Newshare

Clickshare hiring in Amherst/Five College area

As a founder and major stockholder in Clickshare Service Corp., I would be remiss in not posting that our company is hiring one or more technologists in the Five College area (Amherst/Northampton) of Massachusetts. Amherst has the energy and fun found in academic communities meshed with the excitement of a community of high-tech entrepreneurs. All employees are offered an equity stake in the company. The work atmosphere is informal, the work hours are flexible, and there is an opportunity to telecommute for the right individual. Here's the rest of CEO Rick Lerner's post:

Clickshare Service Corp. is looking for highly motivated technical staff who want the opportunity to build an innovative Internet company into an industry leader. Two or three years of experience is desired. However, recent graduates with excellent references and highly experienced engineers will be considered. First and foremost, we are looking for people who thrive in a small team environment, appreciate a high degree of autonomy, and most of all seek to do what's necessary to create and improve this exciting registration, federated authentication, commerce and personalization/customization network technology.

ABOUT CLICKSHARE

Clickshare has been providing online software services to the media industry for 10 years. We have approximately two dozen clients using our online registration and e-commerce service. These include major magazine and newspaper organizations and nearly 2 million registered users. As our client base grows we have the opportunity to expand our existing product base and to introduce exciting new technology into the marketplace.

By joining our small, friendly and energetic staff, you will have an unequaled opportunity for professional development as you are involved in the many tasks required to realize the company's and your potential. Your major duties will include working with clients to define, design and develop custom solutions using our platform; to design and develop new components and products; and to set up installations for new clients. Other tasks will include assisting with customer support and systems infrastructure.

Desired credentials include a mix of the following:

• Solid understanding of modern software development and testing methodologies
• Experience using Object Oriented Design and common design patterns
• Experience using Java, XML, PHP or similar technologies
• Basic understanding of relational database technology and JDBC
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills
• Willingness to work in an energetic, fast-paced, business-critical and team-oriented-environment
• Ability to work without constant supervision
• Degree in Computer Science or a directly related field
• Interest or experience in online music/video is a plus.

You may email your resume and cover letter to jobs2007@clickshare.com or fax these to (413) 458-8002. Additional information about Clickshare can be found on our web site at http://www.clickshare.com/about .

'Representative journalism' -- an experiment in local community

I'm helping with an experiment in Northfield, Minn., with a working title of "Representative Journalism." The goal: See if we can create a system for local or topical newsgathering so compelling and useful that users will help pay for it directly. Kennesaw State University's Len Witt has just obtained a $51,000 grant to start to work on this problem -- with a little bit of help from Chris Peck and me, and a lot of help upcoming on the ground in Northfield, Minn., from a citizen team led by Griff Wigley.

For now, we are calling the concept, "representative journalism" (but realize that's not nearly perfect or catchy). The idea is to create a collaborative (maybe profit, maybe nonprofit) infrastructure to which local social-networks-in-formation can turn for journalism expertise. The RepJ mothership will provide technical, business, fund-raising, financing, marketing, advertising and ethical guidance to the local RepJ organization so that it can hire one or more reporters to cover the local affinity group's issue or passion. It could be geographic like a high school or topical like "the environment." Importantly, we envision the community's journalist reporting to (as in employment) an experienced editor either on a direct or dotted-line basis. We see this as providing the assurance that the work the reporter does conforms to journalistic ethics and principles -- and provides the reporter with cover from being manipulated, as a PR person might be, by the affinity group that actually pays his/her salary or free-lance fees.

There are many issues with this experiment -- some ethical, some practical. The biggest is whether communities will be willing to sustain the cost of semi-pro journalism to cover the passions which bind them. The representative journalist must be unusually focused on engaging with citizens (online and F2F) before, during and after posting of a stories. The journalist reports to a respected, experienced editor.

See the: RepJ blog site (for updates).  (Photo: RepJ team at Northfield radio station on March 13)

Pearl tells story of triumph over fear, cynicism and prejudice

Mariana Pearl, widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who got his professional start in North Adams, tells a story of triumph over fear, cynicism and prejudice in an hour speech to an overflow crowd at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
http://newshare.typepad.com/greylocknews/2008/03/pearl-packs-hou.html

Engagement and the 21st-century newsroom -- the four phases of editorial voice:

News organizations are searching for ways to recalibrate their "voice" and the editorial pages may be one place where experimentation may be easiest to undertake. Read edited and expanded version of remarks by Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, delivered on Sunday, March 2, 2008.   (ALSO SEE JONATHAN DUBE'S SUMMARY OF THE REMARKS)

The remarks were delivered to approximately 30 U.S. newspaper editorial writers at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, in Los Angeles as part of the four-day seminar, “Best Practices: Editorial and Commentary in Cyberspace,” presented by the Knight Digital media Center of the USC Annenberg School for Communication in partnership with the National Conference of Editorial Writers.    Download the remarks from here and post comments.

DOWNLOAD REMARKS (pdf)

One in seven advanced cell phones purchased by Africans; kids share cells, not Facebook

Robin Parker, director of Bizcommunity.com, has spent much of his time developing online journalism businesses on the African continent. In a column at allafrica.com, he notes that "currently, 1:7 mobiles bought daily is bought by an African. In four years time 50% of continental Africans will have mobile phones with high-end capabilities. This poses an interesting dilemma for those governments clinging to old-style autocracy . . . ." LINK: http://allafrica.com/stories/200801040544.html

Separately, Scott Karp of Publish2.0 recounts his experience eavesdropping on teens at a cafe -- and describes how their world revolves around "sharing" their cell phones. Taken together, these two columns suggests news organizations should be focused on worldwide wireless if they want to grow. LINK:

http://publishing2.com/2008/01/04/real-teen-social-networking-in-person-with-cellphones-in-hand/

Ex-LATimes editor says he broached idea of four-paper web subscription consortium -- it's now dead, he says

If Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. opens up the Wall Street Journal's website to free browsing without subscription, it will spell the end of one initiative to figure out how to finance quality news on the web, according to the former editor of the Los Angeles Times.  John Carroll was among four people on a panel, "The News Business and the Business of News," on Saturday at Boston College.

Carroll's assessment came as he describe research he conducted last year while a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.  He was on a panel organized by the Masssachusetts Foundation on the Humanities, part of a free symposium entitled: "No News is Bad News."

Carroll, who now lives in Lexington, Ky.,  said he interviewed about 50 leaders of the news industry during his post-L.A. Times research for Shorenstein. "The captains of our industry were in a state of demoralization and confusion," Carroll said he found.  He said circulation revenue which sustains newspaper report in print is "kaput" on the web because nearly all news websites are free.

During his visits, he said he proposed the idea of a newspaper-industry consortium of four of what he termed the most prestigious papers for national, international and business news -- New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street -- who he said should merge access to their websites and create a common subscription to all. 

"And If you could pursuade those people, who don't like each other all that much, to form a consortium and have all of their web, all of their online material be sold through one vendor, like they would own, just like a newstand on the corner here which sells multiple papers," said Carroll, "they would reclaim something something that the newspaper business is losing, which is a quasi monopoly.

"I don't think it would be an illegal monopoly, because thousands and thousands of people are covering national, foreign and business news. But these people do it by far the best. And if you were an intelligent, if you were this audience, and you could only get those four papers through that site, I suspect we would have a 90% plus subscriber rate in this room and could recover that circulation rapidly.

"That idea, I mentioned it to people at these various papers. None of them said it was a bad idea, but they were already so absorbed  going in their own direction with their own contractual relationships and strategies and so forth that nobody  did it or even paid it that much attention I think. Now that the Wall Street Journal has gone to Murdoch and Murdoch is talking about taking it free, that's the end of it. It will never happen.  But it was kind of a last stab at preserving the idea of paid content." 

Carroll's remarks came 30 minutes into a 75-minute discussion lead by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume, who now teaches at UMass Boston, and including New York Times columnist David Carr and St. Petersburg Times Executive Editor Neil Brown.

Brown outlines efforts by the St. Petersburg paper -- which is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute -- to develop multiple means of delivering on its quality-journalism-which-benefits-democracy-mission to users non only on the web and in the traditional daily paper, but also via free-distribution weekday tabloid. He said the traditional paper's circulation is holding steady and even increasing among some younger demograhics.

Carr said he things newspapers and magazines will evolve into niche publications for the wealthy and they will be "like catnip for marketers," and hence will likely survive, although perhaps with reduced circulation and higher subscription fees.  Meanwhile, he said, "making their websites better and better [and free] is in a way building out the gallows."

The irony, said Carr, is that newspaper reporters have never had more readers, when combined print and web readership is included. But the problem is that advertisers do not consider a web reader to be as valuable as a print reader, so web ad revenue increases are not offsetting print ad revenue declines. 

To listen to an audio stream of the entire panel, click on the carat to the left of the bar below. Carroll's remarks about the four papers begins about 30 minutes in (after about 10 seconds of crowd noise and an introduction by Donald MacGillis, Boston Globe assistant editorial-page editor.  A downloadable MP3 podcast is also available (36 megs). 

(Full disclosure: The author of this post is an investor in Clickshare Service Corp., a company which has patented a system allowing users to have an account at one website and purchase or subscribe to content at multiple other websites.)

Boston researcher thinks TimesSelect experience shows a market for content service charging

MGP2006 alum John Garfunkel has completed an eight-part, 21,000-word study about charging for content on the web. Garfunkel, a Boston-based software engineer and Princeton University grad, studied available public audience-traffic data for the New York Times website during the period when access to its columnists and archives were behind a "TimesSelect" paywall.

His report is dense and its difficult to draw hard conclusions from it. But in an interview, Garfunkel makes one key assertion: He says the influence of Times columnists, as measured by they amount they were referenced in blogs, dropped only about 20% during the period their material was "behind the wall."

In general, Garfunkel believes news organizations may be making a mistake by relying solely on advertising. But he nuances that. "The answer is not in charging for content, it is in charging for service," he says. "It seems there should be options in service or avoiding advertisements."

He goes on in an interview: "I found it disheartening that so many commentators like Jeff Jarvis were willing to go to 100% advertising supported. But if you read Neal Postman and any other media commentator going back decades, you wouldn't find anyone seriously trusting the credibility of 100 percent ad supported content." Garfunkel's self-published study is on his website:

http://civilities.net/TimesSelect

"There is a solution for newspapers to charge money to readers who want to pay money for a premium service of news," Garfunkel concludes. "I don't know if it's a viable market, but I have discussed in some more depth in this series and feel it should considered as well."

Garfunkel says The Times reported it pulled in about $10 million from subscriptions to TimesSelect. By comparison, he says, Fox News channel realizes $850 million a year in carriage fees from cable systems. "I think the economics of this bears further consideration by people who care about the future of news," says Garfunkel in an email report of his findings.

Garfunkel notes he did not have access to NYT's internal data. "The only person I spoke to at the Times was Marshall Simmonds, mostly to clarify some public facts," he says.

His key findings, he says:

-- During his study period (with TimesSelect in place) tThe seven regular Times Op-Ed saw their references in the blogs go up 8 times. A non-representative sampleset of pundits saw increases of 10 times -- a 20% drop-off.

-- Nielsen/NetRatings data for the period TimesSelect was in place, posted by Jon Dube at cyberjournalist.net, show an aggregate 27% increase in NYT traffic. Garfunkel says this traffic growth exceeds the growth during the same period at comparable, competing websites.

-- The paywall was not the reason that the Times archives did not show up in a Google Web search over the last two years. It was already indexed by Google News. Why it did not show up in the web search, was an application of Google's unofficial policy (as reported by Danny Sullivan) to favor non-subscription content.

CONTACT: Jon Garfunkel Boston, Mass. http://civilities.net / jgarfunk@civilities.net / 617.939.3449

FULL DISCLOSURE: The author of this post is a shareholder in Clickshare Service Corp., which has developed a patented system for charging for content on the web.

Alan Mutter on the brain drain affecting MSM newspapers

A good read: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2007/10/brain-drain.html

Old, new, compromise after The Times "opens up"

Yesterday The New York Times announced it would end "Times Select," its approximately-two-year-old experiment with charging for premium content. This has been a closely watched test, and one I follow closely because of my role as founder and shareholder in Clickshare Service Corp. Let's look at the situation from a old-world view, express the new view, and then suggest sort of a compromise.

Here are links to some comment by others:

Vin Crosbie: "Paid content isn't dead; just payment for one-to-many content is. The problem is most people in the industry still think in only one-to-many terms, including those pundits who are hailing TimesSelect's demise as the demise of paid content online."

Scott Rosenberg: " . . . [F]or better or worse, charging for news content online is nearly impossible."

Jay Rosen: "The Times has decided it's better off in the  bazaar." (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/ )

Jimmy Guterman:  "When there is an Internet advertising dip -- however mild, however brief  -- what will happen to the publications that will be close to 100-percent dependent on advertising?"

Steve Johnson:  "But somewhere along the way, it will become apparent that advertising cannot pay for every single info-bit that's on the Web: The ratio of eyeballs to info-bits, many of which are expensive to make, becomes too small."

Jeff Jarvis:  "The relationship is what's important, not the content."

Ken Doctor:  "Times Select may not have been the best retention strategy, but retention of a half-million Times subscribers just got a bit harder.  There's an inevitability here, well-cheered on the web, and now that it's done, best to make the best of it. "

Mark Potts:   "Creating good journalism requires a sophisticated business model, with revenue from multple sources including, in some cases, paid subscriptions."
Also: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/09/timesselect-rip.html

Staci Kramer:  " . . . [T]raffic increases from search-engine optimization (SEO) and the NYT's belief that by opening millions of pages to search engines, that traffic growth will continue and with it, ad revenue."

Times own announcement

Dan Gillmor: "On topic after topic, the Times story (or stories) will move near or to the top of the search engine rankings."

The old view:

There are those such as Jay Rosen who believe charging for news-and-opinion type content is competitively impossible on the largely "free-content" web.  They see this as a hard reality. I guess they figure if that means journalism as we've known it is unsustainable in a solely web environment, so be it.

There are others -- primarily small papers, single-paper publishers and niche publishers such as The Wall Street Journal -- who regard what they do as empirically valuable and they resist making it available for free.

At The New York Times, the ad folks won the internal battle . . . and I think it is a form of death for journalism as we've known it. The competition for advertising on the web is such that it seems hard to imagine sustainable rates will ever support the amount of original reporting we have had in this nation for the last 50 years. It will take some years for this to become really obvious, and then we'll swing back to premium-content services. By then, the newsrooms of newspapers will be hollowed-out shells unless they are subsidized by things like About.com, Kaplan, other businesses, or philanthropy.

I don't know that there is any other way for The Times to have played this. We are watching an evolution that is really not under any individual's or institution's control. There is one possible scenario that could alter this -- and that is if a system evolves which allows sites to charge premium rates for personalized advertising -- because of superior demographic targetting. This is suggested in the article The Times' carried on its own decision.

The new view:

Jay and other see greater value in the "linked web" -- where search engines and cross links magnify the readership and authority of a source like The Times.  This is certainly the promise of the web -- being able to go anywhere for information, largely without restriction, a world in which information is enriched by the ability to deeply cross link.

The compromise:

So where does that leave our thinking:

• Journalism is expensive, and web advertising alone may not sustain it.
• Charging for content puts up walls which destroy the brilliant utility
  of the open web.
• Are we therefore destined to have a an open web, and unsustainable
  journalism?

I don't think so. The challenge is to develop an approach which preserves open linking but yet creates a basis to sustain quality content, whether by advertising or direct user support.

Suppose The Times were able to get paid as its users are served demographically-targetted ads from third-party sites? Then it could "monetize" the demographics of its quality-journalism-seeking audience.

Suppose, for example, The Times got a commission when it served up content to its users from other websites? Bottom line: Newspapers have to start behaving like information valets.

New York Times piece revives thinking about "micropayments"

Dan Mitchell, writing Aug. 27, 2007 in The New York Times, has revived the conversation about so-called "micropayments," noting that iTunes is working and suggesting larger small-payment aggregation networks which facilitate advertising and user exchange might be feasible. The piece ends with a quote
from Bill Densmore.

ALTERNATE LINK: http://newshare.blogspot.com/2007/08/nytimes-in-online-world-pocket-change.html

He writes:

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

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

Also see: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Mit-gathering