Mac Slocum's Recommended Stuff and Links of Note

Despite their delight that there is finally a search engine in the market willing to take on Google’s preeminence, Newspaper publishers still have issues with the whole Bing idea. Our sources argue that Bing could jeopardise any standing it has as an agnostic or neutral search engine if it gets into the game of picking and choosing which newspapers should have premium positions on its News service, and paying some but not others for their content. That could backfire both on Bing, but more importantly on the newspapers that would rather sit above that kind of association, especially where they are concerned that readers will wonder about their editorial independence. [Emphasis added.]

Hoo-boy. This dulls the edge of Mr. Murdoch’s rattling saber:

Is it appropriate for a national newspaper to reprint my personal tribute to Edward Woodward as if it were an article written for them?” tweeted Wright today. “They just lifted it from my blog without asking. And cut off the entire end section about my last meeting with him …

Speaking from a little bit of experience organizing events, these things are enormously expensive. I have a lessons learned document full of post-event observations and the biggest one is this: never underestimate cost. I’m guessing the real cost of all these future of journalism conferences is exponentially higher than the author of the following excerpt suggests:

Not surprisingly, no one would reveal how much Yale’s conference cost. (Harvard also declined to comment.) But when you estimate the cost of an event that includes 17 Yale and 37 non-Yale speakers — with two or three nights at The Study for out-of-towners; travel expenses from North Carolina, Michigan, and even Sweden; and meals, including an invitation-only cocktail reception and dinner — it’s easy to see how quickly it adds up. To be fair, no one at either conference received any kind of speaking fee.

Use the “Legal Opinions and Journals” option on Google Scholar to search through case law. Very useful, especially if you want to point to a particular opinion like this.

… there’s no option to show subscription-based content in Google Web Search, with the exception of Google Scholar content. That’s a big deal. Newspapers get tons of traffic from regular Google web search. If they go subscription-only, they’ll lose that traffic. That might be fine for News Corp, which argues that the traffic it receives isn’t that valuable (despite, oddly, also purchasing ads on Google to gain more traffic). But the difficulty for Google in allowing subscription content into regular web search is that if the top results get flooded with it, uses may become dissatisfied and express their frustration on Google.

My fervent hope, meanwhile, is that journalists will take an interest in where their compensation comes from. This for-profit field has been an oddity in letting its practitioners, the people who create the stuff that consumers consume, be blissfully ignorant of how their businesses run.

I’m not saying that all journalism needs to produce money at some profitable ratio directly attributable to the pieces produced. But being unaware of anything having to do with the cash flows that support the news operation is a luxury we can no longer afford.

Well put. I’ve never understood the animosity toward the business side of journalism. It’s not evil. It’s not even a necessary evil. It’s just business. And if you understand your business even in a basic sense, you inherently comprehend how you fit into the broader structure. That’s important. It’s also one of the key underlying causes of all the current turmoil. A deep distrust of business, to the point of phobia, has halted the forward progress of many smart journalists who still have a lot to offer. Business savvy is the key that unlocks future opportunities. Who wouldn’t want that?

Here’s what this will do: It may drive sales of DVDs a bit short term. But soon, online movie piracy will pick up to new heights. If the movie studios have nightmares about piracy now, their reality will be truly terrifying with this plan in place. There are two major factors that stop movie piracy from being as bad as music piracy was a few years ago: Broadband speeds and convenience. Let’s speak to the latter one first: With services like Netflix, Redbox, iTunes, and the like all offering fairly easy ways to get movies you want, when you want them, it’s less of a headache for most people to use them rather than digging around online to get them for free. But with this new 30-day window in place, the masses would be driven online to search for more illegal content — and more importantly, it would begin to fuel a piracy ecosystem for Hollywood content. There would be more people downloading, but also more people sharing. That’s the key.

I long for the day when this finally happens for ebooks, audiobooks, movies, music … EVERYTHING.

I won’t be surprised if we start seeing serious, robust ebook rental schemes. I’d already been thinking about them when I had two completely unrelated conversations about the idea. By serious, I mean a true Netflix-type model where ongoing revenue to the publisher and author is part of the program. Again, everyone knows the rules, and there is potential for purchases galore.

The days of silo-based thinking are coming to an end (thank god):

Like many of the journo nonprofits cropping up these days, the Tribune will distribute its work through its own website and via “distribution partners.” That’s not only smart, it’s necessary. Building a brand and destination website from scratch is tricky business (just ask Geoff Dougherty) so getting your name out there in as many outlets as possible is a very good idea. Where the Tribune goes where others have not is the idea that the organization can provide a platform for civic engagement through its “on-the-record, open-to-the-public events.”

For future reference: 37 Signals’ Haystack is a web designer database.

TribWire from the Texas Tribune is a very cool example of custom aggregation from a news outlet. Sort of a super Tumblr. As noted in this Nieman Lab piece, the Tribune installed a custom bookmarklet in the org’s browsers so staff can add to the feed on the fly. That’s INSANELY cool.