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Last week, the Zelnik report, commissioned by French culture minister Frédéric Mitterand, recommended imposing a 'Google tax' on the online advertising revenues of Google and other Internet giants as part of an initiative to support creative output in France. Patrick Zelnik, CEO of independent music label Naïve, Jacques Toubon, former minister of culture and Guillaume Cerutti, CEO of Sotheby's France put the report together, also recommending ways to try to get young people back into buying rather than illegally downloading music online. 

Zelnik told Libération that he envisaged taxing a "a small percentage of the €800 million that the search engine brings in from advertising in France." He told the French daily that although the music industry was in the most difficult situation, the press was also "in grave danger."

The New York Times' drop in ad revenue this quarter is much less severe than anticipated, and a marked improvement from previous quarters this year, fueling hopes for a 2010 recovery and balanced budget. 

Although the new sent the paper's share up a few points, the losses in print advertising still outstrips the gains in online ad revenue. The fourth quarter is still expected to have a 25% print ad decline year-on-year, a $97 million drop.

After announcing that it would make concessions to help newspapers earlier this week, Google's Josh Cohen, has given an interview with Media Guardian explaining that the move will help publications retain their relationship with the search engine, without inhibiting their attempts to put up paywalls. 

Google has updated its First Click Free program, so that publishers can limit Google News users to look at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing beforehand. Previously, users have been able to continually view subscription articles for free by entering news websites via the search engine. 

Twitter is ubiquitous.  There are roughly 25 million tweets posted everyday.  And the brains behind Twitter keep introducing new things to keep us hooked.  This week they introduced Twitter Tim.es just following the introduction of Twitter Lists, reports the Online Journalism Review.

Twitter Tim.es uses the links tweeted by your friends and your friends' friends to create a "newspaper" front page of relevant stories for you.  It calculates how many times the links were posted by friends on Twitter and then displays them according to popularity.  These "newspapers," which resemble easier to read RSS feeds with more pictures, can be refreshed every half hour for news updates.  Twitter also has made it so you are able to view the newspapers of some of the most famous and influential Twitter users- such as Jack Schofield of The Guardian and Jeff Jarvis.  

According to the new figures, UK online ad spending will continue to fall in 2010 by 1.1% with a 4.9% lift expected for 2011 bringing the industry back to 2008 figures. 

Zenith projects that the overall world ad economy will get back on track with .5% growth next year and 4.3% growth in 2011. Tellingly, developing nations are expected to lead with 7.8% ad growth in all media, while the 'developed' countries of W. Europe, US and Japan can expect to see a further 2.9% fall. 

The good news is that the market seems to be bottoming out; recent improvements in business confidence have been met with good signals from both advertisers and publishers alike, according to the report.

Source: paidContent

In July the Media Standards Trust, a London-based nonprofit that promotes high standards in news on behalf of the public, launched a new draft microformat in conjunction with the Associated Press, and the MST called for its adoption by others. The proposed microformat is called hNews: it is a semantic mark-up that uses the HTML tagging tools that are already part of the structure of the web to provide machine readable metadata and information. In less technical terms, it is code to be added into the HTML of an article that can tell a search engine or human the article's title, author, the time of publishing, and provides links to the usage rights and news principles. 

 

The Editors Weblog spoke to Martin Moore, director of the MST and Srinandan Kasi, AP vice president and general counsel, to find out more how hNews is being used and its implications. 

Background 

The MST started to work with Sir Tim Berners-Lee's (inventor of the World Wide Web) Web Science Research Initiative a couple of years ago. Both the MST and Berners-Lee were trying to tackle the problem of tremendous growth in the amount of information available online and the necessity of finding ways to index and classify this, the difference being that Berners-Lee was looking at information in general and MST was looking specifically at news content. The MST obtained funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation to research and develop methodologies for distinguishing news online and allowing people to search for news more intelligently and clearly. 

The Value Added News initiative was born, which aimed to develop a novel type of microformat to specifically mark up news. It also looked at RDFa, the language of the semantic web, but decided that as yet it would be "a jump too far" to try to implement this in the immediate future. Microformats are far less complex and "fantastically pragmatic," Moore explained, simply making more identifiable information that is already there. 

HNews is currently a draft for a proposed microformat as it has not yet gone through the process that would lead it to be officially recognised by the microformat community. However, the MST took the decision to launch hNews in advance of this final vetting in order to "start a dialogue with news organisations and the microformat community so that we could evolve it and make it usable for all those that needed it," Moore said. "This is deliberately not a finished product," he added. It is already being used by human rights and democracy advocacy site OpenDemocracy.net and the AP is trialling it. 

The essential benefit of hNews is that by identifying content more clearly and making more of its key information machine-readable it therefore becomes easier to search for. It also could lead to the development of different ways to search via different applications. Kasi was enthusiastic about the advantages of this for the AP. "AP clearly believes that being able to better identify each piece of content for better search discovery, better linking, better aggregation allows ultimately for the customer to see more content, more trusted content, from editorial sources," he said. "Microformats are a very simple, elegant way to do that on a pretty large scale basis," he added, allowing the AP to "prime the content better for search purposes even before it gets to the publisher."

Crucial to the potential success of hNews, both Moore and Kasi stressed, is its ease of use for the journalist. As it deals with information that is actually already there, Moore explained, the mark up system can be incorporated into a news organisation's CMS and as such does not create any extra work for journalists. This is definitely an advantage, believes Kasi: "there's no separate effort needed - and that's the beauty of it." Moore said that Value Added News would ideally like to develop plug-ins for open source blogging platforms, to make the technology simple to use for bloggers also. 

Clearly, the advantage for readers of news organisations using hNews is that they will be able to search news content more efficiently. Whether they will be able to see the same information as the search engine is up to the publisher, who can choose whether or not to make the information in hNews visible to the consumer. OpenDemocracy has placed a 'value added' box below each article which shows the user the information carried in the microformat: the article name, the author, the date published and updated, and a link to the statement of principles. The author's name links to further information about this writer and his/her recent articles: "they decided they would like to make it more useful to the reader," Moore explained. "But equally," he added, "you could integrate and not have anything visible." Kasi said that the AP will leave it up to individual publishers to decide what they want their readers to see.  

In terms of the way that the AP uses hNews, Kasi focussed on the advantages it offers for research and licensing rather than protecting copyright, which seemed to be the key message of the press release on the topic and which attracted the most debate. The AP has taken hNews a step further and has integrated another layer into the format that will notify the AP when a tagged piece of content is viewed. Kasi explained that for the AP, as a content producer without a destination website, this is particularly useful in "understanding how our content actually gets processed and how it goes out on the web." Hence, it gives the AP information to allow it to measure how much usage a particular story gets, and lets the organisation know if there are stories that are lacking in traffic. This information will be stored in the AP's News Registry. For a publisher with one destination site, this is information that is already easily obtainable.

This extra notification also has significant potential for making licensing AP content more efficient, Kasi stressed.  "It allows for more flexible licensing," he said, "giving publishers the ability to approach their own content needs more flexibly and similarly allows content owners to be able to offer the product in more flexible ways." 

For example, a publisher could request to use a photo and be billed an agreed cost each time they decided to use it, rather than having to request to purchase rights each time. "You have taken the bureaucracy out of the process and allowed the publisher to have more flexibility, and content owner to get the precise revenue that is owed." Such tracking capabilities clearly have the potential to improve efficiencies in syndication of content. 

So what are the implications for copyright? HNews is not intended to entirely prevent copyright theft: serious copyright evaders would have no problem removing the relevant html code. But as Moore explained, if there is a link to the usage rights that clearly accompanies each article, it does "make it harder to claim ignorance."  And clearly, the AP's additional notification coding will alert it to unauthorised as well as authorised use.  

Kasi commented that hNews "paves the way for new innovative business models" and Moore said that coming up with a new business model for news might be an "unintended repurcussion" of the work of Value Added News, which did not start with such grand ideas. Doc Searls believes that "the AP is laying foundations of a new business model for journalism" based on the idea of ascribenation: meaning the act of ascribing credit to a source or set of sources for a piece of media work. The idea would be that a reader could choose to pay the source for the content then consume. 

Moore explained that hNews has huge potential for developing APIs based on news content. He pointed to the example of the Guardian, which recently released its Open Platform Content API, allowing developers access to its content and tags in order to create new applications. Developers must work with the Guardian and if one finds a way to make money from Guardian content, they must share revenue with the paper. So releasing content APIs could be a way to find new revenue streams, but it is currently expensive. By integrating hNews, however, Moore specified, "you could do something very similar but much cheaper."

HNews is in a useable form, and all that is really needed now to give it a chance at success and to potentially help develop new business models for news is that content producers choose to implement it. The problem, Moore clarified, is that to truly demonstrate its usefulness requires a lot of content to be marked up in this way and therefore it is difficult to show its full potential until many organisations have signed on. Value Added News is creating its own search engine to help clarify the ways in which it can be used. OpenDemocracy has integrated the format to the majority of their articles and the AP will start having its English-language text processed in mid-November, with a goal of moving on to other forms of assets later. 

Google announced in May that it would start supporting microformats. The benefits for the search engine, as well as more accurate search, include being able to add richer, more detailed information to the snippets that appear below the link in search results. 

So is hNews the future for news? It could definitely have wide-reaching consequences for news producers, distributors and readers. On the most basic level, making content more easily searchable undoubtedly makes sense. Whether it is the best way to do it is uncertain, but at least it is straight forward, and there is potential, as the AP has shown, to adapt the technology to individual news organisations' needs. 

The right for reporters to enter family courts was granted by changes to the law last April, bowing to a campaign led by the Times newspaper, citing the need for greater transparency in legal events. The campaign was supported by politicians, the media and fathers' groups. The existing rules concerning the secrecy of family courts were, according to a family lawyer, Sarah Harmon,"confused and contradictory". Some courts were open to press attendance, while others covering similar cases remained out of bounds. Scottish regulations, moreover, were considerably more relaxed than the English and Welsh frameworks.

And herein lies the publishers' dilemma: making their content unavailable to Google would undoubtedly decrease their traffic, given the nature of online news reading which frequently involves jumping around between publications and searching for more information. But they view Google's business model as unjust, as the search engine seemingly makes a fortune from displaying content that it did not create, via search results and the aggregation service Google News. Criticism of Google has grown steeply in the last few months due to news publishers' growing resentment. Recent reports that Google's profits are soaring despite the recession are likely to fuel more backlash.

A solution seems hard to find. Would Google be willing to offer a share of its income to newspaper publishers, when it created a business model that arguably benefits both publisher and reader? But can it defend its use of others' content for its own financial gain?

Fighting for what's 'fair' 

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Peter Osnos has written a thorough summary of the issues of conflict between content providers and Google "in the link economy." As well as stressing Google's crucial and dominant role in the organisation of the Internet and noting that the traffic sent to newspaper websites via Google has been "inextricable from their audiences' lives," he expressing is a common view amongst traditional media that the Google system seems to be facilitating a shift away from paying  content providers for their work.

Osnos questions the often-cited phrase "information wants to be free," pointing out that the original quote from which this sound bite is taken is not so straightforward. In fact, Stewart Brand, the man who coined the line, followed it in his 1987 book with "information also wants to be expensive." Brand highlights the tension between these two opposite ideas: information wants to be free "because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine" but expensive "because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient." Brand's assumption that this tension would lead to "endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property,' the moral rightness of casual distribution" has become increasingly accurate.

So the question is, how to make sure all stakeholders in the content economy have a fair share? Taking into account evolving technology, changes in consumer habits and developing business models, this is no easy task. The free online content model which virtually all newspapers adopted is no longer working, Osnos stresses, as papers' profits are falling despite healthy traffic. And although he has not been able to come up with a clear solution to the problem, he did manage to explain the 'fairness' issues clearly and precisely, and suggest what needs to be changed.

Fair Conduct

• - Problem: traffic via Google does not necessarily end up on the site of whomever originally produced the content. The Huffington Post, for example, which aggregates much content, is highly skilled at search optimisation and can therefore often send its reproductions of stories to the top of a Google search. Osnos offers the example of a Sports Illustrated scoop which was broken via the website but did not lead Google searches. SI approached Google about this but did not receive a positive response.
• - Solution: algorithms that distribute Internet traffic need to include recognition of who got the story, with human help if necessary. Incidentally, this relates to a project that the Associated Press is working on, to create search landing pages that direct traffic to the original content producer.

Fair Use

• - Problem: Osmos notes that fair use in the US (the standards one must meet in order to use copyrighted content without the permission of rights holders) is far more flexible than he had first thought, as well as being extremely complicated. In the US, copyright law involves considering whether quoting the material is for commercial gain, the nature and scale of the work, the amount being used in relation to the whole, and the impact on the value of the material by its secondary use. In terms of aggregating links, Osmos states that the Google position is that a link and a small snippet is fair use, and the site that generated the content is a beneficiary of the traffic. However, news organisations feel that aggregators should pay for use of the content when they sell advertising around the links, which Google News started to do earlier this year. The issue becomes more complicated when taking into account whether aggregation enhances or detracts from the value of the original content, Osnos adds.
• - Solution: Negotiation seems to be Osnos's advice. A trial would take years, he believes. Newspaper executives have already been in talks with Google, but no details have been made public.

Fair compensation

• - Problem: how to monetise content which is currently free and make sure that the those who produced it are compensated?
• - Solution: as well as charging for content on individual websites, Osnos suggests that users could pay for content via telecom providers. Google could be a "kind of meter," Osnos proposes, helping to determine what percentage should go to the content originators.

Enthusiasm to protect intellectual property throughout the web, not just on aggregators such as Google, has been soaring in recent months. As well as ACAP, other possible solutions include US-based start-up Attributor, which is promising to monitor digital content and prevent its unlawful usage. The company is part of the Fair Syndication Consortium in the US, and has just made an agreement with Deutsche Presse-Agentur that allows the latter to promote and sell Attributor's services in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The Associated Press announced plans to stop misappropriation of content in April (although this is not directed at Google, with whom it has a licensing deal) and the organisation recently announced the adoption of a new microformat which includes usage information.

Going on the offensive?

Howard Weaver, former editor and McClatchy Vice President thinks that it is "time for news to play offense" and take on the search engines. He highlights the big advantage that news outlets can offer: "curated, edited, verified, sorted news" that focuses on what is most important and most reliable, and points out that this is something that Google cannot do. Google's lead, however, comes from the fact that it spans the globe, and newspapers "lack the scale and internet savvy to put that product in front of consumers who want it and for whom advertisers will pay." His solution therefore seems to be a new kind of search engine organised by newspapers themselves: they "will have to work together and win by offering a better product." Weaver reveals that he is on the board of a company that is putting together a proposal for such a product, which would give 50% of revenue back to those who create the stories.

Topix CEO Chris Tolles, however, disputes Weaver's calculations that led him to believe that the major aggregators and search engines make $15billion from news and news-related content and argues that rather, "news is a crap search product, and a loss leader, which is a big reason why Google news is pretty much a non revenue product." He points out that smaller news aggregators powered by journalists do exist and are not making "a ton of money" and he is convinced that "there is no money in building a news aggregator focused on trust."

Does Google, as Osnos suggests, as a major player in the way that news is presented to the audience, have a responsibility to help ensure that this news is suitably funded? If Google did not exist, would newspapers be making more money? Could an industry-run alternative work? How can publishers and search engines work together to ensure that news is read and monetised as much as possible?