Wrong on the Associated Press, Matt Pearce

Pearce is generally a very good guy on journalism stuff. I've followed him on Shitter for years.

But this piece at his Substack, bemoaning Evil Craphouse (Gannett) shivving the AP is wrong.

First, let's do the obligatory perusing of Gannett's lie. Any money saved will not be used to improve Gannett journalism; it will instead pay off vulture capitalists and/or line CEO pockets.

OK, that said, the deal itself?

Had a, say, pre-vulture capitalism McClatchey made such a deal with Reuters, or maybe a Lee Enterprises, or some other middling to large newspaper chain with half a sense of real journalism and not in the clutches of vulture capitalism? I'd applaud it.

To expand on what I told Matt in comments?

First, the AP has been just as much behind the curve on all things internet as any individual newspaper chain.

Remember that it was Deano Singleton as chairman of the board of AP who proposed the "TV model" for internet newspapers even though pay cable channels and pay-per-view CCTV etc existed well before the early 1990s. Remember that the rest of AP's board signed off on that.

Since then? AP has hosted internet spam by Taboola for years, and followed that up last year by officially deciding to enter e-commerce with ... Taboola! This ignores the ethics issue of trying to report on shit you're selling. (It was doing other content-shady things besides its Taboola partnership 15 years ago.)

It also "misstated, then adjusted" how much of its revenue still comes from US print.

And, I mistrust how much money-laundering may be behind its community journalism support.

Feel free to report on any or all of that, Matt. Rather than Wall Street having long knives out for the AP, the AP has been hopping more and more in bed with Wall Street for years.

And, while we're at it, speaking of Deano from the past? Hell, Matt, let's take a look at the Associated Press' current board of directors. The odious Will Lewis is on it. (Update: David Folkenflik has dropped a massive thread on Shitter referencing a petition by WaPost staff, much of which directly references Lewis.) The dude who replaced Mary Junck (so hated and roasted by Bill McClellan at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) at Lee Enterprises is there. (In fact, Junck was a former AP board chair.) Maia Abouelenein, before starting her own company, Digital and Savvy, was a bigwig at Google. Michael Newhouse, scion of the family that was one of the first larger chains to gut print newspapers, and in places like Cleveland, use webistes to do union-busting, is on it. In addition to the newspapers, Advance has a 30 percent chunk of Reddit, a slice of cable giant Charter and more. And, in NOLA, it was a fuck-up. That's a bunch of capitalist verschnizzle on a company that you claim Wall Street hates.

As for papers leaving it? The AP was slow to react, in and after the Great Recession, to members' needs and not offering more tiers of membership services, like say, half a dozen.

As for bashing Reuters? Reuters started just like AP, as a membership news aggregation and collection service, but in the UK not the US. It's no more evil than AP getting in bed with Taboola, if even that evil. Maybe Agence France-Presse will do something similar.

As for the fact that AP is a cooperative? Could be good, could be bad. As for the fact it's a nonprofit? The NFL is a 501(c)6 nonprofit. Catholic hospitals denying all women's reproductive services are nonprofits. The NRA is a nonprofit. Means nothing.

AP wants to raise $100M for community journalism

That's per Axios.

Thoughts?

1. On the most serious angle, is this not just another allegedly big-hearted organization or individual chasing after the same bigger-pocketed organizations and individuals for seed money to distribute? Dick Tofel has covered this plethora (how many in a plethora, jefe de la prensa?) of such organizations.

2. Related? How much of this money is going to get laundered through the AP? This push isn't seed money to help community papers hire more reporters. Rather:

The new funds will be used to support AP's local journalism efforts, as well as the work of other organizations or services that support local newsrooms, per Veerasingham.

So, "laundered" might be harsh. "Recycled" is not.

And, obviously, this isn't going to go to non-weeklies, at least not to ones that were already non-weekly pre-COVID. So, the AP won't be helping the Marion County Record, raising a new round of hell (Word doc at link) over water quality public notices or lack thereof, not quite a year after being subjected to the folding, spindling and mutilation of the First Amendment.

3. Less serious but not totally unserious? Since AP recently reversed course from several months ago, and said, at least indirectly, that it WILL miss Gannett and McClatchy, and since more than 80 percent of its revenue stream is still from story (and video) licensing, when one stops limiting the scope to US newspapers, is this going to compete with the tip jar on its website?

4. Since it is e-commerce partnering with Taboola (that after clickbait webpage partnering with it years ago), is there going to be any quid pro quo on this help?

So, the AP is going to sell us shit now?

 

I remember, a year or so ago, when I first saw the AP's "donate" button at the upper-right corner of its website. The Associated Press has shat in its own foxhole for years (I just love the occasional use of "shat"!) and wanted bailing out? Hah.

Well, I guess not enough people were sending it couch change.

Or else, so many people were that it figured it could grift off them.

It's now going into the e-commerce world, partnering with Taboola.

The shatting (past participle/gerund) in its own foxhole goes back 30 years to then AP board chair Dean-o Singleton, who convinced the rest of the board that the so-called "TV model" was a thing and AP did not need to worry about Internet 0.5, including not needing an early version of a paywall. AP then proceeded to undercharge news aggregators like Yahoo (remember when it was a "thing"?), not anticipate Reuters, then AFP, expanding their American presence, not adjust membership tiers and fees for U.S. member newspapers, and much more.

And, now, it wants to sell us shit.

What do we get?

A digital version of Dean-o's autograph? 

Options to buy into Alden Global Capital?

A model of the "TV model"?

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Update, March 19: Whatever AP does with e-commerce, that won't be the end. Gannett and McClatchy are both cord-cutting at the end of their current subscriptions. AP told the NYT this "would not have a material impact on our overall revenue." 

Bullshit. 

As much bullshit as Gannett's claims, here if you hit the Slimes paywall:

“Between USA Today and our incredible network of more than 200 newsrooms, we create more journalism every day than The A.P.,” Kristin Roberts, the chief content officer of Gannett, wrote in a company memo.

More bullshit. Gannett was crappy before being acquired by Craphouse, and has done zero in investments since then.

You know American newspaper journalism is in the toilet when you can't figure out if Gannett or AP is the bigger liar.

One interesting note?

Gannett's not dumping wire services entirely.

Instead, it's going with Reuters.

Since Deano screwed the pooch long ago, both Reuters and AFP have expanded their US presence, and by a large amount. I'm sure other current AP members are going to come knocking on Reuters' door pretty quickly. 

"Can I have the Gannett deal?"

THAT will affect your bottom line indeed, AP.

==

Weirdly, Dick Teufel, on his Substack, missed that Gannett isn't getting rid of wire services in general, just dumping AP (in part, not totally, in fact) for Reuters. (And, despite me noting that in comments, he hasn't updated.)

He does note, of relevance to the first half of this piece, that AP claimed a year ago that traditional newspaper memberships were only about 10 percent of its revenue stream. (AP itself confirms, per that Poynter link above about Reuters.) That said, most pieces don't discuss how much Gannett was paying. Well, surely some of the video licensing it touts is to newspapers, and I assume Craphouse and McLatchKey are ditching that, too. And, that's not discussed anywhere.

Update, Aug. 20: We've found out that's a lie, and a humongous one. Hence, per my semi-rhetorical question above, we know AP is a bigger liar than New Gannett aka Old Craphouse, and that's a HUGE bar to clear, to reverse the old cliche. Per that, AP's worried that non-US newspapers will ditch the AP for their US newsfeed and look at the likes of Reuters instead.

Update 2, Aug. 20: Meanwhile, the AP is looking into yet new avenues for grifting or money-laundering, pick your word choice.

The Associated Press in Black and White: Causing a controversy by trying to dodge one?

OK, so the AP says that the Stylebook  now says to do what many individual papers have done on a house style for years: Capitalize "Black."

That said, it said it would decide in about a month whether or not to capitalize "white."

CNN didn't wait. It said capitalize both. And I agree.

The issue is complicated by "Hispanic" being capitalized, but in the past, neither "black" nor "white."

As further illustration, last year's entire Stylebook listing on race-related language usage is here.

As for AP's current decision, if it's a legitimate idea to cogitate a month before a decision, do you really need a month? I think not.

So, is this a duck and cover instead? I think so.

The better-yet solution? Lowercase "hispanic." Oh, that neologism "Latinx"? Throw it away. It's a print media bit of virtue signalling. Does anybody really say aloud the word "Latinex"? Thought not. And, no, I'm not alone in saying that.

Update: Kwame Anthony Appiah brings his philosopher's hat to the fray to say "uppercase White." Why? It removes privilege from a White stance, among other things. I get exactly where he is coming from.

Update 2: AP has done just as I expected and is keeping "White" lowercase. Not me. Per CNN, and per Appiah, when I remember, both "Black" and "White" get uppercase. Poynter has more. Per the piece, the AP is engaging in cultural essentialism. The new African diaspora in the US has not necessarily had all of the same experiences. It's that fact, as well as the skin color of his mom, that led some Blacks to ask if Barack Obama was one of them. Within the New World, many Caribbean blacks who have emigrated to the US don't claim to have entirely common cultural experiences with Blacks born in the US. Ask Colin Powell and others.

VP for Standards John Daniszewski also claims "there is less support for capitalizing White." Really? Per the CNN link that said it would capitalize both? Per the feedback you've gotten over the past four weeks? "Less support" is purely relative, not absolute, in this case.

CJR follows AP, or rather preceded it, I think, on a house style. Whatever; it's wrong, too. And, as regular readers here know, it's not the first time I've found it wrong by any means. And, contra a claim by Dallas sports teevee talking head Dale Hansen, it, like most media (self included) doesn't like to admit its mistakes.

Anyway, on this and other blogs, and in all likelihood at any professional sites, this person will capitalize both.

Take a pass on Wick Communications

A couple of blog posts ago, I asked, rhetorically, "How do you run a daily paper without an AP wire?"

As I interviewed at said paper, and as it hasn't hired me, I'm going to "decloak" that previous blog post and let you read in detail who I was talking about.

Obviously, the parent company is Wick Communications. Below, most the rest of that old post, paper locations revealed.

==

I'm not talking a five-day daily, where that wouldn't be that hard.

I'm talking six- and seven-day dailies, where it would be, unless you tighten page count, drop a day of the week or both.

I recently interviewed to be managing editor of the Montrose Press. Wick's stable includes one seven-day daily, one that ... sounds like was a seven-day and now it's now six-day and is being delivered by USPS, interestingly and five or six other six-day dailies, all 3,000 circ or above.

Demographic background? Montrose, Colorado is about 19K. County is 42K. Montrose was "discovered" and presumably "Californicated" in the 2000-2005 period. City pop jumped from 13K to 19K. Froze after the Great Recession, and interestingly, has stayed frozen since; the Californication was a one-off.

Note: I'm going to drop some new updates in here based on a close direct comp with the Gainesville (Texas) Daily (until COVID, in print) Register. Gainesville is 16K in a county of 40K.

Page run? 12-14 a day, I was told, on weekdays. Dunno about the weekender. Since, interestingly, it's a 6 day AM, not PM, there isn't a weekender, to be technical. It's Tuesday-Sunday.

Gainesville, pre-COVID, was a five-day daily in print. Usually 8 pages Tuesday and Wednesday; 12 on Thursday, IIRC, because it still (WHY?) ran weekly TV guide in print. Then 10 Friday and 12, IIRC, weekender.

So, Montrose, with no Colorado equivalent of something as wide as the Texas Tribune? Even though it was more of a regional center than Gainesville (which is only 30 miles from Denton)? Two pages a day too many, arguably, even WITH the wire. Definitely needed to cut two without it, and pre-COVID, cut a day of the week, probably.

Company policy is to can the AP wire. Not as in "someday," but "we're doing it." Related to that is the usual "digital first" etc. blather. Which is what it is.

First, they don't have a separate online-only subscription. I know a lot of smaller dailies do a forced combo buy of print plus digital but if you're really digital first, that itself is bullshit. (That said, assuming they use Blox as their website content platform, I don't know how easy it is to set Blox up to do that. On the other hand, given that Blox comes from Lee Enterprises, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, surely it's doable.)

So, do you cut a day a week? Same sked but cut two pages a day? IMO, yes, that second option at a minimum. Filling 12-14 pages in a county of less than 50K without a wire and typical smaller six-day editorial staff? Uhhhhhh ...

See above. Tuesday-"weekend" five-day daily. Say, 10 pages on Tuesday, 12 on Wednesday with it being shopper flier day. Back to 10 on Thursday. Then 12 on Friday with weekend sports previews and 12 or 14 on weekend.

There are ways around this. One can either cut two pages a day, or one day a week. I speak from personal knowledge.

My current six-day baby is in a town 3/4 the size and a county 4/5 the size of the one at which I interviewed. At my previous semiweekly, the nearest daily was a small seven-day in a town and county both half again as big as Montrose.

My current six-day runs 10 pages on weekdays. On average, 1/2-3/4 a page a day of news, maybe a bit more, and 1/4-1/2 of sports is wire. That seven-day, to my best memory, usually ran 12 on Mondays, 14-16 the next four and Saturdays. It ran one full page or bit more a day of news wire and probably 1/2-3/4 day of sports wire.

So, yes, unless one wants to use cheapie brief sites like State Point, or canned product-placement copy from a place like NAPS, or third, hope your state extension office has plenty of non-ag consumer news, etc., cutting two pages a day is ... a no-brainer.

It's even more a no-brainer with the Trump paper tariffs, which also offer said company the perfect excuse to cut either two pages a day or one day a week, whichever is deemed better.

"Dear Readers: Due to the ongoing Trump tariffs, and their threat to the profitability of this newspaper, we have had to make some painful decisions.

"One of them is cutting two pages of the paper each day.

"In order to keep the same amount of local content as before, we are getting rid of our Associated Press service. Given that we are a community newspaper, and we only ran selected items from the Associated Press in the past, and will look for other sources for state of Colorado and Four Corners news outside the AP, we think this is the best way to provide the best community news content to you our readers."

Now, that said, if your state press association doesn't have at least a weekly roundup column, while national wire might not be a biggie, some state news, especially in-depth state lege coverage while it's in session, to me is de rigeur. That's even more the case if you're running a seven-day daily and there's a bigger seven-day daily next county over. That's true of Montrose and the Colorado press association, or Wick's core in Arizona. (more on that below.)

On the other hand, in a location like Montrose, dumping the wire might not be the smartest. Are the Californicators going to be as interested in a paper without state wire? Or regional Western news? If they can read a header and first 100 words of local news on your website, you may lose them. I don't know. (Remember, no wire means no wire on web as well as print.)

See note above about no Colorado equivalent to the Texas Tribune.

Anyway, with papers bigger than Montrose either narrowing their web on the pages, cutting pages or cutting staff because of the newsprint tariffs (which Congressional bills going nowhere won't stop if they're going nowhere), keeping the same page count without a wire is simply stupid.

That said, the parent company doesn't seem brilliant.

Wick's flagship is Sierra Vista, Arizona, home of Fort Huachuca. It has a six-day daily at Lake Havasu, but that's far away. Much closer, it has weeklies and a semiweekly in SE Arizona; it and a presumably LARGE weekly in a town of 15K are in what should be a hub relationship with Sierra Vista; specifically, Nogales is the semi-weekly in a town of over 20,000 and Douglas is a large weekly.

But, a much bigger seven-day daily, Tucson's Arizona Daily Star, is 75 miles away. If I were it, I might roll the dice and start trying to poach subscribers at the edge Sierra Vista radius. If I really wanted to roll the dice, I might figure that Cochise County is big enough for me to open a bureau (one-person) there. (Douglas is also there; Nogales is due south of Tucson in Santa Cruz County and actually as close to Tucson as to Sierra Vista in miles, and shorter in drive time.) I might add an ad person full-time in Sierra Vista, too. Maybe even a regional sectional 1x or 2x a week. Douglas should be a semiweekly, IMO, and old jokes aside, why Nogales isn't a triweekly, if not a five-day daily, no idea. Santa Cruz County is almost 50K. If the Arizona Daily Star pushed hard enough, it could probably blow up that whole house of cards.

With Sierra Vista a military town, cutting sports wire as well as news wire? My guess would be that's going to definitely hurt print circulation.

(I also saw nothing about Spanish-language papers in Wick's stable; that SHOULD be a no-brainer. Get one reporter who can write some Spanish and translate English and have them do a semi-weekly that combines material from all three of those papers. If Nogales and/or Douglas are deemed too heavily Hispanic and/or too poor to expand English-language papers, to me, that seems a no-brainer that probably should have been done long ago. If someone else has a Hispanic paper in either locale, or Sierra Vista, Wick should have bought it long ago.)

And, that gets to one way you can get rid of the wire more easily — clustering. Not necessarily immediately next door, but increased clustering within a state. That lets you do a state-level version of Gannett's state-by-state daily news roundup. Wick is actually in position to do this in Arizona. With one or two buys in either North or South Dakota, or both, it could do it in one or both of those states, especially since it has the South Dakota capital paper in Pierre.

But ... I doubt Wick is that forward thinking, even though it's in a position to do so in one place.

And, not to be too immodest, but ... I could be a great newspaper company consultant. Companies would just have to pay me to tell them at times that I think they've been stupid, then challenge them to tell me why I'm wrong.

Also, at least one paper in the chain doesn't include special sections for subscribers. No, really ...

All subscriptions may include up to six premium issues per year. For each premium issue, your account balance will be charged an additional fee of $2 in the billing period when the section publishes. This will result in shortening the length of your billing period. …  These (listed but deleted by me) months will have the effect of reducing the length of delivery service otherwise covered by your payment. Months are subject to change without notice. You may choose to opt-out of receiving premium issue content by calling xxxxxxxx

OK now. (I can't remember which paper that is; I think it's one of their North Dakota dailies.)

Nickel and dime time.

It's not unethical, in that it's printed up front. But 3,000 subscribers x $2 x four quarters a year? $25,000 or so out of what should be, oh, $1.25 million gross revenue easy? Three percent is not nothing, but it's not a lot.  Throw in the progress issue and the city/county guide issue free to subscribers and save your bookkeeper and circ staff some hassle if nothing else.

Otherwise, on the double no-brainer vs. reality? Let's just say I've visited Glassdoor as well. The answers I got, as mentioned in the italicized paragraph, didn't surprise me.

To go into detail? I am leery of a company that has less than, say a 3.3 rating out of 5 stars on Glassdoor. Knowing newspaper struggles, I would be OK taking that down to 3.0 for papers.

Wick as a corporation didn't even hit that.

This might be a good point to refer you back to my MSM bingo, community newspapers division, blog post.

==

Sidebar —

That said, I wouldn't write this much about the Montrose Press if I didn't know something about Montrose. I do; Montrose wouldn't be a bad place to live. I also know something about Mountain/Intermountain West towns being discovered, even being full-blown Californicated.

Taos is a good, or bad, example of that. On a small city scale, arguably Fanta Se is, too.

That said, in Nuevo Mexico, I also know the other end of the stick. A decade or so, Silver City had the first nibbles of being "discovered" but that's all that happened. It was more rumors than reality and it continues to lose population. Maybe Californicators thought it was too isolated, though it's only 2 hours from Las Cruces. Maybe local civic fathers planted rumors to try to make reality happen.

Last time I was in Montrose was at the tail end of the Californication or whatever. As it was mid-Census, I didn't realize it had grown that much, though I did note the amount of traffic surprised me.

And, now, it's a puzzler. Why did the Californication stop? Was it entirely due to the housing bubble bursting? If so, why hasn't it restarted again, as it has in, say, Bend, Oregon?

==

Sidebar 2 —

Said job has been readvertised a month after initially advertised. Maybe others, like me, said "huh" about the dropping the wire but not dropping the pages, or other things?

Fake news, thy name is Associated Press

Mainstream media has caviled about so-called "fake news" for the last year or so.

Of course, there's a high level of hypocrisy here.

The New York Times ran Judith Miller's fake news, nay, PUSHED it, then, if that contribution to the Iraq War wasn't enough, it spiked for a full year a story about Bush's warrantless snooping, which helped him get re-elected. Not that John Kerry would have done much different on Iraq, and judging by Dear Leader four years later, wouldn't have done much different on spying on Americans.

(And, I haven't even covered the fake news that's increased on the Times' op-ed page with hiring Bret Stephens.)

And, earlier this year, after it decried "fake news," the Washington Post then Tweeted repeatedly for a third-party group called "Prop Or Not," which made the Democratic Party's, and Clintonistas', "Putin Did It" claims about the presidential election read as soberly as wallpaper drying compared to Prop Or Not's McCarthyism — McCarthyism which later turned up to have seeming connections to Ukrainian fascists.

And, now? Per that screenshot up top?

It's the good old Associated Press, with the screenshot coming from this story.

The issue of posting crap from a place like Taboola has become even more decried in the last year or so, even as "digital dimes" in the online ad world become ever more "mobile nickels." (Thanks, Dean Singleton, and the 1990s AP board of directors, who touted the "TV model" of the Internet while ignoring that pay TV channels like HBO had already existed for 15 years or more.) Indeed, Taboola itself is one of the worst of the "sponsored links" folks, and most the news, or "news," you'll find off those links is sketchy at best, skeezy at worst, and almost certainly native advertising in some way, shape or form.

But, that's not all.

AP is writing, and photographing, its own clickbait as well, as shown above.

If American media dies, it will be from self-strangulation in its own crib.

Is #AP prostituting itself?

Possibly, if you look at this story:

The Associated Press said Wednesday that it has entered into a partnership with WhoSay Inc., a company that helps celebrities manage interactions with fans through social networks and traditional media outlets.

The AP will give celebrities who are members of WhoSay the option to provide exclusive, personal photos and videos to the AP for licensing to major media companies worldwide. ...

The company puts celebrities in greater control of —and offers the opportunity to profit from— their photographic lives. It also allows them to spread their social media posts easily across sites like Twitter and Facebook. As an example, (Sofia ) Vergara posted a picture of a family lunch in Miami last month. The photo has a copyright symbol, indicating she owns it and can make money from it if, say, a magazine wants to publish it.

At the least, it sounds like it's cheapening itself. Basically, WhoSay looks like an elitist version of Twitter. Which makes it look very much like AP is doing celebrity butt-kissing. Great. AP's entertainment feed will look like TMZ soon.

And, shock me that Dean Singleton, as ongoing chairman of the board (who should have been canned when MediaNews filed Chapter 11) would think this is a wonderful idea. Hell, look at AP's whole board of directors.

Singleton/MediaNews? Chapter 11. Mary Junck/Lee Enterprises? Chapter 11. Donna J. Barrett/CNHI? Should be in Chapter 11, but, being owned by the Alabama state pension system, probably can't be. Craig A. Dubow/Gannett? Should be. Still doing mandatory furloughs, isn't it? Michael Golden/New York Times? The company that has a fake paywall and lies about it. Paul C. Tash/St. Petersburg Times? Lives on its Poynter reputation. Katharine Weymouth/Washington Post? Would be in Chapter 11 if not for Kaplan. Gary Pruitt/McClatchy? Wouldn't surprise me if it winds up there.

As Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic notes, it's precisely strategies like this that have made the general public undervalue daily newspapers for years if not decades. Add in the AP board originally selling its content to online aggregators for pennies, and the circle is complete.

The AP keeps slipping

Really, AP? Using a photo from AOL serf labor site Patch.com for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's controversial helicopter flight to his son's ballgame?

Really?

AP source anonmyity gets ridiculous

Here's the latest. On political strategy for a presidential race that won't have its first semi-binding vote for nine months .... granting campaign aides anonymity to "leak" about their boss's campaign plans.

Allies and aides who outlined the path that Romney is charting to the nomination spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publically discuss private strategy sessions.

Ridiculous. "Traditional media" gets worse at this all the time.

Oh, and Philip Elliott of the AP, "publically" is NOT a word. "Publicly" is.

When I grow up, I want to be a bankrupt media mogul too!

Dean Singleton, the man who built up, then overbuilt, MediaNews, while simultaneously wrecking the Associated Press and undermining its connection to its traditional newspaper members in the Internet Age by letting AP whore after news aggregators, once again shows his moxie, bullshit level, or whatever.

As Media News' parent company (a shell organization, if you will — Dean-o was one of the first media moguls in on that idea) emerges from bankruptcy court, not only does the Deanster get to stay on as CEO of the newly reconstituted Affiliated Media, he does so with a nice $650K base salary, and his MediaNews co-founder apparently getting pushed out the door.

Meanwhile, we have the brown-nosing of billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr., father of the former Utah governor, callling Dean-o "a smart businessman."

Can we change that to "a bamboozling businessman"?

Mark Cuban calls Google a 'vampire' – and he's right

He's also right that newspapers — and, even more, press organizations like AP — largely continue to be run by people who are too inept, timid, and "old thinking" as well as old media in dealing with this.

Cuban has cojones, if nothing else. He made his comments at an online media conference, and as the keynoter, no less.

Not just that, he called newspapers cowards for being afraid to let go of Google traffic even as they remain clueless, in his words, about how to monetize said traffic.

Salon, as part of its own take on his comments, highlights the pull quote:

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

The problem lies not so much with individual papers (though those with their own news services, like NYT, McClatchy, etc., fall under the following finger-pointing) as it does with AP (and Reuters and AFP, to the degree my solution could dodge collusion issues).

AP is not charging Google, MSNBC et al enough.

Pure and simple. If AP would increase its contract charges about six-fold — YES, as in 600 percent — and could do a work-around on the collusion stuff, not only with Reuters, but NYT News Service, MCT, etc., it might be enough to force Google to paywall.

And, yes, I think AP could write its contracts in a way as to do a work-around on the collusion issue while leaving the door open for Reuters et al to cut similar deals.

That said, AP's chairman of the board, Dean Singleton, is so effing clueless about this that he ran his own newspaper company, MediaNews, into the ground of Chapter 11, so what should we really expect?

If nothing else, maybe more newspaper chains will reverse cutting back on DC bureaus, and rebuild them — with money they save from canceling AP contracts.

Calling Jay Rosen and Google's chief ass-kisser Jeff Jarvis. Have you already started attacking Cuban?

MediaNews - The latest old media woes

MediaNews, one of the nation's largest newspaper companies, is also the latest to file Chapter 11. As I e-mailed a friend, Dean Singleton may have done a great job of building up MediaNews, but as chairman of AP, he was pretty clueless about how to monetize online newspapers, and related matters.

Paywalling, for example, is one matter.

Point No. 1, even before Deano became AP's chair? When newspapers said look at the "TV model for online papers, did they forget there was such a thing as cable TV? Let alone premium cable?

Point No. 2, on specific, why didn't AP jack rates for Yahoo, Google, MSN, et al high enough to potentially force them to paywall content, therefore giving member newspapers protection to paywall?

Point No. 3 - As both owner of a major newspaper company and AP chairman, why didn't he recognize that, on this issue, AP and its member newspapers are somewhat at cross interests?

Issue No. 2 is general business management.

Point No. 1? If you're not going to paywall locally generated content as well as AP written news, why do you post it online even before your print newspapers come out? (This is not specific to Singleton, BTW.) If online newspapers aren't "monetized" yet, this is a handout. It's like if Campbell's started selling its soup in plastic bottles as well as cans, and said that because the plastic bottles were made more quickly, it would give them away for free.

Anyway, that's a few thoughts for now.

Give me paywalls - from the top down

It's nice that some seven-day dailies, which have a fair amount of local news content, are going to paywalls, but really, that's not enough to solve the national issue.

The real problem, though, is lack of leadership by the AP, not individual newspapers. AP ought to put mandatory paywalls, with anti-Reuters/AFP exclusivity, into another revision of new AP contract. Then, it ought to abut quintuple its rates for Google et al, (with similar exclusivity clauses), high enough that Google would have to paywall, too, and couldn't do this on ads alone.

Tribune Co. bailing on AP

The Tribune Company, parent of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times,, is looking at not renewing its AP contract in 2010.

The Associated Press’ proposed new package of services in 2010 is unpopular with many papers, including controversial new rate structure next year.

Member papers now pay AP for a general news package tailored to their size and location. The new plan will have papers getting all available breaking news dispatches from around the world and other states with premium non-breaking content available at an added cost.

The gist of the complaint is that, even as many newspapers want more local news, the AP is forcing more international news on them.

Editor and Publisher has more:

Under current AP policy, each newspaper buys a package of general news created by AP based on that paper's location and circulation. The package usually includes breaking news, sports, business, and other national, international, and regional news relevant to the client's market, including its state AP wire.

Under the new structure, AP member newspapers will receive all breaking news worldwide (including items from other state wires), as well as breaking sports, business, and entertainment stories. In addition, a package of premium content — made up of five types of non-breaking stories including sports, entertainment, business, lifestyle and analysis — will be available at an additional cost.

The base rate is lower, but the material isn’t targeted by location.

So far, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is the largest paper to officially opt out. Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., is trying to get out at the end of this year, claiming AP’s two-year advance notice doesn’t apply as the new service package is that much different than the old one.

So far, the AP has been indifferent to member newspapers’ complaints, but I don’t see how it can ignore the Trib Co.

But, per E&P, the Trib’s empire also includes: The Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; The Orlando Sentinel; Red Eye of Chicago; the Hartford Courant; The Baltimore Sun; The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa.; and The Daily Press of Newport News, Va.

I just don’t see how the AP can ignore than many newspapers of BIG circulation.

AP reporters’ arrogance toward ‘little people’ in Denver

While eating lunch at the EXCELLENT New Mex-Mex restaurant Jack-N-Grill Sunday (try the chile [sic] relleno burrito, or about anything), an AP editor, and other members of the Fourth Estate, showed up for lunch.

And, overlooking the fact that is a popular restaurant, it was Sunday lunch, and this is a relatively slow-paced restaurant with a price range of about everything under $15 and most items under $10, Mr. Pinstriped Suit Pants, especially, seemed to get a little huffy toward wait staff.

Dude, chill out. You were at the good end of the outdoor seating area, next to the propane chile roaster. (My burrito, made with two Hatch rellenos rather than one ancho, had chiles roasted earlier Sunday morning.)

There goes the newspaper neighborhood

A lot of liberal bloggers may be wringing their hands about Rupert Murdoch being elected to the Associated Press board of directors, but as an ink-stained wretch/member of the Fourth Estate myself, I can tell them their concerns, while not necessarily overblown, are too narrow.

Among other new board members? Donna J. Barrett, president and chief executive officer of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. CHNI is the “Chainsaw Al” of small-town daily newspaper operations. They buy a newspaper, or small group thereof, and immediately attempt to recoup their money ASAP.

Of course, Dean Singleton, already on the board, and his MediaNews, aren’t exactly a gem of newspaper ownership either. After all, it was Deano who asked Barack Obama if he planned to do more to fight Obama bin Laden. It may have been an accident, but I wouldn’t be so sure.

If you want to know more about Deano (disclosure – I worked at one of his papers in the late 1990s), all you need is the quote below from this NYT story:

“Mr. Singleton, 54, a bantam figure with flinty blue eyes, is indeed thought of as something of a magician in the newspaper world — having transformed himself from the son of a ranch hand in a tiny town in Texas to a media baron who now controls a newspaper empire that sprawls from coast to coast,” the Times adds. “He has, in a manner of speaking, sawed many of his competitors in half, only to have them hop off the table and become his partners.”

But, don’t underestimate him, says John McManus from San Jose State’s j-school:

“He aspires to be a mogul in the ranks of Pulitzer and the Hearst of old, and I think he's going to achieve it.”

Trust me, Rupert Murdoch isn’t really an “outlier” here.