THINK!

LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS HERE ABOUT THE IHT, ITS CONTENT, ITS DESIGN AND ITS FUTURE.

2009-06-04T15:28:00.003+02:00

This blog closed back at the end of 2008 (I think).

If you're interested in the future of newspapers, check out my new scrapbook (what others might call a blog) at The Future of Print.

HOWEVER, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO POST ANY COMMENTS ABOUT THE IHT, ITS CONTENT, DESIGN, FUTURE, MANAGEMENT, WHATEVER, OR ABOUT WHY YOU LIKE OR DISLIKE THE IHT, HERE IS THE PLACE TO DO IT.

I have been remiss in checking my gmail for comments received but they're all up to date now, so please, add your comments here on all matters IHT, and I will check them on a regular basis and post them.

I hope that this can become a discussion board for people interested in the IHT.

New IHT redesign / shuttering of www.iht.com

2009-04-18T23:30:00.004+02:00

Think! has moved to The Future of Print, but by dint of the recent redesign of the IHT, this email from IHT reader OPL, and my response.

Please post your views on the new IHT redesign here.

Source: Email from OPL
Date: 02 April, 2008

Ian, any comments on the new IHT print edition and website merger?

The info on www.ihtinfo.com seems to indicate the paper is still--to some extent--a separate operation. Do you have any insight on that? (How much is still really being decided in Paris?)

The paper edition I find cleaner, crisper, more elegant, with undeniably attractive fonts. Most features seem to have been retained bar the "International Life" page. IHT columnists are still there, as is the "In Our Pages" feature. I think the paper looks very contemporary but most of all it still looks like a newspaper--most redesigns these days make papers look more like magazines.

Online, IHT content seems to be diluted in a sea of endless NYTimes.com sections and the IHT logo only appears if you access the global section directly or through IHT.com. If you go to NYTimes.com and change editions the logo at the top remains that of the Times. It's hard to locate IHT-specific content (articles, blogs, link to corp info, archive, other platforms).

And as you've you've no doubt noticed the webmasters made one huge serious mistake I hope they can fix soon: www.gawker.com/5189745/times-nukes-itself-on-google

Ian's response:

OPL, where to begin?

The redesign is good for what it is but it isn't going to sell any more copies of the IHT one way or the other. Deckchairs, Titanic etc. They're not stupid, they know this, but it needed to be done as a holding position in terms of design update and I congratulate them for the job they've done - lots of good obvious stuff. (e.g I liked the extra effort they put into the Chelt. font.)

(Re-design done in-house at NYT - this, btw, could have been done in about 4 weeks any time in the last 4 months to about 4 years, so let's not get too carried away with the accolades; total legacy inertia. People on the business side have been pleading for this type of re-design for at least 10 years or more to my certain knowledge.)

Oh, and one other thing. Is it so damn hard to avoid front page jumps half way through a sentence? I think not. Although the jumps are a lot better.

(BTW: change IHT to International New York Times - or rather, if we are to take a clue from the new url, The Global New York Times - and keep the old IHT format/content the same and no one's really going to give a damn and they've been working towards this probably for some time, even if they won't admit it to themselves, people who work for the IHT or its readers.)

The global edition online is just one big brand marketing fuck-up from top to bottom. (www.global.nytimes.com ? Very catchy and easy to remember: cf. www.iht.com?)

There is complete dissonance at just about every marketing level you care to think of and you really struggle to see any coherent strategy for the IHT brand within what they're up to. One moment the IHT is beneath the NYT, the next above, the IHT adverts don't work, no one tells you what the IHT is, I could go on but I'm tired. As a platform to SELL EFFING NEWSPAPERS internationally like, I don't know, the IHT for example, it's a disgrace. Anyone want to get a free umbrella? Please. Just change the name to The Global New York Times and be done with it.)

Editorially, is is it any better than www.iht.com? Not really. Can it be? Probably. It's got a good editor and I think she'll do great.

Can you easily find IHT-generated content? No. And that's probably precisely the idea.

Design wise, for a savvy international Trib reader, it's a mess. U.S graphic design in complex online information is just not on the cutting edge, and everyone in our globalised world, save Americans, seem to know this.

Separate operation? The future?

They're in danger of giving away the IHT brand for nothing when it has some value, which in the right hands could be considerable. (Not so smart when you're loaded with debt and if you wanted to reduce it you might like to sell the IHT brand at some point - or close the Boston Globe or whatever - but there you go...)

Exactly how much it's worth (let's be clear; it means IHT brand - debatable value - and IHT as newspaper- no value, losing money - now because www.iht.com url, with staggering traffic for NO marketing investment was just trashed!) we don't know until someone makes an offer or they sell it, but they did pay a ridiculous sum of money to a consulting group to put their finger in the air and come up with a number rumoured to vary between not very much and some 10s rather than hundreds of millions; you don't value your properties unless you want to borrow against one or more likely sell one. Actually, I think I know the figure they came up with but I'm trying to be polite both to the people who came up with the number and the people who commissioned the work.)

NYT Co. aren't very good at pricing assets: witness the absurdly rich price they paid the WAPO for their 50% share of the IHT, their disastrous forays into the Manhattan real estate market and the world's worst media share buy back program in living memory.

As to what's being decided in Paris, on a macro level, not a lot. A. Smale does a stand up job but Bill Schmidt (is that how you spell it?), slated to come to Paris from NY to oversee the IHT, did not and remains in NY. I think that pretty much says most of what you need to know.

So, onwards and er, sideways?

P.S The pictures of the columnists do a fantastic job at reminding me every day that for a supposedly international newspaper the commentary is coming from a gallery of white, middle aged (that's polite), male, East Coast Americans. Tres zeitgeist in terms of White House aspirations to project American soft power overseas (sorry: GLOBALLY!!! It's going to end up sounding like The Daily Goddamn Planet or some sort of journalistic battle carrier group that can float around the globe.)

P.P.S Open invitation to IHT - would you like to send me all the reader emails etc you got about the redesign and let me post them on this blog?

And now for the official word to IHT employees:

Dear Colleague,

It's an exciting moment in the 122-year history of the International Herald Tribune.

Today, the newspaper gets a bold redesign to strengthen its international personality and IHT.com moves to a dynamic new home on the Web, creating fresh new print and online opportunities for international advertisers.

Enhanced display environments across news, business and the arts and high-impact positions such as the new larger strip ad on the front page present great new opportunities in the new-look IHT. And with the new online Global Edition, co-branded with The New York Times, targeting our influential global users has never been easier.

Together the IHT and The Times are creating a 24/7 global news operation that can serve the followers of both brands wherever they are, and in whatever format they need. We are committed to helping you reach this demanding, global audience with creativity and vision so contact me or your local New York Times Media Group sales consultant today.

Kind regards,

Jean-Christophe Demarta
International Advertising Director
The New York Times Media Group

Think! has moved to The Future of Print

2009-02-18T00:32:00.003+01:00

I've had it with this blog. Too much time writing and ranting when what I actually want is just a place to gather my thoughts.

You can find that place at The Future of Print.

Unlike Think! it won't be offering it's own commentary - I'll leave you to fill in the gaps - but it will be a one stop shop for anyone concerned about the future of print, and in particular, the future of the NYT and the IHT.

I'm running a bit behind the news curve but over the coming weeks I hope to catch up with all the developments of 2009.

I'll be keeping it pretty minimal and relying on a handful of newsletters to keep me and you in the loop. Hopefully I'll be up to date soon, but I'm not too worried about being behind for a little while - so is every newspaper in the world and c. 90% of the content of their websites.

And besides, if you look at the archives of Think! you will see that Think! was far ahead of the newscurve on issues that have broken out in 2009: not-for-profit newspapers, fears of the NYT Company going bust, paid content and micropayments being just a few examples.

In the spirit of demonstrating that the future of the Internet (as a business model) is far from assured, at The Future of Print I'll be ripping stuff I can get for free off the Net and aggregating it there.

(And to all you advertisers on Mediabistro, I just want to let you know that I can't recall a single advert on it and I look at it EVERY DAY; but I can remember the LVuitton 4-c full back page ad in this week's IHT. Nice yacht, nice environment and yes, nice watch.)

If someone wants to show me how Internet CPMs can pay for a 1,300 person newsroom and multiple foreign bureaus, then I'm all ears.

If somoene wants to show me high impact advertising on the Internet, again, I'm all eyes.

The group think is that print is dead. It is. In it's current form. But group think has a terrific track record of being dead wrong rather than more or less right.

(Thanks PG for that: the only thing I remember you ever saying that made any sense - the bit about 'better to be more or less right than dead wrong', not group think.)

Print, in fact, is far from dead full-stop.

Video did not kill the radio star.

NYT Company to go bankcrupt or public-to-private by the end of 2012 (At the latest! Check revolving credit due dates for relevant deadlines)

2008-12-08T13:11:00.008+01:00

REVISED

1. Tribune Company going bust: there's a surprise.

I wonder what it's going to do to NYT Company stock and commercial paper, news of Tribune company probably going bust? (There was one of these little mini-rallies in the markets so not a good day to judge but they're still under $8.)

I wonder when we're going to read an article in either the WSJ or the NYT about what other big newspaper companies could go bust?

You read today's IHT and tell me this recession isn't going to go into 2010 at a minimum, if not 2011/12. How far will advertising opportunities online have improved by then, technology wise; how many people will have changed their reading habits? Don't think the end of a recession is the end of their problems.

I don't think the NYT is going to make it beyond 2012 unless either it goes public to private or comes up with at least one, ideally three game-changing ideas.

This below from PaidContent.org

Tribune Hires Bankruptcy Advisers; May File Ch. 11 This WeekBy Rafat Ali - Sun 07 Dec 2008 03:28 PM PST Tribune, the Sam Zell-owned newspaper chain, has hired bankruptcy advisers in an attempt to stave off potential bankruptcy filing, reports NYT, citing sources. It is using inv*stm*nt bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin, to try and restructure its crippling debt and assess its options, the story says. WSJ says it could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as this week.... Last month, the company reported a Q3 loss of $124 million, compared with earnings of $84 million for the same period last year. Publishing advertising revenues slid 19 percent ($111 million), and as part of that, interactive revenues dropped 7 percent ($4 million). The company has about $12 billion in borrowings, and stayed ahead of the interest payments as a result of asset sales, but the economy and resulting ad decline continues to hit it hard. The company doesn’t have enough cash to pay $1 billion in interest payments this year, and also owes a $512 million debt payment in June. The bankruptcy possibility was raised back in June by S&P analyst Emile Courtney. For all the gory details on the Tribune saga, read our dedicated Tribune section. Update: Another story in the NYT has some more: Rating agencies say Tribune’s short-term problem is not making debt payments, but complying with a quarterly requirement that its main debt from its acquisition of the company not exceed nine times its EBITDA. A failure to comply by end of this month would mean Tribune had technically defaulted, even if it continued to make payments, and that sometimes can lead to bankruptcy. Chicago Tribune does its own story, and quotes a company spokesperson: “It’s an uncertain and difficult environment...We haven’t made any decision. We’re looking at all of our options.” Posted in: Companies, Media

2. Sorry, but that's my last word on the subject, and the end of this blog, or was going to be, until after posting my initial draft of this post, I saw later in the day news in the print edition of yesterday's IHT of the NYT taking out a mortgage on their HQ building in NY to pay the bills.

(This was not on http://www.iht.com/ yesterday morning but IS on today: now go to the article index at the bottom of the page for Tuesday and see that the story is tagged as a regular business story, not as a Technology and Media story which the Tribune bankruptcy story somewhow is; nor is David Carr's article In string of bad news, omens of a long recession . Go figure.)

(While we're on the subject of things that are in the IHT that are not online, if you want to get the best out of the IHT you have to read http://www.iht.com/ and the print edition because NOT everything that goes into the print edition is run on the website, and not everything that is run on the website goes into the print edition. I personally find that annoying - just as I found Roger Cohen's opinion piece being run, untagged as an opinion piece, on the front page of last Saturday's European edition, extracted from NYT Magazine, and not run on http://www.iht.com/ - so much for integration with NYT and so much for carefully separation of news and opinion.)

Times Co. to borrow against building
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Monday, December 8, 2008
The New York Times Company plans to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building, to ease a potential cash flow squeeze as the company grapples with tighter credit and shrinking profits.
The company has retained Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, to act as its agent to secure financing, either in the form of a mortgage or a sale-leaseback arrangement, said James Follo, the Times Company's chief financial officer.
The Times Company owns 58 percent of the 52-story, 1.5 million-square-foot tower on Eighth Avenue, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano, and completed last year. The developer Forest City Ratner owns the rest of the building. The Times Company's portion of the building is not currently mortgaged, and some investors have complained that the company has too much of its capital tied up in that real estate.
The company has two revolving lines of credit, each with a ceiling of $400 million, roughly the amount outstanding on the two combined. One of those lines is set to expire in May, and finding a replacement would be difficult given the economic climate and the company's worsening finances. Analysts have said for months that selling or borrowing against assets would be the company's best option for averting a cash flow problem next year.
Standard & Poor's recently lowered its credit rating on the Times Company below investment grade, and Moody's Investors Service has said it was considering a similar move. Times Company stock, which has lost more than half its value this year, closed on Friday at $7.64, down 30 cents. More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on December 8, 2008, on page B2 of the New York edition.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08times.php

That Richard Perlez-Pena can write this press release with so little reporting on what it MEANS is unbelievable.

What it means is that they are truly in trouble.

Anyone know the Woolworths story in the UK?

Bought by an asset stripper, who sold off their excellent high street properties and then rented them back to Woolworths who have now gone bust - because they lost their way and couldn't find anymore finance and had nothing to borrow against as a last chance while they sorted themselves out because all their properties had been sold through a gross act of greed.

Unlike the NYT they didn't have the opportunity to fall back on a building, a building which the NYT VASTLY overpaid for and which contributed to the pile of debt the NYT currently has. (In contrast HSBC has just bought for about what the NYT's is borrowing their office HQ in London from the bank that owned it, turning a tidy profit because, naturally, in this market the Spanish bank they bought it from had paid way over the odds for the building in a boom market, just as the NYT did the same.)

The NYT HQ was, they say, Michael Golden's baby this, this temple to a lack of innovation.

If in doubt as what to do about really huge problems facing your business.....go into the property development business at the top of the market. Insane. (Reminds me of 90s Asia pre-crash when people like brewing companies were borrowing millions to finance their new great expansion plans: property for their new HQ instead of a state of the art brewery.)

So the NYT is hawking the family jewels to pay the bills. And no more comment than a straight report from their media guy.

Just wait for round 2 of this which will be the NYT selling their 58% stake in the building to Forest City Ratner (when Forest or whoever buys them out finds the liquidity in the market to borrow to buy and lease back to NYT).

3. And to make it nearly certain that this will be my last post on this blog about the NYT Company, because I don't want to spend my time watching a train crash in slow motion of an institution that I love (the IHT), guess what has happened to about the most innovative person at the NYT?

The woman in charge of http://www.nytimes.com/ - clearly the most innovative part of their business - has left to join NPR to run their digital operations. Which is what?

A not for profit news media organisation!!

So one of their most talented operative leaves to a not for profit!

And I've been blogging for ages now about how the NYT Co. should and could consider some sort of public to private move with either a not for profit model OR what I think more likely and better, a sort of Capitalism 2.0 model where investors are not expecting alpha returns nor big dividends.

I could link all the posts I've made about this but I can't be shagged.

Over at PaidContent.Org Lauren Rich Fine has had this BRILLIANT idea all by herself!!!! Shows how easy it would be for a humble blogger like me to get a job there as their research director.

By Lauren Rich Fine - Thu 04 Dec 2008 01:00 PM PST
If you want to watch news travel fast, make sure it’s about the newspaper industry. Fitch, a credit-rating service, has predicted that some daily newspapers will go out of business as their parent companies default on their debt and are forced to liquidate. But this prediction is extreme: There are interim steps that papers can take to stave off the cash drain.
More after the jump…
Even if Fitch is right, what if instead of liquidating the assets, the papers were reclassified and/or contributed to a not-for-profit? Presumably, someone could benefit from the tax write-off. Sam Zell, owner of Tribune, sold Newsday earlier this year; perhaps there was a gain he wants to offset. He could contribute the Baltimore Sun to a newly established not-for-profit. There was a group in Baltimore that wanted to buy the paper when Tribune was originally for sale--that group could serve as management for the paper and oversee the not-for-profit.
While converting to a not-for-profit won’t improve the financials, it would allow the paper to ask for philanthropic support, not unlike public radio or television stations. This isn’t meant to be a solution to the industry woes but instead a thought that came about after reading that McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) was collaborating with the Christian Science Monitor, a not-for-profit, in some of their overseas news bureaus. I hadn’t realized there were any not-for-profit papers. I’m also encouraged by the establishment of ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative-journalism organization led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger.
Recently, I had an on-air personality from one of the local PBS radio stations present to my media-management class at Kent State University. Listening to him discuss the support for the station and the support for National Public Radio, I have to believe there’s enough support out there for a newspaper. If the goal is to save some of these daily newspapers, perhaps this idea could save a few.

Ironically, just after we learn the NYT web lady has jumped to NPR (you can find her resign. memo on Gawker and the Denise Warren memo from the NYT btw) Bill is on NPR worried amongst other things about being tarred with the same brush as other newspapers (which presumably means the others are going bust and his won't):

Opinion: NYT' executive editor - shortage of "quality journalism"
Posted by Katherine Thompson on December 8, 2008 at 10:53 AM
Bill Keller, the New York Times' executive editor, told NPR's Steve Inskeep that, "there's a real shortage of the kind of information that I would call quality journalism."In a comment about the financial health of the newspaper industry and the rise of blogs, "Good journalism does not come cheap. And, therefore, you're not going to find a lot of blogs or nonprofit Web sites that are going to build a Baghdad bureau."He also said that the venerated newspaper is, "Competing for audience with different people." Keller went on to say the Times sometimes gets "tarred with the condition of the industry that we're in."Source: NPR

Quality journalism BILL ME OLD MUCKER these days means not getting things right AFTER THEY HAPPEN but getting things right and LETTING US KNOW BEFORE THEY HAPPEN.

And that is what blogs do SO MUCH BETTER than you and your lot. That's what you can't grasp - that everything has changed and we are living in a conditional information age. Your journalists look BACK - but Bill, sorry to shatter a lifetime's training and experience, but the time line is now FORWARD.

RE-EFFING-TOOL.

The subprime meltdown? HOOCOODANODE?! Not you, but quite a lot of bloggers knew it damn straight and were telling their readers long ago.

As is evident from the fact that there is NO definition from you to your people at the NYT as to what a blog should be and how it should distinguish itself from their regular Newspaper 1.0 reporting, we know you're in trouble. (Maybe Denise can write that memo - see below.)

Here's a freebie: send out a memo telling all NYT bloggers to write conditional information - what might happen, today, tomorrow, next month. Leave yesterday to yesterday's industry - your newspaper and traditional news site.

4. But the icing on the cake as to true depths of the problems facing the NYT Company is who they have replaced her with! You'd think in these difficult media times you could find some real talent, someone with an outstanding track record in digital publishing.

No, apparently not.

Instead they have turned to their advertising sales VP who, apart from working out how to sell a few ads on the site (not hard) has basically NO experience in digital publishing!!! Is there NO ONE at the NYT Company even who is better qualified or innovative than her (Yasmin N. for example or the IHT's Tech editor Shannon)?

Denise Warren is however a loyal NYT lifer and widely loved and respected by IHT and NYT senior ad sales operatives (probably, umm.)

So you're digital talent, can smell a sinking ship when you're on one and you know the stock options are worth very little. What do you do?

Run for the dry ground of NPR - smart woman; NPR know how to recruit first class talent in a sinking market - smart organisation; and the NYT Company which has forever being telling people that the future of the NYT is digital is only able to muster up an ad sales person to be in charge!! It's beyond belief.

What's also beyond belief is all their talk of personalised NYT.com and aggregated news, adding Twitter etc etc. Are analysts (probably yes) supposed to believe this will drive up revenues on nytimes.com and get readership and CPMs up to replace the sinking into oblivion demographics and revenue of the gray mother? It's laughable.

During this recession which could happily last two full financial years, advertising is not only going to shrink but migrate to the Internet, a place during which those people still in business are going to get their advertising technology better and better. When the recession ends, even if the NYT Company is still floating as a public company, that display advertising ain't coming back, the readership will look only worse.

Tipping points I've blogged about - readers, advertisers belief and now we've reached the final ones: mortgaging the house to keep the family business afloat, talent realising what's going to happen, organisation unable to react intelligently.

No, this is my last post unless about all this. (2008 was my year for blogging and I've learnt all I can about it, or at least, all I think I need to learn which probably isn't nearly enough.) I've had an absolute gutful and I need to stop before I come abusive through frustration and regret something I write!

I'll come back in December 2012 and see if I'm right.

I'll come back sooner if a newspaper company contacts me asking for an idea or two. (And yes, I do have some, and no, I haven't put them on this blog. Emails from private equity companies and investors in NYT Company stock will be answered!! As to lenders to NYT Co. I haven't checked your spreads recently but I'd be making sure you've got your credit default gobbleygook paper lined up. As to Moody's, given the slagging off the NYT gave you yesterday, I'd just get on and join S&P: junk paper- nothing to be gained by being nice any more is there?)

P.S This article by David Carr at the NYT would be funny in his lack of awareness of the future of his industry and his employer, if the underlying realities for so many people working in newspapers weren't so breathtakingly awful. To begin with you think, oh, that's good for him, he's got it - then you read on and realise he really hasn't at all. An article of infinite ironies.

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International Herald Tribune
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Content, the once and future king

2008-12-08T07:14:00.004+01:00

This is a very good article, which I post on this blog for three reasons.

Firstly, like a lot of material you'll find here it's a sort of newspaper scrapbook for my personal reference - my other news scrapbook you can find at A Place in the Auvergne.

Secondly, I just wanted to cut and paste the entire article to remind Virginia of one important element she has overlooked. Anyone can and will rip and burn your content without earning you a dime. For more evidence of this visit http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

Lastly, Virginia is yet again an example of media commentary from the No. 1 Newspaper Site in the U.S.A that fails to refer to the NYT and the implications for the journal she is writing for; a subject that it seems is off limits. Until the bitter end?

Content, the once and future king
By Virginia Heffernan
Sunday, December 7, 2008
For years, we in traditional media have consoled ourselves about the increasing irrelevance of our work. First, we insist that content is king. If a story, image, film or report is compelling enough it will flourish on any platform, dominate every spot. By this logic, creators, producers, artists and journalists should attend only to producing great work and leave the changes in the distribution and display of information to nerds in suits.
When that argument doesn't add up, we console ourselves another way. We say that classic 20th-Century forms like Hollywood movies and glossy magazines breed natural digital extensions. A video game can be spun out of "Gossip Girl." Social networks can coalesce around publications like The Economist or Vogue. Maybe these secondary media will draw people to the main event or maybe - we have been reluctant to notice - they will be the main event themselves. Either way, it's O.K. If a trained and talented old hand makes the primary content, young people who understand iMovie or know how to moderate message boards - someone's nephew or baby sitter, maybe - can spin off the other stuff.
Then there's the troublesome third argument, the one we know is true. This is the one that admits that the content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago. Thrillers, it seems, don't flourish on Hulu. No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it's the afterthought message boards - the ones moderated by interns - that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into "main event" programming that goes unread and unviewed?
The third argument says we have to change. We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it's not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries - music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows - are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.
The journalist Jeff Jarvis has lately blamed his peers for not apprehending better the changes to our profession wrought by digital technology. The writer Ron Rosenbaum has responded that the best journalists were too busy working to philosophize. Both are right. For 10 years, journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly leads or opening her sources to readers? At the same time, a huge number of mainstream journalists have taken to blogging, signed up for Facebook and Twitter, linked to video and experimented with new forms. Jarvis and Rosenbaum are among them.
Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to "tell great stories" or "make arresting images." You don't study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an "article" is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements. Just as shooting film for a Hollywood movie is never just filming and acting in a TV ad is never just acting, writing for a magazine is never just writing.
The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily, on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely normal to old-media people and archaic - if not just stupid - to everyone else. Take an example from a recent issue of Self magazine. It contains an article about volunteer work, one that could have been written in a million ways. But because it appears in a magazine with newsstand sales, a subscriber base of women and ads from cosmetics companies and pharmaceuticals, it is, perforce, a colloquial personal essay that expresses in its DNA deeply held beliefs about how women's magazines work and sell and survive. Specifically, it's produced to engender and justify a cover line, that good old device used by glossy magazines to stand out on newsstands. In this case, the cover line reads, "The #1 Happiness Secret You Might Be Missing," and the story touts volunteering as a wellspring of contentment.
But it seems that one day cosmetics companies will perhaps start beefing up their own Web sites. When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and finally drop off newsstands. With no newsstands and no covers, there is no need for cover lines; with no cover lines, the story no longer has to be written in the cover-line-justifying way. Headlines on Newser or The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast draw an audience with new kinds of come-ons.
People who work in traditional media ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store. Then they should think about what content suits the new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/medium08.php

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LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
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Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

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Sulzberger Ochs Family talks to private equity and sovereign wealth funds to take NYT Company public-to-private: well, it's an idea.

2008-12-04T07:02:00.003+01:00

When the car makers start talking about a slowdown lasting into 2010 (Auto slump seen lasting into 2010) , and commodities futures markets reflecting the same, then you know it's going to a be a rough ride.

Even without the recession (which we're now allowed to call it, although NYT business editors please note, it has actually been going on for more than a year - didn't read that in the IHT) question marks remain over the future of the NYT Company.

I have long argued that some sort of public-to-private move by the family looks attractive, with shares trading as low as below $5 and closing yesterday at $7.75 (an uptick day Global stocks rise on anti-recession plays ).

So this move by Yahoo management, ex and existing, to do a management buyout looks interesting, and the above headline to this post is exactly what they are doing. Their share price is/was around the $10 mark and their shareholders would take such a move in a snap. As would many NYT Company shareholders, and indeed employees.

As to those NYT employees, we've long been told that the NYT won't lay off editorial staff, but brace yourself for the invitation made to employees of the FT.

No, we're not going to sack you, true to our word, but we forgot to mention the idea that we would like you work a three day week. Any takers? Get to work on that long planned novel? You could always pitch it to Random House.

FT Staff Invited to Cut Working Week (Guardian)

The Financial Times is offering staff the opportunity to work a three-day week as part of cost-cutting measures designed to avoid the need for job cuts. John Ridding, the Financial Times chief executive, informed staff yesterday that the cost-cutting measures were being put in place as a result of a worsening global economic conditions in an internal email.

Yahoo shares rise on talk of buyout
By Brad Stone
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO: It takes only a glimmer of hope to excite Yahoo shareholders these days.
Investors bid up shares in Yahoo by 7 percent Tuesday after The Wall Street Journal reported that Jonathan Miller, the former chief executive of AOL, had been talking to private equity and sovereign wealth funds to raise $28 billion to $30 billion to buy Yahoo. That would work out to $20 to $22 a share; Yahoo's stock closed up 76 cents at $11.50.
People in private equity circles said Miller had indeed discussed possible options for Yahoo on and off since he left AOL two years ago. But they also said that a private buyout of Yahoo was highly unlikely, given the daunting environment for deal-making and the amount of debt that such a large deal would almost certainly require.
"I would think this would be a very hard number to raise even in an effervescent financial market," said Roger McNamee, a co-founder of Elevation Partners, a private equity firm in Silicon Valley. "In the current market, where there does not appear to be any debt available for any cause, let alone Yahoo, I think this has to be viewed as a long shot."
Miller, now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture capital firm, did not respond to a request for comment.
This is not the first time in recent weeks that the ears of investors have perked up at the whisper of a possible conclusion to Yahoo's long and twisted corporate story. There have been repeated rumors that Microsoft might rekindle efforts to buy some or all of Yahoo, but Microsoft has mostly debunked these.
Last weekend, The Times of London reported that Miller was working on a deal with Microsoft to buy Yahoo's search business. All parties denied that report.
Jerry Yang, Yahoo's co-founder and chief executive, announced last month that he would step aside once a new chief is found. Yahoo has told at least one major shareholder that it hoped to conclude its search and announce Yang's replacement by the end of the year, but that is an ambitious goal.
A Yahoo spokesman, Brad Williams, would not discuss the timing of the search for a chief executive, and said of the report about Miller that the company would not comment on rumors.
Though Yahoo shareholders and analysts say that a private buyout of Yahoo remains unlikely, they do find elements of that prospect appealing. Yahoo could easily sell off parts of itself, like its search business or its Japanese division, to immediately pay off debt.
Miller, who remains a popular figure in Internet circles, could probably marshal the support of large Yahoo shareholders, many of whom are desperate for a change in management. Miller was the principal architect of AOL's transformation from a dial-up Internet service provider to an online advertising company, which is generally considered to have been a success.
In the 1990s, he was an executive at media outlets like USA Broadcasting, Nickelodeon and Paramount, which could give him the background to create a future for Yahoo in the rapidly changing media business.
One potential hitch is that Miller has a noncompete agreement with his former employer, Time Warner, that extends through March. Miller was forced to withdraw his name from consideration for Yahoo's board over the summer after Time Warner indicated it would enforce the measure.
Sandeep Aggarwal, an Internet analyst at Collins Stewart, said that even talk of Miller's involvement was good for Yahoo and might motivate Microsoft to get off the sidelines.
"Microsoft has had no reason to hurry up and make a move," Aggarwal said. "If Microsoft sees another strategic alternative developing, that might pressure them to move faster. It creates option value for Yahoo, and options never hurt."
But Yahoo continues to face challenges that could discourage anyone courageous enough to think about taking over the business. Though it has the most popular Web site on the Internet, it continues to lose market share in the profitable search business to Google, a relentless opponent. And the market for display advertisements, where Yahoo is strong, is suffering amid the general downturn in advertising.
All these factors, McNamee of Elevation Partners said, are poison to any potential Yahoo deal makers. "Private equity investors hate uncertainty, and the business situation at Yahoo is uncertain enough that it is bound to scare off many deep-pocketed investors," he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/yahoo.php

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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

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Web marketing that hopes to learn what attracts a click (IHT)

2008-12-04T06:36:00.006+01:00

Further to my posting yesterday on Internet advertising and its shortcomings, this article below from today's IHT.

All sounds rather revolutionary on the face of it doesn't it, but given how long Internet advertising has been around, and given how long direct mail has been around, this really is just panel testing on a massive scale, enabled by technology and large data sets. And it took the industry until 2008 to get here?

I wouldn't be buying too many Internet adverts quite so soon, and why on earth haven't publishers been investing in this type of research to up the value of their ludicrously low price inventory?

What I really love, in these difficult times, is this quite extraordinary comment from Planet What the Hell One are You On:

"I think the creative community has to get very comfortable with results-based outcomes in marketing," said Hanlon, whose company has an interest in Tumri. "There are a lot of creative people who didn't sign up for that kind of world."

Now there is a thought.

Web marketing that hopes to learn what attracts a click
By Stephanie Clifford
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Online advertisers are not lacking in choices: They can display their ads in any color, on any site, with any message, to any audience, with any image.
Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients' online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.
It is technology that could cause a shift in the advertising world. The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad's success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad's brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.
The question is, "how do we combine creative energy, which is a manual and sort of qualitative exercise, with the raw processing power of computing, which is all about quantitative data?" said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of VivaKi Ventures, the investment unit of Publicis Groupe.
"I think it's clear that the traditional process of agencies is clearly not going to survive the digital era without significant changes to our approaches," Hanlon said.
The push to automate the creative elements of ad units is coming from two companies in California, not Madison Avenue.
Adisn, based in Long Beach, and Tumri, based in Mountain View, are working both sides of the ad equation. On one, they are trying to figure out who is looking at a page by using a mix of behavioral targeting and analysis of the page's content. On the other side, they are assembling an ad on the fly that is meant to appeal to that person.
Both companies assume there is no perfect version of an ad, and instead assemble hundreds of different versions that are displayed on Web sites where their clients have bought ad space, showing versions of an ad to actual consumers as they browse the Web.
That might lead to finding that an ad for a baby supply store is more popular with young mothers when it features a bottle instead of diapers.
(Adisn and Tumri both measure the ad's effectiveness based on parameters the advertiser sets, like how many people clicked on the ad or how many people actually bought something after clicking on it. They compare those with standard ads they run as part of a control group.)
Adisn's approach has been to build a database of related words so it can assess the content of a Web site or blog based on the words on its pages.
Adisn then buys space on Web sites, and uses its information to find an appropriate ad to show visitors to those sites. If a visitor views pages about beaches, weather and Hawaii, it might suggest that the visitor is interested in Hawaiian travel.
Based on that analysis, Adisn's system pulls different components — actors, fonts, background images — to make an ad. For example, it might show an ad with a blue background, an image of a beach, and a text about tickets to Hawaii. "Once we've built this huge database of hundreds of millions of relationships" between words, said Andy Moeck, the chief executive of Adisn, the system can "make a very good real-time decision as to what is the most relevant or appropriate campaign we could show."
Simple Green, the cleaning brand, began working with Adisn this year to advertise a new line of products called Simple Green Naturals.
"If it's a woman looking at a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator, they can show a stainless steel product," said Jessica Frandson, the vice president for marketing for Simple Green. While Frandson gave Adisn a general idea of what she wanted, she also let the agency do almost random combinations with about 10 percent of her ads to see which of those combinations had the highest click-through rates.
"If it wants to be purple and orange, if that's going to be appealing to my customer, then so be it," she said.
Even Moeck said he was often surprised by the success of certain ads. "Some of it, I just scratch my head and say, 'I have no idea,' " he said.
Tumri's approach is slightly different. It creates a template for ads, including slots for the message, the color, the image and other elements.
Unlike Adisn, it does not buy ad space, but lets clients — like Sears and Best Buy — choose and buy space on sites themselves. And rather than building a contextual database like Adisn, Tumri uses whatever targeting approach advertisers are already using, whether it is behavioral or contextual or demographic, and assembles an ad on the fly based on that information.
"It's reporting back to the advertiser and agency saying, 'Guess what? The soccer mom in Indiana likes background three, which was pink, likes image four, which was the SUV, and likes marketing message 12, about room, safety and comfort," said Calvin Lui, chief of Tumri.
Some advertisers are using that information just to see which version of the ad works best, but Lui emphasized that the appropriate ad is not static, and changes all the time as content on the page changes.
While the planners and buyers in advertising agencies are intrigued by the idea of measuring each part of an ad, the creative staff that designs ads is less focused on measurement and more focused on the overall effect.
"I think the creative community has to get very comfortable with results-based outcomes in marketing," said Hanlon, whose company has an interest in Tumri. "There are a lot of creative people who didn't sign up for that kind of world."
Bant Breen, the president of worldwide digital communications at Initiative, the Interpublic Group media buying and planning firm, had a similar view. "The traditional creative process right now is not structured to essentially deliver hundreds of permutations, or hundreds of ideas for messaging," said Breen, whose firm is using Tumri to determine which ads are working.
"There's no doubt that there will be a lot of data that can be collected that could be applied to the creative process."
But, he said, "that's not necessarily an easy discussion to have with great art directors."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03adco.php

CHECK THIS OUT TOO:
Nielsen starts offering second-by-second data

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
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Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

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Advertising on www.iht.com - are you crazy?

2008-12-03T10:54:00.004+01:00

We can debate the merits of folding iht.com (an asset with presumably some balance sheet value) into www.nytimes.com, but one thing I can tell you as a heavy user of iht.com is that their ad sales really are in the give-away zone.

I'm a daily user of www.iht.com which I look at for about one hour every day between 0500 and 0700 hrs, in order to compile my own daily narrative of the world at A Place in the Auvergne (a one year project which, I can tell you, I am looking forward to completing at the end of this month so enjoy it while you can).

I am relentlessly exposed to third party-sold filler ads (mainly adult dating sites and French supermarkets) and now a real beaut - a banner advert on virtually every single page for a prime competitor of the IHT, The Economist, a deal I am sure is barter between the two media titles.

It's a sorry state of affairs when you have to give away most of your inventory (of which you have too much in the first place) to a competitor for no cash.

What I can say however is that dominant banner advertising on a web site is certainly effective - The Economist's ad is burnt into my brain this morning - but unless the execution changes and one has multiple versions thereof, after the first three times you see it, it's just plain annoying. And not likely to make me click through.

So, the lesson for web site owners is have less inventory at higher CPMs, for advertisers to dominate a site (as the NYT recently did with Facebook to startling good affect for one day) but with multiple creative executions.

I don't think anyone has got Internet advertising figured out yet, either creatively; as hosts; and certainly not as sellers: CPMs are in the pan and the whole currency is completely debased, as is your brand when an IHT reader is exposed to adult dating sites and French supermarkets because the site has given away the inventory to Internet advertising networks to sell for peanuts.

******************

NYT Company update: closed at $7.19 yesterday. Still plenty of time to short it again before the upturn in 2010.

I was saying 2010 but if you look at commodity market futures contracts you might want to scratch recession, replace word depression and think 2011. I'm not sure the Grey Lady has got 2 fiscal years in here with that amount of borrowing, earnings sinking, debt cost rising....

Maybe I'm wrong. Who knows. I still think they need a smart idea or two.

In other times the smart employees would probably jump ship, but I guess there aren't many ships for the rats to run to that aren't also sinking, and then of course, there's always the addictive handcuffs of stock options (which at these prices means people are going to hang around for quite a while).

So even if the ship is sinking and the stock options are worthless why make a move to a competitor, MSM, new media, a different industry.

You have - for now - a job, a salary (a bonus?!), there's nobody out there handing out better jobs, so sit tight, cross your fingers and hope the administrator will honor your terms of employment in the event the company goes bankcrupt.

(Did you see the piece in yesterday's IHT about a Goldman Sachs partner, a bankruptcy lawyer, quitting the firm to return to a bankruptcy law firm. The reason given? He missed the law. Sure. The next day, word gets out that Goldmans are set to lose $2 billion, the first quartely loss since they went public. This guy knew where the money is for the forseeable future - in wrapping up failed giant corporates.)

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
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Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

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Maureen Dowd: A Dead Woman Talking as she Discusses the Future of Newspapers.

2008-12-02T06:34:00.008+01:00

Many of you will know that one of my hobbies is awaiting the first serious coverage of the fate of the NYT (the Company closed trading yesterday, back under $7).

Well, to my knowledge, that article is yet to run, but when one of their leading columnists starts talking about it, one has to assume that there is a strong conversation going on in the upper floors of exec. power at the NYT.

The NYT can run pieces on the implosion of the luxury goods advertising market, the implosion of AP and CNN moving to fill that space, they can even run front page (?) stories about Facebook allowing users to connect to other sites, even stories about Promoting luxury in hard times (Buying all the items listed in the luxury-themed winter issue of Time Style & Design would cost more than $51 million, or about 340 times the annual income of its average reader - the nerve of it given their own T magazine and NO reference to the IHT cancelling its own conference on something described as Sustainable Luxury, an IHT Luxury Conference that was scheduled to run from today in New Dehli - more on that below.)

But heaven forbid anyone write about the elephant in the room - the future of their own newspaper.

Time to give Reuters a call and then run that piece? After all, we do pride ourselves on objectivity do we not; unbiased fair and impartial reporting of the news?

Of course there is another explanation behind Dowd's piece - she's merely positioning herself for imminent retirement or transfer to blogosphere because there are about as many people who believe in her one trick pony show column as there are people who believe that newspapers aren't in trouble. What a visionary!

Maureen Dowd: A penny for my thoughts
By Maureen Dowd
Monday, December 1, 2008
PASADENA, California:
I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself "Thomas Edison."
The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding "a one-way ticket to Bangalore."
Macpherson - bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 - should know. He pioneered "glocal" news - outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online "newspaperless," as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.
"Everyone has to get ready for what's inevitable - like King Canute and the tide coming in - and that's really my message to the industry," the editor and publisher said. "Many newspapers are dead men walking. They're going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I'm pioneering."
I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.
"In brutal terms," said Macpherson, whose father was a typesetter, printer and photographer, "it's going to get to the point where saving the industry may require some people losing their jobs. The newspaper industry is coming to a General Motors moment - except there's no one to bail them out." He said it would be "irresponsible" for newspapers not to explore offshoring options.
He said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the '90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.
So he thought, "Where can I get people who can write the word for less?" In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers - including five reporters - who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
"I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business," he says. "A thousand words pays $7.50."
A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.
I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn't think of herself as a journalist. "I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always," she wrote back. "Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field."
Macpherson admits you can lose something in the translation - the Pasadena City Council Webcast that the Indian reporters now watch once missed two African-American lawmakers walking out in protest - but says the question is, how significant is it?
At first the reaction to covering Pasadena from 8,000 miles away and 13.5 hours ahead was "absolutely brutal," Macpherson recalled. Journalism professors keened and Larry Wilson, the public editor at The Pasadena Star-News, called it "nutty."
But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press' chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group - which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers - told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, "maybe even offshore."
Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews' papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, "If you need to offshore it, offshore it," and said after the speech, "In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter."
Macpherson feels "vindicated," but also "conflicted" about the idea of having an American newspaper industry fueled by Indian labor. "I mean, I am an American too," he said. "I had two ancestors in the Revolutionary War. My mother was in the Daughters of the American Revolution."
It's not easy being a visionary, he said: "I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that's a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you're nuts."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/01/opinion/edowd.php

***********************

It was unfortunate that on Thursday 27th November, during the attacks in Mumbai, IHT.com decided to run the profiles of participants in their "Sustainable Luxury" conference which was to have taken place at the Imperial Hotel, New Delhi, from Dec. 2-4.

The IHT did manage to post a cancellation notice that day, but the profiles remained up on iht.com and are there now (see list below).

One can understand why the conference was cancelled - according to IHT publisher SDJ "Following the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, we felt it was inappropriate to hold the conference at such a difficult time for India". (Naturally there was "the sensitivity to safety concerns for all participants" i.e no one is going to come, in stark contrast to an op-ed piece that ran last week by a Mumbai born US-resident who was going to Mumbai to check into a hotel to show support.)

One might well have argued, as I did, that holding an Oil and Gas conference in Russia was inappropriate, just as as holding a Luxury conference in India, a country of quite unimaginable poverty was also inappropriate. But no matter there.

Remember the big scandal this year, when Vogue India draped 'luxury goods' over some of India's poorest? How quick we forget.

Back on Sept 1st, the headline was Trying to sell luxury goods amid stark poverty, let alone in a recession.

NEW DELHI: An old woman missing her top front teeth holds a tot in rumpled clothes - who is sporting a Fendi bib. At retail, the bib sells for about $100.
A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding helmetless and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way - except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag prominently displayed on her wrist. It costs over $10,000, if you can find one.
Elsewhere, a toothless, barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella costing about $200.
Welcome to the new India - at least as Vogue sees it.

The editorial spread was "not just tacky but downright distasteful," said Kanika Gahlaut, a columnist for The Mail Today, who dubbed it an "example of vulgarity." There is nothing "fun or funny" about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen, she said by telephone.
"There are farmer suicides here, for God's sake," she said, referring to thousands of Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the past decade after debts piled up.
Nearly half of India's population - about 455 million people - live on less than $1.25 a day, according to World Bank figures released last week.

The Vogue India editor, Priya Tanna, had a simple message to critics of the August shoot: "'Lighten up,"'
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/01/business/vogue.php

I note that Priya didn't get the nod to be a keynote speaker at the IHT's conference: that privilege went to Bandana Tewari, fashion features director, Vogue India (for full list of participants see below).

The double standards shown by the NYT/IHT about writing about Luxury- witness their implicit critique of Time Promoting luxury in hard times ran in the IHT today, the same day they ran this little gem: Luxury luggage woos the jet set

This is the built in problem of the size of the NYT - it seems the exec editor of the IHT, let alone the NYT, seems to have little idea about what each section is running on each day and how that makes up an overall narrative, stuck as they are in ridiculous vertical information hierarchies, the uselessness of which I try to point out at A Place in the Auvergne each day.

Anna Zegna, head of the image and store planning department, Ermenegildo Zegna Group
Bandana Tewari, fashion features director, Vogue India
Priya Tanna, head of Condé Nast India
Alison Smale, IHT managing editor
Pia Singh, chairwoman, DLF Retail Developers Ltd.
Peter Simon, founder and director, Monsoon and Accessorize
Charu Sachdev, founder and chief executive officer, TSG International Marketing Pvt. Ltd.
Pierre Rainero, artistic, image and strategy director, Cartier
François-Henri Pinault, chairman and chief executive officer, PPR
Alain Dominique Perrin, executive director, Richemont Group
Dries Van Noten
Kamal Nath, Indian minister for commerce and industry
Mohan Murjani, chairman, Murjani Group
Sabyasachi Mukherjee
Stella McCartney
Tomas Maier, creative director, Bottega Veneta
Kavita Maharaj, director of global corporate relationships, Havas Media
Sergio Loro Piana, chairman, Loro Piana Group
Dr. Amin Jaffer, international director of Asian art, Christie's
John Hooks, deputy managing director, Giorgio Armani Group
Jeffrey Graham, executive director of customer insight, The New York Times
Anand Giridharadas, IHT columnist
Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director, Balenciaga
Lapo Elkann, head of worldwide brand promotion, Fiat Auto S.p.A
Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, IHT publisher
Vinay Dixit, senior director of Asia consumer centers, McKinsey & Company
Santosh Desai, managing director and chief executive officer, Future Brands Ltd.
Anil Chopra, chief executive officer, Lakme Limited
Guy Champniss, global director of business insights, Havas Media Intelligence
Patrick Chalhoub, joint chief executive officer of the regional businesses of the Chalhoub Group
Roberto Cavalli
Christian Blanckaert, executive vice president of Hermès International
Gaurav Bhatia, head of marketing for Moët Hennessy (LVMH), India
Jem Bendell, director of Lifeworth
Manish Arora
Leonard M. Apcar, IHT deputy managing editor and chief editor of the Asian edition of the paper Suzy Menkes, conference chairwoman

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

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If the luxury goods advertising market slows down in 2009 how is the IHT going to remain a viable financial concern?

2008-11-26T11:13:00.006+01:00

What's this a picture of?

The IHT's 2008 Christmas party? No.

A group of market players who punted on NYT Company Stock dropping below $5 in 2008, celebrating last weekend after Friday 21st November saw that stock trade at a low of $4.95? No.

(No as in no, it's not a picture of investors celebrating that event but yes, as in yes, there were some parties last weekend for investors who made that call earlier this year. NTY Company stock really did drop below $5 and it's now trading - as of yesterday's market close - at $7.19.)

Actually, it's a picture of some luxury goods bloke's annual bash in 2007, and in 2008 it's these people's money that have formed the backbone of the IHT's advertising revenue - fashion, watches and other luxury goods from property to hotels.

However it would seem that not even the high end sector is immune from recession, as reported in yesterday's IHT. Not good news and I am sure JCD and SDJ must be in nigh-continuous meetings revising down, and down, and down, their 2009 advertising budgets.

I don't envy them. Even Denise Warren is on record as saying there is "absolutely nervousness in the marketplace", which is PR speak for "we're absolutely in a complete state of panic meltdown at the NYTMG and have no idea what to do."

P.S This is a NYT media article reporting the perils of the advertising marketing that does finally manage to talk at least about the NYT, even quoting Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising officer at The New York Times Media Group. However, unless I've missed it, a broader story about the fate of the NYT Company remains to be written, as does one about News Corp. Perhaps there is a truce between the two companies - we won't write about what a perilous state you're in if you don't write the same about us. Sooner or later a big name blogger will, and the NYT will be left looking very silly.

As sales drop, luxury brands are cutting back
By Stephanie Clifford
Monday, November 24, 2008
NEW YORK: Gold was raining from above for luxury brands in the good old days of 2007.
Last December, the designer Marc Jacobs held his annual holiday party for 800 guests, including revelers from Vogue, W and Harper's Bazaar, in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York. Using the theme of Arabian Nights, Jacobs had arranged for tableaux vivants, contortionists, five open bars, bare-chested women bedecked in gold necklaces, bare-chested men balancing candelabras on their heads and, at one point, a shower of gold glitter poured over the guests.
Jacobs has held the party for each of the past 18 years, but on Nov. 4, a short e-mail message was sent out by his business partner, Robert Duffy: "Due to the financial climate, I had to make the decision to cancel the 2008 holiday party."
After getting through most of this year unscathed, luxury brands are suffering. Rich consumers who were relatively insulated from the economic downturn continued spending, but that has changed in the past few months. While luxury spending began to fall slightly after June, in October alone it dropped 20.1 percent, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which estimates consumer spending in the retail and service sectors.
Graff Diamonds, the London retailer, is among those cutting its budget. "We're definitely not taking on any new advertising, and we're cutting back on all our current advertising," a Graff spokeswoman said. She declined to specify a figure but said the cuts were lower in Britain than in the United States.
Brioni, the Italian fashion line, will cut its advertising by 10 percent to 15 percent in U.S. publications, said Antonella De Simone, the co-chief executive.
Other high-end projects - and the advertising that would accompany them - are being delayed or canceled. Orient-Express Hotels canceled new buildings in Miami; Cartagena, Spain; Zambia; and Puglia, Italy. The American developer Donald Trump is postponing a $300 million development in Philadelphia, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel company has halted projects in Florida, Vancouver and California.
Some luxury brands continue - quietly - to spend on client dinners and hold parties, which they view as directly affecting sales. The events may not erase economic concerns, however.
In October, the Swiss watch brand Vacheron Constantin held a party to promote a new line of watches, some costing as much as $60,000. At the event, it seemed like pre-crisis times: Waiters passed trays of zucchini-wrapped lobster and beef en croûte and filled glasses with Moët & Chandon Champagne.
"As of today, I think it would be wrong to stop everything because of the crisis," Julien Tornare, president of Vacheron Constantin North America, said in an interview. "Of course we will adjust if we have to in the future, but right now we don't want to react."
But more than half of affluent consumers have cut their spending on luxury products from a year ago, according to a study by Unity Marketing, a market-research firm. Those consumers' confidence in the economy is at the lowest level in five years.
"The stereotype in our sector is the high-end luxury brands are Teflon to a recession, which, of course, is nonsense," said Alexander Duckworth, the founder of Point One Percent, a New York company that advises luxury brands on marketing. "Much more so than in a traditional recession, this has really hit quite hard at the top and quite quickly at the top. We're just seeing the very beginning of this."
Ronald Jackson, chief executive of Tradema of America, which markets and distributes Girard-Perregaux watches in the United States, said he was reducing his advertising budget in the United States by about 20 percent for the first quarter.
"We have retailers that are saying, 'You know what? We have this on order, but we need you to not ship it until things get better,"' Jackson said. "We have to react in some way."
The drop-off in luxury business means bad news for magazines and newspapers that have grown to depend increasingly on luxury advertising.
Advertising pages at the top U.S. luxury magazines fell 22 percent for December issues from a year earlier, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Vogue, for example, dropped to 221 pages this December, from 284 pages last December, while Food & Wine went to 126 pages from 160, the newsletter said.
That has meant cutbacks at publishers. In October, Condé Nast announced it would reduce Men's Vogue from 10 issues a year to 2, reduce the number of issues of Condé Nast Portfolio and cut magazine budgets by 5 percent.
Niche Media, which publishes Gotham and Hamptons, laid off some employees and closed another magazine. American Express Publishing, which owns Departures, Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine, is laying off 4 percent of its staff.
"It's definitely an environment that most have never seen," said Ed Ventimiglia, publisher of Departures. "Everyone is very concerned and somewhat confused as to what they should do."
High-end advertising was one of the few strong categories earlier in the year. Luxury ad spending in categories measured by Nielsen Monitor-Plus actually rose 6.7 percent through August over the previous year, even as almost all other areas cut their spending.
Publishers did not miss that trend. In September, Dow Jones introduced WSJ, a glossy magazine, to attract luxury advertisers, and The Washington Post introduced FW, a fashion magazine. The New York Times Co. has said its style magazines are big revenue sources, and magazine publishers like Hearst, Condé Nast and Niche Media have also bet that high-end consumption and advertisements would continue.
Facing a steeper decline, publishers are feeling very vulnerable.
"What the first salvo seems to be, going into 2009, is luxury advertisers - who will go unnamed - are trying to take advantage of the negative news in the market in order to secure a more favorable rate," said Jim Taylor, publisher of Town & Country, a Hearst magazine.
"It would be a reasonable argument if our costs weren't going up dramatically, but we're affected by the same things they're affected by," he said. "Paper's way up, postal's way up."
Taylor said he was expecting smaller brands, in particular, to reduce the number of ads they would run.
At Condé Nast Traveler, advertisers are being slow to commit, and financial services and real estate ads are plummeting, said the publisher, Lisa Hughes.
Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer of Dow Jones, the News Corp. division that publishes The Wall Street Journal and WSJ, said luxury advertising in the newspaper was about flat. There were 51 advertisers in the first issue of WSJ, he said, and 52 so far in the second issue, which comes out in December.
Luxury advertising in The New York Times has been "very stable" this year, said Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising officer at The New York Times Media Group. She said the holiday issue of the fashion publication T Magazine was up by one page of advertising compared with last year. Still, she said, "there is absolutely nervousness in the marketplace."
And Ventimiglia of Departures said the January issue was down in ad pages. "A page here and a page there add up," Ventimiglia said, "even though many lost pages are a result of delayed budgets, and we're taking a hit."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/24/technology/luxury.php

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

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The future of newspapers in a world of Capitalism 2.0

2008-11-19T08:08:00.006+01:00

I've blogged a lot about a publicly endowed public-to-private move by the NYT Company in order to save itself.

I just want to clarify something for a Think! reader who wrote to me about this.

Yes, one option is to go the non-profit endowment route.

But another, and one which is part of my thinking, is that pure endowment isn't the only play here.

Let's just consider for a moment that, after the recent financial meltdown, we're going to see new flora and fauna emerging, a bit like after a forest fire.

I think this is likely not just in the case of newspaper companies and their offerings, but also capitalism in general. It's what I call the birth of Capitalism 2.0. (I don't know if anyone else is using that term, but if so I haven't read about it.)

Capitalism 2.0 is a market place for profit-minded investors (yes, capitalists still want an ROI) within which different classes of investors emerge who are willing, for reasons of contributing to the broader base of social capital, to accept reduced, capped or fixed income returns on their investments.

In my scenario of 100 rich Americans/foundations/endowments/whoever stumping up, let's say, $10 million each to achieve this for the NYT Company, they would enable the NYT Company to survive in the short term and flourish in the long term (once the NYT Co. get with the programme of what is actually going on in the media world and what the market wants and come up with some new ideas). But a fully blown not for profit endowment is not what I have in mind.

What I have in mind is an investment class of managed profit expectations where investors are willing to accept, in return for a broader (can we say greater?) good, lower returns on their capital than they can achieve elsewhere.

Capitalism 2.0 will still leave plenty of investment classes for people who are driven purely by greed and profit, but in 25 years time, might we be asking each other at dinner parties whether we're into - to shorthand the idea - social capital class B investments or pure profit motive class A investments? Emerging social trends will determine which class of investment is called A and which class is called B.

This differential between investment classes can be applied to any company or sector you care to mention. Oil companies that are Investment B class or Investment A class for example, the former being one that caps its profit margins at a certain percentage, re-invests that money in alternative non-fossil energies and pays out, yes, a lower dividend.

Given the NYT families who own the voting stock are going to have to swallow considerably lower dividends for some years to come, even if (and it's an if) they survive, might they like to go for this model and at least claim some glory for developing the concept (after me that is)?

We're constantly told what terrifically socially minded and all round great people the family is (a bit like the Bancrofts, ho hum) so let's see them put their money where their mouth is. Sorry kids, some of you are going to have to get real jobs, but you've all got the nice Manhattan brown house/loft apartment/trust fund based on NYT dividends to date, so it's not all bad is it?

As for management and editorial staff, well, sorry too.

You're going to have to take a pay cut.

I would if I were you in this scenario because given the media meltdown, both re, media market B-side and editorial staffing cuts, there's plenty of members of the liberal media elite who would be more than willing and capable of working for a Capitalism 2.0 NYT Co. on a wage platform of, off the top of my head, at least 25% less than you're currently getting paid.

With the $10 million members of the liberal media elite poneying up to get the debt down by around a billion dollars, the company going public-to-private, the resulting drop in debt servicing fees and 25% off the biggest cost base without you losing your job, this could be one hell of an offer.

And we'll all get a chance to see just how liberal you and the Ochs-Sulzbergers really are. Which would be nice wouldn't it?

If you don't like the deal on the table you can always go and set up a blog, because boy, that's the future isn't it (not).

And let's not forget, that with NYT Company stock trading at as low as $6.90 yesterday, your performance related stock options aren't worth a bag of beans anyway, so no big loss on that front.

Naturally investor/employee participation is going to be a big part of the reward of being in Class B investments as an investor or employee, so we may need a few changes of management style. But judging by the mood music I'm hearing, no one would be worrying too much about that.

BTW: if something like this does happen at the NYT Co. I still want that place on the board. And given how much I've made out of the naked short selling of NYT Company stock in the last 24 months, I'm more than happy to put the first 10 mill on the table. Can't do fairer than that ;)

Today's article in the IHT about the Smithsonian (see below) is perhaps relevant in all this, but there are more thoughts beneath it about the future of newspapers in the world of Capitalism 2.0.

At meeting, Smithsonian practices new openness
By Robin Pogrebin
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
WASHINGTON: Fielding questions about its diminished endowment fund, the possibility of charging admission fees and the fate of its fabled yet shuttered Arts and Industries Building, the Smithsonian Institution held the first public board meeting in its 162-year history on Monday as part of its new commitment to openness and accountability. Sitting on the stage of a 565-seat auditorium at the institution's National Museum of Natural History, members of the governing body, or Board of Regents — including members of Congress — took questions from the audience present and online.
The two-hour meeting was a window on public concerns about the Smithsonian's shaky financial state and potentially endangered programs, rather than merely a forum for combative accusations after two tumultuous years in which the institution has been battered by mismanagement scandals. Museumgoers and Smithsonian staff members had the opportunity to ask whatever they wanted about the organization's operations and direction.
Although billed as an open board meeting, the session seemed more like a chance for the regents to hear from the public than for the public to observe the regents at work. Questions ranged from broad issues like the thrust of the Smithsonian's new strategic planning initiative, intended to draft a course of action for the institution's financial future and its programs, to whether a tram might be built at the National Zoo.
There were nonetheless more challenging moments.
"Why did you not all resign?" was the first question, submitted on a card by an audience member. It referred to the Board of Regents' decision to stay on after revelations about the lavish expense-account spending of Lawrence Small, the Smithsonian's former secretary, or chief executive, who resigned in March 2007.
Roger Sant, chairman of the Smithsonian's executive committee, replied that the regents had asked themselves, "Do we resign, or do we roll up our sleeves — and we chose the latter."
The question that drew one of the most emphatic responses from the regents concerned the viability of the Smithsonian's policy of free admission at all of its components, which include 19 museums and galleries, the zoo and 9 research centers. The Smithsonian draws 70 percent of its $1 billion annual budget from the federal government.
One written comment suggested that "the luxury of free admission must be a thing of the past." The audience booed.
Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and a Smithsonian regent, called the admission policy "one of the great hallmarks" of the institution.
Calling attention to the Smithsonian's unusual governance structure was the scheduled role of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who serves as the Smithsonian's chancellor and traditionally presides over board meetings. At the last minute the chief justice was unable to attend and Sant presided instead. "We've been trying to do some fixing," Sant said upon opening the meeting. "The board views this meeting as an opportunity to directly engage with all of you about the issues facing the Smithsonian."
Many questions were answered by G. Wayne Clough, the former president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who took over in July as the Smithsonian's secretary.
He faces the task of restoring stability to an institution struggling with a $2.5 billion shortfall, crumbling buildings and a recent legacy of improprieties by leading Smithsonian executives. "We believe the Smithsonian is at a turning point," he said in his opening remarks. "The world is rapidly changing in so many ways."
Like other organizations, the Smithsonian has been seriously affected by the nation's economic downturn; the value of its endowment has dropped 21 percent since June. "Of course we can't predict the future," Clough said, "but we can prepare for it."
He said the Smithsonian had "to find ways to be more self-reliant." The institution raised $135.6 million last year, he said, an improvement on its goal of $115 million.
The developer and philanthropist Eli Broad, who serves as a regent, said the board had become more conservative about its investments.
The organization has also raised $400,000 toward the $1.3 million cost of its strategic planning effort, Clough said. But he said that fund-raising was not enough and that the institution needed to set about attracting a younger and more diverse work force and audience.
Clough said he had established a committee to ensure that executives at the institution — including regents, staff members and contractors — reflected the nation's ethnic diversity. "The Smithsonian is the treasure of America and it represents America," he said. "Therefore its Board of Regents should as well."
Several of the questions dealt with the Smithsonian's neo-Classical 1881 Arts and Industries Building, which has been closed for four years and is listed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the nation's most endangered places because of its state of disrepair.
Clough said that the cost of repairs had been estimated at about $75 million and that the Smithsonian would conclude a study on its future use in January. One member of the audience suggested setting aside part of the building as an information center for all the institutions on the National Mall.
The Board of Regents plans to hold open meetings at least once a year. The next one is expected in June. Sant said the board might adjust the format in the future.
"We don't have it exactly right," he said. "But at least we're trying to tinker with it."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/arts/18smithsonian.php

If you think all of the above is a load of old bollocks then you'll be cheered by these remarks by Mr. Capitalism 1.0s recent remarks:

Murdoch upbeat about the future of newspapers
By ROHAN SULLIVAN – 2 days ago
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Global media magnate Rupert Murdoch says doomsayers who are predicting the Internet will kill off newspapers are "misguided cynics" who fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers.
Newspaper companies in the United States and elsewhere are facing fundamental changes to their businesses as more people get their news from the Internet and other sources, and advertisers follow the market away from the paper-and-ink format.
Murdoch, the Australian-born chairman and chief executive of News Corp., said in a speech broadcast Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees" that the Internet offered opportunities as well as challenges and that newspapers would always be around in some form or other.
"Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," Murdoch said in a speech, recorded in the United States and relayed nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It was the latest in an annual ABC series of lectures by a prominent Australian.
"Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights" in the 21st century, Murdoch said.
Murdoch grew a small city newspaper he inherited in 1953 into one of the world's largest media conglomerates that now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox News Channel and Sky Broadcasting, Dow Jones & Co. and the online networking site MySpace.
He said people now were "hungrier for information that ever before" and that papers have an edge over bloggers and other newcomers because they are more trusted by readers.
"Readers want what they've always wanted: a source they can trust," Murdoch said. "That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future."
He said newspapers would have to evolve from the physical item to "news brands" that are delivered in a variety of ways and are flexible for readers.
"I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone," he said. "But our real business isn't printing on dead trees. It's giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.
"It's true that in the coming decades, the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we' ll see gains in circulation — on our Web pages, through our RSS feeds, in e-mails delivering customized news and advertising, to mobile phones," Murdoch said.
"In this coming century, the form of delivery may change, but the potential audience for our content will multiply many times over," he said.
Murdoch cited two of his most prestigious newspapers, The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, as examples of how newspaper brands can win large online readerships.
But he stressed that even these papers must recognize that online customers will decide what news they want and how they receive it.
"To compete today, you can't offer the old one-size-fits-all approach to news," he said. "The challenge is to use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves and then deliver it in the ways that they want."
To capitalize on online opportunities, Murdoch said The Wall Street Journal was planning to offer three tiers of content online — free news, a subscriber-level service, and a third "premium service" of reader-customizable "high-end financial news and analysis."
Murdoch was scathing of journalists who predicted the death of newspapers as self-pitying and "misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity."
"The newspaper, or a very close electronic cousin, will always be around," he said. "It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo around society and the world."

That's all great Rupert but your share price is hardly crash hot either is it?

On that cheery note, I am taking a break from Think! for at least a week, if not more. Knee operation in hospital and other more pressing matters to deal with. I may or may not be back.

Can I just conclude by telling those people who edit the simply dreadful T magazine that, as reported in their piece on Amsterdam in their recent travel edition, Amsterdam is NOT the capital of Holland; The Hague is the capital of The Netherlands. (I think we can sadly take it as a given that the headline writers weren't thinking from their desks in Manhattan about the various provinces in The Netherlands when they called that one.)

Finally.....CHRISTMAS COMPETITION

I'm running a prize competition for the Think! reader who most accurately predicts the NYT Company share price on 31 December, 2008. It's a good prize and I'll send it out in the first week of January, 2009, as well as announcing the winner (anonymous you may remain if you prefer but your entries to ihtreraders AT gmail.com please - if you want to claim the prize I will need your postal address at some point.)

And please, if you are a reader of this blog, and there seem to be lots of you, particularly in Paris, London, Hong Kong and NY according to my stats, and if you haven't yet voted on the three polls on this blog that close at the end of this year, please take a minute to do so.

By far the biggest readership, as judged by the polls, is IHT subscribers but I have data and ISP addresses which would seem to suggest otherwise.

Time to fess up and vote!

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Putting the story back into newspaper storytelling

2008-11-19T07:50:00.004+01:00

One of my central theories about the decline of newspapers is that they've forgotten, in the world of 24 hour news cycle, the meaning and value of the word 'new' in their product offering of 'new' information in newspapers.

(For more on this take a look at a revised posting on repeat stories in the IHT.)

Another, is that partly as a result of this, they've just forgotten, or never realised they had to quickly acquire, the skills of story telling: developing meaningful daily narratives that engage readers in interesting, paradoxical and stimulating ways. I'm not talking about individual pieces, I'm talking about the packaging of those stories into a narrative that people are excited by and want to follow.

Fuck whether it's useful to their job or 'the power of knowledge' or all that other crap newspapers use to market themselves. Tell me a goddamn good story man!

The reason I sign off these blog posts with the invitation to 'explore an alternative daily narrative' at A Place in the Auvergne, is that this Auvernge blog is, among many other things, an illustration of how to tell story using exactly the same information as appears on any given day in the IHT or at www.iht.com. It's rushed, it's not perfect, it's illustrative only of my point, but if you give it some serious study for a day or two you should begin to get the, well, story.

So this piece on story in today's IHT did naturally catch my eye. Worth reading, and substituting the newspaper industry for the movie industry.

Putting the story back into onscreen storytelling
By Michael Cieply
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
LOS ANGELES: The movie world has been fretting for years about the collapse of stardom. Now there are growing fears that another chunk of film architecture is looking wobbly: the story.
In league with a handful of former Hollywood executives, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory plans to do something about that with the creation of a Center for Future Storytelling, which opened Tuesday. The center is envisioned as a "labette," a little laboratory, that will examine whether the old way of telling stories - particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end - is in serious trouble.
Its mission is not small. "The idea, as we move forward with 21st-century storytelling, is to try to keep meaning alive," said David Kirkpatrick, a founder of the new venture.
Once president of the Paramount Pictures motion picture group, Kirkpatrick last year joined some former colleagues in starting Plymouth Rock Studios, a planned Massachusetts film production center that will provide a home for MIT's storytelling lab while supporting it with $25 million over seven years.
Arguably, the movies are as entertaining as ever. With a little help from holiday comedies like "Yes Man" with Jim Carrey and "Bedtime Stories" with Adam Sandler, the U.S. domestic motion picture box office appears poised to match last year's gross revenues of $9.7 billion, a record.
But Kirkpatrick and company are not alone in their belief that Hollywood's ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.
"I even saw a plasma screen above a urinal," said Peter Guber, the longtime film producer and former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment who contends that traditional narrative - the kind with unexpected twists and satisfying conclusions - has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter.
A common gripe is that gamelike, open-ended series like "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Spider-Man" have eroded filmmakers' ability to wrap up their movies in the third act. Another is that a preference for proven, outside stories like the Harry Potter books is killing Hollywood's appetite for original storytelling.
Guber, who teaches a course at the University of California, Los Angeles, called "Navigating in a Narrative World," is singularly devoted to story. Almost 20 years ago Guber made a colossal hit of Warner Brothers' "Batman" after joining others in laboring over the story for the better part of a decade.
But in the last few years, Guber said, big films with relatively small stories have been hurried into production to meet release dates. Meanwhile, hundreds of pictures with classic narratives have been eclipsed by other media - he mentioned "The Duchess," a period drama that foundered last month as potential viewers were presumably distracted by the noise of a presidential election - or suppressed by louder, less story-driven brethren.
"How do you compete with 'Transformers'?" asked Guber.
Ultimately, he blames the audience for the perceived breakdown in narrative quality: in the end, he argued, consumers get what they want.
At the Sundance Institute, as it happens, other deep thinkers tend to think that film storytelling is doing just fine.
"Storytelling is flourishing in the world at a level I can't even begin to understand," said Ken Brecher, the institute's executive director. Brecher spoke last week, as his colleagues continued sorting through 9,000 films - again, a record - that have been submitted for the coming Sundance Film Festival.
The festival, set for Jan. 15 to Jan. 25 in Park City, Utah, will have story as its theme. The idea, Brecher said, is to identify film stories that have defined the festival during its 25-year run, and figure out what made them tick. (Brecher said the final choices had not been made and declined to identify candidates.)
If anything, Brecher added, technology has simply brought mass storytelling, on film or otherwise, to people who once thought Hollywood had cornered the business.
The people at MIT, in any case, may figure out whether classic storytellers like Homer, Shakespeare and Spielberg have had their day.
Starting in 2010, a handful of faculty members - "principal investigators," the university calls them - will join graduate students, undergraduate interns and visitors from the film and book worlds in examining, among other things, how virtual actors and "morphable" projectors (which instantly change the appearance of physical scenes) might affect a storytelling process that has already been considerably democratized by digital delivery.
A possible outcome, they speculate, is that future stories might not stop in Hollywood at all. "The business model is definitely being transformed, maybe even blown apart," said Frank Moss, a former entrepreneur who is now the media lab's director.
Kirkpatrick is not completely at ease with that prospect, partly because his Plymouth Rock Studios, a $480 million enterprise, will need scores of old-fashioned, story-based Hollywood productions to fill the 14 soundstages it plans to build.
In a telephone interview last week, Kirkpatrick said he might take a cue from Al Gore, who used a documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," to heighten concern about global warming. Kirkpatrick is now considering an alarm-bell documentary of his own, he said.
Its tentative title: "A World Without Story."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/20/arts/plot.php

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

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NYT's media correspondent tells us all we need to know about what's wrong with newspapers

2008-11-19T07:32:00.003+01:00

I think this speaks for itself. I mean, really, this is like GM backing SUVs and being surprised when Toyota and Renault do better.

Filling media gaps, watchdogs spring up online
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
SAN DIEGO: Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light - city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.
Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its big newspaper, The Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from the downtown - a site that did not exist four years ago.
As newspapers in the United States - and much of the western world - shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, taking up some of the slack and forcing the mainstream media to follow the stories they uncover.
Here, it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists - the province of the mainstream media, but without the expensive paper and ink. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, Connecticut; the Twin Cities in Minnesota; Seattle; St. Louis, Missouri; and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The fledgling movement has reached a critical mass, its founders think, to form a planned association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for by themselves. And hardly a week goes by without a call from frustrated journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
"Voice is doing really significant work, driving the agenda on redevelopment and some other areas, putting local politicians and businesses on the hot seat," said Dean Nelson, journalism director at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. "I have them come into my classes, and I introduce them as, 'This is the future of journalism."'
That is a subject of hot debate among people who follow the besieged newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is nowhere near robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so, financially, VoiceofSanDiego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
New nonprofits without a specific geographic focus also have sprung up to fill other niches, like ProPublica, devoted to investigative journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which looks into problems abroad. A similar group, the Center for Investigative Reporting, dates back decades.
But experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
"These are some of the big questions about the future of the business," said Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nonprofit news online "has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper."
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many. They have a complex relationship with the mainstream media, whose failings have created an opening for new sources of news, and whose cutbacks have created a surplus of unemployed journalists for them to hire.
"No one here welcomes the decline of newspapers," said Andrew Donohue, one of two executive editors at VoiceofSanDiego. "We can't be the main news source for this city, not for the foreseeable future. We only have 11 people."
Those people are almost all young, some of them refugees from the mainstream media. The executive editors - Donohue, 30, and Scott Lewis, 32 - each had a few years of experience at small papers before abandoning newsprint. So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service. The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is thin - strictly local, selective in coverage and without the wire service articles that plump up most sites.
On a budget of less than $800,000 this year - almost $200,000 more than last year - everyone does double duty. Lewis writes a political column, and Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing, and Woolley, president and chief executive officer, said he is convinced the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity," he said. "It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/voice.php

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

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Attributor and Paid Content for the NYT?

2008-11-18T08:27:00.003+01:00

I recently posted on Why Newspapers Need to Come up with a Paid Content Model. citing in large part a study released by the company Attributor (along with my own blog A Place in the Auvergne as proof positive of how much content is nicked by people like me.)

The point I made was that if you can't come up with a paid content model, don't bitch and moan if people nick you content without renumerating you.

Whilst I'm not yet in a position to judge if Attributor's model can help the NYT's structural and rather systemic flaws, I was interested to receive this email from Attributor's VP marketing, Rich Pearson.

Hi Ian,

I work for Attributor and worked on the study you cited. I agree with your point - we're trying to enable the open syndication model in which "payment" equals an ad revenue share of any money made from re-use.

In this world, content can flow freely and those who produce quality, original content get compensated.

Wouldn't that world be a nice one to live in?

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

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Public-to-Private, socially minded rich New Yorkers and Crowdfunding as a possible way out for the New York Times.

2008-11-18T07:57:00.004+01:00

Regular followers of this blog will have noted that I've been blogging a lot on the idea of the NYT taking the company private/charitable status with the help of a group of very wealthy, socially minded rich New Yorkers.

I'm indebted to a Think! reader, Simon Garner at PBS, for tipping me off to another variable in this equation which is crowdfunding.

Two projects are cited: spot.us and Representative Journalism.

Now my crowd idea was just a smaller one, involving some very rich people, rather than lots of micropayments, which is essentially what a subscription or kiosk purchase is, and that sure ain't working.

However Leonard Witt's idea over at Representative Journalism is closer to my thinking. He's talking about 1000 people (at a local level) making donations of $100 a year to cover a particular issue.

Well, roll that thought out to where I am and you come to say 100 people in the U.S.A. making a one off donation of $10 million dollars. That would pay off $1 billion of the NYT's debt of $1.2 billion, the company goes private/charitable status, and a lot of your problems are over.

Here below, is the piece written by Mark Glaser, a colleague of Simon's at PBS, about exploring crowdfunding for economic sustainability in journalism.

Below the piece, but check the link to see the comments of readers on how this idea was received. There are nice ideas in this piece, but as re. the NYT Company and in the real world I prefer mine. (If it comes off I want a seat on the charitable board btw. Seriously.)

Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business?

by Mark Glaser, November 13, 2008
Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. "It" is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and the economic recession.
Two experiments in crowdfunding, Spot.us and Representative Journalism, are testing the concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, while Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.
[Full Disclosure: I am on the advisory board to RepJ and, like Spot.us, have also received a grant from the Knight Foundation.]

Spot.us is the brainchild of journalist David Cohn (a.k.a. Digidave), who worked on NYU professor Jay Rosen's groundbreaking NewAssignment.net citizen journalism project and helped research the chapter on crowdfunding in Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing book. Cohn won a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for Spot.us, and writes about the project on MediaShift Idea Lab, the sister blog to MediaShift where Knight grantees write about their projects. Here's how Spot.us works:
1. Anyone can come up with a "Tip" or story idea they'd like to see covered. People can "pledge" money toward that story.
2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.
3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).
4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.
5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.
The site officially launched last Monday, but had already funded three stories through a simple wiki set up beforehand. Cohn told me that the challenge for Spot.us isn't so much the technology as it is the fundraising, something that is new to him as a journalist. He said that Spot.us is just one possible alternative business model for journalism.
"I never try to sell Spot.us as a silver bullet that will support a whole news organization," Cohn said. "But I do see it helping a news organization so they can do something beyond their regular means. They can strive for excellence, but it won't support day-to-day reporting. It has its limitations...Community-funded journalism relies on two basic shifts. First, the audience has to think of journalism as a public good like art that's worth sustaining with their own money. The second shift is with reporters who have to realize they are a personal brand and they can pitch the public."

Unlike Spot.us and its piecemeal approach to crowdfunding per story, RepJ takes a longer term outlook by hiring a full-time journalist to work for a local community or cover a specific issue. Leonard Witt, communication chair at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, came up with the idea for representative journalism and got a $51,000 grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation for the trial project in Minnesota. Witt believes that a community or interest group could raise $100 donations (or $2 per week) from 1,000 people to support a journalist who covers their locale or issue for a year.
Witt has yet to test this donation model; he's first trying to get his initial representative journalist, Bonnie Obremski, more ingrained in the community in Northfield, Minn.
"We are dealing with a total Northfield population of just 17,000," Witt told me via email. "We have to literally weave together an information community of members willing to pay for high quality journalism. So we have to work on three fronts: 1) we have to provide high quality journalism; 2) we have to get the community to know our journalist; and 3) the community has to feel that their membership in the community and the news and information it produces has value worthy of their financial support."
Crowdfunding Bloggers
MoveOn.org pioneered getting small donations to pay for political advocacy campaigns, and Barack Obama raised small donations from millions of people in the '08 campaign. And independent bloggers and online journalists have for years been asking their audience to help support their work through small donations. Political bloggers such as Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan, and tech blogger Jason Kottke have raised thousands of dollars from online fundraisers in the past. And freelance reporter/blogger Chris Allbritton financed a trip to cover the Iraq War in 2003 by raising nearly $15,000 from his readers, and wrote dispatches on his Back to Iraq blog.
Allbritton was able to finance a drastic change of beats, going from being a media and technology reporter to becoming a foreign correspondent covering war zones in the Middle East. By supporting his trip to Iraq, Allbritton's readers helped him gain steady work as a freelance correspondent to Time magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Daily News. Now, he is a Knight fellow at Stanford University on a year-long quest to see if the reader-supported model can work at an institutional level.
When I contacted Allbritton for this story, he was amused at the term "crowdfunding" and noted that its advocates might not realize how expensive foreign reporting really is -- especially in a war zone. Even with nearly $15,000 for his Iraq stint, Allbritton quickly went through the funds in just one month because of the high cost of being a foreign correspondent in Iraq. "There was no guarantee that more moneys would be forthcoming from an already tapped audience," he said. "Trust me: You don't want to suddenly find yourself broke in Iraq."
Even so, Allbritton was amazed that he could go cover a war at the behest of his audience, without approval from any editor or news organization.
"I didn't have to ask anyone's permission or check with anyone," he said. "I was relying on my own judgment. It was an amazing sense of freedom to do stories and explore things that I thought were really interesting. That said, it also carried a great sense of responsibility. I mean, when you're at a newspaper or magazine, you have an editor or two to answer to. Now, I had thousands of people watching me and I didn't want to let the donors down. I took that very seriously."
On a less serious subject -- satirical political blogging -- Ana Marie Cox was on the campaign trail covering John McCain for Radar Online when the magazine went belly up. She posted a Rate Card on her personal blog, asking her readers to support her coverage for the last week and a half of the campaign. For $10, you would get a personal thank-you email, and for $250, Cox would pose your question to a McCain advisor.
Cox was surprised that she raised more than $7,000 from her fans in just a few days.
"Words cannot properly convey my gratitude and amazement in the faith you people seem to have in a little Midwestern girl and her fondness for foul language, politics, and hard-luck stories -- not in that order," she wrote on her personal blog.
Still, Cox was quick to note that "due to the astronomical costs of traveling with a campaign, I am pretty sure that amount will run short of covering the trail through election day."
Not long after the pledge drive happened, Cox was picked up by the Washington Independent to continue providing reports from the McCain campaign.
Another blogger that recently started a crowdfunding drive is Jim Hopkins, a former USA Today reporter who writes the Gannett Blog as a watchdog to the newspaper chain and media conglomerate. For the past month Hopkins has been asking for $5 subscriptions from readers via PayPal, and raised nearly $1,500. But he had one particularly vexing problem: Most of his readers want to remain anonymous because they work for Gannett, so using PayPal would reveal who they are to him. To get around that problem, Hopkins set up a post office box to accept cash from them in the mail.
Hopkins told me he is trying to make money from Google AdSense ads, and is using online video to strengthen his appeal for funds.
"I had read that video is a good way to make an appeal because it's more emotional," he told me. "Until recently, my readers had not heard my voice or had a sense of who I was as a person. Just last week I figured out a cheap way to produce video, and people's reactions have been interesting. They said I might have come across as a mean, anti-management person, but the video made me seem more like a real human being. So if I used it as a fundraising tool it could result in more money coming in."
Hopkins is interested in using Spot.us to fund other story ideas, but he is worried that if he puts his pitches online, they could be scooped up by competitors.
"I have to think about ways to present my ideas without having them taken by someone else," he said. "That's an issue that Profnet has wrestled with for years; [it's a site] where a journalist presents a story to [potential] sources, but they have figured out a way around it."
Supporting Crowdfunding Operations
While an independent blogger or journalist might raise funds from readers directly, it's not something that comes naturally to most writers, who might have a gift for words but not business. That's where the "hub" idea makes more sense, and a platform such as Spot.us -- properly marketed -- could help connect writers with potential funders, and handle financial transactions. That hub model has worked at Kiva.org for funding entrepreneurs in the developing world; at DonorsChoose.org for matching charities to donors; as well as entertainment sites such as Sellaband for funding bands directly and IndieGoGo for funding films.

IndieGoGo launched at Sundance last January, and has raised more than $70,000, with more than 800 film projects posted on the site. Filmmakers pitch the public, and they can then micro-finance projects. IndieGoGo takes a 9% cut of all donations, and donors do not share in the proceeds from the film, instead getting quirky "VIP perks" such as film credits or trips to the set. IndieGoGo co-founder and head of marketing and strategy Slava Rubin told me one filmmaker who made a documentary about Iraq gave donors strips of a Persian rug that came from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Rubin thinks the crowdfunding model could work in journalism as long as the journalists can engage the right audience.
"If someone writes [a story about] corn in our energy supply, and they try to get money from people in Iowa, that could work," he said. "You need to be able to engage your audience. You have to be closely connected to your niche, and take advantage of the tools out there to engage that audience. There's Sellaband for music, and there are others, but you have to make a connection with the audience."
Cohn told me Spot.us would try to become sustainable by asking for donations to support the overall operation at the point of sale for story donations. He said that's been a successful strategy for Kiva.org, whose president told him that 79% of people giving money to entrepreneurs will give an extra 10% to cover the costs of Kiva.org's operation. Cohn also would like to get money from advertisers in new ways.
"[Someone like] Macy's could have a survey on our site, and Spot.us users can fill out a survey for them, and in return, they would get credit," he said. "So instead of Macy's giving money to a pitch, they would give it to users, and the users would decide where the money would go. I don't know if it's advertising, but it's a win-win -- the user gets real money to donate, the company gets a survey filled out. But that's in the future."

Wired contributing editor and "Crowdsourcing" author Jeff Howe told me that he was bullish on the crowdfunding model, because it takes much less effort to get someone to throw in a few bucks online than to do the free work of crowdsourcing. Howe thinks Spot.us has promise because of the low cost involved for freelance journalists.
"You just have to pay someone to write the piece, and as you and I know, a couple grand in our pocket will fund a week or more of reporting for us, and that's what the Spot.us model is," Howe said. "I'm really optimistic and hopeful for this as a model for journalism. We're in such disarray right now, where the music industry was in '02 or '03, because of changing mediums and a fickle audience."
One worry he did have was that journalism funders would expect a particular outcome from the story pitch -- and would get upset if the result didn't fit in their assumed world view.
"What you get with a newspaper is a convention to find the facts and write the story," Howe said. "I'm not sure how that convention changes with crowdfunding. I expect that the writers will come back with stories that the funders wanted to see. There's going to be an imperative -- unconciously or not -- to please the funders. And what we know of online communities is that they tend to gather around shared viewpoints and interests. Crowdfunding will work by tapping those communities and they are not disinterested, they will have an axe to grind. People who want you to investigate the local utility will already believe that the local utility is guilty of malfeasance."
What do you think about crowdfunding efforts by Spot.us and RepJ? Do you think micro-donations can support local freelance stories or a long-term journalist covering a particular community or issue? What potential conflicts do you see with these operations and how much could they help bridge the gap in the changing business model for traditional journalism? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/can-crowdfunding-help-save-the-journalism-business318.html

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

Headline Paradox when it comes to African Lives

2008-11-18T07:16:00.003+01:00

K. Annan was visiting the IHT's offices yesterday. He spoke, inter alia, of the need to keep up development money for Africa in times of economic crisis.

I wonder what he would make of the comparative treatment, most notably the headlines used and the length, of these two stories in today's IHT.

One concerns a black congregation church being burnt on U.S election night. That is described as 'an act of horror'(as well as being, further to my earlier post on the Spanish Royal story, two weeks behind the news curve).

A time of hope, marred by an act of horror
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/america/17land.php

A six-year-old boy being killed and his body dismembered in the east African state of Burundi, the latest in a series of attacks in the region on albinos, whose bodies are prized by witchdoctors, is headlined:

Albino boy killed and body dismembered in Burundi
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-TANZANIA-BURUNDI-ALBINOS.php

Which is an act of 'horror' seems pretty self-evident from where I'm sitting, if we don't want semantic devaluation to run wild, and I'll leave you to calculate the respective word count and news hole play.

However, in fairness, Mr. Gettleman in Nairobi did write about this 'horrific' problem back in June of this year (Albinos in Tanzania face deadly threat
By Jeffrey Gettleman (The New York Times) SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 2008) but there is something about the headlines that jars.

Don't get me wrong: burning a black church in America on the night Obama was elected is very troubling, deeply worrying, upsetting, racist and all the rest. But it's the relatively frivolous use of the word 'horror' in one story and the neutral, unemotive headline ascribed to the latest in a long line of truly 'horrific' child murders for the other story, that I don't care for.

If a murder of that nature took place in Detroit, I think we'd have an adjective, let alone an abstract noun, in the headline.

Horror is the Congo, horror is life in Iraq, horror is lots of things.

Horror/terror are words you just don't want to chuck around.

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

A Royal Pain for IHT Readers - repeat stories, way behind the news curve.

2008-11-18T06:39:00.007+01:00

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the IHT running NYT pieces, on stories that IHT editors (alert, on the ball, all good) had already picked up weeks earlier.

To give an example from today's paper, compare and contrast the following:

A royal pain for the Spanish monarchy
By Victoria Burnett
Monday, November 17, 2008
MADRID: When the English monarch in Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader" decides to write her memoirs, she takes the prudent step of abdicating first. Queen Sofia of Spain may be wondering whether she, too, should have waited for her husband, King Juan Carlos, to leave office before granting a Spanish journalist a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
The resulting book, "The Queen Up Close," has provided Spaniards an uncomfortably close look at their queen's conservative views. Her comments on homosexuality, gay marriage, euthanasia and religious education have outraged liberal Spaniards and tarnished an image of discretion that she had carefully tended for decades.
In the most notorious gaffe in the book, the queen said that she respected people's different sexual tendencies but did not understand why "they should feel proud to be gay."
"That they get up on floats and parade in the streets? If all of us who are not gay were to parade in the streets, we'd halt the traffic in every city," she said. She then added that while gay people had a right to unions, they should not be permitted to call them marriages.
As well as homosexuality, the queen takes several forays into politically tricky territory, saying that she does not support euthanasia - an issue being hotly debated in Spain - and that she believes schoolchildren should be taught the origins of man from a creationist point of view.
The book is also peppered with personal tidbits about world leaders and royal travels. At one point, Sofia congratulates herself on persuading the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to wear a suit and tie, instead of his "shapeless" military garb. The late King Hassan of Morocco drove her "crazy" with his mania about food, she says, bringing a retinue of cooks and his own supplies when he visited Spain because "he didn't trust us." Former President Jimmy Carter was a good enough sort, but "behaved really badly toward the Shah of Iran" when he refused him asylum, she said.
The controversy is one of a series of incidents that have revealed cracks in the cocoon of respect that envelops the Spanish royal family. Recent attempts to stifle embarrassing cartoons or claim privacy from the news media have challenged the balance between protecting free speech and protecting Spain's royals.
"I don't think many people would be surprised to learn these were the queen's views," said Juan Díez-Nicolás, a professor of sociology whose organization, ASEP, polls the Spanish public about the monarchy. They are routinely voted the most respected public figures in the country.
"What surprises them is that she would say such things for publication," he said. And moreover, "not offering a view that is widely shared by Spaniards."
Born Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark in November 1938, the queen converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism when she married Juan Carlos, then the future king, in 1962. Elegant, circumspect and fluent in several languages, she became popular in part because of her role in helping to steer Spain toward democracy after the death of Franco in 1975.
Long considered a paragon of royal reserve, the queen emerges from the book as the 70-year-old observant Catholic that she is, rather than the sweet, demure figure that the Spanish public apparently wants her to be, people who follow the monarchy said.
Her comments on gay pride and marriage provoked indignation from the gay community, which won the right to marry in 2005, and prompted a swift apology from the royal household. In a statement read to the press late last month, a spokesman for the royal family said the queen "deeply regrets that the inaccuracy of the comments attributed to her may have caused discomfort or offense."
The statement claimed that the queen had been quoted "inexactly" and suggested that the interviewer, the journalist Pilar Urbano, had published comments intended to be private. Urbano denied this and said galleys of the book had been reviewed by the queen's office, which approved them for publication.
In an interview by telephone, Urbano said she had interviewed Sofia several times, though she did not use a tape recorder. Journalists who closely follow the royal family said that the king was incensed by the book and that those responsible for giving the green light may yet be fired.
Antonio Poveda, president of the Spanish Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, said his organization accepted the palace's apology but that "there's definitely still some bad feeling among the gay community."
"The monarch has always been at pains not to comment on social or political issues," he said. "It seems they have broken with this tradition."
The publication of the book, "The Queen Up Close," follows a rash of setbacks for members of the royal family and Spanish aristocracy looking for greater protection from the press that have contributed to a sense that they are no longer untouchable. A court this month ruled against the Duchess of Alba, who was seeking to have copies of a satirical magazine whose cover featured her lying naked in pile of money removed from news stands.
Telma Ortiz, sister of Queen Sofia's daughter-in-law Princess Letizia, this month lost a court battle to obtain restraining orders against dozens of media outlets, which she accuses of hounding her and her family. The court ruled that Ortiz, an aid worker, is in the limelight by dint of her relationship with her sister and ordered her to pay around €45,000, or about $57,000, in costs, according to press reports.
While Díez, the sociology professor, said the ruckus over the book would blow over and have no impact on Sofia's popularity, other analysts said the dents in the Spanish royal family's image were part of a wider trend away from monarchy in Europe.
"Monarchy is old-fashioned by nature, and Europe is modern in its self-esteem," said Geoffrey Hindley, a historian who has written on European monarchy. "The ethos of republicanism is the style of the majority in Europe."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/europe/sofia.php

Over two weeks ago, the IHT ran the piece below on www.iht.com and an edited version in the paper.

I imagine the NYT didn't but their global edition did and it's not evident to me that two weeks later Victoria Burnett (was she on holiday at the time?) has added all that much value.

And if you're an IHT reader in Spain, you must be yawning over breakfast.

Spanish book quotes queen's disapproval of gay marriage
The Associated Press
Friday, October 31, 2008
MADRID: A Spanish journalist on Friday defended the accuracy of her book that quotes Queen Sofia criticizing gay marriage.
The book has irked the Royal Palace.
The Spanish king and queen are largely respected as figurehead representatives of the state, and rarely speak out on political or social issues.
The veteran journalist, Pilar Urbano, released the book - "La Reina muy de cerca," or "The Queen, very close up," - this week to mark the queen's 70th birthday Sunday. The journalist said it was based on 15 interviews with Queen Sofia, and that the Royal Palace approved the book's galley proofs before it was published, according to news agency Efe.
"What the queen said is what my book says," Urbano said.
The Royal Palace has challenged the comments attributed to the monarch, however, saying in a statement they "do not correspond exactly" with what she said. The palace also said the book also fails to reflect the queen's traditional neutrality on public affairs or respect for people who suffer discrimination, like homosexuals.
"I do not answer to the queen or king, or the Royal Palace. I answer to the truth," Urbano told Efe.
In the book, the queen is quoted as addressing a wide range of issues and saying she opposes abortion and euthanasia. Spain allows the former under restricted circumstances, and outlaws the latter. But the queen's alleged remarks on same-sex marriage are the main source of friction and have angered gay rights groups.
Spain legalized gay marriage in 2005, becoming one of the few countries in the world to recognize same-sex couples as having the same rights as heterosexual ones, including the right to adopt children.
"If those persons want to live together, dress up as bride and groom and get married, they can do so, but that should not be called marriage because it is not," the queen is quoted as saying in Urbano's book.
The conservative newspaper El Mundo said the queen erred by breaking with her tradition of quiet neutrality.
"As human as this burst of royal sincerity might be, certainly there were better ways to make Queen Sofia's birthday a new tool for bringing society closer to the throne," the newspaper said in an editorial.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/31/europe/01spain-fw-360944.php

REVISED: WEDNESDAY 19TH NOVEMBER, 2008

Just so you know I'm not imagining this problem as being regular, as opposed to infrequent, compare and contrast today's story about fighting in the Congo threatening gorillas (by Gettleman) with the same story from Reuters run in the IHT and on www.iht.com on November 10th, 2008, on the same subject.

Once again, wire service well ahead of the curve, and not a hell of a lot of added value from the NYT correspondent.

It's this type of absurd allocation of precious foreign correspondent resource which is why newspapers seem so damn irrelevant and it seems their own memories of what they've already run are really pretty poor.

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

More companies may go private in new year - could the NYT Company be one of them? And might they have to write down the value of About.com?

2008-11-18T06:04:00.005+01:00

I've been blogging with increased regularity now for some time on the very real possibility of the NYT Company going public-to-private.

If you think it's just the rantings of some nutter in the Auvergne, read this.

More companies may go private in new year
By Simon MeadsReuters
Monday, November 17, 2008
LONDON: A dearth of capital provided by banks may drive public companies into the arms of cash-rich private equity firms and could help rekindle the moribund market for public-to-private buyouts.
Private equity companies say there have been some signs of revival in the market, which has been virtually shut for more than a year, as institutional investors seek a way out of companies whose share prices have dropped.
There has been a pickup in business in just the past couple of weeks, with two public-to-private deals going into the due diligence phase, said Andrew Roberts, a private equity partner at the law firm Travers Smith.
A slow drip-feed of liquidity back into the system next year could give more impetus to the market for mergers and acquisitions, Roberts said.
"It's still going to be relatively small deals, in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions," he said.
In the first nine months of 2008, there were only 15 public-to-private buyouts in Britain, according to figures from the Center for Management Buyout Research.
The £2 billion, or $3 billion at current exchange rates, buyout of Emap, a media company, was the largest. It was one of only three buyouts worth more than £1 billion.
This contrasts with the 24 public-to-private deals made last year, including the European high-water mark deal - the £11.1 billion takeover of Alliance Boots by a consortium led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.
And there is a precedent for a rise in this type of deal after a sharp fall in asset values. Toward the end of the dot-com boom, there were 46 public-to-private deals in 1999 and 42 in 2000, accounting for 28 percent and 39 percent of total buyout deal value, respectively. That total includes other deals between private equity firms and buyouts by privately held companies.
Private equity firms have to put in more of their own money when buying a company with borrowed cash, and the size of such leveraged deals has dropped drastically after the credit crunch slammed the door shut on credit markets.
Private equity firms are hoping tight financing conditions may bring back the heady days. With markets for initial public offerings shut and a mountain of refinancing awaiting already tight corporate debt and loan markets, companies have few options.
"Large shareholders are hugely important in these types of deals," said Roberts, the private equity partner at Travers Smith.
In London, the FTSE 100-share index has slumped by more than a third already this year and large institutional investors are set to dominate shareholder registers as the hedge fund industry shrinks and retail investors continue to stay away.
"Now that prices have come down on the listed market, it will open up the possibility of doing public-to-privates," said Richard Chapman, a partner at the private equity firm ECI Partners. "You also have willing vendors."
"There is a desire by institutional investors to pull out of the smaller and midcap companies."
Sam Hart, an analyst with the brokerage firm Charles Stanley, said he believed that investors in any quoted company would be extremely pleased to see interest from private equity firms.
"I'm sure they would look extremely favorably on any approach, and as long as the offers they were making for companies represented a reasonable premium to the current share price, I would have thought they would be quite inclined to accept those offers," he said.
But, Chapman said, although there is room for a pickup in public-to-private buyouts, activity may not restart until 2009, after banks complete reporting 2008 balance sheets and there is an easing of bank debt.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/business/deal.php

And if you think some of my posts about About.com have been off-the-mark (I think the NYT Company overpaid for an out-of-date, distinctly uncool, ageing demographic, behind the Internet curve dot com company) then you might like to check in on this little gem about companies having to write down the value of assets on their books, bought when times were good and money was cheap: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/business/deal18.php

Of course, if they are looking at a public-to-private, that wouldn't be such a bad thing would it?

Meanwhile they plan to merge iht.com into www.nytimes.com, effectively wiping value off the balance sheet - given how much they (overpaid) for the IHT when times were good and money was cheap. WaPo must be delighted.

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

Cost cutting at newspapers treads dangerous path - David Carr's personal message to management.

2008-11-18T05:49:00.004+01:00

I recently posted on my new sport: trying to spot reporting of the NYT Company in the NYT's media reporting.

Here's today's game. Obviously no mention of cutting newroom costs at Mr. Carr's employee and no mention of the indeed obvious: that the journalist writing this piece works for a....newspaper.

I think this is called conflict of interest.

Either the NYT should stop covering newspapers, start covering the NYT when it does or hand-off the job to Reuters.

Cost cutting at newspapers treads dangerous path
By David Carr
Monday, November 17, 2008
In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: fire the most talented, experienced employees.
Of course, those workers were the retail chain's single most important point of difference from the legion of Internet retailers and general merchandisers, but in a single stroke, Philip Schoonover, the chief executive of Circuit City, wiped out that future.
As a pal of mine used to say when I described a particularly boneheaded course of action I had pursued, "How'd that work out for you, buddy?"
For Circuit City, not so great. The "wage management initiative" erased morale, both for employees and the folks who shopped there. Sales sank after the one-time gain from the layoffs. And last week, the company sought bankruptcy protection.
Schoonover joined his former employees in the discard box in September, a nice bit of symmetry until you factor in his $1.8 million in severance, $50,000 in outplacement services and a two-year cushion on health benefits. (The clerks axed in places like Wichita, Kansas; and Tucson, Arizona, got a bit less.)
In the digital age, we're told, the critical difference between success and failure is human capital those heartbeats and fast hands that can make a good business great. So are newspapers reacting to their downturn as Circuit City did?
Every day, Romenesko, a journalism blog at the Poynter Institute, is rife with news of layoffs at newspapers, most of the time featuring some important, trusted names. It is not the young fresh faces that are getting whacked they come cheap but the most experienced, proven people in the room, the equivalent of the sales clerk who could walk you through a thicket of widescreen television choices to the one that actually works for you.
Using clerks as an analogue may not be the most flattering comparison, but I have always thought of journalism as more craft than profession and tell students that it is the accumulation of experience and technique that makes a journalist valuable, not some ineffable beckoning of the muse.
Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business.
Newspapers, which began the race with a huge lead in terms of human assets, may end up just another part of the underinformed commodity of clutter.
"Circulation declines were deeper in the last period, and I have to say that I think it has to do with the quality problems from cuts," said Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell Inc., a market analysis firm. "It is not just the cutting, but the cutting of more-experienced staff, a kind of slow-motion suicide. Circuit City cut its own throat by not realizing what their competitive advantage is, and newspapers are doing the same thing."
Last week, Media General, a company that owns newspapers, television stations and Web sites in the Southeast, eliminated 80 positions in Florida, including a prominent columnist and the editorial page editor at The Tampa Tribune. "The Book of Ruth," a long-running wiseacre feature by the longtime columnist Dan Ruth, will be missed, now and then. He and the editorial page editor, Rosemary Goudreau, follow a political columnist, Joe Brown, the movie critic Bob Ross and the classical music critic Kurt Loft to the exit.
Readers, especially the ones cranky and serious enough to still be buying newspapers, have not missed the trend.
"Fire your best employees and watch your business go out of business, just like Circuit City is finding out right now. Who wants to read old news when one can find quality articles outside of the TampaTribe. Bye Bye TampaTrib, you have fired one too many of your excellent personnel and now I am firing you!" said a reader, Bob, in a comment posted to The Feed blog at TampaBay.com, a media blog by Eric Deggans, a media and television reporter at The St. Petersburg Times.
Yes, the revenue picture is grim and growing grimmer. The biggest outlay besides putting the printed artifact on the street is salaries. And journalists tend to get a lot more indignant when the sheet cake and goodbye speeches are being served up on behalf of people who have the same job as they have.
But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won't stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.
"Newspapers are aimed at the movers and shakers in a community the car dealers, the retailers, the restaurant owners," said Alan Mutter, a technology and media consultant who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur (www.newsosaur.blogspot.com). "When they get together and realize that they are looking at the paper, that it is less compelling than it used to be, it creates a vicious cycle of weaker readership and weaker advertising."
Last week, Sam Zell, a one-man newspaper wrecking crew running the Tribune Company, was interviewed at the FourSquare conference, the annual conclave of media moguls put on by Steve Rattner. I was not there, but I spoke to two people neither of them journalists who listened and were appalled by his disregard for his newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times.
Based on my conversation with those attendees, Zell, who, through a spokesman, declined to comment, suggested that newsrooms were just so much overhead and that what was ailing the industry was overweening journalistic ambition. I've read Zell's products since he took over. I've seen his handiwork, including laying off Lynell George at The Los Angeles Times and Jeffrey Meitrodt at The Chicago Tribune, just two of the many veterans I happen to know he has sacrificed on the altar of debt service.
Newspapers confront tall, menacing seas in the coming year, but it is a sure bet that the ones that dump the ablest hands on deck will be among the first to sink below the waves.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/business/17carr.php

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A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?

"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended." The Oxford Times
Amazon.co.uk

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'

Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY

Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family com
ing to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

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Newsprint demand down but will there be Play on newsprint prices?

2008-11-18T04:02:00.006+01:00

It just isn't getting any better is it?

September 07-September 08, U.S newsprint demand went down 13%, newsprint prices went up 13%. That's the real number to worry about for the IHT because my understanding is that IHT newsprint is bought off the back of the higher NYT newsprint purchases. But in Europe the price gets worse too. As does demand.

Newspapers face fresh printing pressures (FT)
By Robert Anderson in Stockholm and Christopher Mason in Ottawa
Published: November 16 2008 17:30 Last updated: November 16 2008 17:30
Newspapers, which are already bracing themselves for falling advertising sales as the global economy turns down, face more bad news next year as newsprint producers try to push through steep price increases.
European newsprint producers led by Norske Skog, the world’s second-largest, are currently negotiating with customers to increase prices by up to 20 per cent.
They believe that recent capacity cuts have given them the market power to compensate for years of rising costs, flat prices and falling margins.
“We’ve been under quite a drastic margin squeeze for several years,” said Norske Skog’s spokesman. “We see a momentum now for increased prices.”
All of Europe’s big newsprint producers are currently lossmaking as demand continues to fall because of the switchover to internet publication, while wood, energy and transport costs have risen significantly.
European producers have responded this year by committing to cut some 1m tones of capacity – 6 per cent of the total, according to Norske Skog, double the 3 per cent fall in demand.
As cost pressures start to ease, this gives producers a shot at raising margins.
“In Europe we will see the biggest changes, as we’ve had constant overcapacity for several years,” Norske Skog says.
European producers are also benefiting from a fall in imported newsprint as North American producers turn back to their home markets.
North American producers have suffered even more from falling demand, as the switch to the internet has taken hold faster there, but they have also been quicker to consolidate and cut capacity. In the year to September North American newsprint prices soared 33 per cent while consumption continued its descent, falling nearly 13 per cent over the same period.
North American Newsprint producers AbitibiBowater, Catalyst Paper, and Tembec initially compensated for drops in domestic demand by exporting to western Europe, Latin America and Asia.
But the strengthening dollar and the steep rise in North American newsprint prices have swept away European price advantages.
In the first nine months of 2008, newsprint exports to western Europe fell 20.6 per cent from the same period last year, according to the Montreal-based Pulp and Paper Products Council. Exports to Latin America and Asia grew by 17 and 9.3 per cent respectively in the same period, reflecting producers’ efforts to seek out new growth markets.
Analysts remain doubtful, however, whether newsprint producers will be able to push through the price increases in full without more capacity cuts.
“If [North American] producers don’t come out and shut down more capacity, it looks like prices will peak at the end of this year,” said Rahul Gandhi, a New York-based paper analyst with CreditSights.
“The decline in demand though will not stop, so it’s not looking good for producers if they are unable to raise prices.”
“There is a possibility that [European] prices will go up but demand will also go down,” says Johnson Imode of Standard & Poor’s Equity Research in London. “Clients will be able to strike quite a hard bargain with newsprint manufacturers.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a2cac4b2-b400-11dd-8e35-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1

More housekeeping at the Harbinger (of doom) announced - what exactly is going on there I couldn't tell you - but equity swaps reported at around the $15.00 mark - and the NYT Company share price slips yet further.

I said $10 would be a tipping point, we got there shortly thereafter, and we have tipped. How that re-scheduling of borrowing is going I wouldn't like to say but this is beginning to look a lot like GM. Citibank cut another 24,000 jobs yesterday, taking it to 20% of its workforce, and short of the NYT doing something similar, I can't see a turn around anytime soon.

Even if 2010 (end thereof at best, I might add) sees us come out of the advertising recession, I fear that's too far off for the NYT. Advertisers by then may just have given up on print.

Yesterday, the NYT shuttered its award winning mag PLAY having said it would keep 4 issues in 2009, so there you go.

Talk was up about Play as recently as last October (as was talk of no layoffs) but according to an email to Fishbowl NY, from Play editor Mark Bryant, "The company needs to make some pretty considerable cuts going forward."

There's an understatement.

"It was on the schedule. It was in the budget," Bryant wrote when asked "why the magazine had been shuttered so soon after both he and the Times brass confirmed it would continue next year".

According to Bryant, Play wasn't losing money. "I'm am told that last year we more or less broke even, thanks largely to the Nielsen deal for the Olympic issue," he wrote. ('Nielsen bought out the entire issue. It was, according to Bryant, the "largest single day sale in the history of The New York Times".)

Et alors? More or less break even, even with the single day sale in the history of the NYT. Says it all.

Share price now: $7.10 on a day that hit a low yesterday of, yes, $7.

That's 47% down on three months, 61% down on 1 year. Not that anyone's counting or anything.

Anyone want to buy a GM SUV? But where's print's Toyota Prius? It's hard to find a media outlet, print or Internet, that isn't hacking staff off as fast as it can, and one can't help wondering when this option is put into Play at the NYT.

I still fancy a 'go-private' move - hard pressed to see an alternative; hope there are some rich people who couldn't live without their NYT.

The family could sell some voting stock to Harbinger/The Mexican Gunslinger to get that debt down, but what would be the implications of that? Very ugly.

New York Times Co
(NYT:NYQ) NYT on other Exchanges
7.10 USD Last
-0.24 -3.27% Change
1.3M Below Average Volume

Data as of November 17, 2008 16:04 exchange time. Market data is delayed by at least 20 minutes

A Shot in the Arm for IHT Morale.

2008-11-17T14:09:00.003+01:00

When was the last time you can remember a NYT editorial using the work of IHT journalists? Not in a long time.

All good, and good for the brand equity for the IHT (which seems to be being diminshed by the planned wiping from the NYT Company's asset sheet of www.iht.com at a time when frankly I'd have thought they could hardly afford to do such a thing. Have they thought this one through?)

What I find interesting about this editorial are the mixed messages.

The IHT isn't referenced as being owned by the NYT; in the paper NYT and IHT journalists aren't distinguished from one another, in the newsroom it's all talk about intergration and the IHT merely being the global edition of the NYT.

Yet here we have, in terms of brand value, a clear distinction drawn between the IHT and the NYT.

Confused? You should be.

EDITORIAL
Corruption in Bulgaria and Romania
Sunday, November 16, 2008
When the European Commission decided in September 2006 to admit Bulgaria and Romania into the European Union, nobody pretended they were really ready.
The thinking was that EU membership would keep them safely out of Russia's orbit. There were also hopes that joining the European political mainstream would accelerate their efforts to rein in organized crime and corruption. The latter was a fairly astounding miscalculation.
What actually happened, as Doreen Carvajal and Stephen Castle have reported in detail in the IHT, was that the prospect of billions in EU subsidies only encouraged the criminals to diversify from smuggling and extortion and to burrow into the political and judicial systems - the better to siphon off EU money.
Today, Bulgaria is rated by Transparency International as the most corrupt nation in the 27-nation EU. The country could lose almost half a billion euros in aid that was frozen in July because of fears that it was vulnerable. Romania is also a cause of serious concern.
This state of affairs is devastating at all levels. The Bulgarian and Romanian people badly need the EU's development aid. And the shocking reports of corruption are hardening the resistance of other Europeans to further expanding the EU, thus lessening the chances of Turkey or Ukraine to ever join.
Perhaps most grievously, the spread of corruption through all levels of government and society, as in Russia and some other Balkan countries, makes it far more difficult to eradicate everywhere.
The IHT articles chronicled how those who tried to expose or combat the criminals in Bulgaria were regularly threatened, maimed or killed, and how these crimes routinely go unsolved. The result, the reporters were told, was that people have come to accept corruption as an unavoidable fact of life and have become apathetic about fighting it.
The wrong conclusion would be to close the EU door forever. The right one would be to ensure that those who pass through it are ready and get all the support they need to be full and healthy members.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/16/opinion/edbulgaria.php

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?

Amazon.co.uk

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'

Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY

Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune

IHT

New York Times

The NYT Company

Dodging the death knell of obsolescence (cough, cough, newspapers)

2008-11-17T13:43:00.002+01:00

My new sport is awaiting the first serious reporting by a NYT or IHT journalist about the fate and fortunes of their own employer, the NYT Company.

Today we're still at the polite 'cough, cough' stage, but watch this space.

Dodging the death knell of obsolescence
By Catherine Rampell
Sunday, November 16, 2008
By some logic, there is no earthly reason why bicycles should still exist.
They are a quaint, 19th-century invention, originally designed to get someone from point A to point B. Today there are much faster, far less labor-intensive modes of transportation. And yet hopeful children still beg for them for Christmas, healthful adults still ride them to work, and daring teenagers still vault them down courthouse steps. The bicycle industry has faced its share of disruptive technologies, and it has repeatedly risen from the ashes.
Other industries (cough, cough, newspapers) should be so lucky.
For some businesses, the current economic downturn is a bit problematic. For those already facing fundamental threats like newspapers and American automakers it could accelerate the path to what, it has been said, might be death.
But history offers some reason for optimism. Industries like bicycle manufacturers, when faced with a threat of obsolescence, managed to creatively reinvent themselves. What lessons do they provide for struggling industries?
There's no clear route to cheating industrial death. Those companies that have survived technological challenges have in common some combination of perseverance, creativity, versatility and luck. Their precise strategies vary. Some made sweeping changes, and abandoned their original products entirely; others were able to endure by changing little but their marketing.
Take, for example, a certain class of luxury goods. Inventors have created more user-friendly writing implements than fountain pens, more dependable time-keeping devices than mechanical wristwatches, and more efficient ways to heat houses than fireplaces. Yet, many consumers still gladly opt for the cultural cachet of technologically more primitive goods.
These older technologies have survived by recasting themselves as luxuries and by marketing their sensory, aesthetic and nostalgic appeal. Their producers emphasize their experiential rather than functional qualities.
In short, they were Ye-Olde-ed, and a boutique-y rump of the original industry now survives.
The popularity of newspapers the day after Barack Obama's election when they were probably valued more as historical artifacts than as sources of news had a whiff of this development.
But newspapers were not designed with maximum tactile pleasure and durability in mind. "Newspapers were always this scrubby sheet of paper with ink that came off, and that deteriorate in a few hours," said Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California at Davis.
For that reason, he said, it is somewhat difficult to imagine newspapers remarketing themselves as a luxury product.
Perhaps there are other qualities unique to newspapers that can be exploited, just as previous creative industries have discovered when facing disruptive technologies.
Photography might have killed Western painting and portraiture, for example, because painters knew they couldn't compete with the speed and accuracy with which photographs represented the visual world. Instead, many painters and other traditional visual artists innovated with more abstract and less representational images.
Similarly, television might have crowded out movies. Instead, Hollywood focused on bigger, more spectacular, more risqué films the stuff that television couldn't deliver.
Some survivor industries discovered new customer bases.
Bicycles, for example, grew in popularity in the United States through the late 19th century, peaking in the 1890s, but the craze weakened around the turn of the last century. After the First World War, manufacturers discovered a new youth market, which lasted until the baby boomers were kids. Then bikes fell out of favor again, but were revived during the 1970s when those boomers, and their kids, became more interested in personal exercise and gas-free, environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Radio is an even better example. In its 1940s heyday, it was the center of U.S. national entertainment. Then, in the 1950s, television began stealing radio's biggest stars, like Jack Benny and Abbott and Costello. National advertisers radio's revenue base followed the talent. "Radio, actually shockingly, was pronounced dead in 1953," says Susan Douglas, chair of the communication studies department at the University of Michigan.
But the industry revitalized itself by tapping into new markets. First it stumbled upon the youth music market, congregating around the car radio. Then radio innovators found other neglected markets, including underground music movements, longer-form news and talk radio. Along the way, radio's business model changed; the medium cultivated new niche advertisers, rather than national advertisers, to pay for its new niche programming.
For some companies, nestling into a marketing nook wasn't enough. They made radical transitions to new products and new industries, and survived through evolution, not preservation.
"Much of the history of the 'American system of manufacturing' is the story of inventors moving from a declining industry to a new expanding industry," says Petra Moser, an economic historian at Stanford who studies innovation. "Inventors take their skills with them."
Gun makers learned to make revolvers with interchangeable parts in the mid-19th century, Moser says. Then those companies (and some former employees, striking out on their own) applied those techniques to sewing machines when demand for guns slackened. Later, sewing machine manufacturers began making woodworking machinery, bicycles, cars and finally trucks.
Some famous companies have taken more improbable turns, either because their original business was fading or because they saw better growth opportunities. Before making cellphones, Nokia made paper. Before making cars, Toyota made looms (a Toyota textile business still exists). Corning is still a specialty glass and ceramics company known to most consumers for its tableware, but for more than a century it has also profited from uses as diverse as early light bulbs, space, defense and fiber-optic cable.
Some superstar companies managed to reinvent themselves multiple times IBM, for example. Over a century, the company has nimbly transitioned from punch-card accounting equipment (its original business) to large mainframe computers, to personal computers, and finally to information-technology each time facing skepticism from analysts who thought IBM might be too big, too old or too entrenched to adapt.
These companies survived by keeping their ears to the ground. New customer needs emerged, and smart corporations positioned themselves to meet them. "You have to be willing to walk away from the things that have made you great," says Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, which consults with companies (including newspapers and automotive businesses) on how to foster a culture of innovation. He argues that the incumbents in the newspaper industry were caught sleeping during the initial meteoric growth period of Web sites like Wikipedia because the avenue for innovation letting crowds rather than experts aggregate and filter data seemed so antithetical to what newspapers did well.
Of course, straying too far from what a company does well has also proven dangerous. "If you look at the history of firms that have tried to diversify their businesses, you'll see it's virtually an impossible thing to do," says David Hounshell, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who studies technology and social change. "Usually when a firm announces a program to diversify, they've pretty much written their death warrant."
Newspapers have faced challenges before and have adapted including through efforts at diversification. Can these historical precedents teach newspapers how to defeat the economic forces of technological change once again?
Like previous industries fearful of obsolescence, newspapers can either develop a new product, or find a way to remarket and remonetize the old one. Right now, newspapers are doing a little of both: They're adapting their product to the Web to attract new audiences, and they're trying to re-monetize by delivering more targeted advertising.
Meanwhile, we've already seen some of the "destruction" half of Joseph Schumpeter's famous "creative destruction" paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry. So a bigger shakeout may yet come.
But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists or, for that matter, autoworkers will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/16/news/16rampell.php

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY

Ian Walthew

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family com

ing to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

Why newspapers need to come up with a paid content model.

2008-11-15T09:53:00.003+01:00

Most group think says that paid content models for newspapers won't work.

Well, with current approaches, ideas and technology they won't.

But people like me, who have different approaches, different ideas and different technology don't agree. Problem is: we can't find a newspaper interested in talking about it or the money to invest in making it doable.

If you doubt the need for a paid content model for newspapers, do two things.

The first is to check out my other blog, www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com which is many things but not least of all an active demonstration of the need for newspapers to come up with paid content models.

My view is this, and as an author I obviously have mixed feelings about this: if you can't come up with a paid content model then you're too dumb to deserve not being ripped off by bloggers like me.

Show us a way to pay and we'll pay.

Secondly, read this little gem, which is, need I say it, a pirated article:

Pirated articles costing publishers
The Associated Press
Friday, November 14, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO: The audience for unauthorized copies of newspaper articles online is nearly one and a half times larger than the readership on the newspapers' own Web sites, a study released Thursday found.
Attributor, a company that monitors copyright issues, said media companies could capitalize on the trend if they could figure out a way to get a piece of advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories.
The worst copyright headaches diagnosed in Attributor's study occurred in stories about automobiles, travel and movie reviews. The readership of unlicensed stories in those three categories was four to seven times higher than on the Web sites where the content originated.
Attributor, which makes software that trolls the Internet for copyright violations, estimated that the average Web publisher could collect more than $150,000 annually in additional revenue by selling ads alongside its unlicensed material.
The company said the estimate was based on an assumption that advertisers would pay $1 for every 1,000 pages of unauthorized material viewed on Web sites that are not owned by the copyright owners.
If anything, Attributor believes its calculations understate the loss to publishers. The company is already working with a few media companies that could generate more than $1 million in annual advertising by enforcing their online copyrights, said Rich Pearson, Attributor's vice president of marketing.
"The people creating all this content are not being justly rewarded and publishers are clamoring for every dollar of revenue that they can get in this environment," Pearson said.
Attributor, which is privately held, would stand to profit if it could persuade potential customers that the Internet is riddled with copyright abuses that could translate into more revenue if the poachers were identified. Attributor's customers include The Associated Press, Reuters and The Financial Times.
But the issue of copyright infringement was a sore point for media executives long before the company began developing its detection system in 2006.
Attributor's study reviewed 30 billion Web pages hosting copies of stories from more than 100 major Web sites. None of the sites belonged to Attributor's current customers. After excluding all properly licensed content, Attributor then discarded any page that copied less than 50 percent or fewer than 125 words of a copyrighted story.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/13/business/papers.php

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

Amazon.co.uk

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/029785173X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225089096&sr=8-1

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

NYT Company goes as low as $7.25; Harbinger Capital Partners does some housekeeping.

2008-11-15T06:44:00.004+01:00

Not a great week.

The opening bell rung Monday at $9.25, so if you thought that was a good buy under $10 you lost 22% of you investment by the weekend. Hope you didn't.

NYT Company stock traded at an all-time low of $7.25 on Friday and closed out the week a cent above it's previous low of $7.33.

At $7.34 that represents a drop of nearly 47% in the last 3 months, -58% YTD, -61% in a year, -74% in 3 years and -84% over 5 years. More than that you really don't want to know.

Feb. 26th, 2004, it closed at $48.60 at a volume of nearly 3.5 million shares traded. Looking at recent volumes, who knows what's going on.

Meanwhile Friday, a Form 4 regarding The New York Times Company was filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission concerning 10% Class A Common Stock owners Harbinger Capital, moving some 40 million shares from its Special Situations Fund into another of its vehicles last Wednesday. This they did at $8.38. They also did some derivative stuff on nearly 400,000 shares that maybe made them some bucks, so someone, at least is making money.

You've gotta ask yourself if some naked short selling on NYT stock isn't the way forward. But remember:

Ring-a-ring o'roses,

A pocket full of posies,

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

We all fall down.

New York Times Co
(NYT:NYQ) NYT on other Exchanges
7.34 USD Last
-0.62 -7.79% Change
2.4M Above Average Volume

Data as of November 14, 2008 16:05 exchange time. Market data is delayed by at least 20 minutes.
Today's Open
7.82 USD
Previous Close
7.96 USD
Today's High
8.06 USD
Today's Low
7.25 USD
Today's Volume
2.4M
Avg Volume (10 day)
1.3M

Amazon.co.uk

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/029785173X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225089096&sr=8-1

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

http://www.montmartreabbesses.com

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company

New York Times Company to be bailed out by private investors?

2008-11-14T19:28:00.005+01:00

I've been blogging for some time on the very real possibility of the NYT Company taking themselves private as part of some sort of philanthropic bailout by civic minded members of the great and the good of New York. No pressure to make vast profits, worry about shareholders etc.

Interestingly, this tongue in cheek piece from Businessweek, like any satire, has more than a grain of truth behind it.

The money won't come from government, but it may come from a group of very rich, liberal investors.

I wonder if the Family are working the dinner parties and putting out feelers to see if anyone is willing to throw their hat into the ring?

Media Centric November 13, 2008, 5:00PM EST

A Bailout Plan For U.S. Newspapers
A modest proposal for a lobbying campaign to save America's battered dailies
By Jon Fine

TO: Senior executives at U.S. newspaper companies
FROM: Tongue & Cheek Lobbying Innovations LLC
The post-Election Day landscape brings great change for America and its governing philosophy, and this is why we must move quickly to craft a federal bailout for the newspaper industry.
I know from some previous discussions that not all of you agree. Unlike with banks, the collapse of American newspapers does not endanger the world's financial system. Unlike car companies, the newspaper industry does not lose billions of dollars each month. No matter. We can position this as a proactive move to save the only industry prominently mentioned in the Bill of Rights. (Our message team likes that last bit. You'll hear it a lot.) This industry employs over 52,000 journalists, thousands of other workers, and it faces unprecedented challenges. It takes more than a quadrennial sales spike from a closely watched election to save newspapers. Also, the bailout money is there, and—ask any struggling retailer or chain of hair salons soon to claim that they, too, are banks—it won't be there forever.
An Obama Administration will likely show little love for the workaday press, as a simple holler out to your reporters that covered his campaign will confirm. (If you still employ campaign reporters, that is.) But Barack Obama is a civic-minded man. He will appoint civic-minded staffers. They may not love reporters, but they grew up with newspapers. They won't want them to go away, especially since we will paint a news paradigm without papers as being dominated by Fox News and bloggers banging on spittle-flecked laptops.
Decades ago, legislation passed to allow joint operating agreements between competitive local papers, in order to preserve diverse editorial voices. Our mission today will be cast as preserving educational voices.
Two potential Newspaper Rescue Acts:
Debt Relief/Subsidization. The U.S. assumes all outstanding debt at all newspaper companies. At midyear that was $14 billion for the publicly traded players (excluding News Corp., which only owns two U.S. newspapers, but more on them later), $12.5 billion for the Tribune Co., plus more for other private players. The U.S. may take equity stakes in all companies, should the government deem this wise. This plan also includes a onetime sum to offset current revenue shortfalls. Newspapers took in $45 billion from advertising in '07; let's assume ad declines this year and next will total $15 billion. Cost: Around $45 billion.
Industry Digitization. Think of the "license fee" British households pay to the BBC. Government will subsidize Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle (or equivalent device) and mandate that each household purchase one for $50. (Households below the poverty line will get one free.) This plan also provides several billion dollars to develop new digital news products, retrofit or dispose of obsolete assets (like printing presses), and roughly maintain existing newsroom staffs. Government again has the option to secure passive equity stakes. We will stress this plan's "green" aspects. Cost: Approximately $55 billion.
To paraphrase incoming Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, never let a crisis go to waste—it allows you to do big things. Tongue & Cheek can guide the lobbying push essential for our mutual success, but we will require the participation of industry leaders who can navigate Washington with finesse and charm. In other words: Sam Zell, please stay home and tend to Tribune. (By the way, Tongue & Cheek has cultivated News Corp. (NWS) executives. Having Rupert Murdoch on board will defang those who howl about liberal media bias.)
Should our proposals fail, we can still shake loose much low-hanging fruit. For starters, a special—and substantial—tax credit for daily newspapers, given our "educational" rebranding. Consumers' subscriptions will win tax-deductible status as well. I'm less certain than some of you that lifting laws preventing newspapers from owning radio or TV stations in the same market will fatten bottom lines. But here, too, a persuasion campaign can reap benefits.
I recognize some may perceive all this as an admission of defeat. But let's feel a sense of opportunity, not shame. And always remember how your business differs from the other supplicants. No newspaper ever bankrupted a country or peddled a product as patently putrid as the Pontiac Aztek.
Fine is BusinessWeek's MediaCentric columnist and Fine On Media blogger .

Meanwhile, how are those stocks doing?

Er, not too good. As of about 20 mintutes ago, here's the story.

New York Times Co
(NYT:NYQ) NYT on other Exchanges
7.49 USD Last
-0.47 -5.90% Change
687.4K Below Average Volume

Data as of November 14, 2008 13:27 exchange time. Market data is delayed by at least 20 minutes

That would be a 20% drop this week, with a low of $7.33 and a low of $7.44 this week. If there's ever a time to do this, it's now.

It's not a strategy for survival, it's not a business plan, even as a non-profit making foundation funded newspaper, but it would buy some much needed time for someone, please someone to come up with some ideas.

This ad recession is going to go into 2010, no doubt about it, and that means 2 years of agencies and clients finding cheaper and cheaper alternatives that work. I don't think there is a lender out there right now with that much patience or risk carefree.

People are talking about GM going bankcrupt. Well, wait till you see the Q4 earnings, then the 2009 Q1 and Q2 and need I go on......

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

Amazon.co.uk

'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times

Amazon.com

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company