Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Delivering deluxe information

It's touching that Dambala cites his Creative Commons license in this post. Quaint notions like that are going the way of the dodo in the era of robust reporting.

If it is the policy of Newhouse or any other local MSM entity not to cite blogs or acknowledge the information we uncover....then I fully expect them not to use the information we uncover.

If Newhouse is convinced the future of journalism is online, they should probably take note of the common courtesy online entities show for one another and if that doesn't ring a bell for them perhaps they should read the stipulations of the creative commons license attached to this blog and many others their employees may choose to data mine.

But it isn't the failure to cite that people like Dambala should be worried about.  That's really only the beginning. Once the professionals are all delivering content online their next step is to kick you off altogether. Which is what the end of net neutrality and the dominance of mobile technology via the app model of content delivery is going to facilitate.

That's the motivation behind copyright disputes like this one for example that people like David Simon are championing.

It's also the subtext of the whole Perricone affair. They're letting one commenter on NOLA.com define every non-professional user of the internet in order to discredit anyone who isn't in the club.

And, of course, also there's this.

In a blog post, Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou characterizes requests to limit political speech as troubling. "We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services," said Chou. "We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not."

According to Chou, some of these information removal requests come not from authoritarian regimes but from Western democracies. She points to Spanish regulators, who asked Google to remove 270 search results linking to blog posts and newspaper articles referencing public figures, specifically government officials. She also notes that an unnamed public institution in Poland asked Google to remove links to a website that criticized it. 

The Arab Spring is over, literally and figuratively.  The internet is going to change from a tool of democratic insurgency to a tool of autocratic institutional control. And it's going to happen very quickly.

Update:  This CJR reaction to Ricky Matthews' front page column this week addresses Advance's strategy.

Edmonds estimates that the Times-Pic’s print reduction will actually lose the paper money, at least initially: slicing revenue by 22 percent and costs by just 17.5 percent.

So why are they doing it? Because gutting the news budget by an estimate half, would save up to 7.5 percent of overall costs, making the idea slightly profitable. And when I say “slightly” I’m talking about two or three million dollars a year, based on Edmonds’s fairly generous assumptions.
It is easy to see why Advance, so far, is nearly alone among news organizations in taking this plunge.

Again, the primary problem here is not the reduction in print, but the decimation of the Times-Picayune’s newsroom. In other words, disinvesting in journalism behind a digital smokescreen, as I wrote last week.

Advance's plan isn't about finding new revenue streams through a robust digital business model. It's about leveraging its monopoly brand along with the "print is dead" meme to massively cut costs by putting people out of work. By electing to jump to digital they run the risk of incurring new kinds of competition from other kinds of small new media companies or from independent actors like AZ, for example. But I think they're betting they'll be able to impose a new kind of monopoly position as the infrastructure of the internet becomes more and more favorable to actors with money and influence.

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