Just Because People Say They'll Pay For Something, It Doesn't Mean They Will

from the at-all dept

I've been ignoring this one, but people keep submitting it. BCG came out with a report over the weekend on a survey it did, claiming that about half of all people would pay for online news. It was amusing to see people react to this, as some reported it as "most won't pay for news" and others reported it as "oh my goodness, a lot of people will pay for news." Of course, the reality is that this is just a survey of what people say they'd pay for -- and history has shown that surveys are notoriously poor indicators in terms of getting people to accurately reflect what they will and will not buy. Besides, just a day later, a totally different survey claimed that 80% of people wouldn't pay for news online. The answer is that no one knows how many people would pay for content online, but I'd bet that the number is lower than what both of these surveys predict, and we'll see that soon enough.

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Newspaper Industry Lawyers Attack Fair Use, Claim Google Is Illegal

from the and-so-it-begins dept

Hmm. So, on Monday Rupert Murdoch suggests that the courts would reject fair use as a concept, and by Friday two newspaper industry lawyers just happen to have an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining how Google violates copyright law by caching the websites it indexes. If the names of the lawyers -- Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown -- sound vaguely familiar, that's because they're the same two lawyers who, six months ago, wrote a laughably ridiculous editorial (that time for the Washington Post) proposing special new copyright laws to save newspapers, while destroying pretty much everything that makes the internet useful. Of course, both the Washington Post and the WSJ conveniently left out the fact that these two lawyers regularly represent newspapers and other media and entertainment firms -- even as that seems rather relevant (what happened to those FTC disclosure laws?).

While I do actually agree with the lawyers that it's a shame the focus on the Google Book Search settlement avoided the big fair use question, I think they're entirely wrong to suggest that Google itself violates copyright law.

The copyright code allows public libraries to copy texts as long as there is no "direct or indirect commercial advantage." But that does not describe what search engines do. They use the complete copies they take for free to sell the advertising that has made them enormously profitable. This has a direct impact on book publishers, and on the publishers of magazines and newspapers that are losing the advertising that once supported them. According to Ken Auletta's recently released book "Googled," its search business alone now takes in 40% of all advertising across the Internet.

Perhaps Sanford and Brown are unfamiliar with basic copyright law, but the commercial advantage issue is only a small part of copyright law, and there are plenty of well-established cases of fair use in commercial use. In fact, I'd suggest that they consult the very media companies they work for, as most of them regularly rely on fair use defenses for reprinting or broadcasting content -- despite the fact that they're very commercial entities.

Furthermore, it appears that Sanford and Brown are either unfamiliar with how Google works -- or are purposely misrepresenting it. In the case of most news stories, Google has little or no ads. It only recently put ads on Google News -- long after the decline in ad revenue for newspapers. Besides, if local advertisers are finding a better return by advertising on Google, isn't that a good thing? That's called competition, and I'm surprised these lawyers would be against that.

In the last year, many fresh ideas have begun to circulate on how to help the publishing industry transition profitably to the online world. But without legal reform to back up these new business models, publishers will not have the bargaining power to make the search engines into true partners willing to compensate them meaningfully for their copyrights.

Yes, proposals like the ones that you guys suggested in the Washington Post without disclosing who pays your bills? Funny how that works. And those proposals are not about "helping the publishing industry transition profitably." Plenty of smart publishers are perfectly profitable. The proposals are about protecting the status quo and hurting the innovators who better serve the market. Sanford and Baker are trying to protect their big clients, but they'd be better off telling them to innovate, rather than push bogus editorials and pass ridiculous laws designed to hold back progress.

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Chicago Tribune Tries An Experiment: Life Without The AP

from the who-needs-it? dept

Via Jeff Sonderman we find out that the Tribune Company wants to experiment next week and see how far it can get without content from the Associated Press. Last year, we noted that various newspapers were beginning to drop their AP membership as they were concerned about a new pricing structure, as well as the fact that the AP seemed unable to keep up with the modern world, and seemed increasingly less relevant. Worst of all, some of its moves actually appeared to position the non-profit organization as a competitor to its own member newspapers.

The Tribune was one of the larger publishers to indicate that it was sick of the AP, giving the organization two years notice (as required) that it didn't plan to renew its contract at the end of October, 2010. For this experiment, the Tribune wants to see how far it can get without AP material (though it will use it if there's nothing else). Still, the newspaper giant notes that it has plenty of other wire options: "Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France Presse, Cable News Network, Global Post, Bloomberg and McClatchy newspapers." Some of those are "new," but should make it clear to the AP that it doesn't quite have the monopoly it seems to think it has.

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Washington Post Calls For Federal Funding Of Newspapers?

from the gee,-biased-much? dept

Just days after we wrote about a study that showed more government funding of the press leads to less reporting on government corruption, along comes the Washington Post with an editorial saying it's time to have the federal government fund more journalism. I wonder how Watergate would have turned out if the Washington Post was relying on Nixon for cash... The editorial piece claims that no one is "filling the gap" left by fewer newspaper reporters, but presents no evidence whatsoever to support that. The market is changing, absolutely, but we're seeing all sorts of new, unique and innovative ways of covering the news -- often allowing much greater coverage than in the past. Getting the government involved may sound good to the Washington Post, but it hardly seems like the right formula for an independent press.

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Filmmaker Gives Newspapers Bogus Stories To See If They Fact Check

from the guess-what-he-found-out? dept

Rose M. Welch alerts us to the news of a filmmaker who wanted to see how much fact checking newspaper do, so he started calling them with totally made up "tips" about celebrities, and discovered that many of them were quickly printed with little to no attempt to fact check them at all. To be fair, the stories were all sent to UK tabloids, and the tabs aren't exactly known for their thorough reporting standards -- but still, given how often we hear about how bad new media online publications are at basic fact checking, it's worth pointing out that just because you print on paper, it doesn't mean there's any more fact checking. At least with online stories, people can respond quickly (often in comments or on their own sites) and challenge things. In print, it's much harder to see what others are saying on the same topic.

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New Zealand Newspaper Tries 3D Issue To Get People To Pay More Attention

from the experiments dept

As various newspapers continue to think about new business models, Adam points us to the news of a community newspaper in New Zealand that experimented with a special 3D issue, including various 3D images and (of course) special 3D glasses. The idea is to get people to spend more time looking at the newspaper. While it does seem like a neat gimmick, it doesn't seem like it is a sustainable idea on its own (they expect to do it again, but probably not for another year, due to the effort it takes). But, of course, no single gimmick needs to be sustainable by itself. It's neat to see publications recognizing that they at least should be trying out other things to add value that people will appreciate.

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Cablevision Puts Up Newsday's Paywall; But Really Just Using It As A Churn Reducer

from the that's-not-a-business-model dept

When Cablevision first bought Newsday, Charles Dolan admitted the company knew very little about the newspaper business, but promised to consult widely with newspaper experts in coming up with a plan. That seemed like a really really bad idea, since all the newspaper experts we've seen don't seem to even recognize what business they're really in. But, it looks like that's exactly what Dolan did. Back in February, the company announced that it was going to put up a paywall for its content. Since there had been no update or any action since then, I'd actually begun to wonder if the company was rethinking that idea. No such luck. Apparently it just took a bit of time to fully plan out Newsday's self-destruction.

The company has announced that it will start charging a whopping $5/week (not month, but week) to access the website unless you're an existing paper newspaper subscriber and/or a Cablevision subscriber.

Let's be absolutely clear what this is. It is not a plan to build a 21st century news organization. It's a plan to try to reduce churn elsewhere, by putting up a slight hurdle for Cablevision cable customers and Newsday newspaper customers to prevent them from leaving. Cablevision's customer base and Newsday's subscriber base overlaps quite a bit, so for plenty of those folks there will be no change at all. But this won't do anything to actually help the news organization grow. Those who don't subscribe to the paper edition or who use a competitor for broadband (like Verizon Fios which is pushing hard in Cablevision's market) will simply go elsewhere. While the NYC papers don't cover Long Island news quite as completely, they do a pretty good job with the basics, and other local news sources will fill in the rest. Cablevision is basically saying that it's giving up in the online news business. It's an admission that it doesn't know how to compete. This won't help it sign up new customers, and may only barely help it prevent old customers from leaving.

It's basically a suicide play for Newsday. This is really a disappointment, since Cablevision -- amazingly -- had actually been one of the most forward thinking cable companies out there in terms of offering real value on the broadband side of things. But apparently it bought Newsday as an asset to let it wither away.

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AP Convinces Newspaper That Watermark Will Stop Mythical Evil Copiers

from the cut-and-paste? dept

Someone anonymous sent in an explanation by the Town News for its decision to use the Associated Press' hNews "watermarking" system which is the AP's silly and meaningless attempt to stop copying of AP content. The General Manager of Town News, Marc Wilson, explains why they signed up for the program using the totally unsubstantiated scare tactic, claiming that there are these awful content thieves out there stealing content:

Probably the biggest issue within the newspaper/Internet world is controlling the re-use of content posted on the World Wide Web.

Actually, I'd say that the biggest issue is figuring out a business model that works. If you're trying to control the use of content you put online, you're doing it wrong. And, oops, the hNews format doesn't do much to stop content reuse due to the magic of the world's worst copyright infringement tool: cut-and-paste.

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out who believes this myth that copying news content is some massive problem. Sure, there are some spam sites out there, but they get no meaningful traffic. There are some claims that they cause search engine trouble, but that's overblown as well. Google and others are pretty good at sussing out where the content originated. But, according to Wilson, this is a huge problem:

But what they don't like the rise of the many companies that copy or scrape content off of newspaper Web sites -- and end up competing with the sites that originated the content.

Again, where are these mythical content copiers? There are spam sites, but they get no traffic and they go away pretty quickly. Besides, if you can't compete against a spam site scraping your content, you're definitely doing something wrong. If your brand and your community management is so weak that a spam site can compete with you, you don't deserve to be in business.

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It's 2009 And Newspapers Are Just Now Realizing That Reporters Should Interact With Their Communities?

from the better-late-than-never dept

We've complained in the past about how rare it is for reporters at newspapers to actually engage in comments on their articles. Instead, they seem to view the comments with disdain, pointing out how idiotic many comments are. Well, of course that's what happens when the folks at the actual newspaper ignore them. So, while it's nice to see a newspaper like the Cleveland Plain Dealer (whose writers have been advocating for changing copyright law to protect newspaper business models) finally realize that its reporters need to engage in comments in order to foster more of a useful community in those comments, it's really quite stunning that it's taken this long for newspapers to figure it out -- and that such a "revelation" requires a special announcement from the newspaper itself.

We're joining the online conversation. For too long, we at The Plain Dealer posted stories on cleveland.com and then turned away to focus on the next day's news. Now, we're encouraging our reporters and editors to pay attention to what you're saying, to answer your questions and respond to your complaints.

A newspapers' true asset is the community it serves. Too many in the newspaper business have been neglecting that community. It's great that this particular newspaper seems to have finally figured it out, though it's amazing that it took this long and is such a big change in focus that it requires an announcement.

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Is The Newspaper Political Endorsement A Thing Of The Past?

from the hopefully... dept

Romenesko recently pointed us to the news that the Atlanta Journal Constitution has decided to do away with political endorsements, and instead, focus on trying to provide more information on what candidates positions really are on various issues. This makes a lot of sense. I'd always wondered how much impact (if any) newspaper endorsements had these days. It may have been significant in the past, perhaps, but these days, with so many ways of getting information about candidates, it's difficult to see how an 11th hour endorsement from a newspaper people probably don't trust anyway is going to make a difference. And, of course, I could never understand how newspapers hold themselves up as bastions of objective reporting... and then turn around and endorse candidates. While I tend to think that the whole concept of journalist objectivity is overblown, these newspaper endorsements weren't helping either way. Hopefully other newspapers will follow suit.

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New Advertising Strategy For Newspapers? They Make Great Umbrellas

from the well,-there's-that... dept

Justin Zak sends in a photo he took of what's apparently the Austin American Statesman's latest attempt to convince people that a hardcopy newspaper has more value than an online newspaper:

If you can't read it, that little ad block at the bottom reads: "Newspapers Make Great Umbrellas." That'll convince the online masses...

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Perhaps The Real Problem With Newspapers Is All That Extra Overhead...

from the cut-the-fat dept

We keep hearing from newspaper execs about how important it is to keep newspapers alive to fund all that important "investigative reporting." The problem, of course, is that most newspapers don't really do all that much investigative reporting. Hell, they don't really do that much reporting at all. A few months back, we noted that a quick look at a variety of local newspapers all showed a very small number of locally produced stories (usually under 10) each day. All the rest were wire stories and other stuff -- not much actual local reporting at all. As a whole bunch of you are sending in, Clay Shirky recently did a similar experiment, taking apart his local hometown newspaper, slicing the paper up into "news" and "other" categories, and finding that news was a small fraction. And most of the news was wire service. Actual locally produced news involved only six reporter bylines. In investigating further, he discovered that the paper only had six reporters -- despite a staff of 59 people. And, yes, obviously many of those other roles are important -- the editors, the printers, etc. But, at some point you have to question the claim that the "reporting" is so expensive. It certainly looks like there's an awful lot of overhead and inefficiency built into the system. And that's why newer news startups are able to succeed -- because they don't have that extra legacy layer of fat to deal with.

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Post Mortem For A Dead Newspaper

from the looking-backwards,-not-looking-forward dept

John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, has been running a great blog about issues from the newspaper industry over the past few months. He consistently has been saying stuff that made me wonder why the Rocky Mountain News didn't seem to do the sorts of things he seemed to constantly talk about... and now he's explained why. He recently gave a talk at Google about lessons from the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News in both text and video form. It's long, but well worth watching/reading:

You should take in the whole thing, rather than just reading my summary, but he basically goes over the last decade and a half or so of mistakes that the Rocky Mountain News made in terms of trying to figure out the online business. The key takeaways aren't that surprising if you're a regular reader around here. The company kept defining itself as a newspaper company, not a news organization (or, better yet, a community builder). Everything it did was based on how it would impact the paper edition. The focus was not on competing with web properties and services, but on the other major newspaper in town, the Denver Post. Things got so bad that when the Columbine Massacre happened, the newsroom refused to give any news to the web people, because they were afraid that the Denver Post would "steal" it.

It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset.

The talk is amazingly honest, coming from someone who accepts a share of the blame for what happened, and should be required reading/viewing for anyone in the media business, new or old. The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with.

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Could Artists Help Newspapers? (And Vice Versa)

from the symbiotic-content dept

Reid Rosefelt writes "I thought you might be interested as this is a good example of how someone can make money out of free (or close to it). ... Jeff Scher has had a long and successful career as a painter and an animator/experimental filmmaker.... Recently he was asked to make a short film [once] a month which would run in the Opinion Page of the New York Times. This has changed his life. It's not just that his worldwide audience has grown beyond his wildest dreams; he is reaching a completely different kind of audience -- people who would never have seen his movies in museums and festivals. And although he makes very little money doing them, it has been the best advertising in the world for his paid projects. ... He is getting jobs that he would never have gotten, including one from one of his musical heroes."

The details of this deal are a bit unclear to me, but it sounds like Scher gets free publicity for his work -- and the New York Times gets some interesting content that might help promote its own reputation (and reason to buy). Also, according to Rosefelt, Scher retains ownership of his artwork, but the NYT has an exclusive license to show his work for the first month that it's on the NYT site. While that detail may appear to be a shrewd clause for NYT to help it gain audience, it shouldn't rely too heavily on that exclusivity. The NYT needs to focus on providing interesting and unique content all the time -- and the month-long time limit suggests that someone in the deal might understand that fact. But in any case, this is yet another example of how providing digital content for free can create a viable business for an artist.

In the bigger picture, though, this promotion alone obviously won't budge the NYT's bottomline. However, this deal highlights one of the NYT's strengths: that it can help artists (not just journalists) to connect with a large community -- and an expanded business could be built around that strength. There's an opportunity here for newspapers to reach broader audiences with content (beyond news) that is not a commodity. Experiments like this could point to more newspapers turning to curating unique content and providing more useful services to readers -- services that can't easily be copied.

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Why The Traditional News Media Is Becoming Less Relevant: They Didn't Adapt

from the must-read dept

Michael Skoler, over at Nieman Reports, has such an amazingly good essay on how the traditional news business lost its audience, I'm having trouble deciding which parts to quote. The whole thing is great, and is a must read. The basic thesis, though, is one you'll hear a lot around these parts. As the newspaper folks lash out at everyone, the real problem has been their own inability to adapt and change. They were built on a model where they were the sole place for a community to gather, but that community now has other options, and the news media has not kept up. Here's one snippet:

The truth is the Internet didn't steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason--many people don't feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.

Today, people expect to share information, not be fed it. They expect to be listened to when they have knowledge and raise questions. They want news that connects with their lives and interests. They want control over their information. And they want connection--they give their trust to those they engage with--people who talk with them, listen and maintain a relationship.

Trust is key. Many younger people don't look for news anymore because it comes to them. They simply assume their network of friends--those they trust--will tell them when something interesting or important happens and send them whatever their friends deem to be trustworthy sources, from articles, blogs, podcasts, Twitter feeds, or videos.

Mainstream media are low on the trust scale for many and have been slow to reach out in a genuine way to engage people. Many news organizations think interaction is giving people buttons to push on Web sites or creating a walled space where people can "comment" on the news or post their own "iReports."

People aren't fooled by false interaction if they see that news staff don't read the comments or citizen reports, respond and pursue the best ideas and knowledge of the audience to improve their own reporting. Journalists can't make reporting more relevant to the public until we stop assuming that we know what people want and start listening to the audience.

Again, don't just read this snippet, read the whole thing. It goes on to talk about how other community sites have built trust, and have done it by really involving the community and empowering them. Anyone in the news business who doesn't understand this shouldn't be working in the news business much longer.

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Some Proactive Thoughts On Making Newspapers Better

from the build-community,-sell-scarcity dept

Last week, in discussing my debate about newspaper online business models with the NY Times' David Carr, one of our commenters wanted more actual examples of what newspapers should do. Luckily, an anonymous commenter put up some ideas and some suggestions on how to structure a news business. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Steve Yelvington posted a nice list of seven keys to building healthy online community, which newspapers should mostly follow (my one quibble: I think he's wrong to deny anonymous commenting). But most of the other stuff in there makes a lot of sense, and includes things that newspapers rarely do, such as giving the users more power, participating in the community, and even just recognizing that the community is a priority.

Then, Mathew Ingram points us to a list from Dan Gillmor about things he would do if he ran a news organization, most of which focus (also) on involving the community a lot more. The whole list is worth reading, but one thing I really liked was the idea of including a box with each article that includes "Things We Don't Know" with an invitation for readers to fill in some of the blanks. So, along those lines, we certainly don't know "the answer" to news business models (as if there is a single answer), but would love to hear more ideas in the comments.

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Obama Open To Helping Newspapers, To Avoid Reporting Becoming 'All Blogosphere'

from the oh-really? dept

Mathew Ingram points us to the news that President Obama has indicated that he's at least open to hearing bills that would help bailout the newspaper industry because he's afraid of reporting becoming "all blogosphere":

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding."

That seems like an odd way to characterize things. First, it seems odd to lump the medium in with a certain type of reporting. There are plenty of "real reporters" who do plenty of "serious fact-checking" within the blog world too. Blogs are just a publishing medium. Yes, because there's a lower barrier to entry, you do end up with a much larger absolute number of bloggers, many of whom are just giving opinion. But the idea that there aren't blogging reporters is pure folly. In fact, I'd argue that the serious blogs on certain subjects to a lot more to "put stories in context" than your average newspaper reporter, who writes up a quick take and moves on to the next big thing. Topic-specific blogs are often much more accurate, much more detailed, and much more willing to focus on context than newspaper reporting. So why rescue one bunch of reporters, just because they happen to print on paper?

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The Lies Newspapers Tell Themselves About Their Traffic

from the that's-not-going-to-work-too-well... dept

We've already discussed how delusional it is to believe that 10 to 15% of online newspaper readers will suddenly convert to paying for online news content, but the numbers may be even worse than that. Jeff Sonderman points us to Alan Mutter discussing a report that suggests newspapers are vastly overcounting their online audiences:

In "nearly every market" included in a study of 118 newspapers of every size in every part of the country, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive found that publishers on average report the number of unique visitors to their websites is 1.3 times larger than the population of their respective communities -- and fully 10 times greater than their print circulation.

Those numbers are not just moderately overstated. "They are magnificently incorrect," said Harmon

And that's a massive problem. If they're already expecting 10 to 15% of that population to pay, and it turns out that the real population is a lot smaller and a smaller percentage signs up to pay, the numbers that those in the industry are throwing around concerning paywalls are going to not just be bad, but they're going to be downright embarrassing.

On top of this, that same study noted that newspapers don't seem to realize how little of their actual traffic is from loyal visitors, which tend to only represent about 25% of the actual traffic. And, just because someone's a loyal visitor, it doesn't mean they'll pay. This leaves newspapers in a seriously bad spot when it comes to doing any sort of prediction on how a paywall will work:

• You don't really know how many unique visitors you have.
• You have to guess at the percentage of loyal visitors who will be amenable to paying for content.
• You have to guess the price loyal visitors might pay.
• You have to estimate not only how much web traffic you will lose but also how far your ad revenues will tumble in response to the almost certain decline in page views.

It's like watching a train wreck in motion. I'm hopeful that most newspaper execs actually have some inkling of this -- which is why we've heard mostly talk, and seen so little action, on paywalls.

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Is It Possible For Newspapers To Save Themselves?

from the sure-it-is dept

Joshua-Michele Ross is suggesting that people suggesting new business models for newspapers should give it up, because newspaper companies are simply unable to adapt:

Because the news industry doesn't suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution during a time of disruptive change.

While we have all been busy telling the newspaper institution what they should do differently we have missed one big point: Institutions are structured to precisely NOT do much of anything different.

I have to say, I don't find this convincing. While I think it's true that most newspapers won't do enough to change and will face more trouble because of it, claiming that they cannot change is questionable. Yes, it's quite difficult for companies in an industry being disrupted to make that shift, but there are cases where companies do make the shift. Intel switched from a memory business to a processor business. IBM has pretty much made the shift from a big tech company to a services company. Nokia used to make rubber boots. Companies with good and visionary management (and a healthy appetite for taking some big risks) can make, and have made, tectonic shifts. Yes, it's true that most don't do this, it does not mean that it's impossible. Claiming that they're structured not to make the change isn't true. They do have legacy issues, but it doesn't mean they can't make a big move to fix that.

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Dear Newspapers: Time To Focus On Enabling The Community; Not Limiting It

from the try-this-again dept

As we keep hearing from newspaper execs (and sometimes, reporters) insisting that paywalls or micropayments are the solution to what ails the industry, we keep asking why people will pay. The whole reason why newspapers used to work as a business model was that they collected a community around news. But, these days, there are much better communities out there. The newspapers haven't kept up. And, when it comes to news, people want to participate. They're not passive. That might mean contributing to the news or commenting on the news, but just as likely it means sharing and spreading the news, as well. But nearly every proposal from newspapers looks to limit that ability, which only makes it less valuable to the very community the newspapers need, driving them elsewhere. We've been saying for years that newspapers need to focus on enabling communities, but that still seems to be the last thing on most of their minds.

For example, this rather depressing discussion of research presented at the Future of Journalism conference concerning participatory media suggests that many in the newspaper business view the whole "participation" thing as a pain to be dealt with. Very few look for ways to better enable the community -- most seem focused on how to prevent the community from doing something bad, or looking for other ways to somehow limit the community.

And then you have situations like this:

Finding newsworthy material in contributions from the public is a challenge. In his study about Dutch newspapers and UGC presented at the conference, Piet Bakker found that there was little news contained in comments on stories.

From the point of view of the traditional journalist, the amount of news in comments was minimal. Instead, comments were seen as a way to attract more visitors and increase loyalty, but these benefits were counterbalanced by problems with abusive comments, a lack of contributions, and the cost of moderation.

They're viewing the entire thing backwards. First, they're complaining that there's "little news contained in comments." But who said there was supposed to be? It's the basic difference between reporting and a discussion. But the newspaper folks are so focused on having to be "reporters" that they're missing the fact their community wants to have a discussion around the news. Instead, it's seen as a bad thing that it's "not news." Furthermore, rather than being seen as a way to enable the community, comments are reduced to a way to attract more visitors. If you're just looking to attract more visitors, there are all sorts of things you can do. If you want to enable the community, it takes a different mindset.

Of course, not every newspaper person thinks that way. Techdirt reader Shane Richmond, who is the head of technology for the Telegraph, has written up a report for the Nieman Foundation, discussing the various ways that paper is looking to enable the community. As you read through it, it's not about page views or having the community submit stuff for journalists to do the real work on, it's actually all about enabling the community: enabling them to have a voice, enabling them to connect with one another and even enabling them to have an audience. As Richmond notes, there's still a lot more to do, but it looks like the Telegraph is approaching this with the right mindset. It would be great to see more newspapers follow the same path.

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