Long ago, in the beginning, a newspaper developed a Web site. Hundreds followed that lead. Now, one newspaper has only a Web site. In the end, what will there be? And what will be the consequences for readers?

A Wisconsin daily newspaper, whose readers have been increasingly shedding it, has now shed a significant expense — newsprint. The Capital Times of Madison, whose circulation has fallen from more than 40,000 to 18,000, said “-30-” to its printing press. It has become an online information enterprise around the Madison.com portal.

The 90-year-old newspaper — one of two serving Madison under a joint operating agreement — will only publish a tabloid-sized edition twice per week carrying some news, opinion and a weekly arts, entertainment and culture section. It will be distributed in its home-delivered partner paper, the Wisconsin State Journal.

It’s a dicey move, but critics like me have said for years that the Web-only newspaper will see its day come (which does not mean we have argued that online-only is a good idea). So what does this end-of-print mean for Madison and beyond?
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In case you missed it, Trent Reznor yesterday released the new Nine Inch Nails CD, The Slip, as a free download. I’ve only had time to listen to it once, and that was while I was working. So I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve been able to give it a few minutes of real attention. In any case, it’s free NIN, and what’s not to love about that.

Industry watcher and pundit extraordinaire Bob Lefsetz predictably has some thoughts about the release. I’m a big Lefsetz fan, mainly because of his relentless assaults on music industry greed and stupidity, and if you’re somebody who’s disgusted, dismayed or confused by how bad the music biz has gotten in recent years, you need to be a Lefsetz Letter subscriber. Full Story »

Last week AT&T exec Jim Cicconi did his part to spread FUD by claiming that the Internet will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010, bolstering this doomsday notion with absurd claims that three households could conceivably consume as much bandwidth as the entire existing Internet, or that the entirety of existing networks built today came from private-sector innovation, a claim I’m sure everyone from Vint Cerf to Al Gore can dispute. Full Story »

In the first quarter a year ago, The New York Times Co. made $23.9 million in profit. This week, the company reported a loss of $335,000. That’s about the worst quarter-to-quarter loss the company — and the news biz — has ever seen.

In a story by The Times‘ Richard Pérez-Peña, president and CEO Janet L. Robinson said “it was ‘a challenging quarter, one that showed the effects of a weaker economy,’ compounded by ‘a marketplace that has been reconfigured technologically, economically and geographically.’”

That’s Robinson-speak for “Holy crap! We’re screwed!”
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With the downturn in the economy, the welfare reform Bill Clinton enacted during his presidency might not seem as politically prescient as it once did. In his New York Times article, “From Welfare Shift in ‘96, a Reminder for Clinton,” Peter S. Goodman reports on Peter Edelman, who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure. Not only Bill, but Hillary, doesn’t “‘acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,’ Mr. Edelman said. ‘It’s just not in their lens.’”

Once Hillary was in the Senate, Goodman reports, “When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton ‘wouldn’t have anything to do with it,’ Ms. Chapin said.” Full Story »

It’s the new conventional wisdom: The news biz is dying. Declining circulation. Abandonment by advertisers. Falling revenues. Cuts in staffing to reduce costs. The news biz needs a new business model, the critical harpies proclaim.

But what should a new business model for an industry whose principal product is journalism look like?

It would have to recognize several new — and old — realities.

• Any new business model must generate profit.

There’s no way around this. Journalism is best sustained within a for-profit frame. A company that engages in newspaper journalism as a product is not supported by government (unlike public television) nor should it be. The same holds for commercial broadcast journalism as well. To provide news, the company must make a profit to attract investors and secure the resources to collect, report and transmit that news. A non-profit model cannot immediately match the breadth and depth of news reporting that a healthy democracy of more than 300 million citizens requires.
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Timothy Crouse’s book gave us the overused phrase “boys on the bus.” Now, it seems, the boys (and girls) are being yanked off the bus in droves. Fewer and fewer reporters for the nation’s major dailies are riding the campaign bus and flying on the press plane to regularly cover the remnants of the pre-convention presidential race.

That bodes poorly for both the survival of the print press and the level of political knowledge of the electorate the print press decreasingly serves.

Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times reports that 650 journalists parachuted into Cleveland, Ohio, in February to cover the debate between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “But,” Mr. Steinberg writes, “early the next morning, as the two candidates set off for engagements across Ohio and Texas, representatives of only two dozen or so news organizations tagged along.” [emphasis added].

Newspaper managers say they have reasons for pulling the boys off the bus.
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Item: Citizens are concerned about online privacy and security. According to a new report from USC’s Center for the Digital Future, “Sixty-one percent of adult Americans said they were very or extremely concerned about the privacy of personal information when buying online, an increase from 47 percent in 2006. Before last year, that figure had largely been dropping since 2001.” These fears are well-founded.

The study, to be released Thursday, comes as privacy and security groups report that an increasing number of personal records are being compromised because of data breaches at online retailers, banks, government agencies and corporations. Full Story »

Appearing weekly, Nota Bene takes a step back from the news. Also, as an appendix, it culls trenchant comments to articles and posts, as well as the occasional passage from email. Nota Bene was founded by Mike Sheehan.

When New York’s Governor Eliot Spitzer spit the bit, it was a loss for New York state and the Democrats. But Spitzer had been, and continues to be a problem for Hillary Clinton, as Peter Baker, blogging for the Washington Post, points out. John Nichols also weighed in on this at the Nation. Full Story »

Last month the Associated Press cast a harsh light on a dark secret of many big public industries–that workers have far too much access to personal data of customers, and misuse and abuse it accordingly

Vast computer databases give curious employees the ability to look up sensitive information on people with the click of a mouse. The WE Energies database includes credit and banking information, payment histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and energy usage. In some cases, it even includes income and medical information. Experts say some companies do little to stop such abuses even though they could lead to identity theft, stalking and other privacy invasions. And companies that uncover violations can keep them quiet because in many cases it is not illegal to snoop, only to use the data for crimes. Full Story »

If you haven’t already heard about it, Comcast doesn’t just block subscribers from using BitTorrent, it also blocks the public from even complaining about it in public:

Comcast’s spokespersons admitted it paid people to do the same for a hearing on the company’s actions regarding its interference with peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as BitTorrent. The placeholders not only held spots in line, but also crowded into the hearing itself, preventing more than 100 attendees — many of whom had come to speak against Comcast — from getting inside. Full Story »

I believe my current participation could be a distraction.

— major league baseball pitcher and accused steroids and HGH cheat Roger Clemens, in withdrawing from a scheduled appearance at an “event, which takes place largely at Disney Hollywood Studios, and lets fans interact with athletes and ESPN personalities and watch live ESPN programming”; Feb. 20.

I’m very excited about watching this game. I do want to thank your coaches. Thanks for coaching. Thanks for teaching people the importance of teamwork. I like baseball a lot, so thanks for teaching them how to play baseball, too.

— from President Bush’s remarks at a “tee ball” game between the Little Dragons and the Little Saints at Ghana International School in Accra, Ghana; Feb. 20.
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Edward Wasserman, writing in the Feb. 18 Miami Herald, makes an obvious but still unsettling point about the news business:

The nearly two-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks.

Prof. Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, recounts that two hundred years from the penny press to the difficulties that “new media” have with a business model that presumes people will pay for news — and therefore advertisers will pay to park themselves in front of those eyeballs. But, says Prof. Wasserman:

That era is now ending, not because the public no longer needs news or because people mistrust news any more than they always have — but because new technologies are churning out better ways to reach customers who are shopping for cars, jobs or homes.

For two centuries, advertising has supported journalism. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press — but does not guarantee profitability. That news organizations must achieve without government support.
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It’s official–the three-month writer’s strike has come to an end, with 92.5% of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) voting to get back to work after an agreement was struck between the WGA and the major studios that would (in theory) guarantee writers a larger percentage of revenue from shows broadcast or sold over the Internet–the chief sticking point that led to the strike in the first place. Full Story »

Feb. 12, 2008
The Honorable Hillary Clinton
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Sen. Clinton,

When I stepped into the voting booth in the New York state primary Feb. 5, I pulled the lever for Sen. Barack Obama, not you, my state’s junior senator. But I had misgivings.

Not any more. Any doubts I had about the wisdom of my choice of Sen. Obama vanished when you chose not to show up on Capitol Hill to vote on the critical cloture vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill. As passed by the Senate, that bill would grant retroactive legal immunity for the telecommunication companies that aided the federal government in spying on Americans. Although Sen. Obama (and you) did not vote on final passage (a foreordained formality by this point), he showed up to vote on the issue of cloture. He voted when it counted. You didn’t.
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When a newspaper dies, “a voice is stilled.” That was the headline in the Cincinnati Post Dec. 30, the day before the newspaper’s presses were silenced. Corporate owner E.W. Scripps closed both the Cincinnati Post and its cousin, the Kentucky Post.

In their day, they were great, ornery, cantankerous papers fearing and favoring none:

Vance Trimble, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Kentucky Post in the 1960s and ’70s, explain[ed] his newspaper’s editorial philosophy this way: “Everybody could get in the paper, and nobody could stay out.” [emphasis added]

That applied to Mr. Trimble, too. When he was arrested on a drunk-driving beef, the paper ran a photo of the editor behind bars the next day. Now, that was a newspaper I can admire.

But should this be RIP, Cincy Post — or good riddance?
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The Save The Internet coalition alerted me to Comcast’s quietly rolling out new terms of service that codify what has been common knowledge for some time–that the company does, indeed, interfere with traffic on its network, and reserves the right to do so, any time it wishes.

Of course, the company hasn’t actually come out and said it so plainly, any more than they’ll admit they cancel customer accounts for hitting undisclosed bandwith caps. Instead, as Mike Masnick notes, they’re using “weasel language” that implies their intent without being so precise as to be caught. Full Story »

Right now the Senate is embroiled in debate over whether or not to grant the major telecom companies (chiefly AT&T and Verizon) retroactive immunity for their participation in the NSA’s illegal surveillance program, in addition to legitimizing vast new surveillance powers over Americans with almost no oversight. You already know my feelings about that, so I won’t belabor the point.

On this issue, as with many others (such as their opposition to net neutrality), the two giants of the telecom industry have been largely buddy-buddy. Both of them stand to lose millions in damages from lawsuits brought against them for their actions, before even getting into the bad publicity the case has already caused. It’s easy to forget that these two companies are (at least in a technical sense) competitors, and don’t always pursue the same goals in the same way.

Case in point: Full Story »

I earn between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. I have three degrees. I teach at a small Catholic liberal arts university. I own several cameras. I have two vehicles, one four-wheel-drive, the other high-mileage. I belong to two environmental organizations. I commute more than 10 miles to work. I contribute to three non-profit organizations. I am single. I buy clothes from Lands’ End and L.L. Bean. I collect Rotring pens and pencils. I play guitar and piano. I read science and detective fiction, purchased mostly from Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I have two iPods, one computer and two TVs. I have several credit cards. I drink beer. I once owned a handgun. I have a mortgage. I have voted since 1964 as an Independent or Democrat.

To our presidential candidates, I am not Denny Wilkins, an individual human being: I am a set of data points, one of about 168 million sets of data points collected by both the Democratic and Republican national committees. They are interested in me only because I am an eligible voter. Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will base their direct-mail, push-poll, robo-call and volunteers-knocking-on-my-door messages on computerized analyses of me as data. I will be micro-targeted by candidates’ campaign organizations for the sole purpose of producing a vote for a candidate.
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