S. bank ACH network rules for electronic funds transfers
The Associated Press, a non-profit cooperative owned by U.S. dailies
Visa, once a nonstock association of the world’s banks (now a publicly traded company)
The New York Stock Exchange, until a few years ago, a nonprofit formed so that brokers and investors could make money.

DETAILS

In the United States, electrical cords you might buy at a hardware store all have a tag on them certifying they have been checked for safety by Underwriters Laboratories. That’s one example of an industry collaborating in a way that has nothing to do with pricing or serving or competition. It’s around creating an important consumer benefit – this cord is not likely to cause a fire in my house.
We might also think about the BlueTooth Special Interest Group. The way your earbud communicates with your cell phone, or the way your laptop communicates with a wireless keyboard, is via the BlueTooth protocol. It’s a very complicated set of voluntary industry rules about how wireless radio devices handshake and connect with each other. There were multiple companies that had patents in that area and they were all competing just the way Sony and VHS video recording formats competed until VHS effectively won.

The industry, with appropriate advice on antitrust oversight, formed a non-profit association that cross-licensed all of those rights and developed protocols. There is still competition on the price of earbuds and they each have different features. But one earbud knows how to connect uniformly with other BlueTooth devices – regardless of manufacturer.
Another example is the non-profit, public-benefit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, (ICANN). It’s the core entity that owns the root domain name servers on the Internet. It makes sure when we type in infotrust.org or RJIOnline.org, we all go to the same place and addresses are uniformly propagated. While ICANN has no way to require participation in the domain-name service, that system is so useful at creating a seamless network of connections anywhere that virtually all nations and services do – except those bent on fraud or political control.
CableLabs is the non-profit development laboratory that works with cable television operators globally to create new business opportunities based on innovative technologies.
Think about when railroads got started. Some of them had different gauge tracks – and still do on different continents. The United States standard is different from Europe. At least in North America, if you’ve got a boxcar, you can build it with the same width wheels as all other boxcars and run it across the U.S., Canada and Mexico without a problem.
The National Automated Clearing House Association is an affiliation of U.S. banks that lets you do electronic funds transfers and electronic bill paying by establishing standards.
The Associated Press is another example of a non-profit cooperative. U.S. publishers formed it in 1848 as a newsgathering cooperative and have continued to govern it under the Membership Corporations Law of the State of New York, without stock and without profits, raising "assessments" each year to match the operating requirements of the service. It organized because newspapers had a technical problem – there wasn’t enough bandwidth on the telegraph network to get multiple reports from the battlefronts of the Mexican-American War. So publishers pooled and shared the same factual reports sent by a reporter via telegraph to all points. And then individual newspapers embellished the factual reports with their own perspective into their own news stories.
Visa: Dee Hock was head of a small bank in Washington state in the 1960s. His bank was working with the Bank of America, then in San Francisco, when Bank of America had a card called the BankAmericard. Bank of America owned that. And Bank of America said to Dee Hock, in effect: “We have a real problem, we are trying to get all these banks around the country to carry the BankAmericard. And they don’t want to do it because they are perceiving the BankAmericard as our brand, and they are afraid that if they promote our brand, some of our customers are going to become Bank of America customers instead of the local banks customer.”

And you know what Dee Hock said? He said, instead of trying to make the BankAmericard a national brand, why don’t you profit by giving the idea away. Form a nonstock corporation, the Visa International Service Association, and share control of that association with hundreds of corresponding banks who you have been trying to do business with. And let’s give it a new brand, a brand of its own not connect with Bank of America. And that became the Visa card, the most phenomenally successful network for the exchange of value in the history of the planet. And it spawned a competitor, MasterCard, and it completely overtook the American Express model.

And that business model is this: If you have an American Express card, your account is with American Express. But if you have a Visa or MasterCard, your account is with whichever bank you signed up with – it’s not with Visa or MasterCard. Those are acceptance brands only. They run the system in the background for the benefit of their bank members. It’s the wholesale in the background.

The vision of associations run for the benefit of members lasted for 40 years or more and established the worldwide convenience of credit and now debits cards. An industry took a situation where no one was winning – consumers, banks, merchants – and created a new idea, or network in which everyone began winning. In terms of the ubiquity of a card that works anywhere on the planet, in terms of the convenience and trustworthiness of that card system – unbeatable.

On March 19, 2008, the banks that formed Visa took it public in the largest initial public offering in U.S. history, raising $18 billion, ending its unique non-stock structure.

The New York Stock Exchange. Formed under a buttonwood tree in 1792 by a group of brokers, for most of two centuries it was the world’s premier marketplace for the exchange of corporate equity. Yet while brokers, banks and investors – its members -- grew and prospered, the NYSE did not – it stayed a non-profit, member association until March 2006. Until then, its only mission was to make and govern an efficient marketplace.

[1] -- Overview of author’s RJI work: http://tinyurl.com/densmore ; http://www.newshare.com/disclosure; for Acknowledgements, see Page 39).

[2] -- For a discussion of the term “information valet” and Internet identity go to: http://wp.me/phs3d-bb

[3] -- The late Carnegie Mellon University Prof. Herbert Simon is credited with introducing the idea of the attention economy as early as 1971. Books by Thomas Davenport and John C. Beck (2001) and Richard A. Lanham (2007) expand the concept.

[4] -- Persona – In this context the set of interests and attributes the user wishes to present. (See Page 13).

[5] -- The word from “publisher” comes from the Latin “to make public,” and the Middle English usage was to “proclaim publicly.” An entity providing one-to-one information services may not be a “publisher.”

[6] -- Multiple presentations of self depending on context. For discussion of the term’s use see Page 13.

[7] -- Available at: http://www.naa.org/trendsandnumbers/advertising-expenditures.aspx

[8] -- Source for this paragraph: Feb. 1, 2011 email and attachments to the author from Clark Federicksen, of eMarketer Inc.

[9] -- See a discussion of editorial voice here: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/speakers/name/william_densmore/

[10] -- Terence Kawaja at Luma Partners, in New York, continuously updates a chart of relationships in the "advertising ecosystem." It's viewable from: http://slidesha.re/fp4a5F

[11] -- For a scenario of how The New York Times Co. could abandon daily publishing yet still sustain a billion-dollar news and advertising business see: http://tinyurl.com/4eba8wd

[12] -- The author is founder and a stockholder in Clickshare. See: http://www.newshare.com/disclosure

[13] -- Excerpt from: http://www.visa-asia.com/ap/center/mediacenter/includes/uploads/Visa_Worldwide_Report.pdf (at page 4): The Visa association is not a profit-driven organisation, and the four companies that make up Visa

issue no cards and make no loans. Members fund day-to-day management and make the investments needed to maintain and develop the Visa payment system. Fees are levied according to the following formula: Annual operating and marketing costs, Investment in new products, platforms and systems, Increase in reserves, Member’s annual fees.

[14] -- Four parties: (1) End users (buyers) (2) rights-holders, advertisers and publishers (including authors, artists, information providers and aggregators – generally sellers) (3) Neutral authenticators, logger and aggregators of transactions, and (4) account managers (banks, telcos, publishers, billers etc. – generally buyer’s agents). Also see: http://wp.me/phs1Y-Z (A discussion of the four-party concept).

[15] -- See Bill Densmore’s blog discussion of the fourth-party idea (from 1994) at: http://wp.me/phs1Y-Z

[16] -- In March, 2009, Rod Doherty, executive editor of Foster’s Daily Democrat, a 17,900-circulation daily in Dover, N.H., narrated a five-minute video describing a series of “house advertisements” the paper had run documenting its local “journalism that matters.” VIEW VIDEO: http://tinyurl.com/fosters-matters

[17] -- Video interview with Michael Dreyer, CIO of Visa, posted Oct. 7, 2008 at ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/videos/cio/visa-cio-michael-dreyer/334990 )

mediagiraffe: St. Paul drops charges against GOP convention reporters after 60K letters delivered

2008-09-19T16:45:00.000-04:00

Free Press, the national media-reform organization, said on Friday that local authories in St. Paul, Minn., have agreed not to prosecute journalists arrested on misdemeanor charges during the Republican National Convention earlier this month. The group staged a news conference to comment on the decision.

Watch the press conference: http://free.convio.net/site/R?i=dCYuXmsTcGIKq-F4dvUcuQ..
http://www.freepress.net

"This is an important first step, but many questions remain," Free Press quoted Nancy Doyle Brown from Twin Cities Media Alliance, as saying, adding: "We still need answers about why and how journalists got swept up in these arrests in the first place. And more than anything else, we need to ensure that this never happens again. We'll never know how many important stories never got told because their authors were behind bars, not in the streets."

Nearly two dozen reporters were arrested during the four-day event, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and two of her producers, Associated Press reporters, student journalists, local TV photographers, among others. Other journalists were pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were held at gunpoint during a "pre-emptive" police raid aimed at disrupting protesters.

Free Press cited a press release from St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman's office which noted that the city's attorney will use a "broad definition and verification to identify journalists who were caught up in mass arrests during the convention."

"We're pleased that the St. Paul authorities ultimately acted to uphold the rights of all journalists -- including those citizens using blogs, cheap cameras and cell phones to report news as it happens," said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, the national media reform organization. "Our task now is to ensure that our press remains free to report on the events, issues and stories that matter to our country, our communities and our democracy."

Less than three days after the initial arrests, more than 60,000 people across the country signed on to a letter from Free Press, demanding that Mayor Coleman and local authorities immediately "free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them." These letters were delivered to St. Paul City Hall the day after the convention following a press conference that included local citizens and many of the journalists who had been arrested earlier in the week.

"The news from St. Paul City Hall is certainly welcome regarding the decision to drop charges against journalists who were arrested and cited during the RNC," said Mike Bucsko, executive officer of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild Typographical Union, who spoke at a press conference. "However, it is essential the elected officials in St. Paul and Ramsey County examine the circumstances that led to the needless detention and harassment of journalists to ensure this type of indiscriminate behavior on the part of law enforcement does not happen again."

Local advocates and independent journalists from KFAI Community Radio, National Lawyers Guild, Twin Cities Daily Planet, Twin Cities IndyMedia, Twin Cities Media Alliance and The Uptake were joined bynational groups American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, The Newspaper Guild, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporters Without Borders, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Writers Guild of America, East, in condemning the unusually harsh treatment by city authorities.

NYTIMES: In Online World, Pocket Change Is Not Easily Spent

2007-08-27T10:28:00.000-04:00

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/technology/27micro.html
Published: August 27, 2007

By DAN MITCHELL
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26 -- The idea of micropayments -- charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content -- was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea. Micropayments will never work, he wrote, mainly because "users hate them."

But wait. Amid the disdain, and without many people noticing, micropayments have arrived -- just not in the way they were originally envisioned. The 99 cents you pay for a song on iTunes is a micropayment. So are the tiny amounts that some operators of small Web sites earn whenever someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some stock-photography companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each.

"Micropayments are here," said Benjamin M. Compaine, a consultant and lecturer at Northeastern University who specializes in media economics, "they just have not evolved in the way that everybody expected."

From the earliest days of the Web until around the time of Mr. Shirky's manifesto, the expectation was that a handful of companies would provide platforms -- or perhaps a single ubiquitous platform -- that would enable Web users to pay a penny, a dime or a dollar for a bit of content such as a newspaper article, a comic strip or a research report. Simply clicking a link would complete the transaction.

Sellers of content -- at the time, newspaper companies -- were among the most interested in the idea as they looked for revenue that did not depend on advertising. And the Web, rather than being a threat to their business, would allow them to expand their audience vastly.

But the problems proved insurmountable. Many micropayments companies have shut down, been acquired or changed their business models over the years. Among them: DigiCash, CyberCash, First Virtual Holdings and Peppercoin. They used various systems, but in general users paid into accounts with their credit cards and then drew from those accounts. In the mid- to late '90s, electronic cash had become such a popular concept that some politicians worried that it might threaten the stability of the nation's currency.

But the economic and technical challenges were enormous. Consumers were reluctant to pay even a tenth of a cent for something they believed should be free. "There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in any decision to buy, no matter how small," Mr. Shirky wrote in 2000.

It turns out, however, that consumers are more than willing to pay for certain types of content in certain situations. Consumers "expect to pay for music and movies, but not so much for the printed word," said George Peabody, an analyst with Mercator Advisory Group, which serves the payments industry.

"Closed loop" systems like iTunes are the most successful, Mr. Peabody said. That's where consumers have a continuing relationship with the merchant and usually pay with their credit cards. "Open loop" systems, where the consumer pays many merchants through a single payments processor -- the way micropayments were originally envisioned -- are much less successful. "To date, the market has said there is insufficient demand for these services," concluded a research report Mercator published in April.

There is another problem with closed-loop systems: cost. The fees for every transaction are too high to make tiny payments worthwhile for many online content sellers -- sometimes those fees exceed the price of the content being sold. For most merchants, according to the report, purchases of less than $1.50 aren't worth it.

One solution is to aggregate purchases, or group purchases over a period of time, and then process the payments in a single transaction. That's how iTunes works. But credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard, which charge fees for transactions, "aren't really happy with that idea," said Mr. Peabody, because it means less money for them.

Visa and MasterCard prohibit most merchants from aggregating payments directly. The networks have recently promoted their efforts to serve the "small payments" market -- encouraging consumers to use cards for parking meters, for example. But so far, they have stopped short of widely supporting aggregated-payment systems. There are "operational challenges," said Pam Zuercher, Visa's vice president for product innovation. Visa is evaluating such systems, she added, because "there is an undeniable trend -- users want to use their cards for very small purchases."

Merchants can aggregate payments through another company, but that adds to costs and "implementation has been tough," Mr. Peabody said. For sellers of the lowest-priced content -- anything under 75 cents -- micropayments have been made irrelevant by the easy availability of online advertising, Mr. Peabody said. Programs like AdSense from Google, which allows even the smallest Web publishers to have relevant ads placed on their sites, make micropayments unnecessary. The program pays Web publishers what are often very small amounts each time a reader clicks on an ad.

Looked at another way, though, AdSense is based on micropayments. "All the criteria are there," said Mr. Compaine, the Northeastern University lecturer, "but the money isn't coming from the end user; it's coming from the advertisers."

Bill Densmore, a founder of the payments firm Clickshare, a former newspaper publisher and now a consultant and a director of a citizens' media project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has been promoting micropayments from the beginning. He envisions Web publishers joining with one another and with producers of other content to create huge networks, sharing users and, in effect, revenue.

For example, he said, a large newspaper could sell subscriptions that would allow its readers to download music from iTunes or Rhapsody, read articles from regional papers, and watch movies and TV shows from YouTube or Comedy Central. Some material would be sold for a fee -- with the payments managed internally by the network. Mr. Densmore acknowledged that this is all pie-in-the-sky at this point. But, he said, for newspapers in particular, the status quo is not good enough. In that business, he said, there are "enough people feeling enough pain that they need to be open to asking what models might work."

----------------------------------------------------------------
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Retiring Cleveland editor says readers must pay for news on the web

2007-05-16T01:46:00.000-04:00

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/doug_clifton/index.ssf?/base/opinion-0/117895954137400.xml

The work of newspapers, in whatever form, is vital
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Doug Clifton
Plain Dealer Columnist

When I got into this business almost 38 years ago, most cities had two
newspapers, nearly everyone read one of them and Walter Cronkite - the
even-tempered, erudite, gentle Walter Cronkite - personified broadcast
news.

Now, as I prepare to leave, most cities are lucky if they have one
newspaper and luckier still if even half the population reads it. And
you'll search almost in vain to find a TV anchor even remotely
even-tempered, erudite or gentle.

But change even more fundamental than that unfolded in those 38 years.
Cable TV morphed from a novelty to a 150-channel universal presence.
Entertainment programming like Studio One or Omnibus became "Beavis and
Butthead" or "Desperate Housewives." The three network news programs that
offered sober reflection on the day's most significant events became
promotion-filled, self-aggrandizing, collections of tidbits dressed up to
look like news - accompanied by thumping music and flashing lights.

And the Internet - the medium that just a decade ago was a concept beyond
the comprehension of most Americans - now threatens to bury us in www
addresses.

The sum of all that change, some say, poses a grave threat to newspapers
and the work they do.

To some - perhaps even to many - newspapers' demise would be no loss. To
them, the press is an intrusive, sensational, often malevolent, purveyor
of negativism. Worse, many newspapers rake in double-digit profits. The
mainstream media, or MSM, as they call it, has become the slur of choice
for the critics.

Perhaps the excesses of the few in this business have tainted the
reputation of the many. And perhaps the many have, at times, given critics
reason to be distrustful.

But an evenhanded review of the work of newspapers over the last 100 years
tells another story. No other institution in a democratic society performs
their function.

Go to the archives of any newspaper in America and leaf through their
pages. It won't be long before you find a significant piece of journalism
that exposes a social ill, a failed institution, an abuse of power, a
misdeed by a trusted official.

Journalism, I would argue, provides the lubricant that keeps the wheels of
democracy spinning. It is the ultimate check in our system of checks and
balances. It evens the contest between the haves and the have-nots. Even
with its countless flaws, its frequent excesses, its sometimes mindless
pursuit of the trivial, journalism ensures balance in society's balance of
power.

Since the birth of the republic, newspapers have been providing that
service. But today, because of the radically changed media landscape,
their ability to provide that service is being compromised.

Newspapers operate on a very simple model. They carry content people want
to read. Advertisers want to reach that audience of readers, so they pay
for the privilege of having their messages accompany the news. The
resulting revenue covers most of the costs of producing a newspaper.

The formula worked to society's advantage for decades. But the Internet
began to change all that.

Content that once appeared only on paper began appearing on the Net,
thanks to newspapers' own Web sites and aggregators such as Google. These
Web sites offered content free to anyone with a computer.

Advertising also appeared on the sites, but not in the same volume as in
the paper version.

You may have heard or read some of the dire forecasts about the future of
newspapers.

Newspapers are a dying medium, some say, and their death is being hastened
by the Internet. The once-healthy profits are fading fast.

I hear this at least once a day: "I don't need the newspaper; I get my
news from the Internet."

Of course, that's not true. People who prefer the Internet do get their
news from the newspaper. The Internet doesn't produce the content, it
merely distributes it.

If you go to Google News or Yahoo News you will find news, but it will
have been provided by AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, The Plain Dealer
and countless other newspapers.

In other words, the newspaper, which at great expense employs reporters to
find, evaluate, analyze and present news, gives it away free on the
Internet. This can't go on forever. Eventually, something must give.

If readers abandon conventional newspapers and go to the Internet,
advertisers will be forced to look for other media - the Internet included
- to present their messages.

Newspapers will survive if readers pay them for their Web content or if
advertisers flock to newspaper Web sites in sufficient numbers to offset
the revenue lost to the ink-on-paper enterprise. One or both of those
options is likely to happen.

If they don't, newspapers - and the journalism they produce - could die.

And why will that be worth your tears? Because without journalism,
democracy and civil society will falter.

Clifton is retiring as the editor of The Plain Dealer. His last day at the
paper will be Tuesday.

dclifton@plaind.com, 216-999-4123

Previous columns online:
cleveland.com/columns

STRATEGIC: Tribune's Jack Fuller says "time to pay the piper"

2007-05-15T20:02:00.000-04:00

http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2003_11_14.shtml#004132

Nov.14, 03

By Staci D.Kramer in Evanston, Ill.

Trib's Jack Fuller -- Time to Pay the Piper (by Staci Kramer, guest
blogging the ONA conference from Evanston, Ill): No surprises but a smooth
look at online economic reality from Tribune president Jack Fuller, who
opened ONA's 4th annual conference with a warning about giving content
away. He should know -- Fuller estimates that he has signed off on
online-related expenses netting out to $600 million. "Eventually someone
will have to pay the piper," said Fuller, predicting that news sites will
move to a model at least paid in part by the subscriber. (The Trib's
LATimes.com is already charging for access to some coverage.) Offering
free content from the start "may have been our biggest mistake... We all
did it." Compounding the problem: much of that "free" content is expensive
to produce. He said free online content may not be siphoning readers away
from newspapers completely but that online is cannabilizing print in terms
of frequncy of use. Instead of reading the paper seven days a week people
are picking up the print edition less and going online in between.

http://www.journalists.org/2003conference/news/000036.html

Keynote speech
Tribune's Fuller: Future is paid content

By Kelly O'Brien
November 14, 2003

EVANSTON, Ill. -- The president of Tribune Publishing said Friday that the
future of online journalism will likely include paid content.

.We got everybody used to the idea that things that cost a lot of money to
make ought to be available for absolutely nothing,. said Jack Fuller,
describing the earliest days of online news publishing.

But, he said, out of necessity, .I think everyone will move, at least in
part, to a model paid by the reader..

Addressing the Online News Association.s fourth annual conference in
Chicago, Fuller conceded, "Nobody wants to go first. If you go first, you
lose."

Fuller, the keynote speaker, pointed out another lesson that must be
learned if the online media are going to thrive: adaptability.

"People get upset when newspapers change," said Fuller, but they also get
upset when online media don't.

The trick is knowing how to change, he said.

"What we need to do in confronting changes," he said, "is experiment,
assess the results and adapt over and over and over again."

In essence, Fuller said, journalists would be "experimenting our way to
the future."

Since the advent of online journalism, Fuller said that a great deal of
information has been gained on what young people, in particular, expect
from their news coverage.

He was encouraged that "we can reach young people with what we like to
think of as news," he said, "so long as we don.t make the news reports too
demanding, too long, or too difficult."

However, he added that young readers want editors to acknowledge that they
know "what the difference is between what.s important in the world and
what's just entertaining."

Fuller's comments to about 250 ONA members kicked off the two-day
conference, which will also address media convergence, coverage of the
Iraqi war and the increasing popularity of Weblogs. The winners of the 4th
Annual Online Journalism Awards will be announced Saturday night.
----------------------------------------------------------------

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STRATEGIC: Big payoff for inventor of "software metering"?

2007-05-15T19:52:00.000-04:00

ORIGINALLY AT:
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-7784_3-5418184.html

EXCERPT:

Dan Griffith, software asset manager at Motorola's Freescale Semiconductor
subsidiary, said there's big business awaiting whoever comes up with the
software equivalent of an electricity meter. "As the utility model moves
forward, somebody needs to make a meter the customer accepts and the
vendor accepts," he said.

October 19, 2004

Pay-as-you-go software licensing going slow

David Becker, Staff Writer, CNET News.com

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Pay-as-you-go software might sound like a fine idea
in principle, but it's a bear to put into practice.

That was the gist of conversation at the SoftSummit conference, as
software executives discussed the promise and reality of utility computing
and subscription pricing.

Utility computing, a tech buzzword, essentially promises that a company
will have to pay for only the computing resources it actually uses,
dramatically cutting costs and improving efficiency.

Sounds good on paper, but both software makers and customers have been
slow and inconsistent in committing to the model, for reasons ranging from
economics to privacy.

For the software industry, utility pricing poses a threat to the bottom
line, said Jason Maynard, an analyst at Merrill Lynch. It's hard to
precisely predict software needs, and under standard perpetual license
models, that usually results in drastic overbuying.

"We have an industry that's still addicted to the crack of perpetual
licensing," Maynard said. That's why utility pricing, to date, has largely
been restricted to upstarts like Salesforce.com, where the whole business
model is built around alternative pricing, he said.

"I don't think you're going to see the big vendors change out of
inspiration," Maynard said. "This is going to be a slow transition that
happens as customers demand this."

Also, usage-based pricing is new and thus inspires all sorts of novel
legal issues, said Erik Larson, director of product management for
software maker Macromedia. That means lengthy contracts that are expensive
for software makers to hash out, making them reluctant to apply utility
pricing to all but their biggest accounts.

"People don't think much about the end-user agreement that comes with a
perpetual license, even though it's a big legal contract, because the
terms are pretty familiar, at this point," he said. "With utility pricing,
by its nature, everything's different. Those contracts are 200 pages and
take a whole team of lawyers to work out."

One of the biggest areas for potential dispute is what gets measured and
how. Software usage can be volatile and hard to predict, and coming up
with a metering scheme fair to all is a fine balancing act, said David
Rowley, vice president of business development for copy protection
specialist Macrovision.

"When you go in and lease a car, the contract says so many cents per mile,
and people have a pretty good idea of how much they're going to drive in a
year," Rowley said. "Software isn't necessarily like that."

Customers may also have issues with how much information the software
maker gets to collect. Usage patterns for key applications can provide
valuable information on a company's business plans, making companies
reluctant to share such data, even with the folks who made the
application, said Rowley, likening the situation to telling Sprint, "you
can keep track of my minutes but not whom I'm calling."

STRATEGIC: Napster venture capitalist on "self-expression" payments

2007-05-15T19:47:00.000-04:00

Hank Barry is a principal at Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners, the VC which
invested in the original Napster before it got shut down by lawsuits. He
is interviewed on the future of digital media at a blogging website called
Courante.

Barry was CEO of Napster and previously was a partner with Wilson Sonsini
Goodrich & Rosati, where he led the firm's interactive new media practice.
Hank holds a B.A. degree in economics with highest distinction from the
University of Michigan and a J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, where
he was managing editor of the Stanford Law Review.

The link is here:
http://www.corante.com/vision/digitalmedia/hank_barry.php

Here are excerpts:

"[W]e are in the early days of payments systems other than
advertising in what you might call the "self expression market." That is
changing, as we get into payment structures for RSS (subscriptions),
digital object marketplaces like Bitpass, etc. But there is no eBay for
digital objects, where an individual can choose to, say, offer one work on
a Creative Commons license and another for many dollars. That will
happen."

" . . . If you are looking at it economically, I can see a time when the
sum of all the individual information commerce has economics that look
like that of "traditional content producers," but it will be a long while.
And I am not certain that independent (i.e., small or individual)
producers will necessarily benefit. As I said, the tools for creating that
work are ahead of the channels for distribution (and the tools for
search). That is changing, as we get into new payment structures, etc."

STRATEGIC: European publisher says Google stealing content; free can't continue

2007-05-15T19:37:00.000-04:00

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001615173

European Publishers Group Says Online Content Cannot Remain Free

By HELENA SPONGENBERG, Associated Press Writer

Published: December 06, 2005 2:25 PM ET

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep
allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their
content.

"The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based
copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years," said
Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in
prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference.

His stance backs French news agency AFP which is suing Google for pulling
together photos and story excerpts from thousands of news Web sites.

"It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to
copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what
they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back
of other people's content," he said.

"This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term."

Consumers were drawn online by free content but this needed to change, he said.

"The value of content must be understood by consumers so that new business
models can evolve. Industry must have legal certainty and the confidence that
their intellectual property will be protected.

Balsemao said that good quality content produced by professionals would be the
"gold content" for new media.

Last March, Agence France-Presse claimed the "Google News" service infringed on
AFP's copyrights by reproducing information from the Web sites of subscribers
of the Paris-based news wholesaler.

It is seeking at least US$17.5 million (euro14.85 million) in damages. AFP says
Google is breaking rules on the "fair use" of copyright material because its
news site looks similar to AFP subscribers.

The Google News service, which debuted in 2002, scans some 4,500 news outlets
and highlights the top stories under common categories such as world and
sports.

Many stories carry a small image, or thumbnail, along with the headline and the
first sentence or two. Visitors can click on the headline to read the full
story at the source Web site.

Yahoo Inc. has a similar service, though it uses human editors and pays some
news sources, including AFP and The Associated Press, for rights.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HELENA SPONGENBERG, Associated Press Writer (letters@editorandpublisher.com)
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Berkshire Eagle: Middle cities are struggling

2007-02-11T15:00:00.000-05:00

ORIGINAL LINK:
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/business/ci_5200210
HEADLINE: Middle cities are struggling
PUBLISHED: Saturday, February 10

By Hillary Chabot, Berkshire Eagle Boston Bureau

Middle cities often have empty storefronts dotting their once-vibrant
downtowns. The cities sprouted and grew into leaders during the industrial
era, but lost their purpose and are now struggling to reinvent themselves.
Pittsfield and 13 other middle cities have populations of more than 40,000
who dwell outside the Greater Boston area. The cities are trying to boost
their local economy while often facing fiscal instability and
higher-than-average crime and dropout rates.

Study to boost economic vitality

The Pioneer Institute, an independent think tank, studied the 14 cities
and investigated how to bring back economic vitality into urban middle
cities. Lowell, Springfield, Lawrence and Chicopee were all included in
the study.

Although Pittsfield is doing better than most middle cities, its residents
fall well below the state average per-capita income at roughly $20,000,
and only a little more than half of its students score "advanced" or
"proficient" on the math portion of the MCAS tests.

Middle cities continue to perform poorly despite the almost $1.5 billion
in state aid they received last year, James Stergios, director of the
institute, said.

"There are huge expenditures going to middle cities, and I'm wondering if
there is a way to use the money more effectively," he said.

Further state funds needed

Pittsfield, along with other midsize cities, can stimulate its local
economy further if additional state funds are promised for tangible
results, he explained.

"You offer them a carrot, but you tell localities what you think they need
to do," Stergios said. The state would invest more in the communities as
they make improvements in children's test scores, reducing crime and
managing their local finances.

A safe environment in which people can work and play is vital to economic
development, along with encouraging businesses created by the large
immigrant populations that are already present.

Although he may not have the answer to bringing back Pittsfield's former
bustling downtown, Stergios believes that asking the questions is an
important start.

"The goal is not to assume these measures are the right ones, but we think
this might be a good start for the discussion," he said.

----------------------------------------------------------------

The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Consumer groups say privacy still elusive for Internet users

2006-10-18T09:44:00.000-04:00

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/personal_technology/15770608.htm

Posted on Mon, Oct. 16, 2006

Internet privacy options are few
CONSUMERS HAVE LITTLE SAY ON USE OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA

By Anick Jesdanun
Associated Press

NEW YORK - If you don't like what your favorite Internet search engine or e-commerce site does with information it collects about you, your options are limited to living with it or logging off.

Major search engines, for instance, all keep records of your searches for eeks, months or even years, often tied to your computer's Internet address or more. Retailers, meanwhile, generally presume the right to send marketing e-mails. Although online companies have become better at disclosing data practices, privacy advocates say the services' stated policies generally don't give consumers real choice.

``None of them have gotten to the point of giving a lot of controls in users' hands,'' said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the technology watchdog group Center for Democracy and Technology. Privacy policies ``are about notice . . . not about control.''

Recent developments -- from companies losing laptops containing sensitive data to Time Warner's AOL releasing customers' search terms -- have again turned the spotlight on Internet privacy. But the push for stronger federal protections is countered by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' desire to require Internet providers to preserve customer records to help prosecutors fight child pornography. Officials have released few details, though they say any proposal would keep the data in company hands until the government seeks a subpoena or other lawful process.

Federal law already limits how personal financial and health care data may be used, but U.S. privacy laws are generally considered weak compared with Europe and Canada. Industry groups have stepped in with guidelines that go beyond legal requirements. One group, Truste, requires member companies such as AOL and Yahoo to give consumers a way to decline sharing personally identifiable information with outside parties. Companies also must disclose any use of tracking technology and specify personal information collected and how it is used.

``The fact that we don't license every person on the Internet gives consumers (the ability) to shop around,'' said John Tomaszewski, Truste's vice president for legal, policy and compliance. ``We've got folks out there engaging in a higher standard than what is normally required.''

Some companies go even further. E-Loan customers worried about safeguards when data gets outsourced to India can choose to have loan applications processed domestically, though loans in such cases would take two additional days to close. Mark Lefanowicz, E-Loan's president, said about 80 percent of customers have agreed to outsourcing, and he said choice pre-empted any backlash.``They have the right to deal with us under their terms,'' he said. ``If we just disclosed we used an overseas provider, for a lot of customers it's irritating to them.''

Comcast, meanwhile, gives customers a range of options on how long its servers keep e-mail, while a small search engine called Ixquick promises to purge data within 48 hours. In other cases, companies have responded to backlash from customers. When Facebook recently allowed easier tracking of changes their friends make to personal profile pages, users threatened boycotts and forced the company to apologize and offer more privacy controls.

But such cases are rare. Consumers generally haven't demanded better privacy options the way they shop around for better prices or ease of use, said Carl Malamud, senior fellow at Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. ``As a consumer I don't choose based on practices for privacy,'' he said. ``I choose based on, and many consumers do the same.''

So Google remains the leading search engine, even as it won't say how long it keeps data on what people search. Like other companies, Google says such information is helpful in improving services and fighting computer attacks and fraud. Tom Lenard of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a technology think tank that shuns government regulation, added that data retention lets credit card companies identify unusual activities and gives car dealers the ability to offer instant loans. Limiting what companies can do would hurt consumers, Lenard said.

Many companies already restrict data sharing on their own but stop short of a total purge.``There is such a mantra built around the information economy and how valuable the information is of the user that companies don't want to give that up,'' said Schwartz, the Center for Democracy and Technology official.

Jason Catlett, founder of the privacy group Junkbusters, said individuals ought to have more opportunity to see, edit and delete records companies have on them. In many cases, he said, customers couldn't easily purge credit card numbers or their accounts entirely once they register with personal information, often a requirement just to make a single online purchase. ``There's still a lot of diversity in information practices,'' he said, ``but there has been a convergence to what the average person would consider too low a standard.''

----------------------------------------------------------------

Bloggers have forced media to become more transparent, Powers says

2006-08-30T18:17:00.000-04:00

Bill Powers, media critic for National Journal, talks about how much more
"transparent" the news industry has become in the age of blogging. And he
says that is probably a good thing.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.prweek.com/us/news/open/free/blogs/589577

From PRWeek Online . . . .

Interview: Bill Powers
Journalist Q&A
PR Week USA Aug 28 2006 15:38

Bill Powers got his start in journalism as a researcher for Bob Woodward.
From there, he moved on to a writing career at The Washington Post and The
New Republic. Nine years ago, he landed at the National Journal. Powers
spoke to PRWeek about the masses of media critics chasing thin-skinned
reporters.

PRWeek: Why did you get into journalism in the first place?

William Powers: I hadn't thought about that one in a while. I was working
on Capitol Hill in the Senate, right out of college, and I guess I just
realized I really didn't have it in me to be a lawyer or a politician. And
I had always liked to write, and I had this job offer really come out of
the blue to work for Bob Woodward at the Post as kind of his researcher,
and it was too good to pass up. And I was very lucky to start there. I
helped him write one of his books. That took about three years until that
was done and the Post kind of gave me a tryout as a reporter. And I made
it, and they hired me and I stayed there for quite a number of years and
had all kinds of beats before I became a critic/columnist.

PRWeek: And why did you kind of move over to the media critic side?

Powers: I was edging that way anyway at the Post by inclination. That was
really where my interests were. And what happened was there was a magazine
column at the Post, called the "Magazine Reader," that had been around
forever; in fact, the original columnist, I'm told, was Katherine Graham.
And it had always been done for years as a kind of summary of what was in
the magazines this week. And the fellow who was doing it. took a new
assignment, and it was just unoccupied. So although I was a reporter in
the business section at the time, I went to the style section, and said,
"Hey, I read a lot of magazines, I'm interested in that column, could I
give it a try?" and they said "Sure, do a few columns and we'll see if we
like them." And I did a few columns, and I did them in a slightly
different way. I set a lot of critical eye to the thing, because that was
my natural bent.

And they liked it, and I turned it into a basically critical look, rather
than a digest. It was like, "Here's what's in magazines lately, and here's
what I think about it." And people seemed to read it. That worked for
quite a while, people seemed to like it. I did that for a few years, and
then I had a nice offer from Mike Kelly, who was then editing the New
Republic, to go there and start their first media column. So I did that,
and then was hired by National Journal, just a year later, to basically do
the same thing for them-- to have a media column. So I have been there for
a long time now, almost 9 years.

PRWeek: Any pluses or minuses to doing the press column at a political
type of magazine?

Powers: No, it's kind of a nice plus, because as far as the National
Journal goes, generally speaking, I've got the beat to myself in a way. I
mean, people do stories about the media, but I'm sort of the media person
and for our readers it's a little bit of a change of pace. And I think,
thanks to the web exposure- my column is one of the features in the
magazine where you don't have to have a password to get in there - so
thanks to that web exposure, it also kind of keeps the National Journal
brand out there, maybe in places where people wouldn't be reading it as
much because they are not as political as Washington. Our readership tends
to be focused in Washington, but thanks to Romenesko, when I have a column
up there we might have some readers plugging in from all over the place.

PRWeek: With the Web, now almost anybody can be a media critic. Do you
think the quality of media criticism is still there?

Bill Powers: Suddenly, there are about 10 million more media critics than
there were 10 years ago. I find that exciting. It's funny, there are all
these bloggers and all these people who are instant media critics, and yet
there are a lot of traditional news outlets that still don't have anyone
doing media criticism... My philosophy is, the more, the merrier.

And I actually think there are a lot of bloggers who are so good at it
that I sort of wish they would be picked up by mainstream outlets and do
both. Because I just think it's a topic that's really inexhaustible. I do
this weekly column and I never have a shortage of ideas. There is always
so much happening. And I do find that people really are engaged by this
subject and talk about it. I think the conventional wisdom in journalism
is that media criticism is an inside-the-business topic and it's really
just going to be read by other journalists. And I don't think that's true
anymore. I think there is a broader interest. Everybody sort of becomes a
media critic, and people follow the stuff. I just did a public appearance
last night jointly with Dan Okrent, the former New York Times ombudsman.
It was a charity thing for a public library, and they had us in a
congregational church in a town up where I live. All these hundreds of
people showed up! It was great. They were all interested, and they asked
incredibly intelligent questions, it was just fascinating. It wasn't
journalists, it was people from the public who really follow this stuff
and care about journalism.

PRWeek: So you are not of the opinion that to be a media critic, you have
to come up through the ranks of journalism for years and years?

Powers: Well, I think it helps a lot to have experience as a reporter.
When Dan Okrent went to the Times, there was some internal grumbling
because he had never been a newspaper reporter. But he had been a reporter
- he had all this magazine experience, and a lot of editing experience.
And I think it's hard, if you have never been a journalist, to understand
how the business works. I think there are people who can do it. Obviously
there are great movie critics who have never written a movie; most of
them, obviously. But I do think that the folkways and values and just the
inside knowledge of how journalism works is a bit arcane and hard to
acquire from the outside, and so it is trickier if you're an outsider. But
I read some of these blogs, and these people are really good and astute.
And they are coming at it as a consumer, which is a very valuable point of
view. You really want to know what a smart reader thinks even if they have
never been a journalist. So I think there is room in there. I would never
count anybody out just because they have never done it.

PRWeek: Do you think the rise of media criticism is tied at all to the
decline of media credibility?

Powers: I do think one of the reasons things look so bad is that the
business has become, in a very short period of time, extremely
transparent. It was not very transparent just 15 years ago. And suddenly,
because of technology and competition among all these media outlets,
institutions like The New York Times and CBS News have sort of had to take
the shades off the windows. They've had to show the public how they do
things, and how they work, and how mistakes are made.

PRWeek: What do you think of the future of the newspaper industry?

Powers: I feel that is above my pay grade to say. I don't get into the
business side of stuff very often, and so I frankly don't understand how
the ad business and the cost of newsprint and all these factors play into
it, so I would be really hesitant, I feel like I'm not on solid ground to
predict. But I was asked this question [recently], "Are newspapers about
to die?" I think that while we are in this period of structural change
that feels very chaotic and threatening to journalism. I do think that
part of the reason it feels so threatening is that it is structural, and
that all these ways of presenting journalism that we have grown used to in
the last 100 years, particularly newspapers, are losing their firm
footing. But that doesn't mean that if newspapers shrink or go away they
are not going to be replaced by something else. The crucial thing, in my
mind, is "Is there a market for, and a popular hunger for, truth?" And I
just think that is a constant of society and it's not going to go away.
Even if newspapers disappear, there will be a lot of people who can make a
living digging up the truth because there will be a market for that.

PRWeek: How well do you think the press has covered the Bush
administration so far?

Powers: It's a very mixed record at best. Obviously, the pre-war argument
regarding weapons of mass destruction was a huge failure by the media
establishment... But I do not agree with those who feel that journalists
have been completely flattened by these people - that we as a profession
have lost our desire to get behind the curtain and get good stories about
the White House. I just think that they're hard to get.

PRWeek: How open do you find media organizations to be in terms of being
the subject of coverage themselves?

Powers: There is a lot of thin skin out there in journalism. It's very
funny how these people cover others all day long, but when they receive a
phone call from somebody like me, they become so uncomfortable and
prickly... And it's kind of funny because they're journalists. They're
supposed to be the people who believe in openness.

PRWeek: I always think that might be because journalists have seen how
easy it is to mess a story up.

Powers: That's part of it. Other journalists know how it works and they
know easy it is to stitch together a story, sometimes just on a couple
facts. And how often stories don't hang together behind the curtain as
well as they might, and so they are worried that is going to happen to
them. Frankly that's why I think media criticism is all the more important
today, because we want to get more people doing this who are good at it
and who acquire a reputation for basically getting it right, or for being
trustworthy, so journalists will return their calls.

PRWeek: Any advice that you would like to give to PR people?

Powers: I hear a lot of complaints from journalists about PR people who
kind of don't get what we do as journalists. My impression is that a lot
of people go into the PR profession believing that as media consumers,
they automatically know how the news business works. And a lot of them
don't.

PRWeek: That seems to be the most common complaint

Powers: That is the main issue. But then, once in a while you run into one
of these people - frankly they're either people who are either really,
really big media omnivores, who have been fans of journalism for years, or
they are people who have worked in journalism themselves - and they
completely get it, A to Z. And they don't waste anybody's time, they know
exactly what you need and how to help you, and they know how not to get in
your way. And those people are great. They're a treasure. I don't know if
they're appreciated by the people they work for, but journalists sure
appreciate them.

Name: William Powers
Outlet: National Journal
Title: Media columnist
Preferred contact method: bpowers@nationaljournal.com
Web site: www.nationaljournal.com/powers.htm

Garrison, five current journalists earn 2006 Yankee Quill honors

2006-08-30T18:12:00.000-04:00

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/state/hc-29104003.apds.m0362.bc-ct--yankaug29,0,1158898.story?coll=hc-headlines-local-wire

By The Associated Press
Published August 29 2006

BOSTON -- Five New England journalists, including the crusading anti-slavery editor William Lloyd Garrison, are the recipients of the 2006 Yankee Quill Award for their contributions to improving journalism in the region.

The award is presented annually by the Academy of New England Journalists through the auspices of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and the New England Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. It is considered the highest individual honor awarded by fellow journalists in the region.

This year's honorees include a special posthumous award to Garrison, a native of Newburyport, and editor of the Liberator, a weekly abolitionist newspaper in Boston. Garrison was considered the most impassioned voice in America for ending slavery and was invited by President Lincoln to help raise the nation's flag again at Fort Sumter, S.C., at the close of the
Civil War.

Other recipients include:

- Gary Lapierre, managing editor of WBZ Radio in Boston;

- David Offer, executive editor of Central Maine Newspapers in Augusta;

- Chris Powell, managing editor and vice president for news of the Journal Inquirer, of Manchester, Conn.;

- Walter Robinson, assistant managing editor/Spotlight Team, The Boston Globe.

They will receive the Yankee Quill award on Thursday, Nov. 16, at the 51th anniversary convention of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors at
the Omni Parker House in Boston.

Lapierre, who is retiring this December after a 46-year career in New England broadcasting, will be honored for his "intelligent and thoughtful delivery of the news" and practice of "service journalism."

Offer will be recognized for a 41-year career that includes serving as the top editor at the Newport Daily News in Rhode Island and the Central Maine Newspapers' Kennebec Journal in Augusta and Morning Sentinel in Waterville. He is also a former investigative reporter at the Hartford Courant, and played a key role in the development of the national Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.

Powell, whose entire journalism career has been at the Journal Inquirer, has been one of the state's leading advocates for access to government. He has spent hours testifying at legislative hearings, writes numerous columns on the issue and files more freedom of information requests on behalf of the public than anyone in the state. His paper is known for breaking investigative stories and was the first to report on the scandal involving Gov. John Rowland.

Robinson has held 15 assignments during 34 years with The Boston Globe - from reporter, chief of bureaus at Boston City Hall, Massachusetts State House and the Middle East to city editor and assistant managing editor for local news. His latest assignment was directing the investigative Spotlight Team, whose work on the clergy sexual abuse scandal earned the Globe the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. Robinson, who is retiring this summer, will teach journalism at Northeastern University, his alma mater.

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COPYRIGHT: Is it OK to use Monsanto films -- as long as you like biotech?

2006-02-03T11:01:00.000-05:00

The U.S. chemical giant Monstanto Corp. is apparently taking a novel approach the concept of copyright "fair use." If you want to use its promotional videos to promote agribusiness, feel free. But if you want to use the videos in any other context, they're supposedly off limits. Does U.S. intellectual property law allow the rights owner to set the terms of Fair Use?

See the post below:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 21:29:29 EST
From: LesleyBec@aol.com
To: jess0875@hotmail.com, lmr-discuss@louisvillemediareform.org,
acmemembers@acmecoalition.org, briant@sover.net
Subject: Re: [ACME Member List] Monsanto videos and Fair Use

Dear all,

Monsanto's online videos "Conversations about plant biotechnology" at www.biotech-gmo.com have a new copyright notice -

"The consent of the copyright holder to use this material and the images in the published context only is granted solely for the purpose of promoting the benefits of agricultural biotechnology" (emphasis added).

The videos paint a rosy picture of a food system dominated by genetically modified foods, starring farmers who have undisclosed connections to the biotechnology industry and some who also receive significant government subsidies. The videos don't address problems of cross-pollination and terminator technology, the lack of testing for safety, the possible production of allergens and carcinogens, the effects on small farmer, organic production, global markets, the balance of nature and the interactions between ecosystems and agriculture, and so on.

After thinking about this for a while, and then reflecting on how very many lawsuits Monsanto has brought against farmers, I finally decided not to use these videos in media literacy presentations, because I don't want to be sued by Monsanto.

I think the new limits on Fair Use will have an adverse impact on education.

Lesley Becker

NEWSPAPERS: Cincinnati Post newsroom shrinks 25% in six months?

2006-01-22T23:35:00.000-05:00

Five-person buyout hits Cincinnati Post especially hard

At a time when newspaper buyouts are cutting staffs by 25, 50, or even
75 people at a time, a buyout offer seeking just five takers might not
seem so important. But to staffers at The Cincinnati Post, last week's
five-person proposed buyout is sparking concern. Not just because it
will reduce the 65-person newsroom by another handful, but also
because it marks the second such buyout move in less than six months
at the struggling daily. "The part that sticks in our craw is that
they are still making so much money," says Bob Driehaus, president of
the Cincinnati Newspaper Guild and a Post reporter. "They stand to
make $28 million over the next two years and to cut jobs and quality
when you are making that money is infuriating." In September, the E.W
Scripps-owned paper gave buyouts to 15 staffers, decreasing the
newsroom from 80 to the current 65. If another five are lost through
buyouts -- or possibly more -- that would mean a 25 percent reduction
in staff since early last fall. Staffers have until Jan. 25 to decide
if they want to take a buyout. ... But Rich Boehne, Scripps' executive
vice president in charge of the newspaper division, said judging the
paper strictly on its profits is unfair. "If circulation is declining,
that is what we have to react to," he said, noting that the
36,000-daily circulation paper has been steadily losing reader for
years, prompting the cutbacks. "Our share of profits is not a driving
force in how we make decisions about the Post."

Source: Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001880734

OPEN PIPES: American politics contributes to rise of breakaway Internet addressing system

2006-01-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

ORIGINAL URL:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113763907007950547-email.html
Posted Jan. 19, 2006

PRINTED HEADLINE:
Endangered Domain: In Threat to Internet's Clout, Some Are Starting Alternatives

Rise of Developing Nations, Anti-U.S. Views Play Role;
Pioneer Sounds the Alarm; A 'Root' Grows in Germany

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 19, 2006; Page A1

More than a decade after the Internet became available for commercial use,
other countries and organizations are erecting rivals to it -- raising
fears that global interconnectivity will be diminished.

German computer engineers are building an alternative to the Internet to
make a political statement. A Dutch company has built one to make money.
China has created three suffixes in Chinese characters substituting for
.com and the like, resulting in Web sites and email addresses inaccessible
to users outside of China. The 22-nation Arab League has begun a similar
system using Arabic suffixes.

"The Internet is no longer the kind of thing where only six guys in the
world can build it," says Paul Vixie, 42 years old, a key architect of the
U.S.-supported Internet. "Now, you can write a couple of checks and get
one of your own." To bring attention to the deepening fault lines, Mr.
Vixie recently joined the German group's effort.

Alternatives to the Internet have been around since its beginning but none
gained much traction. Developing nations such as China didn't have the
infrastructure or know-how to build their own networks and users generally
didn't see any benefit from leaving the network that everyone else was on.

Now that is changing. As people come online in developing nations that
don't use Roman letters -- especially China with its 1.3 billion people --
alternatives can build critical mass. Unease with the U.S. government's
influence over a global resource, and in some cases antipathy toward the
Bush administration, also lie behind the trend.

"You've had some breakaway factions over the years, but they've had no
relevance," says Rodney Joffe, the chairman of UltraDNS, a Brisbane,
Calif., company that provides Internet equipment and services for
companies. "But what's happened over the past year or so is the beginning
of the balkanization of the Internet."

The Internet, developed by U.S. government agencies beginning in the
1960s, uses a so-called domain-name system, also called the "root," that
consists of 264 suffixes. These include .com, .net, .org and country codes
such as .jp for Japan. The root is coordinated by a private, nonprofit
group in Marina del Rey, Calif., called the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers or Icann. This body works under the auspices of
the U.S. Department of Commerce, which set up the organization in 1998.

CAST YOUR VOTE

Question of the Day: Does the U.S. government have too much control over
the way the Internet is run?Having a single root is central to the
universality of the Internet and critical to its power and appeal. Key
servers that are part of the root system determine whether the suffix of
an Internet domain name is on the official list. If so, the message is
directed within milliseconds to the administrator of each suffix for
further routing. In the case of .com, that administrator is Verisign Inc.

A single root helps ensure that when people type in a Web address such as
www.amazon.com, they all end up at the site of the Internet retailer no
matter where in the world they are or which Internet service provider they
use. All addresses must use one of the 264 domain names. Any changes must
be approved by Icann and ultimately by the Commerce Department.
Alternative roots form the basis for rivals to the Internet.

As the Internet's role grows around the world, some are uneasy with the
notion that a U.S.-based body overseen by the U.S. government has sole
power over what domain names are used and who controls each name. Other
countries such as China also say Icann is too slow in forming domain names
in non-Roman languages, hindering the development of an Internet culture
in those countries.

Concern about U.S. oversight increased last summer when the Commerce
Department persuaded Icann to postpone the approval of a new domain-name
suffix to be used for pornographic Web sites, .xxx. The department said it
had received letters of complaint from Christian groups. While other
countries also opposed the name, critics cited the incident as evidence of
Washington's influence.

The matter of control came to a head last November at a United Nations
summit in Tunis, where the U.S. delegation fought off demands from more
than 170 countries to give up unilateral oversight of Icann.

More than half of the Internet's users today are outside the U.S.
Governments increasingly are interested in how the Internet works. Brazil,
for instance, collects much of its tax revenue online. "The Internet has
become a critical part of our lives," says Abdullah Al-Darrab, Saudi
Arabia's deputy governor for technical affairs. "These policies should not
be left to a single country or entity."

U.S. officials counter that the Internet is too valuable to tinker with or
place under an international body like the U.N. "What's at risk is the
bureaucratization of the Internet and innovation," says Michael Gallagher,
the Department of Commerce official who administers the government's tie
to Icann. Mr. Gallagher and other backers of Icann also say that the
countries loudest in demanding more international input -- China, Libya,
Syria, Cuba -- have nondemocratic governments. Allowing these nations to
have influence over how the Internet works could hinder freedom of speech,
they say.

Others argue that a fragmented Internet is a natural result of its global
growth and shouldn't be terribly harmful. Governments already control what
their citizens see on the Internet by blocking some sites, making surfing
a less-than-universal experience, notes Paul Mockapetris, who invented the
Internet's domain-name system in the early 1980s.

Icann's master database of domain names is preserved in 13 "mirrors" --
servers that automatically copy any changes made to the original database.
The duplication makes the system robust in cases of attack or failure. Ten
of the 13 mirrors are in the U.S.; the others are in Amsterdam, Stockholm
and Tokyo.

Operating the 'F Root'

A nonprofit organization headed by Mr. Vixie operates one mirror called
the "F root." Working without pay or contract from Icann, he runs his
mirror from the basement of an old telegraph office in a brown stucco
building with a red, Spanish-tiled roof in Palo Alto, Calif.

Located between a Walgreen's drugstore and an art gallery, the F root
building looks unimpressive, but it plays a critical role in the flow of
Internet traffic. Powerful servers inside a locked, metal cage translate
Internet domain names into a series of numbers, called Internet protocol
addresses, helping users find Web sites and send and receive email. Mr.
Vixie's center handles about 4,000 queries a second from several
continents.

Mr. Vixie, a high-school dropout, was a precocious programmer, helping
while still in his mid-20s write the domain-name software now used on most
servers. He now runs a company that services the software. He helped build
the F root in 1994 when he was 30 and helped foil an attack by hackers in
2002 that hampered all the mirrors except his and one other. Later he came
up with a way to bolster the system by replicating the function of the 13
mirrors at other servers.

Now Mr. Vixie is turning his attention to what he feels is an even greater
threat to how the Internet works: fragmentation.

Last June, Mr. Vixie emailed Markus Grundmann, a 35-year-old security
technician in Hannover, Germany. Mr. Vixie was seeking information about
the Open Root Server Network, or ORSN, which Mr. Grundmann founded.

Mr. Grundmann at first thought the email was fake. He was surprised that a
pillar of the U.S.-led system would want anything to do with him. He
explained to Mr. Vixie that he set up ORSN in February 2002 because of his
distrust of the Bush administration and its foreign policy. Mr. Grundmann
fears that Washington could easily "turn off" the domain name of a country
it wanted to attack, crippling the Internet communications of that
country's military and government.

Mr. Vixie says he has no interest in making political statements but he
agreed last September to work with Mr. Grundmann by operating one of
ORSN's 13 mirrors. Mr. Vixie has also placed a link to the once-obscure
German group on his personal Web site.

The moves roiled the Internet community of programmers and techies of
which he is a prominent member. Vinton Cerf, one of the founders of the
Internet, says he asked Mr. Vixie on the phone, "What were you thinking?"
Says Mr. Cerf: "I don't think it's helpful to give visibility to a group
that is fragmenting the Internet."

Mr. Vixie says he sees the European effort as a check of sorts on the
Icann system. The U.S.-backed group will be more likely to act in the
global interest if it knows that users have an alternative, he says.

Twelve other computer scientists -- mostly in Germany, Austria and
Switzerland -- have agreed to help run the new root. Close to 50 Internet
service providers in a half-dozen European countries now use ORSN.

For the moment, that is merely a symbolic step. The domain names in ORSN's
directory are identical to those in Icann's. Users of ORSN get routed in
the same direction as they would have if they were in the Icann system and
can communicate with the same Web sites. ORSN doesn't create or sell its
own domain names. If it did, Mr. Vixie says he would quit immediately. But
if ORSN disagrees with a move taken by Icann, it could refuse to follow
suit.

"The Internet is a child of the U.S. government," says Mr. Grundmann. "But
now the child has grown up and can't stay at home forever."

Choosing a Suffix

A company called UnifiedRoot, based in Amsterdam, has taken things a step
further than ORSN. In late November, the company began offering customers
the right to register any suffix of their choosing, such as replacing .com
with the name of their company. The price is $1,000 to register and an
additional $250 each year thereafter.

The company has established its own root and signed up Amsterdam's
Schiphol Airport, among other companies, according to Erik Seeboldt,
UnifiedRoot's managing director. These companies can use their own brand
name as a domain name to create addresses such as arrivals.schiphol, he
says. Users of UnifiedRoot can also access all sites using Icann-approved
domain names such as .com, but Icann users couldn't go to a .schiphol
address, he says.

"We want to bring freedom and innovation back to the Internet," says Mr.
Seeboldt. The Internet service provider Tiscali SpA, which has five
million subscribers in Europe, and some of Turkey's largest service
providers use UnifiedRoot's naming system.

Some countries with non-Roman alphabets are also taking matters into their
own hands. China has created three domain names in Chinese characters --
.zhongguo, .gongsi and .wangluo -- and made them available for public and
commercial use inside China only.

Similarly, Arab countries have in the past 18 months experimented with
country code domain names in Arabic, distinct from the Icann system, says
Khaled Fattal of Surrey, England. Mr. Fattal is head of Minc.org, a
nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Internet multilingual.

"There is no such thing as a global Internet today," says Mr. Fattal. "You
have only an English-language Internet that is deployed internationally.
How is that empowering millions of Chinese or Arab citizens?"

Icann is responding to the criticism. At its last meeting in December it
took steps to enhance the role of foreign governments in its decision
making and accelerated the development of non-English domain names.

Paul Twomey, the chief executive officer of Icann, says the divisions
reflect cultural differences between nations that operate under a strong
government hand and those, including the U.S., that put more trust in the
private sector. "We are more comfortable with messy outcomes that work,"
says Mr. Twomey, who is Australian. "But we need to integrate other values
and languages into the Internet and make sure that it still works as one
Internet."

That's not enough for some. "We would like the process to speed up," says
Li Guanghao, the head of international affairs for the China Internet
Network Information Center, in an email interview. The center allocates
Internet-protocol addresses in China in conjunction with the Icann system
but is also developing the non-Icann Chinese character suffixes.

Mr. Vixie says he joined ORSN to make clear his view that such efforts
will continue unless Icann becomes more inclusive. "I realize that this
could help unleash the hordes of hell," he says. "But I hope it will make
people wonder: 'What if there are more of these?' "

Write to Christopher Rhoads at christopher.rhoads@wsj.com

----------------------------------------------------------------

January 2006 Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) E-Newsletter

2006-01-09T20:40:00.000-05:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 11:00:41 -0500
From: Rob Williams <rob.williams@madriver.com>
To: acmediscuss@acmecoalition.org, acmenews@acmecoalition.org
Subject: [ACME Discuss List] AIME - January 2006 Action Coalition for Media
Education (ACME) E-Newsletter

AIME ------------------------- > ACTION IN MEDIA EDUCATION
ACME's (new) monthly e-newsletter
E-Issue/January 2006 (#1)

Please circulate globally. Happy New Year to all!
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OUR MISSION
ACME is a network of educators, students, health professionals,
journalists, media-makers, parents, citizens joined as a
member-supported, independent, nonprofit, continental educational
coalition devoted to a three-part mission:

Teaching K-adult media education: skills, knowledge, and activism.
Championing independent media production and independent media
voices.
Democratizing our media system by supporting local reform and
justice efforts.

ACME is independently funded, run by teacher/citizen volunteers,
and takes NO MONEY from Big Media corporations or their subsidiaries.

OUR ACME SUMMIT NEWS: OCTOBER 6-8, 2006 IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT
Diane Wilson, citizen activist, mother of 5, and author of the new book
An Unreasonable Woman, has agreed to give our Friday night opening
keynote!

For more about Diane, her book, and ACME Summit co-sponsor Chelsea
Green Press,
visit http://www.chelseagreen.com/authors/277

For more information about attending and presenting at ACME's 3rd
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Visit http://www.acmecoalition.org

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OUR ACME E-CLASSROOM: Free DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCES
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Coalition seeks funding for teaching public to consumer, create media

2005-09-15T00:11:00.000-04:00

---------------------------------------------------------
The following appeal was transmitted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, by the
president of the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) to several
listserves. The non-profit organization is seeking contributions to
further its mission -- giving the public tools to be smarter consumers and
creators of media. (DISCLOSURE: Bill Densmore is on the ACME board).
---------------------------------------------------------

Hello colleagues and friends,

We live in the midst of the most powerful media culture in world
history, a media culture with tremendous potential! The Internet,
blogs, podcasting, e-gaming, digital video production - all offer us
new and exciting ways to communicate with one another.

If you are an educator, health professional, journalist/media maker,
engaged citizen, policy maker, or concerned parent who has been
watching our media during the last decade, though, you know that our
mainstream media culture is in the midst of a SERIOUS crisis.

The signs are all around us.
Commercial carpet-bombing of our public airwaves.
News we can lose.
Corporate consolidation of our publicly-owned media outlets.
Target marketing everywhere we turn.
Multi-billion dollar advertising and branding campaigns aimed at our
society's most vulnerable members: our children.

The Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME at
http://www.acmecoalition.org) is working to solve these problems. And
we need your help. This letter is your invitation to join us. And if
you join before December 5, you'll also receive two fabulous DVDs and a
copy of one of the most important books about media published in the
last year - a $350 value - for FREE!

Simply click on http://www.acmecoalition.org/page.cfm?ID=26 for our
membership information.

Need more convincing? Here are just a few reasons why you might
consider supporting ACME.

1. We are the only INDEPENDENTLY-FUNDED media education coalition on
the continent. We take NO BIG MEDIA FUNDING from Time/Warner, Comcast,
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our ETHICS CODE at http://www.acmecoalition.org/page.cfm?ID=56

2. We offer a (brand new) INTERACTIVE WEB SITE, BLOG and LIST SERVE
(http://www.acmecoalition.org) for our members that features:

Our searchable and updatable MEDIA AND PUBLIC HEALTH and INDEPENDENT
MEDIA databases.
Our free, discounted, low-cost media education resources.
Our regularly updated URL hot links to all of our dues-paying members
and partners.
Our bi-monthly bulletin - BACME - chock full of useful media-education
related information.

3. We arrange for SUBSTANTIAL DISCOUNTS on some of the world's best
media education resources. Beginning right now, dues-paying and
card-carrying ACME members enjoy 50% DISCOUNTS (that's right - 50%) on
dozens and dozens of Media Education Foundation (MEF at
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resources. Click here for our discount list, growing by the week:
http://www.acmecoalition.org/page.cfm?ID=81

4. We support the creation of LOCAL, STATE and PROVINCIAL ACME CHAPTERS
by donating 50% of our membership dues to existing officer-led ACME
chapters, including chapters in San Francisco, St. Louis, New York
City, New Mexico and Vermont. Read about starting an ACME chapter at
http://www.acmecoalition.org/page.cfm?ID=72

5. We organize AFFORDABLE CONTINENTAL MEDIA EDUCATION SUMMITS that
offer SOLUTIONS to the problems that plague our corporate commercial
media culture. Our next Summit will be held in Burlington, Vermont in
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6. We offer a wide variety of FREE CLASSROOM RESOURCES, including our
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7. And, if you join or re-commit to ACME right now, you will receive,
ABSOLUTELY FREE, our ACME Fall 2005 Membership Package, including Media
Education Foundation DVD "Captive Audience: Advertising Invades The
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Consumerism: Media Literacy For Success" CD-ROM," and Robert
McChesney's latest book "The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication
Politics In The 21st Century" (not to mention an ACME "What the FCC
Button" and "Media Buy The People" bumper sticker.") (As supplies
last).

That's a MULTIMEDIA PACKAGE WORTH MORE THAN $350. Absolutely FREE, for
the first 100 people or organizations who participate in our membership
drive.

Join ACME today by visiting our secure online pledge page or simply
sending us a check. It's that easy.

Click on http://www.acmecoalition.org/page.cfm?ID=26. We hope you'll be
a part of our ACME community.

Who are we? A brief history. We founded ACME in Albuquerque during
October 2002 because we wanted to create a media education organization
that would bring to the table the best teachers, reformers, students,
public health advocates, citizens, and parents to create a grassroots
nonprofit coalition that would champion media education, independent
media production, and media reform and justice initiatives locally and
globally.

There was magic in the New Mexico air three years ago - as well as
hope, and the promise that we could collaboratively work together to
create something bigger than ourselves.

Now, three years later, all of us who have supported ACME can look back
with pride on what we've accomplished.

As we launch our second annual fall e-membership drive, we're hoping
you'll take just ten seconds and join or re-commit to ACME today.

Simply click on http://www.acmecoalition.org/page.cfm?ID=26 for our
membership information. We've made it easy for you.

And thanks for supporting independent media education!

Sincerely,

Dr. Rob Williams
ACME Board President

On behalf of Alison, Bill, Bob, Elizabeth, Lynn, Pepi, Peter, Sara and
Veda - the ACME Board

CHARGING: Tom Hespos: Perhaps It's Time for Aggregated Registrations

2005-08-30T13:10:00.000-04:00

Online Spin for Tuesday, August 30, 2005:
http://publications.mediapost.com/?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=33560

Perhaps It's Time for Aggregated Registrations

By Tom Hespos
Tom Hespos is President, Underscore Marketing LLC.

There's been quite a bit of grumbling and online petitioning surrounding the notion of forced registration at content Web sites. A good number of publishing clients have recently asked us how they should tackle online registration and how much content they should give away before requiring a user to register. Consumer opinion on the subject is not to be disregarded - many privacy-conscious consumers are resorting to using pooled log-ins taken from sites like BugMeNot.com in order to avoid having to submit registration data for their favorite content sites.

I think publishers need to be more upfront when they require registration data from consumers. Most privacy policies do make mention of the reasons why they require ZIP codes, demographic information, and other data points from consumers, but that information tends to be buried within privacy statements and legalese. Perhaps a home page link ("Why This Site Requires Registration") could help consumers understand the need for publishers to underwrite their content through targeted advertising.

Reading some of the online petitions circulating this past week, I noticed that there seem to be two main reasons why consumers dislike registration:

1.. They dislike interruption - News sites, blogs, and other content aggregators tend to engage in a good deal of deep linking, more so than ever before. While many such sites discourage deep linking to sites that require registration, it still does get done quite a bit, and it's frustrating for consumers to have to register for a site they may use only once to check out a linked story. My own surfing behavior often involves hitting my browser's back button when confronted with a mandatory registration for a site I'd probably never use again.
2.. They're increasingly privacy-conscious - Mixed in with the privacy-crazed who believe all content should be free forever and that targeted advertising is the spawn of Satan, you'll find quite a number of concerned consumers who simply do not understand why many sites require registration. They may or may not be aware that ad targeting has something to do with it. After reading several comments on anti-registration petitions late last week, I came to the conclusion that there may be a good number of consumers out there who simply don't get it. And that's a bad thing.
At a minimum, I think it's certainly time to address the concerns of the folks described in No. 2 by being a bit more upfront with why publishers need certain data points from their regular users. To address the people who fall into the first category, perhaps it's time to examine the notion of aggregated registration, in which one company or entity could handle the one-time registration for a number of content Web sites. This seems to be an easy play for many newspaper networks or an opportunity for a specialized company.

Doing nothing, however, will lead more consumers to be suspicious of publisher motives. Those who are already suspicious are either registering with false information or using pooled log-ins from BugMeNot and similar sites. If sites like BugMeNot can emerge without help from publishing companies, there must be enough concern out there to merit something like an aggregated registration process, such that a single consumer can register for several sites in one shot.

The hard-core privacy activists will always rail against registration, but I think the average consumer can come to understand why registration is important to publishers. Smart companies are using solutions like those offered from eMeta for access control, and such solutions can be tailored to take advantage of deep links that propagate throughout the Web, while simultaneously ensuring more consumers do eventually register.

Through a combination of transparency, technology, and compromise, I think we can tweak registration such that it will continue to work for publishers for quite some time.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Harper's Magazine: Aug. 2005 -- Mark Miller on Ohio rigged?

2005-07-24T12:37:00.000-04:00

The August edition of Harper's Magazine has a cover article by New York University journalism professor Mark Crispin Miller marshalling evidence and conjecture about whether the Ohio presidential-election returns in 2004 were rigged, thus giving George Bush, instead of John Kerry, the White House. The just of the piece is that the mainstream news media, especially the New York Times, is afraid to report the possibility that the nation's electoral system is capable of being rigged because of the destabilizing effect which would result. Harper's is not online. But here are three links to other Miller writings that give his story line.

http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2005/07/none-dare-call-it-stolen.html
http://www.pastpeak.com/archives/2004/11/mark_crispin_mi.htm
http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/12/ana04029.html

In Korea, newspaper sites left in the dust by news aggregation sites

2005-07-20T10:20:00.000-04:00

The Korea Times : Portal News Service Sweeps Online Media Scene
Internet portals are elbowing out newspapers in the online news service market, as a growing number of people get news information through the online portals, not through newspaper homepages, writes Kim Ki-tae, staff reporter for The Korea Times. In the case of major portal www.daum.net, its news service��s page views stood at around 110 million in July 2002, but soared to nearly 3.8 billion last month, showing the times 34.5 increase. Meanwhile, the page views of the homepage of Chosun Ilbo, which has the most popular Web site out of the local dailies, slid from 690 million to 451 million in the three years.

INTERNET CONTROL: What is the U.S. plan -- to dominate?

2005-07-06T09:26:00.000-04:00

FROM MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW . . .
Headline: Control of the Internet

The United States may have mostly invented the technology that founded the
Internet, but today only about one in five Internet users is an American.
That would seem to make international control of the Internet an obvious
goal, and until recently that was the plan. By David Appell

http://wwwnl.technologyreview.com/t?ctl=E189F6:2ED7CC0

OPEN PIPES: Brennan Center for Justice on on Brand X decision

2005-07-05T17:28:00.000-04:00

Everybody is probably talking about this, so here is my contribution/legal analysis:

Two Defeats - and a Silver Lining

The Supreme Court's Grokster and Brand X decisions may be disappointing,
but file-sharing technology survives, and the campaign for media democracy
goes on.

The link is to http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/grokster&brandx.html

By Marjorie Marjorie Heins
Brennan Center for Justice
Free Expression Policy Project
161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th fl.
New York, NY 10013
212 992-8847
marjorie.heins@nyu.edu
www.fepproject.org

FREE SPEECH: U.S. asserts worldwide control of Internet "directories"

2005-07-04T08:55:00.000-04:00

Associated Press reporter Matt Moore reports from Frankfurt, Germany,
that the U.S. has announced it will retain physical control of the
computers which control Internet addresses -- and hence traffic. The
decision is drawing harsch criticism from other nations. "This seems like
an extension of American security in the aftermath of 9-11,"
said John Strand, a Copenhagen-based technology consultant. "People will ask:
'Do the Americans want to control the Internet?"' Read the full story at:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/ap/ap_2070105.asp

Times' Nisenholz suggests premium-content sharing network?

2005-07-03T18:03:00.000-04:00

AUDIO-ONLY STORY

Posted: 7:32 a.m., June 28, 2005
AT: http://www.marketwatch.com

URL:
http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/news.asp?siteid=mktw&doctype=2006&nx=38533.5597800926-837571057&property=sid&value=2006&symb=NYT

WEBSITE HEADLINE:

A service like I-Tunes for news?

An executive at the New York Times thinks online readers
might be ready for a supermarket of low-priced news stories

STREAMED AUDIO:

The senior vice president for digital operations at the New York Times has
a vision for a network of premium-paid content on the Internet. Martin
Nisenholz told a trade conference in New York his company.s Times Select
package of access to Times archives and byline columns should be the first
offering in a venture which would give bloggers a way to make money.

Patterning his idea after Amazon.com's affiliate program, in which web
sites get commissions for helping Amazon sell things, he indicates
bloggers who subscribe and pay for access to Times Select and then link to
its articles, can profit by getting a share of revenue from people who
choose to also subscribe.

Nisenholz says he wants to incite the blogosphere to share revenues. He
said: "We can create a revenue stream for people who are creating
publications and blogs." Nisenholz says he thinks such a network could
include print, audio and video offerings.

I'm Frank Barnako.

TECHNOLOGY DAILY: Brand X and Focusing On 'Network Neutrality'

2005-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

FROM: Technology Daily
http://www.njtelecomupdate.com/lenya/telco/live/tb-GSSV1119906704461.html

After Court Ruling, Advocacy Groups

Focusing On 'Network Neutrality'

By David Hatch
June 27, 2005

Public advocacy groups are making "network neutrality" a top legislative
priority after the Supreme Court handed them a defeat Monday -- and they
could be boosted by support from Amazon.com, Microsoft and other
corporations, sources said.

Those companies, along with other members of the Coalition of Broadband
Users and Innovators -- such as Yahoo and eBay -- want to safeguard
customer access to their new and existing high-speed Internet services.
But opposition from the cable industry is expected to be fierce.

Meanwhile, Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska and Commerce
ranking member Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, vowed late Monday to review the
impact of the court's ruling in the so-called Brand X case on
public-interest obligations -- including contributions to the $6.5 billion
Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes telecom service in rural and
impoverished areas. Both lawmakers are strong proponents of the fund, and
Stevens plans to introduce a universal service reform bill in an effort to
strengthen the program.

One source, speaking on background, suggested that the high court's
classification of cable-delivered high speed Internet as an "information
service" means the technology also would not be subject to public interest
requirements governing 911 emergency service, consumer privacy, law
enforcement wiretapping, and communications access for the disabled.

"[A committee review] will permit us to consider what steps may be
necessary from the Congress or the Federal Communications Commission to
ensure that our communications laws preserve competition and protect the
interests of consumers," Stevens and Inouye wrote.

Network neutrality would bar cable companies from blocking or degrading
competing telecommunications, media or commercial services offered over
broadband pipes. The restrictions likely would extend to phone providers
of high-speed Internet. The high court ruled Monday that broadband over
cable modems should not be subject to "common carrier" rules requiring the
sharing of networks with competitors.

"Network neutrality is no such thing," Kyle McSlarrow, president of the
National Cable and Telecommunications Association, responded during a
Monday press briefing. His industry has a business incentive to preserve
the rights of cable-modem customers to go anywhere online, he said, and
network neutrality would create a solution for a non-existent problem.

Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the House
Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, will champion the
neutrality cause by seeking to add anti-discriminatory protections to
telecom legislation being drafted by the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, a source said.

"My goal will be to ensure that national broadband policy reflects the
open architecture model of the Internet and remains a medium friendly to
innovation," Markey said in a statement. "Congress intended that cable
broadband services should be treated with the same openness and access
that consumers and Internet providers enjoy today over telephone lines,"
he added, while declaring, "Unfortunately, today's ruling is both
anti-consumer and anti-competition."

But House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, may not be
receptive to Markey's goals. "I commend the court for upholding the FCC's
deregulatory approach to broadband services," Barton said in a statement,
adding that the "FCC correctly determined that broadband services should
not be regulated as common carriage."

Said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., chairman of the Senate Commerce Technology
Subcommittee, "It is my hope that Congress can build on the Supreme
Court's decision today on Brand X by updating our nation's communications
laws" and removing barriers to innovation.

SSen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a Commerce Committee member, wants the FCC to
protect independent players on the Internet and is willing to consider a
legislative fix, a source said. But the source suggested that the court's
decision could be moot in a few years -- because the telecom legislation
envisioned by lawmakers would kill the regulatory framework that
classifies technologies as "information" or "telecommunications" services.

"I think it's an uphill battle," Jeff Chester, executive director of the
Center for Digital Democracy, said of the chances of finding support for
network neutrality among influential GOP lawmakers. Nevertheless, he said
the court's ruling in National Cable and Telecommunications Association v.
Brand X Internet, would galvanize cable industry critics. "There will be a
growing call on the part of the civil-liberties community and the Internet
community to reverse this decision," he said.

Gigi Sohn, president of the watchdog group Public Knowledge, said
anti-discriminatory safeguards could be outlined in a few sentences. But a
congressional source suggested that provisions would be lengthier and more
complicated. The FCC or another agency, Sohn said, should be charged with
enforcing the requirements.

GROKSTER: Legal fire-sharing trade group urges new business models

2005-06-29T06:26:00.000-04:00

FULL STATEMENT: http://press.namct.com/content/view/2022/9/
Contact: Kelly Larabee DCIA 602-258-1416

DCIA Addresses Supreme Court Decision in MGM v. Grokster Case

Tuesday, 28 June 2005

ARLINGTON, VA, (NAMC) - The Distributed Computing Industry Association
(www.dcia.info), which focuses on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and last
week celebrated the milestone of recruiting fifty (50) Members in less than
two years, responded to today's US Supreme Court ruling in the MGM v.
Grokster case by committing to redouble its efforts to foster the
industry's commercial development.

"The DCIA welcomes the Courtÿÿs refusal to rework the Betamax decision, and
is optimistic that the grounds for secondary liability that it announced
today will prove to be fair and workable. As the case works it way back
through the lower courts, we anticipate clarification of the rules of
engagement between content providers and technology suppliers in the digital
realm generally, and with respect to peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing in
particular. We are confident that todayÿÿs decision in the MGM v. Grokster
case will ultimately lead to the continued expansion of our industry,ÿÿ said
DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty in making the announcement.

"We urge all affected parties to focus now on deploying new business models
for content distribution that are non-infringing and expand the marketplace
for digital content, and not to pursue legislative intervention, which would
only be counter-productive. The private sector, with added clarity that will
result from such lower court outcomes, should manage the process from
here,ÿÿ he added.

"This ruling provides impetus for the P2P distribution channel to grow and
flourish. P2P digital rights management (DRM) technologies and micro-payment
services have been proven with computer games, software, and independent
music and films. Major labels and studios can avail themselves of these
tools to develop marketplace solutions ÿÿ starting today.ÿÿ

"We hope the Courtÿÿs decision will lead to a shift away from conflict and
toward commerce, and we encourage everyone to come to the table and develop
new business partnerships. The MPAA and RIAA and their powerful members
control 90% of popular entertainment content distribution and can now move
forward to license responsible P2P companies using this highly efficient and
extremely popular channel for the distribution of their copyrighted works to
create new markets and revenue opportunities. P2P file-sharing technologies
are part of the larger movement to an increasingly distributed computing
environment."

Contact: Kelly Larabee DCIA 602-258-1416

BACKGROUND: Post by Susan Crawford about the Brand X case

2005-06-28T10:46:00.000-04:00

http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/27/977707.html

It's More Important Than Grokster

by Susan at 01:46PM (EDT) on June 27, 2005 | Permanent Link

The consequences of BrandX (also decided today) are more important than
those of Grokster. Grokster keeps the status quo in place. BrandX opens up
a whole new world of regulatory power.

"What?" you ask. "I thought BrandX was just about the access of little
ISPs to big mean cable systems."

No. In fact, both opinions are the reverse of what they purport to be. The
Grokster opinion gives certainty to tech companies. And the BrandX opinion
takes it away again.

In BrandX, Justice Thomas gets very confused about the internet and ends
up essentially announcing that everything a user does online is an
"information service" being offered by the access provider. DNS, email
(even if some other provider is making it available), applications, you
name it -- they're all included in this package. And the FCC can make
rules about these information services under its broad "ancillary
jurisdiction."

This is very very big. This means that even though information services
like IM and email don't have to pay tariffs or interconnect with others,
they may (potentially) have to pay into the universal service fund, be
subject to CALEA, provide enhanced 911 services, provide access to the
disabled, and be subject to general consumer protection rules -- all the
subjects of the FCC's IP-enabled services NPRM. I've blogged about this a
good deal, and now it's coming true: the FCC is now squarely in charge of
all internet-protocol enabled services.

The implications of all this are staggering. This is the real news from
today. After the DC Circuit's ruling in the broadcast flag case, people
may have thought that the FCC's "ancillary jurisdiction" was in trouble.
No longer -- the FCC has been given an enormous jurisdictional surge in
power. Even though its statute -- in my view, at least -- doesn't really
give it this authority.

Whoof.

Newshare -- Sharing the future of news

From Paper to Persona: The White Paper

The end of mass markets

A. OPPORTUNITY: THE OVERVIEW

1. Brokering attention, sharing persona[6]

From product to service

Atomized content and the iPad – opportunity or threat?

What won’t support news – mass-market advertising

Delivering audiences, not sites; ad CPM pie splinters

From atomization to clearing house

5. When publishers no longer own the pipes

In whom do you trust – identity or ‘persona’

Public trust through public engagement

B. OPPORTUNITY: WHAT MIGHT WORK

What might work for the next newsroom

CITIZENS AS JOURNALISTS – THE NEW OPPORTUNITY?

Privacy – the necessary companion to personalization

Uncle Sam vs. Facebook Connect as de facto identity card?

The politics and business of “do-no-not-track”

Why news organizations need the shared-user network

CONCLUSION: NEXT STEPS FOR NEWS

Public benefits paramount

Making the new digital market: A case for the Information Trust Association

mediagiraffe: St. Paul drops charges against GOP convention reporters after 60K letters delivered

NYTIMES: In Online World, Pocket Change Is Not Easily Spent

Retiring Cleveland editor says readers must pay for news on the web

STRATEGIC: Tribune's Jack Fuller says "time to pay the piper"

STRATEGIC: Big payoff for inventor of "software metering"?

STRATEGIC: Napster venture capitalist on "self-expression" payments

STRATEGIC: European publisher says Google stealing content; free can't continue

Berkshire Eagle: Middle cities are struggling

Consumer groups say privacy still elusive for Internet users

Bloggers have forced media to become more transparent, Powers says

Garrison, five current journalists earn 2006 Yankee Quill honors

COPYRIGHT: Is it OK to use Monsanto films -- as long as you like biotech?

NEWSPAPERS: Cincinnati Post newsroom shrinks 25% in six months?

OPEN PIPES: American politics contributes to rise of breakaway Internet addressing system

January 2006 Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) E-Newsletter

Coalition seeks funding for teaching public to consumer, create media

CHARGING: Tom Hespos: Perhaps It's Time for Aggregated Registrations

Harper's Magazine: Aug. 2005 -- Mark Miller on Ohio rigged?

In Korea, newspaper sites left in the dust by news aggregation sites

INTERNET CONTROL: What is the U.S. plan -- to dominate?

OPEN PIPES: Brennan Center for Justice on on Brand X decision

FREE SPEECH: U.S. asserts worldwide control of Internet "directories"

Times' Nisenholz suggests premium-content sharing network?

TECHNOLOGY DAILY: Brand X and Focusing On 'Network Neutrality'

GROKSTER: Legal fire-sharing trade group urges new business models

BACKGROUND: Post by Susan Crawford about the Brand X case

CITIZENS AS JOURNALISTS –
THE NEW OPPORTUNITY?

Making the new digital market:
A case for the Information Trust Association