Long Island News

via Lighthousegetaways.com

I decided to take a little break from the usual type of blogging on this site and share with you my idea for a profitable journalism site. I had to come up with this project idea for my Journalism 24/7 class, but the more I worked on it I realized that this idea could possibly be do-able. Basically the idea would be a subscription based site that provided in-depth and original news coverage of Nassau and Suffolk County on Long Island. This is a market that no one has really tapped into yet and I am sure that there are people that would be willing to pay for coverage of their counties. One may believe that Newsday has sufficiently covered this market, but the truth is that they haven’t. The majority of stories are from the police blotter and AP content. Nassau and Suffolk County tend to be overshadowed by New York City and Queens.

My site would focus on the community and also feature a social networking aspect. Those that sign up for a membership to the site will be able to create a profile, upload a picture, and converse with other residents on message boards.  The message boards will be a place where people can comment on local news stories or debate on certain topics. Local businesses will be the focus of advertisements and businesses that donate to the site will be thanked publicly. Social events such as rummage sales, street fairs, and business openings will be advertised as well. There will be in-depth coverage of the schools and sports teams, which will keep the children and parents interested in the site. Schools doing certain projects will be featured and local sports teams and players will be featured as well.

Citizen journalism will play a small part on my site, but it will be heavily edited and monitored. Citizens that wish to write stories will have their article and picture featured on the site, but articles will be ranked in accordance to timeliness and importance. For example, a woman’s article about her favorite kind of cat will be ranked lower than someone writing a story that comments on current politics.

Since taking on both counties would be a difficult job, I would probably start off in one county and focus on building up the site’s following. The staff would most likely be comprised of freelance and part-time journalists and also staff to manage the website. My start up money would relay mostly on donations from residents and businesses and also loans. It would be a labor of love and require a lot of promotion, but I think that if this is done right I could have a good and profitable idea on my hands.

Now don’t go and steal it on me

The Fight For The Net Continues

via roberts ravings

Time Warner Cable and AT&T had proposed legislation that would protect cable and phone company monopolies , but would also crush North Carolina’s towns and city’s efforts to build their own local broadband networks. Activists had believed they had originally succeeded in slowing down the process of the bill, but the companies had a final trick up their sleeve. Early yesterday morning, Time Warner Cable and AT&T had quietly pushed to have the committee meeting to dicuss the bill moved up to 8:00 in the morning. Luckily sites like Twitter and blogs had caught wind of the move and rallied up the troops. North Carolina’s residents managed to flood their legislatures with calls and complaints, but the real impact was made when people began showing up at the statehouse. The result ended up being that the bill was tabled, but many are saying that while they would have preferred the bill had been killed entirely, it is enough for now.

I’m a little relived that social networking sites such as Twitter are becoming such a useful tool in getting the word out. Trying to push that meeting up so quietly was a sneaky move and makes me lose respect for this company even more.

Journalism Online: Will it work?

Steve Brill via Slate.com

Steve Brill, founder of American Lawyer and Court TV, has partnered up with Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery Jr. to create a solution to the revenue issue in the journalism business model. Their new company, Journalism Online, will attempt to bring publishers together and make pay barriers around the content. Journalism Online will require micro-payments for individual articles or day passes for a flat fee. Publications that sign up with the company will receive monthly and annual passes. The idea is to secure all the content behind the pay walls with the hopes that readers will be willing to pay.

The idea seems good, but still there are skeptics. Jack Shafer at Slate brings up a good point; you can copyright an article, but you can’t copyright the news.

What’s to prevent such Web enterprises as the Huffington Post, Nick Denton’s Gawker enterprise, or some startup (Shafer and Manjoo?) from purchasing the most expensive all-tiers pass from Journalism Online and rewriting or otherwise encapsulating the best and most noteworthy walled-in articles in real time—and then selling ads against it? This is essentially what Henry R. Luce and Britton Hadden started doing in 1923 as they rewrote newspapers on a weekly basis for Time magazine. It is what the Week continues to do today.

Shafer argues that due to legal restrictions such as the fair-use provisions of the Copyright Act, people would be able to steal from the paid content of Journalism Online. By re-writing the stories and making them sound original, they would be considered fair game.

Shafer goes on to say:

Publishers might try to beat back the news distillers by invoking the “hot news doctrine” devised by the Supreme Court in 1918 to prevent William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service from rewriting and reselling the contents of the Associated Press. The decision essentially bestowed upon content creators a special set of property rights, subject to a lawsuit if:

i) a plaintiff generates or gathers information at a cost;
ii) the information is time-sensitive;
iii) a defendant’s use of the information constitutes free riding on the plaintiff’s efforts;
iv) the defendant is in direct competition with a product or service offered by the plaintiffs;
v) the ability of other parties to free-ride on the efforts of the plaintiff or others would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.

Shafer brings up some good points, so it may be a while before Journalism Online manages to make this kind of plan work out. Some may worry that people can simply copy and paste articles from the paid content, but there are HTML codes that can prevent text from being highlighted. Perhaps that, along with other methods will help Journalism Online launch successfully.  Brill also has to get his team together to examine all the legal restrictions and freedoms in journalism before they can create something that works.

Time Warner Cable Folds Under Pressure

via blogs.NYU.edu

According to Tim Karr at Save The Internet, Time Warner Cable has backed down from its plan to create excessive fees for those that use the Internet for more than just basic email and surfing.

The plan would have people paying as much as $150 a month for full Internet access. Time Warner’s reasoning behind this excessive pricing is that it will discourage people from watching pirated videos on-line and will prevent inevitable Internet brownouts.

I agree with the public backlash that Time Warner has received. After years of being able to use the Internet without any fees or penalties (aside from Internet providers), charging large amounts of money for full access seems ridiculous. This is a plan that won’t work out, because people don’t stand idly by when negative change is occurring.

Is The New York Times The New Darfur?

via justicefortheworld.org

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller appeared to think so. According to Tim Grieve’s report on Politico, Keller spoke at the opening of a new building for The Stanford Daily on Thursday and touched on the topic of the future of newspapers. He predicted that the New York Times will be “left standing after the deluge.” His reasoning for this prediction seemed to be based on the loyalty of New York Times’ readers, who have apparently been offering to donate money to keep the paper alive. After a little joke about how he doubted that GM was getting similar offers, Keller said, “Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.”

Wait, what?

I had to read that part over twice before it sunk into my head. While I would like to see the NYT make it out of these rough times alive, I would never compare it to or rank it with the importance of saving Darfur.

Keller then responded to Politico in an email attempting to explain his remark:

“I think it’s pretty obviously a reflection of my mild astonishment at the earnest fervor with which some people have suddenly embraced the cause of saving newspapers,” Keller wrote. “That’s matched only by my mild astonishment at the silly literal-mindedness with which some people read my occasional public comments.”

Perhaps it is a remark that shouldn’t be taken literally, but it was also just a poor choice of words in the first place on his part. To me, human suffering and the suffering of a publication are two completely different things. They should never be compared, because it is obvious that the importance human life trumps the stability of a newspaper.