That said, the industry wouldn’t turn down some help from Congress, says John Sturm, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.

Testifying at a House hearing this morning, Sturm says his group does like proposals that would let newspapers–and other businesses–change some of their accounting practices related to tax refunds (via net operating-loss provisions) and pension plans. Oh, and he’s in favor of a proposed law that would let papers operate as nonprofits while still generating advertising revenue.

The complete text of Sturm’s opening statement is embedded at the bottom of this post, and if you want to watch the hearing, organized by Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, it was streamed live (albeit choppily) here.

My political handicapping skills are nonexistent, but that said, I think there’s no chance of Congress passing a bill that singles out newspapers for aid. Local papers are still vitally important to local lawmakers, but many of those lawmakers’ constituents hate their papers, for all manner of offenses, real and imagined. I just can’t imagine what they’d do if they were told their tax dollars were going to support their local rag.

Still, I wouldn’t rule out some politically motivated pressure being applied to bogeymen like Craigslist and Google (GOOG), in the form of antitrust scrutiny or other arm-twisting.

JFS-Statement-Joint-Economic-Committee-092409-Hearing –

If the court’s decision holds up, it could well start another round of dealmaking similar to the one we saw at the beginning of this decade in which the industry consolidated to about half a dozen major players.

Reuters:

“The commission has failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30 percent of all cable subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming,” the court said.

The judges pointed to rising competition among video providers, including satellite companies like DirecTV Group Inc, as well as telephone companies like AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, which have been rolling out their own subscription television services.

“Cable operators, therefore, no longer have the bottleneck power over programming that concerned the Congress in 1992.” the court said. The FCC’s cable ownership limit has been the focus of court challenges for years.

As Reuters points out, new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski can try to appeal the decision or try to write a new one. But if the cap stays off, we’re likely to see another round of combinations, or attempted combinations, at the very least.

Lots of handicappers have already been expecting big cable operators like Comcast (CMCSA) to make a run at programming assets, as it did with Disney (DIS) years ago. But what if the company deploy its assets to bulk up with more subscribers instead? Investors in Cablevision (CVC), the smallish, New York-based cable system that is a perpetual supposed takeover target that never gets taken over, like the idea: CVC shares are climbing modestly in a flat market.

Here’s the text of his mea culpa, posted at a company-hosted bulletin board:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

If you’re feeling petty, you can note that this apology took six days to arrive. But that would make you petty. A bigger person would say that Bezos’ self-flagellation is pitch-perfect in every aspect and a rare admission of fallibility from an American leader.

Great, right?

Almost. Now all we need is for Amazon (AMZN) to promise that it won’t go into your Kindle and take away something you bought, ever again. But the e-commerce giant won’t say that.

Instead, it’s left open a big, worrisome loophole that it refuses to close. Amazon says it won’t forcibly remove your content from your Kindle “in these circumstances.” But it won’t say what circumstances would prompt it to take back product it’s sold.

That’s dumb. And doubly so coming from Amazon, a company that succeeds in large part because of its well-deserved reputation for kick-ass customer service.

And let’s be honest: Very few Kindle buyers are worried about losing their e-books in the middle of the night. And if Amazon wants to reserve the right to do this again, for specific reasons, well, that’s cool, too. Just spell it out, one way or another, and we can all move on.

Alas, you’ve got no choice but to remember that last part. It has disappeared from the Web, apparently at the behest of Major League Baseball.

Stewart dissected the media hubhub about Obama’s pitch–and in particular Fox News’s analysis of it–on his July 15 show. But if you watch the archived version of that show at Viacom’s (VIA) “Daily Show” Web site, you’ll find that the bit has been cut out of his opening monologue. It once ran for two minutes and 43 seconds, but now the archive stops short at the 55-second mark.

And if you try to watch that episode on Hulu, the Web site owned by News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney (DIS), you’ll find that it’s gone altogether, replaced by a message blaming “rights issues” (click image to enlarge):

What happened? The story, via Viacom officials, is that pro baseball officials contacted them this week and told them to take down the Obama footage, which it owns.

The argument, I’m told, is that the MLB was fine with Stewart (and every other TV show in the country) using the clip under “fair use” terms–the footage itself was a news story, and Stewart was adding value via his commentary, etc. But it balked at the notion of the footage remaining in Viacom’s archives, and circulating on the Web, forever.

None of that makes any sense, of course: There’s no reason that Stewart’s use of the clip should be okay, but only for a limited time. And if Viacom wanted to spend time fighting MLB on this, it certainly could have.

But presumably, the company figures it wants to use its legal resources elsewhere–like fighting the never-ending copyright lawsuit it filed against Google (GOOG) and YouTube. Remember that one?

In any case, I’ve reached out to MLB to make sure I’m not missing anything here. And of course, you can still find all sorts of footage of the pitch, along with other anchors making fun of it, all over the Web. Like this one:

Here’s an edited version of the beginning of the July 15 episode of the “Daily Show.” Before you click on it, note the title of the clip, and it’s original running time.

I’m told that an edited version of the show will show up on Hulu again later tonight or on Thursday.

From the Strib’s posting on Journalism Jobs (via Minnpost): “Enthusiasm for communicating political news on many different platforms–from print to online to mobile to social networking media–is essential.”

First: Good to know that even bankrupt papers are still hiring. That’s my good news tidbit for the day.

Second: The social-networking part may sound like a novelty, but I think in the not-too-distant future, this is simply going to be a core requirement for any reporting job, like having a driver’s license.

The story went up on VF.com six days ago and has generated just under two million page views since then, says executive online editor Michael Hogan. (Disclosure: I’ve been a free-lance contributor to Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” list in the past and will be again this year). Had Palin not made her blockbuster announcement on the Friday before the Fourth of July, the piece would be doing even better: Vanity Fair generated more traffic on the Tuesday the story was posted than the day after Palin made her news.

Still, it’s a big coup for the magazine’s site. The only way to generate more attention would be to run a slideshow featuring young attractive women.

Which the site can also do: Its story-and-photo package on Jessica Simpson, which ran in May, attracted 5.5 million page views to the site over a two-day period. Vanity Fair has generated 85 million page views so far this year, Hogan says.

And if you really want to generate traffic, run slideshows featuring very young attractive women. Last year the magazine’s 18-picture slideshow featuring a kind-of-topless Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus attracted some 18 million page views in a couple of days.

None of that will be terribly surprising to people who’ve wallowed in Web publishing for any amount of time. What surprised me a bit, though, was Vanity Fair’s decision to publish the piece in its entirety from the start. Doesn’t that cannibalize newsstand sales?

Maybe, says Hogan. But “it’s an open question as to what costs newsstand and what doesn’t.” And as the magazine tries to figure that out, he says, it has been experimenting. Some stuff goes up online before the magazine hits newsstands, while other pieces won’t appear on the site until a month later.

In the case of the Palin piece, the magazine had originally prepared to run an excerpt/summary of the story at first, then make the whole thing available by the end of the month after the news cycle was extinguished.

But on Friday, June 26, a few days before the excerpt was scheduled to run online, the magazine rethought its plan, assuming that the piece would be widely quoted and discussed before most people would ever see it. “The PR department started getting concerned that it was going to be controversial, and they wanted people to read the whole thing, and draw their own conclusions,” Hogan says. The final call went to Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, who, I gather, isn’t really much of a Web guy.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to read Michael Lewis’s latest piece for the magazine, on AIG’s (AIG) notorious “financial products” division. That one’s only available, for now, in excerpt form online, which means I’m actually going to have pay cash to read it, or wait a few hours–Hogan says it should be available in full later today.

That distinction popped up this morning after Politico detailed an “astonishing offer” by the paper’s business staff to lobbyists–a chance to underwrite “salons” with D.C. bigshots, hosted at the home of CEO Katharine Weymouth.

A promotional flier Politico got its hands on also promised that the Post’s editorial staff would be part of the events, including one scheduled for July 21. But that part isn’t true, a Post spokeswoman told me via email this morning:

The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers.

As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this.

We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that The Post should be leading these conversations in Washington, big or small, while maintaining journalistic integrity. The newsroom will participate where appropriate.

OK, so that’s cleared up. But let me play devil’s advocate: What exactly would be so wrong about getting the paper’s reporters or editors to to participate in one of these?

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the Post has been at the nexus of power, money and influence. In fact, Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, was famous for hosting gatherings much like these at her house. And publications of all stripes, including this one, as well as Dow Jones, which owns this site, frequently charge fees to attend networking events where their editorial staffs participate.

And you’re likely to see more of this stuff, not less, as publishers search for revenue streams besides advertising to stay afloat. Any tempest you see about this today is going to look quaint in a couple of years.

UPDATE: The ensuing uproar has forced the Post to cancel the events altogether. Post execs are now busy pointing fingers at each other, although it seems clear a lot of the blame is going to be laid at the feet of the paper’s conference group and/or marketing team.

But note Howard Kurtz’s report on his employers’ reactions to the reaction: Weymouth (or her proxies) say she was OK with the idea, but not the marketing; Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli says he was OK with the concept, but not this version:

Weymouth knew of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation. But, one of the executives said, she believed that there would be multiple sponsors, to minimize any appearance of charging for access, and that the newsroom would be in charge of the scope and content of any dinners in which Post reporters and editors participated.

Brauchli said he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences of the sort commonly staged by major news organizations.

But he said he made clear to the company’s marketing officials that Post journalists would participate only if they could substantially control the nature of any such conference. Brauchli said he was blindsided by the wording of these fliers and that they are an embarrassment to the newspaper.

In the old days, the fact that this story broke just before the long holiday weekend would help the Post. But this story will now have legs, egged on by stuff like this:

Simulmedia founder and CEO Dave Morgan told an industry conference today that Rep. Rick Boucher, the Virginia Democrat who has become the loudest voice in Congress in the advertising/privacy fight, is prepping a bill that will force publishers to let Web surfers “opt in” before they’re served with any third-party tracking cookies.

Not a huge surprise: Boucher laid out the case for the bill last week at a Congressional hearing. It’s unclear just exactly what that would mean for the business: Could Google (GOOG) not send cookies out if you, say, played a YouTube video embedded on a third-party site (like the one the White House runs)?

But right now the details of the proposed bill don’t matter: The industry has already started arguing against it via promotions that explain just how valuable Web advertising is to the country (and by extension, the targeting/tracking that cookies enable it). From MediaFlect’s Dorian Benkoil:

“Congress’ position is that consumers are not appropriately aware of what is being done on their machines, and the use of cookies delivered by a third party is something consumers have not been appropriately informed of,” said Morgan, who oversees privacy initiatives for the Internet Advertising Bureau [and who] was in Washington last week talking to FTC officials and congressional staff, he said. “Congress’ default position is that that will require an opt-in,” to serve a third-party cookie.

That’s a perfectly sensible position from a consumer’s perspective: Why should advertisers and their proxies track what you’re doing on the Web without your consent? But from the advertising/publisher perspective, an opt-in plan means a plan no one will ever agree to, which means no more cookies/tracking, period, which means Web advertising becomes as imprecise and clumsy as good-old TV and print ads.

Which is why the Web guys prefer a bill that allows surfers to opt out–or preferably, no bill at all.

I still like my Solomon-like solution, which I’ve thrown out before: Let consumers opt in, but give them a reward for doing so.

It doesn’t have to be much–consumers say they care about privacy, but in reality, they’re very happy to trade personal info for trinkets and geegaws. Maybe you get “privacy points” every time you visit a site for the first time and sign away your right to complain about tracking. And if you earn enough you get a bag of Cheetos, etc. Sure we can work something out.

[Image credit: rpongsaj]

That’s the short version of a followup to a post I wrote earlier this month in which I noted that Google said it was no longer logging data from tracking cookies sent out from WhiteHouse.gov. That move was applauded by the privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But there’s a bit of important nuance that I should have highlighted the first time around, and I’m doing so now at a reader’s behest.

Long version: After I wrote my story, I got a note from Daniel Brandt, who runs Scroogle.org, a nonprofit that tries to foil Google’s attempts to track its users’ online behavior. He contended that that Google was still tracking YouTube views on the White House site. “I just clicked on a video at whitehouse.gov…and the YouTube Flash code phoned home to Google about two seconds into the video,” he wrote. “Nothing has changed. What is Google/YouTube talking about?”

I relayed that question to Google (GOOG) spokesman Scott Rubin, who said that Brandt was correct–up to a point. YouTube is still sending viewing data back to the mothership when you watch a video at WhiteHouse.gov. It just doesn’t pay attention to said data.

Rubin’s explanation:”Even though the cookies are still sent as before when playback starts (since we did not change the domains of the video or playback functionality), we no longer log this information.” Just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, I asked Rubin what exactly becomes of the cookie data that YouTube receives from the site. “We don’t store it anywhere,” he wrote.

Is that an adequate answer? It’s OK with me, but then again, I don’t ever assume that the Web offers real privacy. And if you have a rigid distrust of Google or other institutions in general when it comes to privacy issues, I’m guessing it won’t cut it.

But the EFF, which is about as vocal and aggressive as it gets when it comes to the stuff, is OK with the answer. Pretty much. Here’s legal director Cindy Cohn’s response to me when I relayed Rubin’s explanation:

It doesn’t satisfy us entirely, but it’s a small good thing. The part that is especially troubling here is how difficult it has been to get YouTube to publicly disclose the nature of this change, much less get a clear idea of what logging/tracking is still going on through other means. This information should be in the whitehouse.gov privacy policy, which right now is remarkably vague about what information is going to YouTube, much less what it does with the information it receives. YouTube should also disclose it, at least on their blog if not elsewhere. Basically now citizens won’t know unless they happen to follow EFF’s blog, your blog or one of the other tech media outlets who have followed the story. That’s a real problem. The public deserves to know–clearly and in nontechnical language–what is happening with their viewing information, both on Whitehouse.gov and elsewhere.

To sum up: If you’re the kind of person who’s worried about the information that Google collects about you when you surf the Web, you can feel a little more secure about what happens when you visit WhiteHouse.gov–if you’re the kind of person who’s placated by Google’s assurances. I’m guessing that’s a very narrow Venn diagram.

And in case you’re wondering, All Things Digital has its own cookie policy, which the site breaks out separately from its privacy policy. You can find it here.

Reuters: “‘We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,’ said the [unnamed U.S.] official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election. He declined further details.”

CNN: “Senior officials say the State Department asked Twitter to refrain for going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time to ensure the site continues to operate. Bureau’s and offices across the State Department, they say, are paying very close attention to Twitter and other sites to get information on the situation in Iran.”

UPDATE: Even the State Department can’t keep Twitter up forever. It’s nighttime in Tehran and Twitter is down — the company’s status blog dedicated to stuff like this indicates it should be shuttered from about 5pm tp 6:30 pm eastern time. UPDATE2: It’s back!

But after making an initial concession earlier this year, Google (GOOG) and the White House are going further. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains: “Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.”

Will that be good enough to satisfy hard-to-please critics like the EFF? Amazingly, it does! Though of course, they’d like to see more. Here’s Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director:

This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the Government for taking it. It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software.

Now we’d like to see them turn that cleverness to other places, not just the White House. Google/YouTube should offer this same “tracking-free” viewing to others. Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking…

In addition, the government should adopt “tracking-free” videos across the board for all government websites. Viewers of videos from the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, your member of Congress and other governmental entities deserve the same privacy protection that viewers of the President’s speeches.

The IRS has videos? Who knew? In the meantime, feel free to watch clips like this one, of Obama’s April victory over the UConn women’s basketball team in a game of “P-I-G” without worrying that the government is watching you watch.

Confused? Of course. So was I, when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.

Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.

Note how the company describes it: “A lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer” that will work on Macs and PCs with “standard Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls”–but not with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Media Center machines or Apple’s (AAPL) AppleTV boxes. And it also isn’t designed to work with any other Web-to-TV software or boxes, like Vudu.

To spell this out: I’m writing this post from the “cave” that the All Things Digital team has set up for the D7 conference, and it’s full of gorgeous 22-inch and 30-inch Mac displays that are much nicer than anything that sits in my cramped Brooklyn apartment. Hulu is saying that they’d be A-OK with me watching Tina Fey and crew, via their service, on those monitors. But they don’t want me trying to get that show on an actual television.

Isn’t a screen a screen? Nope. Not to Hulu’s owners: GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and soon, Disney’s ABC (ABC). To them, it’s important to make the distinction between TV programming, which generates significant ad revenue and/or cable subscription fees, and online video, which generates very little at all. That’s why NBC CEO Jeff Zucker reiterated his opposition to Boxee, the software that makes it easy to move Web video like Hulu to TV sets.

Now all he has to do is convince tech-savvy entertainment consumers to play along. Good luck!

UPDATE: Several readers have suggested to me that Hulu and its owners aren’t as dumb as they seem, and that they do indeed intend to use Desktop eventually, as a Boxee-like product of their own–that is, they will use it to let people watch Hulu on TV. If so, that means that Jeff Zucker wasn’t being honest when he declared that “right now we’re committed to Hulu being an online experience, and that’s where our vision is today, and I think that will continue.”

But for what it’s worth, whenever I’ve talked to anyone at ABC, Fox, NBC or Hulu, all of them have been consistently mindful about not trying to disrupt the existing value chain that supports the cable and broadcast TV business–“the ecosystem” is the euphemism they prefer. So I don’t find Zucker’s comments so far-fetched.

Anyone want to weigh in? If you use your real name you can sound off in the comments below. Or you can drop me a line at  peter@allthingsd.com.

And I think that gap is going to trip up a lot of big players in the years to come.

For a reminder, head on over to NebuAd’s Web site, which no longer works. That’s because the targeting firm, which once employed 60 people, closed up shop on Friday, according to MediaPost.

NebuAd was supposed to work with various Internet service providers and track Web surfing behavior of the ISPs’ customers, then sell that data back to the ISPs. That plan blew up last summer when the company became the subject of congressional hearings, and by last fall just about all of its former clients had run screaming from the company.

The standard response here from ad folks is that NebuAd was a bad apple that practiced a particularly noxious version of targeting. And that the press, lawmakers and the general public don’t really understand how targeting works.

And all of that may be true! But even if it is just a perception problem and the online ad business has only the best intentions when it comes to collecting and using personal Web data, it’s a perception problem that the industry has done a lousy job of fighting.

So said my lunch date today, who’s a veteran of several big online publishing companies, and who tells me that the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the industry’s trade group, is petrified of more NebuAds because they will likely lead to regulation.

Recall that Rick Boucher, a conservative Democratic congressman from Virginia, has already promised to regulate behavioral targeting at the likes of Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL. If the thought of that sort of thing is so distasteful to the ad guys, they’re going to have to start selling much more persuasively than they’re doing right now.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Josh Marshall, the journalist/entrepreneur behind Talking Points Memo, and had a great chat about news, new media and the business of running a self-funded Web site. But my notes and video have sat on my hard drive since then, for no other reason than I never got around to publishing them.

Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for the kick in the pants I needed: Over the weekend, the New York Times (NYT) columnist has given Marshall a huge, if unintended, endorsement by borrowing his work and then getting caught.

After an initial attempt by Dowd to explain away the similarity between her work and his, the Times is now running a correction on Dowd’s Sunday column, noting that she “failed to attribute a paragraph” to Marshall.

You’ll read plenty more about this on the Web over the next few days, if you’re inclined. But it would be a shame if that’s the only thing you know about Marshall’s site, which is an interesting hybrid of politically focused reporting, commentary, and aggregation/blogging.

And I do mean a mix: If you just glimpse quickly at his site, you might think it’s the same grouping of links and headlines that you can find anywhere else on the Web. But Marshall was a real reporter prior to starting the site and his 12-person staff does real reporting. Its best work, to date, was uncovering the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorneys scandal in 2007, which led to prestigious Polk Award in 2008.

Just as interesting: It’s a profitable business that has never taken outside investment and until recently, has made almost all of its money by relying on ad networks. The most effective ad network, says Marshall: Google’s AdSense. See! Google (GOOG) really does support content!

More recently, Marshall has hired Yahoo (YHOO) vet Diane Rinaldo to serve as the company’s first real ad rep, trying to translate the site’s one million (give or take) monthly unique readers into more significant revenue. That’s alleged to be a real challenge since advertisers are supposedly loath to touch political content. But then again, start-up blogs aren’t supposed to do real journalism–or act as unattributed contributors to the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090518/meet-maureen-dowds-favorite-writer-talking-points-memos-josh-marshall/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090513/surpise-congress-helps-the-britney-bailout-move-ahead/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090513/surpise-congress-helps-the-britney-bailout-move-ahead/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 22:09:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7343 Shows you what I know. In March, I predicted that something called “The Performance Rights Act,” which would require radio stations to pay musicians–or at least, music labels–whenever they play one of their recordings, would never get through Congress.

Not because the notion is necessarily a terrible idea, mind you. But because musicians and music labels seemed unlikely to be beneficiaries of Washington aid.

Today, however, the music business got one step closer to getting the bill passed: The House Judiciary Committee approved the legislation in a 21-9 vote. There’s a long way to go: If I remember my Schoolhouse Rock correctly, the bill has to get through a Senate committee, then the full House, the full Senate and then President Barack Obama’s desk before it becomes law.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which hits my inbox almost daily with a press release decrying the act and promising its ultimate failure, assures me that “nearly half the House of Representatives already opposes RIAA efforts to feather the nest of foreign record labels.” And that kind of invective may help them quash this thing.

But let me reiterate: I still think the best way to kill this, if you were so inclined, would be to start calling it the “Britney Bailout.”

Per my previous story, here’s the campaign I would run if I was the NAB: “Slap up an ad that shows Britney Spears driving with her kid on her lap or staggering around an MTV stage or cavorting with K-Fed, and run a simple tag line: “Britney wants more money. Tell Congress not to give her any.” But again, what do I know?

Oooh. Here’s that Schoolhouse Rock classic:

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