http://www.newshare.com/wiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=173.124.67.71&feedformat=atomIVP Wiki - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T11:19:35ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.31.1http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc-economics&diff=2360Ftc-economics2009-12-01T21:45:18Z<p>173.124.67.71: New page: =FTC workshop: Three observations by economists/experts: Bloxham, Athey, Evans== <hr> This is page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From...</p>
<hr />
<div>=FTC workshop: Three observations by economists/experts: Bloxham, Athey, Evans==<br />
<hr><br />
This is page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier to Blogggers: How Will journalism Survive the Internet Age," held Dec. 1-2, 2009, in Washington, D.C., at the FTC's 601 New Jersey Avenue offices. Your scribe is Bill Densmore, a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Of course we've tried to provide accurate quotes and summaries. But the FTC has stenographers recording all of the testimony and that should be your definitive source. The home page for this coverage is http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc <br />
<hr> <br />
<br />
<big>Now we wrap up Tuesday's FTC sessions with three background presentations, one by Mike Boxham, director of insight and research of the center ofr media design at Ball State University; from Susan Athey, Harvard University economics professor; and David Evans, a University of Chicago Law School lecturer.</big> <br />
<br />
==Mike Bloxham: Mapping the Modern Media Ecosystem==<br />
<br />
He calls hs presentation "a people-centric view of media use." <br />
<br />
There is convention wisdom that nobody reads newspapers any more. That's rubbish, Bloxham says. It's not all about online. When you say mobile is where it's heading, what does that mean. We hear all the time that young people don't care about news. He is surrounded at a university by people who do care passionately about news -- "they are totally committed news junkies." This issue is one of presentation. <br />
<br />
He displays a chart mapping news consumption by hours of the day. <br />
<br />
They observed 350 people on two occasions twice across the United States in a "VCM Study 2009." <br />
<br />
Live TV is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room in terms of daily duration hours -- a daily average of 300 minutes viewed used by about 97% of the people studied. Very low: Gaming, magazines and newspapers. Newspapers at about 37% of people using around 45 minutes a day. The web is somewhere in the middle. er <br />
<br />
*See: http://www.researchexcellence.com <br />
*[mailto:mbloxham@bsu.edu mbloxham@bsu.edu]<br />
<br />
==Susan Athey -- Option-based markets==<br />
<br />
She consults to Microsoft on online advertising markets. She's an economics professor at Harvard University. Her views reflect only her academic research. She's talking about the economics of publishing. <br />
<br />
What are the economic forces: there is basic supply and demand. There is confusion about the number of websites vs. user attention. User attention is limited, consumers aren't going to spend 30 hours in a day viewing advertising. Advertising dollars should follow the viewers. <br />
<br />
====The new economy====<br />
<br />
*Platform markets: reduce prices fo rmost sensitive side of the market. <br />
*Competing platforms: News outlet v. news outlet <br />
*Competing platforms: news, ad platform, aggregators. <br />
<br />
"In the media market, free is often going to be more profitable than pay" if content is undifferentiated. If free is more profitable than paid and it isn't covering your fixed costs then you either need to cut your fixed costs or grow. Growing requires fixed-cost investments. That will create strong pressure for consolidation and concentration. That means regulation, like the FTC, will pay a central role. <br />
<br />
When the Bell had a monopoly, they didn't charge for the Yellow Pages. Google has 97% of the search market in Europe, but they don't charge. If reducing your customer base won't send your advertisers away, then it makes sense to charge. <br />
<br />
====The old world====<br />
<br />
Publishers deliver known, stable, tailored audience to advertisers. Newspapers have little competition across cities for either consumers or advertisers. <br />
<br />
====The new world====<br />
<br />
The change to online browsing -- you visit multiple places. The consumer still has limited time. they are dividing that time among a larger set of outlets. It will reduce the effective supply of eyeballs. Effective supply decrease due to duplicated impressions and hterogeneous audience.<br />
<br />
Not all advertiesr compete for consumers on all outlets because of scale. <br />
<br />
Publishres compete for consumers to steal market share. For advertisers to reach the same consumers. <br />
<br />
There's all this new content that is going to compete for eyeballs. The impact of browing new content is the supply of ad space decreases since framenged content does not attract advertisers, typically less effective advertising. <br />
<br />
Ad platforms and internet browsing -- Ad platforms come in to save the day. the ad platforms know the user. they have data, information, matchmaking. Advertisers tend to with with the ad platforms, rather than the publishers because the advertisers can buy the same users in different places. A result: Publishers lose tailored audience, unique info about audience. Platforms: "They own a lot of the consumer information, not the publishers."<br />
<br />
Now the aggregator comes and the aggregator gets between the publisher and the aggregator. Competing aggregators compete and that gives advantage to the publishers. One aggregator could compete by offering differentiated content. Publishers could enter the aggregation business but it is hard to do at scale. <br />
<br />
The ad platforms can help save you from the problem created by the aggregators. But you have to hope that the add platform that comes in is going to share the revenue. <br />
<br />
The consumer time in the end is limited. Publishers have multifaceted competition everywhere they look. Aggregators will potentially own the eyeballs and the information. Publisher scale will help publishers bargain for rents. <br />
<br />
"I think it is important that the FTC is trying to put all these issues together . . . because it looks to me like the are going to have a lot of work to do in the coming years." <br />
<br />
==David Evans -- Univ. of Chicago law school and Univ. College London== <br />
<br />
The newspaper business is going to continue to shrivel. The big unknown is whether the newspaper industry is the typewriter or the bicycle. <br />
<br />
====Typewriters or bicycles====<br />
<br />
The bicycle industry still exists; typewriters do not. <br />
<br />
If the demand for journalism is elastic, then maybe Murdoch will get people will pay money. Or the downward spiral will cause it to wane. Either way, it is hard to see how tradidtional journalism will not continue to shrink. <br />
<br />
====Background analysis on advertising/newspapers====<br />
<br />
The web has increased ad space, diverted viewers and cut advertising prices. There will be more mobile apps, so there may be some increased advertising space. Traditional journalism is losing out because of advertising decoupling, price is elastic, so traditional journalism is going to go down. <br />
<br />
But he thinks new models will emerge: He goes to the basic economics of ad-supported media. The supply of advertising inventory is coming from two things. It's cheap to supply the space online. Viewers are attracted by content -- the bait -- and they are then sold to advertisers. It's a matchmaking business to match content and advertisers. Whether it is efficient at that is a question. <br />
<br />
The traditional journalism business is mainly an input into producing viewers for the advertisers. it doesn't produce direct revenue. What's happened to the newspaper industry? <br />
<br />
A massive increase in advertising space on the web. <br />
<br />
Pageviews: "There are no good metrics of this on the web." <br />
<br />
A lot of inventory on the web is substitutable for what is in newspapers. So advertising supply has vastly expanded and there is lower demand for offline content. Time spent with newspapers down 17% between 2004-2009. There's a massive reduction in viewers offline, an accelerated decline begin around 2004. <br />
<br />
Newspaper advertising was 40% of newspaper revenue, now down to 28%. eBay and Criagslist and CareerBuilder.com have taken most of it away. Advertising and subscription revenue are declining. There is a spiral downward. Online can't make up for that. <br />
<br />
====The coming advertising glut====<br />
<br />
He thinks it will get worse because there is a coming expansion of advertising inventory -- on mobile, social networking. Microsoft has talked about putting ads on Windows. There is Twitter (broadcast media); YouTube. All this new space will further reduce advertising in traditional media and reduce the demand for journalism. <br />
<br />
"I think traditional journalism shrinks a lot," says Evans. He thinks the print newspaper business will shrink to something small and sustainable. <br />
<br />
His public-policy observations: <br />
<br />
*Policemakers should recognize drastically changed economics of media businesses; implications for antitrust, copyright, regulation. <br />
*Hard to see a market failure in the production of traditional journalism; shouldn't subsidize production of something consumer's don't value. Don't mix market failure with nostalgia. <br />
*Expert entrepreneurs to develop new ways of meeting consumer demand for information and engaging in public discourse. "There are lots of entrepreneurs out there doing exciting things."</div>173.124.67.71http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc-first-afternoon&diff=2359Ftc-first-afternoon2009-12-01T21:04:57Z<p>173.124.67.71: </p>
<hr />
<div>=FTC workshop: Afternoon speakers: Yahoo, Google, Journalism Online=<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
This is page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier to Blogggers: How Will journalism Survive the Internet Age," held Dec. 1-2, 2009, in Washington, D.C., at the FTC's 601 New Jersey Avenue offices. Your scribe is Bill Densmore, a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Of course we've tried to provide accurate quotes and summaries. But the FTC has stenographers recording all of the testimony and that should be your definitive source. The home page for this coverage is http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc <br />
<hr> <br />
<br />
<big>The afternoon session has begin with a series of short presentations. We'll incorporate teh remarks of Ken Doctor, media analyst, and Len Downie, VP at large of the Washington Post later (your scribe had to attend other business but taped those sessions). <br />
</big><br />
<br />
We come back to the floor with the two major search engines' presentations. <br />
<br />
==Lem Lloyd: Yahoo!== <br />
<br />
Total 52% of U.S. Sunday circulation. Half of all paid subscribers in the United States. "This deal, this partnership, has taken a tremendous amount of resources for Yahoo! ... but we think it has been very well worth it." Newspapers bring high-quality content, brand, offline distribution, local community and a local sales force. He says the local says force is the most difficult thing to replicate. <br />
<br />
Yahoo brings technology, brand, reach/audience, training and Internet expertise. The goal was to reposition ad spend in the local ad market which is estimated at $14 billion in 2009. <br />
<br />
It starts with local classifieds being upsold to the national Hot Jobs site. There is search component -- Yahoo is the exclusive search. There's a content piece also -- local headlines by zipcode are now on the Yahoo home page. This sends more than 50,000 referral links a month to local papers. <br />
<br />
And local papers can resell Yahoo inventory in the local market. <br />
<br />
"As part of the deal Yahoo created a next generation ad platform," says Lloyd. They were going to create a new platform anyway, they worked with newspapers to define and build it. Now 250 papers are on it and they all agree on taxonomy -- so that you can ads by section all across the United States. Now those newspapers don't have to be "out of the game on national advertising, they can create their own networks." <br />
<br />
He provides testimonials from McClatchy, Scripps and the Milwaukee Journal among other. <br />
<br />
Have sold 18,000 campaigns onto Yahoo representing six billion ad impressions, fueled by behavioral targetting. The CPM rates on behavioral targetting are very good, Lloyd says. <br />
<br />
Yahoo analyzes patters of purchasing behavior, score each Yahoo user with the category "so you can deliver the right kind of ad with the right kind of person at the right time." They have 400 or 500 interest categories. <br />
<br />
Example: San Francisco Giants fans looking for SUV hybrids. <br />
<br />
===Training is a big key==== <br />
<br />
Yahoo's Lloyd says training of local newspaper sales forces has been neglected. He talks about a newspaper sales person who had been selling the paper for 40 years and had huge success in a couple of weeks selling Yahoo "audience" instead of "space" (print ads). <br />
<br />
A Dallas car dealer sold six Cadillac CTS' in a week via the Yahoo-Dallas Morning News partnerships. <br />
<br />
Local advertisers are confused and audience-based selling allows them the ROI that they are looking for. Benefits for consumers include a less cluttered ad environment, high-quality web pages, free services from Yahoo! and access to goods and servies they want. Yahoo has just removed teeth-whitening ads with questionable claims. <br />
<br />
<br />
===Concerning privacy===<br />
<br />
He works with newspapers to put specific links on their website to allow users to opt out of behavioral targetting. All Yahoo ads served are labeled. If you click on the privacy policy link in their ads, you can go to a Yahoo privacy page and immediately opt out. If you don't want to have an airline ad follow you, for example, you can opt out of that. <br />
<br />
There are also links on the site that allow you, through the Network Advertising Initiative, to opt out of a wide array of things across the internet. <br />
<br />
Lloyd says the partnership has been three years now. "It's very much a marriage, we have learned a lot," he says. Newspapers can beat the advertising competition in the local market -- but only if their reps are trained. <br />
<br />
==Google's Josh Cohen -- looking to work more with publishers==<br />
<br />
Josh Cohen is senior business product manager at Google News. Earlier, he worked for Reuters, the wire service. He says Google is at the FTC sessions because high-quality news is important not just to Google but to society at large. <br />
<br />
The Internet is now a top source where people get their news. Consumption has gone up. Only about 50% of news users come into a newspaper website via the front page. "Increasingly, every single page on a publisher's website is a front page." They are coming in from all kinds of places -- all driving traffic to an individual publisher's site. <br />
<br />
Google sees this world as a partnership with publishers. Publishres and search engines are partners in a world of digital distribution. Thhe publishers create content and distribute it. Readers find it through social networks, blogs and search engines -- sending billions of visits to publisher. <br />
<br />
He shows a slide which shows a typical portal website as focusing links to the portal. The experience and editorial voice is that of the portal (he seems to be suggesting Yahoo, here). He describes this as a focusing lense -- focused to the portal. He shows Google as a convex (or is it concave?) lens which sends traffic to multiple websites rather than focusing it to one website. <br />
<br />
Google usually looks for a site map when it crawls a website. They other thing they look for is a robot.ext instruction file. the news crawler is know colloqually as the "GoogleBot." The robots exclusion protocol looks like this at a command-line level:<br />
<br />
*User-agent: * (the name of the search bot you want to respect this) <br />
*Disallow / (that can be directories) <br />
<br />
You can give instructions to even exclude a page. <br />
<br />
"These are all different layers of control that publishers have today," says Cohen. "And the reality is that the vast majority of publishers want to be discovered."<br />
<br />
"There is no single factor that is causing the challenges for newspapers," says Cohen. He cites aging demographics in particular. So there is no single solution that fixes it all. "I think the way we see our role is as one of the partners that can work with publishers . . . you should never look to close yourself off and have a single partner." <br />
<br />
The challenge: Get more readers, build more engaging websites and make more money from it. You can grow your online business by getting more readers, keep them longer or make more money from them either with advertising or subscriptions. What Google is working on: Increase ad revenue for publishers, help develop more user engagement (example Google FastFlip), and explore additional business models (subscriptions: First Click Free program; working to support purchase of digital content. <br />
<br />
Idea: "use the powered by Google approach to help publishers implement subscriptions on their site." <br />
<br />
AdSense returned more than $5 billion last year to participating websites. <br />
<br />
Bottom line: He says they are looking to work with publishers more. <br />
<br />
<br />
Now there's an afternoon panel starting: "Emerging Business Models in Journalism." <br />
<br />
<br />
==Steve Brill: Some content sales in January?==<br />
<br />
Steve Brill heads Journalism Online LLC, an effort to develop subscription and other pay models for American newspapers.<br />
<br />
"I don't think the government really should be involved much in this, except possibly to make sure all the privacy data that our friend Yahoo talked about a few moments ago is really given over voluntarily." <br />
<br />
"If all that behavioral targetting is working so well, why are we all here anyway?" asks Brill.<br />
<br />
He says the newspaper business is going down fast. He says he and his wife a few years ago decided to endow a journalism program at Yale. He tells a story of a Yale parent who called concerned their daughter was being "lured" into journalism. He thought about that question for awhile, and that is what caused him to start Journalism Online with former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz "who is the brains of the outfit." He adds: "This is stuff that Gordon and I really care about." <br />
<br />
"I know that Gordon and I haven't presented a business or a proposal that perfectly meets all the answers," he says, but adds they have made some real progress in helping find a way for publishers to derive value for their content. "We support all of those models." He says search engines are news producers friends. "when you use a search engine the right way, it brings them to you content and then you can ask them to pay for it." <br />
<br />
He doesn't know if it is micropayments, or subscriptions, or 10 or 15 free articles are the answer. "What we think we do know is that a minority of engaged readers on a website will pay something for content if that content has distinctive value." <br />
<br />
It's been hard to find any large news organization that has been able to sustain itself through advertising alone. "So our basic proposition is very simple: That journalism needs to be professional and it needs to be paid for . . . what we're trying to do is reestablish an old business model -- not create a new one -- and that is that people pay for some of the cost of delivering the content." <br />
<br />
Susan DiSanti of the FTC says the FTC is doing a survey/study of its approach to privacy. And there is a workshop in this room on Monday that is going to talk about behavior advertising and privacy will be one of the main topics. <br />
<br />
DiSanti: Doctor said in his survey about 10% of people said they would be willing to pay for news. Does Brill think that is right? <br />
<br />
Brill: He says that's as good a number as any. He says that at 10%, the partners he is talking about would have a home run if 10% of their web users began paying for content. Because once you have revenue at that level, there is an incentive to hire reporters <br />
<br />
<br />
DeSanti: "Are you ready to give an estimate" of when the service will start? <br />
<br />
Brill: "We are right now as we speak about a week away from shipping our initial beta software to our initial affiliates. They are going tobe kicking the tires over the next month or so and sometime after the first of the year there should be real people buying something off the platform." <br />
<br />
Lauren Rich Fine, a former Wall Street newspaper analyst: <br />
"There are loyalists will pay pretty much any price and that's why i think Journalism Online will be successful."<br />
<br />
<hr><h2><br />
[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc BACK TO COVERAGE HOME PAGE]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
Found tweets: @jeffjarvis catches Murdoch contradicting himself http://bit.ly/6H16sT What a difference a recession makes.<br />
<br />
Arianna Huffington explains the Internet to Rupes Murdoch. http://bit.ly/6OUV4Y<br />
<hr></div>173.124.67.71http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc-first-afternoon&diff=2358Ftc-first-afternoon2009-12-01T21:02:49Z<p>173.124.67.71: </p>
<hr />
<div>=FTC workshop: Afternoon speakers: Yahoo, Google, Journalism Online=<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
This is page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier to Blogggers: How Will journalism Survive the Internet Age," held Dec. 1-2, 2009, in Washington, D.C., at the FTC's 601 New Jersey Avenue offices. Your scribe is Bill Densmore, a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Of course we've tried to provide accurate quotes and summaries. But the FTC has stenographers recording all of the testimony and that should be your definitive source. The home page for this coverage is http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc <br />
<hr> <br />
<br />
<big>The afternoon session has begin with a series of short presentations. We'll incorporate teh remarks of Ken Doctor, media analyst, and Len Downie, VP at large of the Washington Post later (your scribe had to attend other business but taped those sessions). <br />
</big><br />
<br />
We come back to the floor with the two major search engines' presentations. <br />
<br />
==Lem Lloyd: Yahoo!== <br />
<br />
Total 52% of U.S. Sunday circulation. Half of all paid subscribers in the United States. "This deal, this partnership, has taken a tremendous amount of resources for Yahoo! ... but we think it has been very well worth it." Newspapers bring high-quality content, brand, offline distribution, local community and a local sales force. He says the local says force is the most difficult thing to replicate. <br />
<br />
Yahoo brings technology, brand, reach/audience, training and Internet expertise. The goal was to reposition ad spend in the local ad market which is estimated at $14 billion in 2009. <br />
<br />
It starts with local classifieds being upsold to the national Hot Jobs site. There is search component -- Yahoo is the exclusive search. There's a content piece also -- local headlines by zipcode are now on the Yahoo home page. This sends more than 50,000 referral links a month to local papers. <br />
<br />
And local papers can resell Yahoo inventory in the local market. <br />
<br />
"As part of the deal Yahoo created a next generation ad platform," says Lloyd. They were going to create a new platform anyway, they worked with newspapers to define and build it. Now 250 papers are on it and they all agree on taxonomy -- so that you can ads by section all across the United States. Now those newspapers don't have to be "out of the game on national advertising, they can create their own networks." <br />
<br />
He provides testimonials from McClatchy, Scripps and the Milwaukee Journal among other. <br />
<br />
Have sold 18,000 campaigns onto Yahoo representing six billion ad impressions, fueled by behavioral targetting. The CPM rates on behavioral targetting are very good, Lloyd says. <br />
<br />
Yahoo analyzes patters of purchasing behavior, score each Yahoo user with the category "so you can deliver the right kind of ad with the right kind of person at the right time." They have 400 or 500 interest categories. <br />
<br />
Example: San Francisco Giants fans looking for SUV hybrids. <br />
<br />
===Training is a big key==== <br />
<br />
Yahoo's Lloyd says training of local newspaper sales forces has been neglected. He talks about a newspaper sales person who had been selling the paper for 40 years and had huge success in a couple of weeks selling Yahoo "audience" instead of "space" (print ads). <br />
<br />
A Dallas car dealer sold six Cadillac CTS' in a week via the Yahoo-Dallas Morning News partnerships. <br />
<br />
Local advertisers are confused and audience-based selling allows them the ROI that they are looking for. Benefits for consumers include a less cluttered ad environment, high-quality web pages, free services from Yahoo! and access to goods and servies they want. Yahoo has just removed teeth-whitening ads with questionable claims. <br />
<br />
<br />
===Concerning privacy===<br />
<br />
He works with newspapers to put specific links on their website to allow users to opt out of behavioral targetting. All Yahoo ads served are labeled. If you click on the privacy policy link in their ads, you can go to a Yahoo privacy page and immediately opt out. If you don't want to have an airline ad follow you, for example, you can opt out of that. <br />
<br />
There are also links on the site that allow you, through the Network Advertising Initiative, to opt out of a wide array of things across the internet. <br />
<br />
Lloyd says the partnership has been three years now. "It's very much a marriage, we have learned a lot," he says. Newspapers can beat the advertising competition in the local market -- but only if their reps are trained. <br />
<br />
==Google's Josh Cohen -- looking to work more with publishers==<br />
<br />
Josh Cohen is senior business product manager at Google News. Earlier, he worked for Reuters, the wire service. He says Google is at the FTC sessions because high-quality news is important not just to Google but to society at large. <br />
<br />
The Internet is now a top source where people get their news. Consumption has gone up. Only about 50% of news users come into a newspaper website via the front page. "Increasingly, every single page on a publisher's website is a front page." They are coming in from all kinds of places -- all driving traffic to an individual publisher's site. <br />
<br />
Google sees this world as a partnership with publishers. Publishres and search engines are partners in a world of digital distribution. Thhe publishers create content and distribute it. Readers find it through social networks, blogs and search engines -- sending billions of visits to publisher. <br />
<br />
He shows a slide which shows a typical portal website as focusing links to the portal. The experience and editorial voice is that of the portal (he seems to be suggesting Yahoo, here). He describes this as a focusing lense -- focused to the portal. He shows Google as a convex (or is it concave?) lens which sends traffic to multiple websites rather than focusing it to one website. <br />
<br />
Google usually looks for a site map when it crawls a website. They other thing they look for is a robot.ext instruction file. the news crawler is know colloqually as the "GoogleBot." The robots exclusion protocol looks like this at a command-line level:<br />
<br />
*User-agent: * (the name of the search bot you want to respect this) <br />
*Disallow / (that can be directories) <br />
<br />
You can give instructions to even exclude a page. <br />
<br />
"These are all different layers of control that publishers have today," says Cohen. "And the reality is that the vast majority of publishers want to be discovered."<br />
<br />
"There is no single factor that is causing the challenges for newspapers," says Cohen. He cites aging demographics in particular. So there is no single solution that fixes it all. "I think the way we see our role is as one of the partners that can work with publishers . . . you should never look to close yourself off and have a single partner." <br />
<br />
The challenge: Get more readers, build more engaging websites and make more money from it. You can grow your online business by getting more readers, keep them longer or make more money from them either with advertising or subscriptions. What Google is working on: Increase ad revenue for publishers, help develop more user engagement (example Google FastFlip), and explore additional business models (subscriptions: First Click Free program; working to support purchase of digital content. <br />
<br />
Idea: "use the powered by Google approach to help publishers implement subscriptions on their site." <br />
<br />
AdSense returned more than $5 billion last year to participating websites. <br />
<br />
Bottom line: He says they are looking to work with publishers more. <br />
<br />
<br />
Now there's an afternoon panel starting: "Emerging Business Models in Journalism." <br />
<br />
<br />
==Steve Brill: Some content sales in January?==<br />
<br />
Steve Brill heads Journalism Online LLC, an effort to develop subscription and other pay models for American newspapers.<br />
<br />
"I don't think the government really should be involved much in this, except possibly to make sure all the privacy data that our friend Yahoo talked about a few moments ago is really given over voluntarily." <br />
<br />
"If all that behavioral targetting is working so well, why are we all here anyway?" asks Brill.<br />
<br />
He says the newspaper business is going down fast. He says he and his wife a few years ago decided to endow a journalism program at Yale. He tells a story of a Yale parent who called concerned their daughter was being "lured" into journalism. He thought about that question for awhile, and that is what caused him to start Journalism Online with former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz "who is the brains of the outfit." He adds: "This is stuff that Gordon and I really care about." <br />
<br />
"I know that Gordon and I haven't presented a business or a proposal that perfectly meets all the answers," he says, but adds they have made some real progress in helping find a way for publishers to derive value for their content. "We support all of those models." He says search engines are news producers friends. "when you use a search engine the right way, it brings them to you content and then you can ask them to pay for it." <br />
<br />
He doesn't know if it is micropayments, or subscriptions, or 10 or 15 free articles are the answer. "What we think we do know is that a minority of engaged readers on a website will pay something for content if that content has distinctive value." <br />
<br />
It's been hard to find any large news organization that has been able to sustain itself through advertising alone. "So our basic proposition is very simple: That journalism needs to be professional and it needs to be paid for . . . what we're trying to do is reestablish an old business model -- not create a new one -- and that is that people pay for some of the cost of delivering the content." <br />
<br />
Susan DiSanti of the FTC says the FTC is doing a survey/study of its approach to privacy. And there is a workshop in this room on Monday that is going to talk about behavior advertising and privacy will be one of the main topics. <br />
<br />
DiSanti: Doctor said in his survey about 10% of people said they would be willing to pay for news. Does Brill think that is right? <br />
<br />
Brill: He says that's as good a number as any. He says that at 10%, the partners he is talking about would have a home run if 10% of their web users began paying for content. Because once you have revenue at that level, there is an incentive to hire reporters <br />
<br />
<br />
DeSanti: "Are you ready to give an estimate" of when the service will start? <br />
<br />
Brill: "We are right now as we speak about a week away from shipping our initial beta software to our initial affiliates. They are going tobe kicking the tires over the next month or so and sometime after the first of the year there should be real people buying something off the platform." <br />
<br />
Lauren Rich Fine, a former Wall Street newspaper analyst: <br />
"There are loyalists will pay pretty much any price and that's why i think Journalism Online will be successful."<br />
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<hr><h2><br />
[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc BACK TO COVERAGE HOME PAGE]<br />
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<hr><br />
Found tweet: @jeffjarvis catches Murdoch contradicting himself http://bit.ly/6H16sT What a difference a recession makes.<br />
<hr></div>173.124.67.71http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc&diff=2341Ftc2009-12-01T15:47:30Z<p>173.124.67.71: </p>
<hr />
<div>=Running notes: "From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age"=<br />
<br />
<big>This is the jump page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier to Blogggers: How Will journalism Survive the Internet Age," held Dec. 1-2, 2009, in Washington, D.C., at the FTC's 601 New Jersey Avenue offices. Your scribe is Bill Densmore, a fellow at the [http://www.rjionline.org Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute] at the Missouri School of Journalism. Of course we've tried to provide accurate quotes and summaries. But the FTC has stenographers recording all of the testimony and that should be your definitive source. The home page for this coverage is http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc <br />
<br />
<hr> <br />
<br />
<h3>BOOKMARKS: </h3><br />
<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc COVERAGE HOME PAGE]<br />
*http://twitter.com/ftcnews (for Twitter feed) <br />
*Twitter hash tag: #ftcnews <br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/ftc/ftc-slides.pdf Reynolds Institute slide deck (PDF)]<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Ftc-day-one-part-one DAY ONE: Leibowitz, Steiger, Edmonds]<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Ftc-murdoch Rupert Murdoch's remarks]<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Ftc-panel-state-of-journalism Tues. Panel 1 -- State of Journalism]</div>173.124.67.71http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc-murdoch&diff=2340Ftc-murdoch2009-12-01T15:32:54Z<p>173.124.67.71: New page: ==Rupert Murdoch: Looking at the future== <hr>[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.ftc BACK TO FTC HEARING WIKI HOME PAGE] <hr> "It is a credit to this agency that a wide variety of views ...</p>
<hr />
<div>==Rupert Murdoch: Looking at the future==<br />
<br />
<hr>[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.ftc BACK TO FTC HEARING WIKI HOME PAGE]<br />
<hr><br />
"It is a credit to this agency that a wide variety of views are represented today," says Murdoch. He credits Steiger and Edmonds for reports on the history of journalism. He says he'll talk about the future of journalism. <br />
<br />
He says the future of newspapers is bright, so long as government doesn't overregulate or subsidize. He says newspapers have stood up to the rich and powerful. With the Internet, millions more people have the ability to rise in society, hold government accountable and pursue their dreams. <br />
<br />
Some newspapers will fail. We shouldn't blame technology for that, says Murdoch. Those that prosper will find new ways to meet the needs of their readers and users. But for the news business to propose, he says there are three things that need to happen. <br />
<br />
*Media companies must deliver the news people want in the formats they want it in. <br />
<br />
*Convince people that journalism is worth paying for <br />
<br />
*Government must clear the path for growth and investment <br />
<br />
He elaborates on all three. <br />
<br />
====Delivering news people want====<br />
<br />
News organizations with declining circulation and a wall of journalism awards aren't doing the job of looking out for the needs and interest of their readers, says Murdoch. <br />
<br />
He talks about what News Corp. is doing. He is working on using their TV spectrum space to bring news information to their wireless consumers. <i>(Densmore comment: This is not something I've heard of before -- Murdoch seems to be saying he is working to create an alternate path to mobile devices using broadcast spectrum?) <?i><br />
<br />
He says News Corp. is pursuing delivery via e-readers -- but he says "we have no intention of getting into the hardware business" but intends to work with all platforms. He says the company is increasing its spending on journalism. He says Fox-owned news stations added 50 hours of news this year, airing 700 hours of local news. He says the WSJ offers more national and international news than before he owned it. <br />
<br />
"I often make the point that . . . We are in the news business, not the dead-tree business." <br />
<br />
====Quality content not free, Murdoch says====<br />
<br />
"A business model dependent primarily on advertising is dead," says Murdoch. "Although online advertising is increasing, that increase is only a fraction of what is being lost in print advertising. That is not going to change, even in a boom." He says the old model was based on a "quasi-monopoly" by newspapers.<br />
<br />
"In the new business model we will be charging consumers for the news that we offer on our Internet sites," Murdoch says. "... We intend to expand this model to all of our news organizations in the News Corp. stable." <br />
<br />
"Critics say news consumers won't pay. I believe they will ... when we give them something of value." <br />
<br />
All under the talent veil of fair use. "<br />
<br />
"There almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft ... producing good journalism is expensive." <br />
<br />
"The truth is that the aggregators need news organizations. Without content to distribute .... screens would be blank slates." Right now producers have the cost, aggregators have the money. "There is no such thing as a free news story and we are going to ensure that we get a modest price for the value that we provide." <br />
<br />
===='The government has a role here'<br />
<br />
He says regulation of news in the 21st century is based on 20th-century models. He says government should get ride of arbitrary regulations that prevent people from investing. He complains about the FTC's cross-ownership rule for broadcast properties. He says the rule stifles competition. He says competion in markets now goes cross media. <br />
<br />
He says "the drumbeat for assistance for newspapers" is as alarming as regulation. He poo-poos non-profit ownership of papers. "The prospect of the U.S. government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling to anyone who believes in freedom of speech," says Murdoch. <br />
<br />
He wraps up: Let news organizations innovate, give news to customers how they want it, when they want it, ask people to pay, let aggregators desist and start employing their own journalists, and keep government out of propping up failing businesses.<br />
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Although the topic today is journalism: "I think we do better to think of the future of democracy." <br />
<br />
<hr>[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.ftc BACK TO FTC HEARING WIKI HOME PAGE]<br />
<hr></div>173.124.67.71http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc&diff=2339Ftc2009-12-01T15:24:32Z<p>173.124.67.71: New page: =Running notes: "From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age"= <big>This is the jump page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Com...</p>
<hr />
<div>=Running notes: "From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age"=<br />
<br />
<big>This is the jump page for rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier to Blogggers: How Will journalism Survive the Internet Age," held Dec. 1-2, 2009, in Washington, D.C., at the FTC's 601 New Jersey Avenue offices. Your scribe is Bill Densmore, a fellow at the [http://www.rjionline.org Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute] at the Missouri School of Journalism. Of course we've tried to provide accurate quotes and summaries. But the FTC has stenographers recording all of the testimony and that should be your definitive source. The home page for this coverage is http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc <br />
<br />
<hr> <br />
<br />
<h3>BOOKMARKS: </h3><br />
<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc COVERAGE HOME PAGE]<br />
*http://twitter.com/ftcnews (for Twitter feed) <br />
*Twitter hash tag: #ftcnews <br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/ftc/ftc-slides.pdf Reynolds Institute slide deck (PDF)]<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Ftc-day-one-part-one DAY ONE: Leibowitz, Steiger, Edmonds]<br />
*[http://www.newshrae.com/wiki/index.php/Ftc-murdoch Rupert Murdoch's remarks]<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Ftc-panel-state-of-journalism Tues. Panel 1 -- State of Journalism]</div>173.124.67.71http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ftc-day-one-part-one&diff=2338Ftc-day-one-part-one2009-12-01T14:32:11Z<p>173.124.67.71: New page: <big>This is Bill Densmore of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. What follows is rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier ...</p>
<hr />
<div><big>This is Bill Densmore of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. What follows is rough, contemporaneous notes of today's U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop: "From Town Crier to Blogggers: How Will journalism Survive the Internet Age," held Dec. 1-2, 2009, in Washington, D.C., at the FTC's 601 New Jersey Avenue offices. Of course we've tried to provide accurate quotes and summaries. But the FTC has stenographers recording all of the testimony and that should be your definitive source. The home page for this coverage is http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc </big><br />
<hr> <br />
<br />
BOOKMARKS: <br />
*http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/ftc <br />
*http://twitter.com/ftcnews (for Twitter feed) <br />
*Twitter hash tag: #ftcnews<br />
*[http://www.newshare.com/ftc/ftc-slides.pdf Reynolds Institute slide deck (PDF)]<br />
<br />
<hr><br />
<br />
It's just past 9 a.m. I'd guess there are between 150 and 200 people in a wide conference room with two large screens and a hearing table in the middle. The FTC opens by playing a short video produced by Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media overviewing changes in the media ecosystems. <br />
<br />
In the front row waiting to speak is News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch. Arianna Huffington is also present and speaking later this morning. <br />
<br />
Now FTC Commission John Liebowitz steps to the podium to welcome us. He describes "news journalism" as vital to a functioning democracy. He says the experiments in news gathering "aren't yet fully apparent or fully sustainable in a broad sense" and so it isn't clear whether these experiments are evidence of "creative destruction, or just destruction." <br />
<br />
Liebowitz says there is webcasting and "Twittering" of today's event underway and an overflow crowd in a remote building in Washington. <br />
<br />
Liebowitz, who notes his wife works at The Washington Post, noted is sense of shock at walking into the Los Angeles Times newsroom and seeing rows and rows of empty desks. In 2005, estimates are that American newspaper newsrooms will have 25 percent fewer people than they do today. <br />
<br />
"The Internet is dramatically reducing advertising revenue for news organizations," he says, and yet: "We still need journalists to be watchdogs ... but they can't keep producing the news if they are not paid for their work." He says citizens have never paid the full costs of news. Nor do citizens in other democracies. <br />
<br />
"Our history clearly reflects that news is a public good," says Liebowitz. He says speakers over two days will disagree on many things, but probably not on the importance of news to a democracy. He says the FTC's congressionally mandated policy-studying function covers issues of competition and consumer protection and the state of the news and the Internet involve both of those issues. <br />
<br />
"My own sense is that we need to udnerstand these changes to journalism much better than we do today before we can consider any changes or legislation.... but we should be able to take action to preserve the news that is necessary to a democracy." <br />
<br />
==Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief, ProPublica==<br />
<br />
Now speaking: Paul Steiger, the editor-in-chief of the non-profit, philanthropy-funded ProPublica, a New York-based watchdog journalism organization. He summarizes their operation -- over 16 months, investigative pieces run in partnership with more than 40 news organizations. But he says for organizations like his, "it will be years before they will make up for the losses of the last year or two" in the mainstream media. With dozens of reporters, ProPublica is the largest investigative-reporting organization in the nation, which has a range and persistence in its work. But he says that's not enough. <br />
<br />
"The processing of finding and communicating news as we have known it may no longer require newspapers ... but it still will require reporters ... to probe for the carefully contrived hoax," says Steiger. Why are professional journalists needed, asks Steiger rhetorically? <br />
<br />
-- Bloggers can ill afford to defend a libel case<br />
-- Complicated databases need to be built <br />
<br />
They got their tax exemption in five months. He has received $2.3 million in commitments from donors beyond their original donor. Fund-raising is their beiggest challenge. Taking the non-proift route for journalism is "creating a new class of cultural institution in this country," Steiger says. He call's it a start with promise. <br />
<br />
==Rick Edmonds, the Poynter Institute== <br />
<br />
Edmonds is now presenting an overview of the industry's financials status. He says newspapers are spending $1 billion less on news going into 2010 than they were three years ago. "We really don't know what investigations, insights and basic coverage simply is not going on and won't."</div>173.124.67.71