New York Cabs Gouged Riders Out of Millions – NYTimes.com.

Reason to love it:

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If you’re not familiar with the Zachary Kouwe story, you can read the Times‘ Clark Hoyt’s recap here. Basically, Kouwe, a reporter for the New York Times‘ Business section and DealBook blog, stole copy from wire service reports, press releases, and in a few cases, original reporting from the Wall Street Journal, which is how he was busted– the Journal’s editor, Robert Thomson, complained to the Times’ Bill Keller.

Some, including Craig Silverman make the case (or at least supply the facts for others to make) that plagiarism detection software might be a good thing for newsrooms to invest in, to scan their own reporters’ stories for potential sourcing problems. I have to completely disagree. But not because I’m worried about newsrooms turning all Big Brother on their own reporters. No, I think, as evidenced by Kouwe’s lame excuses, both to the media, and to the bloggers from which he stole, he knew what he was doing, and chose to continue doing it, due either to pressure he put on himself, or the newspaper’s editors put on him, productivity-wise. The problem is not one of software detection algorithms, but of human decision making.

Putting myself in Kouwe’s shoes for a second, he says he was filing upwards of 7,000 words a week, of hard-fact copy, for DealBook, the Andrew Ross Sorkin-founded business blog that’s in some ways become the flagship of the Times’ online business reporting. Now, honestly, for the type of bold-faced, big name stories the paper covers, any experienced business editor has to realize that one reporter can’t possibly turn in that much originally reported hard news, consistently, week after week. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Kouwe naturally scanned the wires, blogs, press releases, etc., to stay on top of breaking news; he also read what others had the time to report and posted relevant stories to DealBook. All of that is kosher; that’s how a blog works. But copying and pasting paragraphs of text into your editing software, without including the URL, or a note to yourself of the source, is not being lazy or sloppy; it’s the first step of willful omission of the sourcing, whether it happens in your Word document or WordPress backend.

What’s also not OK is that Kouwe, in his note to Teri Buhl (linked above, which Felix Salmon reported) tried to argue his way out of giving proper sourcing to Buhl’s story, months before his episode with the Journal. I have to assume this is because Kouwe felt the pressure from the newspaper’s editors to provide a certain amount of original reporting in his stories. So he justified copy/pasting excerpts of other people’s work by convincing himself that sourcing wasn’t necessary because he had thrown some of his own reporting on top of the original story. Kouwe had logged several years as a newspaper journalist. He knows that’s not how it works. But there is that pressure. Editors of  certain stripe do get annoyed/upset when you attribute reporting to a competitor, especially if they’re of the opinion that you could report the same details yourself if you’d quit being so lazy and pick up the damn phone. But, would Kouwe have called the sources for the story Teri Buhl writes about, if Buhl hadn’t wrote the story in the first place? Almost certainly not. Therefore, Buhl deserved credit for the scoop, even if Kouwe did new reporting on top of it. As did the Journal.

I would bet, with no inside knowledge, that the fiercely competitive Times, especially its Business section, especially DealBook, is loath to credit competitors, because it looks weak. So editors push for original-sounding reporting, and Kouwe massaged wire copy and blog posts to meet deadlines and word counts. Look, there’s only so many ways to report the figures of a deal. If Reuters or Bloomberg already wrote the perfect two sentence graf, why not quote it, attribute it, and be done with it? What’s the point of having a highly paid Times staff writer pull up EDGAR, get the 10-Q, do the math on the numbers, and write his own sentence? Surely he’s got other work to do, 6,990 other words to file?

I’m not absolving Kouwe. I’m just saying plagiarism detection software doesn’t get at the problem of asking a financial reporter to file 7,000 original words per week, on a dozen or more different stories, given the length of typical blog posts. Nor does it get to the problem of why Kouwe felt uncomfortable crediting blogs and newspapers for their reporting.

At The Big Money I was a regular writer of Today’s Business Press; a first-read 700 word summary of the major dailies’ business sections, which is still being written every weekday by my successors. We make no bones about what we do; we read articles, summarize or pull quote them, and direct our readers to the newspapers that wrote the originals, sometimes teasing additional facts or bits of interest that are present in the original story. We cite every publication, use ample quotes, and avoid rewriting the stories as much as possible. If we have observations or new reporting to add, we add it, but we make it clear where we’re getting our information from.

Kouwe, in filing so much copy for DealBook, was clearly being asked to do much of the same thing, in addition to any original reporting he undertook. Except somebody, either Kouwe, Sorkin, or editors at the newspaper, couldn’t stomach the idea of doling out so much credit to other outlets, whereas we at TBM write Today’s Business Press specifically to dole out credit to other outlets. It’s really not so bad, giving credit. It doesn’t cut into your brand equity or make you less trustworthy, especially when you confirm facts and add new ones. Links to bloggers or other media outlets aren’t just nice; they make the world go ’round. If DealBook is going to insist on covering the financial world with the breadth of a great business blog, it should staff up accordingly or accept the idea of being part of an ecosystem of scoops it reports, and attributions to other outlets whose scoops it wants to pick up. If DealBook is going to demand 7,000 words a week from Kouwe’s replacement, they should be prepared to see quite a lot of links, or hire a few more reporters to share some of that load.

Could Plagiarism Software Have Spared The Times an Embarrassment? [NYT]

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My former colleague Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote about me for Sunday’s New York Times: Op-Ed Contributor – Have Keyboard, Will Travel. It’s a short read, but the gist is this:

Dozens of Web sites have correspondingly sprouted up, posting articles written for free or for a fraction of what a traditional magazine would have paid. Into this gaping maw have rushed enough authors to fill a hundred Roman Colosseums, all eager to write in exchange for “exposure.” Paul Smalera, a 29-year-old who was laid off from a magazine job in November 2008, is now competing with every one of them. And after months of furious blogging, tweeting and writing for Web sites, Paul has made a career of Internet journalism, sort of.

Sheelah goes into some details of my financial picture and what the various gigs I’m doing pay me. It’s not entirely pretty, especially when you’re nearing basically 30, but hey, it’s reality for me right now. While I wasn’t amped about the chance to reveal my credit card and student loan debt, and paltry paydays, I did so for a couple, (I think) important and well defined reasons:

1. I ask the same of my sources: I’ll be honest, I don’t know why anyone talks to the press. As Janet Malcolm says on my sidebar, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” We don’t have subpoena power. There’s no reason you have to talk to us. But invariably, I pick up the phone, identify myself as media, and ask people to spill their guts to me. And more often than not, they do. Sometimes it’s professional, sometimes it’s personal, and usually, it’s a mix, but the information they’ve given me, whether about an interest rate or a murder, wouldn’t have been known before. I always thank them and try to be respectful of their time. Sometimes I have to spend a lot of time badgering people into talking– not because I’m trying to get some kind of ‘dirt’ on them, but because I really think their contribution is invaluable to the story. The times I try hardest to get someone to talk is when I feel the story will be a disservice to them without their weighing in. If I’m writing about someone’s actions or thoughts, I want their voice in the there. So when Sheelah asked me to talk to her for her piece, I felt I owed it to her as a journalist myself. How could I ever ask anyone to do what I instinctually would not want to do (talk to media) if I refused to do it myself? So I did.
2. I’m in the Lost Generation: If you’re in your early 20s and entering journalism, the narrative is that you’re foolhardy or you’re a digital guru. If you’re in your 40s, the narrative is that you’re an entrepreneur with a second act, or you’re a sad sack print refugee who’s been laid off or jumped ship to a new industry, after spending half a career toiling in this unfruitful enterprise. But I don’t see much written about my group: roughly 30-40, having clocked some solid years of labor, and watching the old world that inspired us to enter journalism fall apart in front of our eyes, even as we try to work every day. David Carr asked on Twitter, “Can I eat?” Unless that is an invitation to dinner, yes, David, I can eat. (And I’d be happy to eat on the Times’ expense account, so call me.)  What did you think was happening out here man? There’s a hard reality to the economics of the business for me: I’m invested in this career, having already changed careers once before, just a few years out of college. I could probably jump ship again and be making more in a few years in some other field, or doing something completely off the grid like running a charter boat in the Caribbean, but I’m still committed to this undertaking (funereal pun not intended). I’m learning more about it in the hopes of having a hand in shaping it for my successors. What would be “dead bang” scary to me, as Carr put it, is being about 45 and about three promotions away from the job I’d want to retire in, at a newspaper. What are the chances you make it all the way home?  Anyway, less has been said about my cohort than the ones above and below me, and so I understood why Sheelah, a member of it herself, wanted to focus on people around my rung on the ladder.

Here’s how she closes:

He also writes a blog for a Web outfit that pays him $250 a month to try to generate traffic for its site. He is making progress; some larger Web sites and even print publications have asked him to contribute. “What are the goals now?” he said. “I don’t even think about it in those terms right now. I’m just happy to be writing regularly. I’m treating it as a month-to-month thing.”

While most people are worried about getting paid for their work, I’m more concerned that journalists might be the digital-age equivalent of monks illuminating manuscripts, a group whose skills will soon disappear. Still, Paul and many like him press on, hoping that things will get better. And maybe they will.

I am worried about getting paid. And I found it really funny that Sheelah made a reference to monks, given that my blog is called Living Through 1500, a Clay Shirky reference to the rise of the Gutenberg printing press era. But I take her point. It’s harder to do old-fashioned yet immensely important journalism from where I sit. On Friday I was at the paidContent2010 conference at the New York Times building (strangely, probably as Sheelah’s story was being edited, a few floors above my head) and heard Arthur Sulzberger brag about sending David Barstow on a six month assignment to write a story about the Tea Party movement. It’s a pretty great story, but I wonder, as my colleague at The Big Money, Marion Maneker commented to me later, if the Times got their money’s worth on that one. Not that the article wasn’t superb– it was. But it seemed there and gone in a flash. Couldn’t the website have done more–with the article, with the voices, with the reporter’s notes?– to really make sure Barstow’s piece got the attention it deserved? What would.. yes I’m gonna say it… What would Gawker have done with that material?

There’s a lot of talk about the death of media, death of journalism, etc. Don’t put too much stock into it. A lot of really good people are trying really hard to do good work. And the industry is being forced to purge itself of a lot of really bad habits it picked up when printing press were also licenses to print money. In the long view, I’m more convinced than ever that  journalism will be here. It may not be in a form we recognize today, but people will always pick up the phone and get other people to tell them important things they’re not supposed to talk about.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Comcast and NBCU chiefs want to team up, but that doesn't mean it's the right or only move in the playbook.

I’m at the paidContent 2010 conference today, and roughly halfway through, everything I’m hearing from the panelists is reinforcing an idea I’m still trying to give some shape and form to in my mind: the idea that primary revenues for media needs to come from somewhere other than subscription and even advertising models. I’m not saying those models don’t work or aren’t important, components. But neither one replaces the simple newsstand or corner box as a low-barrier, no-thinking-required flagpole for newspapers to get penetration and ultimately revenues from the casual reading public.

The conversation as of late has shifted away from friction–the idea that websites that charge have to offer a quick, easy way to pay in order to convert readers. Part of that is because the friction has indeed been reduced somewhat as of late, but mainly because worrying about friction is a like worrying about a problem that does not yet exist. If the only reason people weren’t paying for news online were friction, the thinking goes, well, we could fix that.

Well I would maybe argue that all friction is there until there is no friction at all. Why aren’t cable companies, in other words, paying websites for the content they deliver to homes, they same way they pay carriage fees to the cable channels they deliver to homes? What if the money pipe were reversed?

To be clear, the technical challenge of the meter here would not be much of a challenge at all. The real challenge is the business model for this, and the massive psychological shift it would take for content providers, users and the cable companies. But I think it’d be brilliant if I got my cable bill every month and had a couple nickels charged to me for access to the Times, CNN, PBS, whatever. Net neutrality is obviously a big concern in this model. But good legislation (ha!) could help level the playing field between sites that remain free and sites that ring the meter on a user’s Internet account. I wonder if Google as high-speed ISP might not attempt something like this.

As far fetched as this already is, I’m certain it will never happen. Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal clearly shows where the cable cos minds are. They have no interest in being dumb pipes, and plowing profits back into better speeds and technical features. They all want to be content companies now, too, controlling every link in the supply chain from shooting the pilot to streaming the video to your iPhone. That’s why no matter how dumb some of the things Google has done as of late have been (Buzz) I agree with Farhad Manjoo that Google’s ISP plan is brilliant. It’s putting pressure on cable and phone ISPs in a way that hasn’t existed for years and years. Here’s hoping it’s not one of the 60-80% of products they launch that eventually fail.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Remember when right in the heart of Late Night Wars II: Jay vs. Conan, NBC’s Dick Ebersol trashed O’Brien in the New York Times? Ebersol is “chairman” of NBC Universal Sports. “What this is really all about is an astounding failure by Conan,” he said. At the time, Conan also took some shots at Leno in his monlogues that were hilarious and in astoundingly good taste for someone going through such a public betrayal and dumping. What did Ebersol said of Conan’s Leno jokes? It was, “chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn’t beat in the ratings.” Oh, that sloshing sound you hear in the background? It’s just Jeff Zucker’s water being carried.

By the way, what is it called then, Dick, when you steal the ideas of a guy you fired? Conan had a pretty funny bit called “Twitter Tracker,” a sort of death-metal voice-over recap of some very bland celebrity Tweets, unworthy of the attention bestowed on them. It was a wry commentary about celebrity, probably eight levels above Ebersol’s head. It was also one of many of Conan’s late night ideas that Ebersol probably found out of touch with the great swaths of middle America that Jay Leno so resonates with.

Yet Ebersol’s NBC Sports have taken the same idea and made it a featured (and serious) part of their Olympics website. The complete lack of humor behind the Olympics Twitter Tracker would normally be an indication that Ebersol was behind it. But, chances are this was actually a low grade decision by an NBC employee– perhaps one with a secret allegiance to Conan? So yes, I know Ebersol wasn’t thinking about Conan’s Twitter Tracker when they unveiled the Olympics one, but the lazyness of not finding another name for the feature that didn’t directly stem from Conan’s joke speaks to the disdain for which the redheaded one probably had to deal with from NBC brass who never understood his brand of humor.

In Conan’s Tonight Show glory days, Twitter Tracker even had its own Twitter account and website. The account has since gone dormant and the website sadly redirects to NBC.com, from where all traces of O’Brien have been scrubbed as if he was a Soviet commissar.

NPR talked about the Olympics’ Twitter Tracker’s “strange poetry,” but I think the feature is more like a karmic payback. Twitter tracker (by the way, I know it’s a bit that NBC owns of course, so it’s not really “stolen” as I wrote above) is one of the skits that NBC thought wasn’t helping Conan connect with his audience. Conan earned a $35 million buyout and a shot at new, friendly network home, thanks in part to that skit.

One of his favorite things to rib NBC about once he was an outs was that Ebersol’s Olympics are estimated to be costing NBC $250 million in losses. He never went directly after Ebersol, but after the pasting he received at his hands in the press, you have a feeling he wouldn’t have minded if someone else made the connection. Meanwhile, Ebersol, having disposed of Team Coco, is infuriating sports fans everywhere by tape delaying an Olympics happening on North American soil, simply to goose primetime ratings. Twitter track that, Dick.

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The Times has a story with the incredible statistics of how much money we fork over for all our connectivity every year:

It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.

I was part of tail-end of the New Jersey Bell generation– the phone bill was the first and last expense. It’s incredible to think of how much more money we’re spending on the mere function of being connected–and how crucial it really is to maintain that connection:

“You don’t really lump these expenses into a discretionary category,” said Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. “As the expectation of connectedness increases, it’s what is expected for people to be functional in society.”

Reading this got me to thinking– and I know I’m wading into issues of net neturality here,but just bear with me–who is really the first customer in the chain when someone goes to nytimes.com, or cnn.com, or whatever? It’s the ISP, right? Comcast, Time Warner, whatever. Or the trunk carrier they contract with. But the point is, without the glorious mass of content that media companies put on the Internet, none of us are paying Comcast or whatever ISP we use the $20-60 a month for high speed Internet. Are we? I’m not paying that much just for email. I’d rather write letters, or print them out and mail them.

The ISP is the dumb pipe that does what we subscribers tell it to do. And yet the ISP gets paid by us for providing us–with someone else’s content! It’s true, owning the pipe is a racket, and going back to the beginning of trade, it always has been and always will be. But how is it that Comcast can hit nytimes.com as many times as its subscribers demand, and not pay a penny for that to the New York Times itself? Instead, subscribers, who are already paying for Comcast, and their land line, and their cell phone bill, and their data plan, and their XBOX membership, and whatever else, are soon going to be asked to pay nytimes.com directly.

Meanwhile, the only reason nytimes.com exists is because our ISPs connect us to it, and allow use to place huge demands on the New York Times’ servers. for free. The relationship has existed for years in this state because the ISP’s have a plural monopoly– if you have a choice of more than one, you are a rare bird indeed. There’s no competition, on the Times’ end of the pipe, and thus no way to negotiate a price for each person who accesses the site.

That’s part of why the idea of Google providing high speed Internet, in parallel to what the cable cos are already providing, could be a huge disruptor indeed. But that’s an aside. Just imagine, for a second, if the New York Times’ website announced that within a year, rather than charge each customer for access to content via a meter, it instead was going to block access from any ISP that did not pay a tiny carriage fee per unique IP address per day? Or that, say, it would create an interstitial page to alert readers from non-paying ISP’s that they needed to pay a small access fee to view the site, since their carrier was not?

The cable television industry is wildly successful because it follows a business model something like this. I’m just thinking out loud here–with around 20 million uniques a month, and company-wide revenues of $2.4 billion last year, I’m not sure exactly where the bar needs to be set. Or how many news organizations, in actuality, could pull off a system like this. Almost without question, ISPs would try to pass the costs onto subscribers. But if the costs were a penny a day– 30 cents a month– how could they make the case for egregious increases, especially if individual usage were accurately metered and reported? And especially if there existed a competitor, like Google, to force price competition?

I’m not saying this idea is perfect or even sensible. I’m just posing it as a thought experiment. Part of the huge resistance to paying for content online, it seems to me, has to do with transaction friction, with value perceptions, with the idea that there are ways to hack around the sturdiest pay walls. What if companies simply moved the revenue collection out of users’ hands, a little further up the chain? Would this uncork a whole new set of problems? Possibly. I can think of a dozen. But it also might solve a  few big ones in the process.

Cellphone and Entertainment Fees Add Up for Families – NYTimes.com.

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I know, the DMCA sucks. Newsflash, right? But hear me out. Google sees popular music blogs posting MP3s of the songs they are discussing. Google says it received DMCA notices about the alleged copyright infrigement. Meanwhile, as paidContent notes, “many blogs are now wined, dined and even paid (via advertising) by record labels. After the success of blog-buzzy acts such as Arcade Fire, Lily Allen and Vampire Weekend, entire PR firms are dedicated to courting armchair DJs and amateur critics.”

The next step that Google takes is to delete the blogs in question. Not to alert the blog’s owners, or to provide them a copy of the DMCA, but to. delete. the. entire. years. old. blog. What’s worse is that Google’s response to the controversy smacks of the worst kind of corporate passing-the-buck garbage of old-line companies; the exact type of thing a 21st century company, even a behemoth like Google, is supposed to be better than. Increasingly, Google seems incapable of  acting with integrity, as the same culture of infighting and ‘just-following-orders’ that infected and broke Microsoft’s culture of innovation seems to be taking root at the Googleplex:

“When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorised manner, we will remove the blog,” explained product manager Rick Klau. “[If] this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are ‘official’ … it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question.”

The trouble with filing a formal, legal DMCA counter-claim is, that most bloggers don’t know how. What’s more, many of Blogger’s DMCA notices allegedly omit the name of the offending song. Bloggers aren’t even sure what they are denying.

How is this due process? A record company’s legal department doesn’t like that its advertising agency or promotions department or artist’s manager is giving out MP3’s to bloggers to build interest in the artist. The lawyers justify their salaries by filing DMCA takedown notices to Google, who hosts the blogs. Some numbnut at Google sees the DMCA notice and decides the best course of action (after allegedly receiving “repeated complaints”) is to delete the blog, no questions asked, no opportunity for response given, no questions asked. I would say the burden of proof is unfairly placed on the blogger, but the truth is, there’s no burden of proof here at all. The record company emails the ISP with a complaint, and poof, blog content is disappeared. It’s just that simple to destroy your work. Note to everyone: don’t blog on Blogspot, or at least, back up every post and file somewhere else.

Perhaps you’re thinking, well, Google must realize this is a terrible way to do business. They’ll change this, right? Well, that’s what they already said and ignored:

In a press release last year, Google seemed to recognise this distinction, announcing a new policy vis-a-vis music bloggers. From now on, it wrote, DMCA notices would not result in the instant deletion of offending blogs. Instead, individual posts would be temporarily removed, with a prominent notice to help bloggers respond to the allegations. “Music bloggers are a large segment of our users – and we know that for those who’ve received one or more DMCA complaints in the past, this may have been a frustrating experience,” Klau wrote in August. Almost six months later, the experience doesn’t appear to have become any less frustrating.

The law governing these takedown requests, the DMCA, is, I’m far from the first person to say, completely irrational. Digital copies of songs or videos are ubiquitous, practically free to make, and available from multiple legitimate sources. The existence of such a copy on a blog does not automatically indicate that blog is committing a copyright violation. Yet when a violation is alleged to occur, it’s treated as if the ‘violator’ stole a master copy of the work and began running off bootleg CDs in their basement.

And yet despite the DMCA being a defining element of online communications today, Google, by virtue of owning Blogspot, the largest blog host in the world, seems to have a completely ad-hoc and backwards approach to enforcing DMCA takedown requests of MP3s. They’re treating bloggers as guilty without a trial or even evidence, and giving full benefit of the doubt to the legal teams asking for the request. No due process, no discovery, no hearing, no rebuttal, no peep out of you, blogger. You’re in the wrong, because Capitol Records said so.

And it’s clear, from the article, the record label’s legal teams aren’t providing a full and fair accounting of the copyright violations they want taken down. They don’t care if the PR department gave a blogger an MP3 for posting. To them, a posted MP3 is a violation, period. What’s unclear, and what needs to be determined, is why Google is treating record company lawyers with more deference than they treat their own bloggers.

Without Warning, Google Closes Music Blogs; Years Of Archives Gone | paidContent.

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It’s been a quieter week from me than I had planned, and that’s not just because I’ve been planning the menu for my Super Bowl party. My laptop hard drive, about 3 years old, bit the bullet last week, and I only had about a 90% backup of my data. There’s a variety of reasons for this– some laziness, some reluctance to buy a big new external hard drive for Time Machine to run on, when i have so many other NAS’s and Drobos and externals laying around, doing various chores on the home network– I was sure I would scare up a couple hundred gigs of free space somewhere on the network in time to do a comprehensive backup. But I didn’t.

What was fascinating to me is HOW MUCH of my data lives on the Google cloud. My email, address book, web bookmarks, some work documents and other bits are all stored in various places on Google’s fast and free backups. While I don’t love my data being out on the net, I do love that it saved my bacon this time. I’m not having to reassemble my rolodex or write people telling them I’ve lost their email. That’s pretty sweet.

The biggest hit was my music. My most recent iTunes backup was several months ago. So while I have my entire back catalog, some new additions have been lost. That said, iTunes has a once-in-a-lifetime get out of jail card, where if you ask nicely, they just might let you re-download all your content, for free, ONCE. I did, and they restored some 600+ items to my Library. That was HUGE.

I also happened to burn a disc of photos from my recent trip to the national parks in southern Utah for my friend and traveling companion Boris, which makes up for my lack of a recent Aperture backup, and the fact that I never got around to uploading them on Twitter. All in all, things could’ve been WAY worse. I was a web developer for a small nonprofit in DC before entering journalism, and being a jack of all trades, I also helped out some with IT, designing the backup system, etc. I’m pretty sure my geek decoder ring has been permanently revoked after this embarassing episode.

And that’s really the only reason I’m sharing it. Data loss: it can happen to you, too, no matter your geek cred. I share my shame in the hopes of helping you avert yours. If you’re looking for something to do today, buy yourself a big external hard drive like the one I just bought, and set up Time Machine (simple) or a Windows backup program. Or, at the minimum, set up a Free CrashPlan account for your documents folder. Trust me, the time and little money you spend on it will be well worth it someday. I’m sure many of you out there are tut-tutting me now, but I KNOW there’s a few of you reading this, thinking, ‘yeah, I should get around to that already….’

TRUST me. Do it right now.

It probably won’t pay out, but it might, and if it doesn’t, at least the paper won’t have lost much if any money.

What’s sad here, of course, is that the NYT has given up its dream of winning the other lottery: becoming such a popular and high-value global news source that it will be able to make a very large amount of money from a free website. And it’s also sad that the NYT is happy to risk losing its paper-of-record status online for the sake of making this bet.

Image via Wikipedia

That is sad, and I’m not sure why the Times is taking this recidivist approach towards their most loyal readers. They should be rewarding their most loyal readers, increasing traffic and advertising. But how might they do that? I’ve thought of five things I’d like to see on nytimes.com tomorrow, and I’d eat my hat if they didn’t increase traffic immediately and “durably,” thus increasing ad inventory, engagement and time on site metrics, and therefore increasing revenue and providing a higher quality user experience. Without ado:

1. No more article pagination. The only reason to do this is because you think you’ll earn marginal ad revenue on ads served on page 2, 3, etc. But the tradeoff is decreasing the amount of time readers have to browse the other good stories on your site, or annoying them by making them click the “single page” button at the top of every article, as I do now. The number of clicks a reader gives your site is scarce. Don’t waste them on stupid things like pagination. Give them links to more articles to click and read, as WSJ, Reuters, and many of your competitors do.
2. Make the Times Skimmer the default home page. It’s a brilliant way to browse the paper; the most akin to the printed newspaper experience I’ve ever seen on the web. (Also, I’ve noticed it presents all articles in single-page format, proving your own usability wonks hate pagination too.) That said, it needs enhancements. It needs to be lighter loading, and it should present multimedia content as well as it presents stories, or even better, in exploding windows. It should also, like Amazon and Netflix, learn from your reading habits to present  you with articles you’d be most interested in reading, right on the front page.
3. Give away the Times Reader Adobe Air App for free. I haven’t really used the app as intended, as I’m not a subscriber, and thus would have to pay to see all the features. But from the demo, I get that it’s an amped up and super fast version of the Times Skimmer, and its status as an stand alone app would make it a persistent background presence for most hard core news junkies. The News in Video and News in Pictures features are particularly stunning. You would never withhold the benefits of a new printing press from your customers, so why are you holding back your most advanced technology from them? I bet most of your readers don’t even know about the Times Reader app. And if you insist on charging for it, don’t tie the product to your print customer dinosaurs. Learn from Bloomberg here–once the company provided something of value– the terminal– to their customers, they could build on it to deliver all sorts of important content and information, and grow their business. Give your readers something better than the website. Give them the Times terminal, and grow the value. Serve ads that appear when a reader clicks back to the app after being away from it for a while. But compel them into leaving it open all day, perhaps by promising pop-up alerts on breaking news when the app is running.
4. Give us a real blog landing page. Because that’s not it. that’s an RSS feed page, which is handy, but not what I mean. Where can I go to find out what’s the latest on all of the Times blog network, in one place, and dive in? I can’t go anywhere right now. This is so simple I’d be happy to code if for the Times if they promise to use it.
5. Integrate Twitter feeds onto author, story and section pages. When I’m reading an author with a Twitter account, I want to see the feed in the sidebar. When I’m reading Dealbook, I want to see what @Dealbook is up to. Likewise David Carr’s Monday column. You made your writers clean up their Twitter presence; don’t hide them from us now. Connect us. That’s your job, it always has been. Show us what your writers and editors are really thinking about. People love your product because they develop attachments to the writers creating it. Don’t hide their other output just because it’s conversational and gasp, at times, irreverent or funny.

There. Five simple things. These could all easily be up in a week’s time. I bet traffic would go up 10% over the expected norm in a month. If that bump continued apace for a year, that would more than obviate the need for some revenue-neutral paywall. So why not do these things immediately, until the paywall geniuses have their Doomsday machine ready, and then decide what route the future of the Times’ online experience should take?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Thank goodness that when Steve Jobs took the stage to sit in his Le Corbusier chair and show off the iPhone Maxi, er iPad, he didn’t roll out some cockamanie plan to have a digital magazine and newspaper stand with some kind of special pricing program and application store, and trot out, say, Arthur Sulzburger or, well, who else really, would it be but Arthur Sulzburger, to talk about how great the iPad was going to be for the future of news? Thank goodness, and here’s why:

There’s no need. Everything that newspapers and magazines want to be able to do with per-issue pricing, subscriptions, video, automatic delivery, etc., is already enabled by the iPhone app store, which is the same place iPad users will turn to for programs and content. As Apple’s demo employees were telling the geekerati assembled at the play-table after Jobs’ address, ‘if you use an iPhone, you already know how to use this.” There have been a number of disappointed ruminations by media types, and Ryan Tate summarizes the angst ably in Gawker:

But what their demo — the sole non-website newspaper content — lacked in actual pizazz it failed to make up for in hype, either. Nothing from Jobs on a dedicated newspaper (or magazine) store or reader application. Hardly any waxing poetic by Apple on the possibilities and content development path for newspapers and magazines. Which, as we said before, is absolutely Apple’s prerogative — these guys are in the business of making money, not rescuing other industries — but has to give print media execs heartburn.

Exactly, Ryan. It’s ridiculous to think that Jobs is going to hitch his wagon to a bunch of old-time media companies and do their R&D for them. There’s been nothing stopping them from programming subscription-ready value-added content apps for the iPhone ever since OS 3.0 came out in March 2009. Is it Apple’s fault if the content is not compelling enough for readers to want to purchase? Or if the magazines or newspapers can’t figure out how to rework their content to make it compelling? Or build an app that is on a ‘must-have’ level? Right this minute the most successful paid app in the App Store from a media company is ranked #45: CNN Mobile, for $1.99. It has 3 stars, because most of the reviewers complain it’s full of advertising and has a crappy layout. How is that Apple’s fault when so many small developers have figured out to how provide awesome experiences on the platform, and big developers, like Facebook, have singlehandedly redefined what an App can be?

What Jobs has done with the iPad is exactly what made the iPhone successful: he created a pretty spectacular space for app developers to compete over eyeballs for. Some iPad users will only play games or watch video; others will read books and news; a third group may just want to email from the road. A fourth group will inevitably hack into the thing and find ways to multi-task and run background apps and whatever else Apple is banning in its sandbox.

In other words, Apple is not interested in throwing a lifeline to industries that can’t figure out this new world we’re living in. Maybe there’s some karmic reason OS X and the iPhone/iPad OS are based on a core called Darwin. There is a Darwinism at play here; figure out a way to get users to put your app on their device. Then figure out a way to keep them clicking on it, and making you money. If you can’t, you’re toast.

The book publishing industry is not exactly going to be mistaken for a futurists convention any time soon, but when I wrote about e-readers for a couple of publications recently, I talked to some executives who specifically said they don’t care what platform their content is available on, as long as it’s out there and revenue can be collected on it. That’s not just desperation, that’s faith in your product. (I know some publishers are playing cat and mouse with ebook release schedules, but that’s not going to last as more of the audience moves to e-reader platforms. In fact it’s mostly a negotiation tactic with Amazon. Since Apple’s letting publishers set prices, unlike Amazon, they have no reason to deny readers the electronic version of their books on the same day the print copy rolls out, or possibly even earlier.)

In short, the tools are already there for the iPad to become the ’savior’ the print media is looking for. But Steve Jobs is not your new bicycle. He will be happy whether the top paid app on the iPad is the ‘New York Times Daily Subscription’ or ‘Rock Band.’ And to be fair, some media companies are investing heavily in creating online content that finally gives users what they want. Sports Illustrated rolled out a tablet demo in December that looked ridiculously beyond the reach of any extant device–until the iPad came out yesterday. Now, truthfully, for SI or any old-school magazine to produce issues on a weekly frequency that contain anything like the content and multimedia seen in that demo is going to take A LOT of manpower. Far more than those places are staffing right now. The good news is that their are oodles of journalists already trained to use these tools and produce this kind of content. The bad news is they require salaries and expensive equipment and hardware. The better news is that these big magazine companies still have the money to place a bet on multimedia editions of their magazines. The great news is a whole new generation of publishers can start working in this medium today, without all the legacy costs of a print publication.

The race to develop a machine like this has already been lost. It’s over. Not that Apple’s first gen iPad is the end of the road; but no magazine consortium is going to beat Apple at this game down the line. The best thing the magazine companies can do is stop kvetching, stop wasting money on hardware, and give content consumers all they’ve ever wanted all along: an amazing content experience that they’re willing to pay for.

Apple has just created the ultimate sandbox. The newspapers and magazines are the rich kids who can afford the coolest Tyco toys. The question is, can they get over the fact that the sandbox is in Steve Jobs’ backyard? Readers aren’t going to wait around for the print media to get over their sulking; they’ll be happy to play with whoever shows up first at Jobs’ iPad sandbox with their dumptruck or steamshovel, even if it’s made out of plastic and the windshield’s popped out, as long as it’s fun and worthwhile. Readers will grow with those apps as they evolve and build audiences and revenue. If old media doesn’t get its act together, they’ll be playing with their shiny metal front-loaders in their crappy cardboard sandboxes, that wilt in the rain, all by themselves, right around the time Stevie and his friends are graduating to the jungle gym.