Churbuck.com

From an excellent article on serial “fabulist” Stephen Glass and his attempts to be admitted to the California Bar after sullying his name in the late 1990s by concocting a ton of stories in The New Republic, George,  and many other fine publications:

“Such was their demand for their child’s success that they even hired a “tutor” to help Glass master rope-climbing. “Applicant noted that, at least in this case, their efforts were unsuccessful. He still could not climb the rope, even after tutoring,” Judge Honn continues.”

The poor guy, the victim of two over-weening helicopter parents who were hell-bent to see their son get a medical degree. So obsessed that they hired a rope climbing tutor to get him up the rope and build his self-esteem.

This is the guy that put Forbes.com on the map after our managing editor Kambiz Faroohar and computer crime reporter Adam Penenberg started checking into Glasses’ story Hack Heaven.  They exposed the fraud, Vanity Fair wrote a feature, Hollywood made a film, and Glass went on to write a novel, The Fabulist, and graduate magna cum laude from Georgetown Law.

Last Friday I climbed a rope for the first time since I ascended one in the wrestling room in high school in 1976. I climbed it ten times in fact, inching my way up the 15′ long, 2″ wide hawser at the urging of my CrossFit trainer. I’ve got no skin on my inner thighs, have a lurid trench burned into my right shin, and no fingerprints on my right hand’s middle and pinkie fingers. But I climbed the frigging rope.

Oh but the feeling of accomplishment to have climbed that terrifying rope not once, not twice, but ten times in a row, slapping the girder on the ceiling every time before descending in a panicked slide of friction and controlled falling. I feel no urge to tell a lie as a result.

So, Mr. and Mrs. Glass, there is still hope for young Stephen. Sign him up for CrossFit and have him watch this how-to video. Then maybe the California Supreme Court will let him be a lawyer where his unique prevaricating skills will be right at home.

via The trial of Stephen Glass.

Om Malik delivered a thoughtful recollection of ten years at the front lines of the new, new media revolution yesterday when he recapped a decade of blogging that started in the earliest days of Dave Winer’s Userland, a humble beginning that has grown to one of the leading professional tech blog networks (GigaOm) and his rightfully deserved position as one of the world’s leading tech pundits.

We worked together in the mid-1990s at the launch of Forbes.com until he departed for San Francisco and I decamped for management consulting.  What started as a professional relationship quickly turned into a personal friendship that has endured over the years, perhaps forged in the mutual crucible of 85 Fifth Avenue and the dingy second floor office that served as a launch pad for many interesting people and personalities.

Some highlights of his essay that stood out:

• Cacoethes Scribendi:  blogs scratch the itch to write for people accustomed to writing a lot. Moving from the intra-day publish-often always-on newscycle of Forbes.com to a monthly print schedule meant he needed a daily outlet. “When I was working for Forbes.com during the early days of the dot-com bubble, I learned a vital lesson – you had to write every day to be any good and to have a complete handle on the beat. There was no way around the plain-old beat the pavement reporting.”
• Twitter Is Not a Blog Killer: maybe it is a communications vehicle for the barely literate, but 140 characters doesn’t stand a chance of competing with 250 words. “Twitter has only acted as an accelerator for my blogging role, allowing me the luxury of writing less but reaching far more people.”
• On curation: “Mostly because curation and sharing of content has become as important as writing. By sharing videos, photos, links, or quotes we are all essentially editors and the sharing itself is an act of editorializing.”
• And of course, what is a great blog post without a good list?

I never voted for Barney Frank — I couldn’t, he represented the next congressional district over from the Cape and Islands — and even if I could have I wouldn’t publicly expose my vote because, well, as an independent and former political reporter I’m conditioned not to tip my ballots in public.

I ran into him in July in Washington, in Reagan National Airport in the US Air terminal, both of us bound back to Boston; him for the beginning of some summer congressional break, me wrapping up a six month consulting engagement designing a social media metrics framework (if that isn’t a dreary bureaucratic cliche and hopeless mission, I don’t know what is) for a big public relations firm. He looked perturbed, a bit conscious of his face recognition among the people, hoping that no one would pick him out of the crowd and start chewing his ear about one contentious issue or another. He wasn’t alone, there was a New Hampshire congressman on the same flight, but there’s no mistaking Barney, one of the more visible and intelligent legislators of our time.

When I manned the statehouse bureau for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune — that is when the parochial editors back in North Andover deigned to let me out of their sight and flee the smoke-filled newsroom and their inane assignments to interview Megabucks winners (“I’m gonna buy a Winnebago and a microwave oven …”) and write thumb-suckers about the weather in the royal, USA Today inspired, “we” (“We Hate Snow”) — there was a now famous Barney Frank campaign poster tacked onto the wall of the press room by the tinny loudspeaker that piped in the ravings of the state representatives.

“Neatness isn’t everything”

By that point in time (1984), Barney had graduated from the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and gone onto represent suburban Boston and Southeastern Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress. We reporters loved him for his lack of preening polish and his sharp wit,  his willingness to deliver the perfect mordant quote on any occasion. He was an unmade bed of a man, a schlub, a man living on an astral plane where clothes and body type didn’t matter. His statehouse office was a legendary mess.

He was one of the few elected types that would actually pop into the press room, a feral pen of hacks and wretches banging away on little pre-laptop Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100s, and yuck it up with the crew from the Lowell Sun, Quincy Patriot-Ledger, the Salem Evening News.  I was too green and intimidated to yuck it up with him or any of the big personalities in state politics, but I did love to lurk on the edge of the scrum, micro-cassette recorder held over the shoulder of some television or radio reporter, and listen to him dig into some opponent or issue with his slightly retarded lisp and swallowed “G’s”.

My favorite Barney Frank moment is this YouTube video, taken at a constituent town hall in New Bedford, when an unhinged Lyndon LaRouche candidate decided to mess with the wrong guy.

Politics and sexual proclivities aside, Congress has lost one of the smart ones. Henrik Hertzberg’s recollection in the New Yorker is worth the read. Today’s New York Times’ story about Frank’s retirement announcement at the age of 71 is somewhat depressing, only in that Frank blames the current partisan bitterness, lack of cross-aisle respect, and shallow-as-a-mud-puddle media coverage for his decision to leave the hustings and become a public intellectual.

“When he arrived in the House in 1981, he said, “you had Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan talking about how they were friends after 5 o’clock — although if you knew Reagan’s work habits it was really, like, after about 2:30.”

Now, Mr. Frank said, the notion that wrangling between Democrats and Republicans is “a competition between people of good will with different views on public policy” has vanished. For that, he blames Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and current Republican presidential candidate with whom he has a tense history.

“Newt’s the single biggest factor in bringing about this change,” Mr. Frank said. “He got to Congress in ’78 and said, ‘We the Republicans are not going to be able to take over unless we demonize the Democrats.’ ”

Mr. Frank also blamed the conservative news media for the bitter divide that had made him reluctant to continue in Washington, as well as moderate voters who he said do not make their voices heard enough.”

Gawker network three times more valuable than Drudge Report, according to survey | Poynter..

Interesting list of top 25 blogs/aggregators by 24/7 Wall Street. Congrats to my buddies who work at or own some of these.

”

1. Gawker: $318 million
2. Drudge: $93 million
3. PopSugar Media Network: $64 million
4. SBNation: $56 million
5. Macrumors: $52 million
6. Business Insider, Seeking Alpha: $45 million
7. Cheezburger Network $41 million
8. Mashable $39 million
9. GigaOM $32 million
10. Perez Hilton $29 million
11. Funny or Die $27 million
12. The Blaze $24 million
13. Zero Hedge $16 million
14. ReadWriteWeb $13.2 million
15. VentureBeat $13 million
16. PItchfork $12.9 million
17. Mediaite $12 million
18. Newser $8 million
19. Boing Boing $7 million
20. Gothamist $4.2 million
21. Breitbart $4 million
22. Destructoid $3.7 million
23. Breaking Media $3.5 million
24. 24/7 Wall St. (Of course the site had to put itself on the list, though it doesn’t estimate its own value.)”

A couple weeks ago Google’s doodle celebrated the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer who wrote such fantastical modernist works of literature as Ficciones, The Labyrinth, and The Aleph.  I was introduced to his writing in college by my roommate, who was a student of Spanish literature, and while dense and difficult, found a certain strange attraction to the stories. Borges is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century — a shame he was never awarded the Nobel prize in Literature — on an order of Nabokov, Joyce, Barthelme and other modernist authors.

In 1985, when I was a cub reporter at a daily newspaper in northeastern Massachusetts, Borges visited Philips Andover Academy — the prestigious prep school — and gave a lecture there. The city editor at the paper wanted someone to interview the blind writer, but his name drew a blank in the newsroom except for me, who became very excited at the thought of meeting such an eminence.

He was staying at the Andover Inn on the Philips Andover campus, attended to by his assistant (and later wife) Maria Kodama. A photographer from the paper accompanied me, thoroughly bored and glazed over by my breathless attempt to convey the fame and impact of the little old man and his complex surrealistic stories that prefigured hypertext.

He was old (he died the following year in Switzerland of cancer), short, and dressed impeccably in a dapper suit. He shook my hand, welcomed me to sit on the bed beside him, and asked, in a heavy accent, if I would like a cup of tea or water. The photographer’s flash popped a few times, and Borges’ face was startled by the sound of the camera shutter, a little perturbed it seemed at the thought of being photographed without warning. He didn’t cover his blindness with sunglasses, and cocked his head slightly to better hear my questions.

I knew instantly that there was nothing I could ask the man that he could answer and that I could then quote in a story of any possible interest to the 40,000 readers of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, most of whom were more engaged by the debate over whether the city garbage-men should continue to drag household trash barrels onto the street or if the homeowners should do it for them. It was, in a perverse way, like being in a Borges story, where the protagonist is lost in a library looking for knowledge that can’t be expressed.

We talked about his books, me expressing my fondness for specific stories, especially The Garden of Forking Paths, and his puzzling themes of labyrinths and diverging, non-linear thoughts. Keep in mind I was only three years out of  Yale, where my head had been filled with the Deconstructionist theories of Derrida by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman.  We talked about Pynchon, Paul Theroux (who visited him and wrote about the meeting in The Old Patagonian Express) and my college writing teacher, Gordon Lish. I didn’t take any notes in my spiral reporter’s notebook. What was the use? And after 30 minutes his assistant gently interrupted to say Mr. Borges needed his rest.

I thanked him, posed for a picture of him that is probably in the Eagle-Tribune morgue somewhere, and after shaking his hand, made my goodbye.

I went to the newsroom with the photographer and wrote a brief, superficial 100 words about Borges’ visit. I regret not having brought a copy of one of his books for him to sign.

Monday Note.

Very interesting piece this morning by Frederic Filloux about the change in power between corporate PR and the press. The thesis is the changing nature of the news cycle — digital serfs churning content into the maw  as opposed to enterprising reporters developing their own leads and chasing them down — has shifted the power to corporate journalism: corporate content developed and handed over to the press for straight pass-through republishing.

“Contents are now tailored for the needs of digital media. As one of the renegade journalist recently told me – a fine female reporter disappointed by the trades’ evolution  –, corporate communication departments are switching from the usual press release to almost-ready-to-publish stories. She showed me compelling examples of product announcements treated in a variety of manners. The communiqué was largely ignored, but its transformation into a pre-packaged version showed up everywhere: internet, but also mainstream medias, newspapers, TV, radio.  The PR advisor was herself surprised by the efficiency of the process (and rather happy for her client): none of the media were eager to go outside the path she defined; reporters called the specialists she suggested, used the photo and video material she provided; no question asked whatsoever.

“The underlying facts: most journalists no longer have the time, the training, nor the motivation or even the management supervision to go beyond the surface. So, let’s feed them with what they need and we are in full control.  That’s the plan. And most of the time, it works beyond expectations.”

I suspect this will definitely be the norm, not the exception in business journalism, especially in the B2B trades, and put more of an emphasis on content creation and development skills inside of a PR agency or corporate communications team than the former model of stonewalling and spinning. In essence the creative side of journalism moves from the newsroom to the source.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. spammed me this morning to say that the NYT.com is moving to a subscription model very soon.

I blog about this topic only because I was once such an ardent front line promoter of the free-and-open model back in 1995 when Forbes.com launched and the traditional newsroom wanted the Wall Street Journal paid-sub model. I still maintain subscription content is a mistake in most cases, or at the very least, digital access should always be free to those antediluvian enough to continue paying for the print version.

Anyway, here’s the terms of the Times – of some interest as they surveyed me last fall with a lot of different possible scenarios and permutations. I’m moot due to the print subscription:

“On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.

On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For access to all other sections within the apps, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.

The Times is offering three digital subscription packages that allow you to choose from a variety of devices (computer, smartphone, tablet). More information about these plans is available at nytimes.com/access.

Again, all New York Times home delivery subscribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com and to all content on our apps. If you are a home delivery subscriber, go to homedelivery.nytimes.com to sign up for free access.

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.

The home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all “

The local rag, the Cape Cod Times, went to a metered paywall late last year. Maddening as hell to pay into a tiered model that tells me I have used 7 of 50 story clicks in a month. Whoever the financial whiz was that came up with that complex tiering system needs to be spanked.

I pay because I used to work there and somewhat like their local coverage — but a lot of the locals around me have moved on and given up on the Cape Cod Times. A death sentence for a local product that can only survive with local impressions. And if the pricing is going to happen — go flat and keep the complexity out of it. Please.

The best thing that can be said about the dead-tree era of publishing that sustained the world for a few centuries was the relative ease-of-use and standardization in operating the delivery mechanism — the book, newspaper, or magazine. Sentences began on the left, went to the right (in the West), eyes moved from to bottom, and when you finished the page you turned it. Need to remember a place? Dog ear the page or use a bookmark of some sort. Need to annotate? Scribble in the margins. Underline the text. Highlight the sentence.

The first digital versions of text tried to ape their paper antecedents. Zinio and other early e-mag technologies were basically smarter PDFs of pages, but they were proprietary, and it wasn’t until HTML provided a common framework and page description language that there was some semblance of standardization on how to read pixels.

Now that we are two years into the dedicated e-reader revolution — starting with the Amazon Kindle and now the notion of iPad apps, all hell is going to break loose on readers with very bad consequences. While others have bemoaned the end of the web as it moves off of standard platforms and onto proprietary ones, my beef is purely based on usability.  Today’s culprit is the vaunted New Yorker’s new iPad version, a “free” app that sticks a $4.99 gun in your ribs as soon as you decide you actually want to read something in it.

Jason Schwartzmann’s cute video instructions aside, the New Yorker is an utter failure as an online reading experience for several reasons.

• Pages are turned by flicking up, not side to side.
• The table of contents is impossible to find
• The standard menu has no option to jack up the font size to make the thing elderly eyes compatible
• It doesn’t remember your place automatically
• It doesn’t appear to have any annotation capabilities
• Getting out of the cute animation of how the cover was drawn was nigh impossible

New Yorker editor David Remnick needs to b-tch-slap his designers and start over. I will not buy an iPad version of the magazine again ($4.99 is a rip off what appears, thanks to the missing table of contents, to be a severely truncated version of the real thing). Whomever coded the thing and made their “enhancements” to the reading experience are the beginning of an ugly trend that is only going to get uglier as formats splinter and digital typographic designers decide to innovate the same way they managed to muck up web design over the years. Amazon enforces a modicum of standardization, so for now my allegiances will lie with the iPad’s Kindle app. But magazines and papers better settle on a defacto standard for tablet/reader publishing or we’re all screwed trying to find out where the table of contents is, the font adjuster and the virtual bookmark. I need to get smarter about these new tablet production tools.

Memoirs are generally untrustworthy affairs, especially when penned or ghost-penned by retired politicians or athletes seeking to cash in on their glories with a fat advance and a chance to put onto the record their version of the past with no arguments or contradictions. But rare is the memoir of a man of letters, a literary autobiography as it were. Some writers, like Steven King, have written strong reflections on the craft of the writer, weaving in their own life’s plot as a framework, but for the most, the autobiography is at best an opportunity for we readers to be taken into the conspiratorial confidences of the tale-teller and given a version of events that at best is written with the same verbal grace as their non-Onastic work, and at worse whitewashes controversy and settles past feuds with the awesome singularity of the printed page.

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Melville, Hemingway … few literary lions have written about themselves, indeed some like Pynchon are impressive in keeping their biographies off of the page, and limited to but a few cryptic paragraphs on the edge of the dust-jacket and end papers.  Literature resists critical psychoanalysis and the text is supposed to speak for itself, but yet the reader wants more insights into the dark influences behind the fiction: hence the cottage industry a few years back into tell-all biographies of John Cheever, the tortured alcoholic chronicler of Mad Men-era suburban New York and Westchester. The result was a bit embarrassing in the end.

I have not been a close fan of the political journalist Christopher Hitchens over the years. His work in Vanity Fair has occasionally come into view, but I haven’t been a fan in the sense of buying his books and seeking out his work in the Nation and television talking head-fests. For some reason I bought his memoir Hitch-22 and have been picking away at it this summer, slowly immersing myself into the life of what could be one of the last true British men-of-letters. That he has esophageal cancer didn’t come to my attention until I was half-way through the book, a relief as I am glad I didn’t come to the book with some morbid rubber-necking as a motivation. I had first become aware of him when he assailed my former employer, The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, and my late colleague, Susie Forrest, for their first Pulitzer Prize for reporting the Willie Horton scandal during Michael Dukakis’ failed run for the presidency in 1988.   Then came this astonishing video of Hitchens undergoing waterboarding so he could report on the experience first hand.

The book is remarkable and opens with the type of astonishing development that any novelist would crave. Hitchen’s mother, a relentlessly self-improving English woman hiding her Jewish roots from the strictures of post-WW II English society, abandons her career naval officer husband and ends her life in a lonely Athens hotel room with her new lover. The effect, the development puts into place a foundation for the rest of the tale that never relents.

Hitchens intelligence and ambitions are unwavering. His mind is obviously astonishing. But it is is dogged refusal to back down from a life-long hatred of totalitarianism, to proudly wear the jingoistic labels of “Trotskyist,” to reject religion and faith and willingly face his attackers that makes this work a true profile in courage. His early calls for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, his proud embrace of American citizenship despite an upbringing as the consummate Englishman, his love of the language and the fun of word play …. in the end it combines into what I have to declare is my favorite literary autobiography ever.

The greatest part of my journalism career will always be the people I met in the newsrooms along the way, the old timers and crusty senior members of the masthead who would consistently display some courage or curmudgeonly craziness to inspire a young reporter. One of the greats will always be Forbes’ automotive editor, the great Jerry Flint, who passed away on Saturday, August 7 at the age of 79.

Jerry was the king of Detroit car reporters, covering the beat for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times before setting off on a 31-year career at Forbes. I best remember him for three things:

1. Convincing me in my first year at Forbes, when I was working out of an apartment in Boston as the “New England Bureau Chief” (a bureau of one, me), that I could expense my utilities and even a cleaning service through my monthly expense report. “Really? Gee!” and I took the bait, filing the receipts only to get called on the mat by my boss for being the Mark Hurd of Forbes in 1988. “But Jerry Flint said …”

2. After starting Forbes.com in 1995 the ad sales force was told to take me around to the big accounts to sell them sponsorships on this new thing called the World Wide Web. One of the first stops was Detroit, center of a lot of print ad pages back then, as GM was the magazine’s biggest account. I was hauled around the city (my first time there) by the ad guys and eventually taken to the offices of J. Walter Thompson to pitch the Lincoln account. Jerry was in town and used as a lever to get the meeting with the Lincoln execs. I had no idea the kind of clout he carried, but there I was, a “portable” projector in tow (the thing had wheels and a handle and weighed 50 pounds) and my Toshiba Satellite, and Jerry flies in, dapper as always, and the kow-towing began. I had no chance to make my pitch. We were taken into a windowless conference room, the table covered with ominous lumps shrouded in cloth.  Next year’s models were going to be unveiled to Jerry and the Lincoln designers were very nervous. As they unveiled one car after another, Jerry looked on, finally saying with a sarcastic smile, “Hell, they’ll always be cheap Cadillacs with big lumps on their asses, won’t they?”

3. On Nova, the PBS show, there was a documentary about America’s love affair with SUVs and minivans. Jerry made a cameo inside of some Soccer Mom Wagon, sitting in the back seat and popping open, one at a time, all the cup holders. When he got to 17 his point was made. “May drive like a shoe box but it holds a hell of a lot of Slurpees.”

Jerry was old school, but Jerry owned the car beat. As the New York Times obituary said this morning, he loved big noisy cars.  Here’s Forbes memorial.

I tend to be a sucker for completing surveys from brands I love and the New York Times is one of them. This morning I invested 15 minutes in a lengthy survey on my willingness to pay for a variety of schemes to deliver NYT content to me via print and online. As a staunch hater of pay-walls, yet an inveterate paid subscriber of the Wall Street Journal Online (as well as a paid subscriber to the print editions of everything from Woodenboat to Baseball America, the Times and the Atlantic Monthly) I contradict myself when I say on the one hand that information should be free versus my practice of paying for stuff that I really want and prize.

The Times is obviously going to a paid model. But here’s my proposal to them. Segment your circulation in a pyramid model. At the top are print subscribers who cough up the big bucks to have a wad of paper dropped at the end of the driveway every morning. Those subscribers get carte blanche access to everything. iPad apps, smartphone apps, NYT.com. No questions, no up-charges, no nickle and diming. The rest? Well, tier it from a monthly model but don’t nag the user to death with micropayments and day passes.  I would rather be hit once and hit hard than suffer the death of a thousand cuts.

Gauging from the dozen or so pricing schemes offered up during the interminable survey, the beancounters at the Times are crunching through a lot of models, models driven by the panoply of platforms they have to deliver to: paper, PC browser, iPad, Smartphone, e-book readers. But what came through for me, as I tried to pick the best pricing scheme like a new set of eyeglasses at the optometrist – “Better this way? Or this way?” — is how much the Times is important to me and would rank, along with a handful of sources, as the only publication Iwould cough up $50 a month or more to read on whatever device I decide to read it on.

While I wish there was an advertising model robust enough to subsidize publishing and keep the paywalls down, the truth is the old display model of CPMs does not work, sponsorships are barely hanging on, and marketers will carry their ad dollars to volume ad networks and paid search for the foreseeable future. So, if keeping the reporters and editors of the Times employed means paying for digital access, then so be it. I will pay.

The one thing I may not pay for much longer is the print edition. Much as I love it, I seem to be the only one in the household who does. So … iPad get ready, you may be the preferred platform for the foreseeable future.

via Bloggers Be Warned: FTC May Monitor What You Say – Advertising Age – News.

AdAge reports this old news (which has been sent to me by enough people that I have to comment)

“Thinking about letting a big-name blogger test-drive your new hybrid in the hope he’ll post a glowing review about it, or maybe sending some beverage products to an influencer, hoping she’ll spread the word?

“You might have to think twice, if the Federal Trade Commission follows through with its proposed plan to start regulating viral marketing and blogs.”

Libertarian sensibilities and First Amendment misgivings aside, I’d support a truth-in-blogging disclosure policy. I’m sickened by the ongoing”twilight of objectivity” as the  traditional press fades away, and the online replacements — from review sites gamed by business owners, to payola agencies that build buzz for a fee — aren’t stepping in with any kind of ethical compass.

Those who play it straight will have no problem. I just want to make sure when I see someone raving about a product or service that I know the terms on how they came to try it. If they bought it themselves, all the better. If they took a test drive or loaner — then tell me. If they cashed a check for the “review” — they better disclose or I hope both them and the writers of the check get whacked for the deception.

This morning the New York Times reports on the annual meeting of the Associated Press, and the remarks by AP Chairman William Dean Singleton that the organization “was mad as hell” and not going to take it any more from the portals and internet sites that use, abuse and profit from  its content under the guise of “fair use.”

Rather than rely on the Times — an AP member — for the news, I dug out the full text of Mr. Singleton’s remarks:

“On Saturday, the AP Board of Directors unanimously decided to take all actions necessary to protect the content of the Associated Press and the AP Digital Cooperative from misappropriation on the Internet.

The board also unanimously agreed to work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and who reward the cooperative for its vast newsgathering efforts — and to seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don’t.

We believe all of your newspapers will join our battle to protect our content and receive appropriate compensation for it.

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.

You will be hearing more about this important and exciting campaign in the coming weeks and months, but I wanted to share this with you today. I know all of you will be looking forward to playing a big role in this cooperative effort. “

Here’s the problem in a nutshell.  The AP is ticked off at Yahoo and Google and other big portals for running ads against excerpts of its content — even when those excerpts and headlines link to the full-text version on the original AP member newspaper’s website. AP wants to be paid by the portals for the privilege of lifting its headline and ledes and then linking back to the full-text. They’ve been moaning about this since early 2008.

From the Times article:

“This is not about defining fair use,” said Sue A. Cross, a senior vice president of the group, who added several times during an interview that news organizations want to work with the aggregators, not against them. “There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle.”

But the details remain to be worked out, she said, including how to limit use of articles and how to share revenue. When asked if The A.P. would require a licensing agreement before a search engine could show specific material, Ms. Cross said, “that could be an element of it,” but added, “it’s not that formed.”

This reminds me of the edict of a former CEO of a former employer (not Forbes) who decided that he would ban links into his content by competitors.

This also reminds me of the lawsuit pending here in Massachusetts by Gatehouse Media against the Times and Boston Globe for linking to Gatehouse’s weekly newspaper websites and drawing its headlines and leads together in an attempt to create “hyper-local” aggregators.

I see two fundamental religious differences in the philosophy of linking and linkage.

1. Internet geeks and techies, like myself, see the “hyperlink” as the essence of the Web and that most content on the web should be linkable and not walled off.

2. Publishers and lawyers want to be compensated for the cost of producing the content that gets linked to, and are aggravated by ads sold against a page containing a link to the page they created.

Prediction? AP is clutching at straws. This is an embarrassment for them and their members who are hurting hard and need all the traffic they can get. The quid pro quo in linkage is traffic and the portals are dumping billions of free page views into their laps. Shut off the links and start chasing sites on a battle against the concept of “fair use,” replacing the debate into one about “fair share” and no one wins.

I would no sooner pay a blogger to mention a product or service than I would pay a reporter for the same coverage.

The notion of engaging a third party — agency or individual — to produce content about a brand or product is tantamount to deceptive advertising and a mark of stupid desperation on the part of the marketer who approved it. (clarification: and then publish it as being ostensibly “objective”)

I have no issue with lending a product to a blogger or reviewer affiliated with the mainstream press under the usual terms of a loaner/reviewer program. I would not gift product or services  nor pay a fee to the writer.

Note the last word: “writer.” Bloggers, like journalists, are “writers” in my mind. I don’t care if their preferred medium is an audio podcast or a video Vlog — if they publish content publically and with an eye of making money from that traffic via advertising or promotion of their services, they are, loosely, to my mind, a “writer.”

If bloggers want to be accorded the same respect and gravitas of a professional journalist/writer then they need to abide by the same code of ethics. Journalists don’t accept money to cover stuff. Period. They may do that in some backwards nations, but not in the USA. Bloggers who join any sort of program that compensates them for coverage of any kind — positive or negative — openly disclosed or not — are, in my traditional ethical mindset, crossing the line.

Bloggers in the social media space — consultants and theorists — are probably due some excuse if they check out these services and report on them dispassionately. But as an ongoing revenue stream and practice — it’s grounds for not being considered in any media plan. I understand there are many bloggers who need to make some money from their blog and I don’t dispute their right to monetize their traffic, but payola is crossing the line. Contextual advertising, or an overall sponsorship is one thing. But paid posting is a no go.

Bloggers don’t need to behave like a Washington Post reporter: accepting no gifts, no junkets, pay for “free” coffee, and avoiding anything that would indicate a bias. Blogs seem more like oped — at least at a personal level — than the press, but if a blogger wants the respect and authority accorded to the mainstream press then they need to behave like one. Disclosure statements are not enough.

I recently unfollowed one prominent social marketing blogger and columnist for perceived ethical transgressions. I regret that I am unfollowing another today. I am not going public with my unfollow list, but let’s say there is a coterie of social marketing bloggers — not actual marketers but theorists or agency people — who are really pissing me off with their echo chamber and questionable ethics. I am turning them off.

I am not going to call people out in public anymore. This social marketing niche is getting way too incestuous and repetitive and frankly, stupid in its repetitive back slapping, re-affirmation, ego stroking, and over amplification of the same desperate case studies.  Rather than squawk and bitch I am simply turning up the squelch. End of rant.

Disclosure: I don’t run ads on this blog, I used to be a reporter, no one sends me free stuff (other than Uncle Fester), and I need to stop being angry so much.

Esteban beat me to this on Dec. 4th

Mark Cahill on PC Mag’s decision to ditch dead trees and go all-digital, a reminder of why Mark remains one of the best media strategists out there.

“I believe we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. Those that can make the jump will start to make that jump quickly. Notably, I expect to see trade journals become a relatively rare beast. Ivory towered experts lecturing professionals about their profession is a thing of the past. Instead, users will gravitate to profession-based niche social media. The journals will slowly cease to exist, and the magazines that remain will be serving the less technical of the professions.”

PC Magazine To Kill Print Version | All Things Cahill.

* Mark and I worked together at Reel-Time and IDG.

If I pay for the New York Times to be delivered to me in hard copy every morning, do I have an automatic right to the electronic edition delivered to my Kindle? If I pay the Wall Street Journal.com an annual fee do I deserve to get the Kindle edition for free?

This is a buy once/use many times in many different formats argument – not a multi-user argument, though the metaphysics of simultaneous media consumption is very trippy, e.g. I pay one pay-per-view charge for the movie and the entire family can watch it. But each of us pays a ticket to enter the theater (obviously because the theater is in the business of renting seats, not content). Being a music copy protection crank, and a notorious copyleftist, I will acknowledge my responsibility to pay for original works and not pirate them, but must I pay, as the man said in Men in Black, for The White Album yet again because a new format has been developed?

The newspapers in particular – that’s a tough one. Obviously they need every dime of new revenue they can get, and if they can build circ electronically then power to them, but what about faithful subscribers to that content in other mediums? Should we not get an all-inclusive license however we want it delivered? I can see the papers actually paying me to go paperless – a green rebate like the grocery store that knocks a nickel off the tab for every recyclable bag I bring with me in lieu of paper of plastic. But no, I suspect a couple things at work – specifically to the Kindle case.

1. Kindle doesn’t feel like an open format that the New York Times can offer like, say, a PDF version for download from its site. It’s Amazon’s and that’s that.
2. Amazon is getting a piece of the transaction, so what do they care that I pay the NYT directly for the paper edition?

So, what happens if Bezos opens the Kindle format to the public domain and publishers can suddenly go direct to their subscribers, and if their circulation management tools are strong enough, recognize a subscriber seeking a multi-channel license and discount it accordingly?

Amazes me that 12% of all Amazon purchases of that portion of its book inventory that has a Kindle version are indeed for Kindle owners. E.g. – take a best seller, put it online in print and kindle formats, and more than ten percent of the customers buy it for the electronic device.

The jungle drums of the Forbes.com alumni network are starting to rumble today, reacting to the piece in Gawker yesterday and Valleywag this morning that Forbes.com is making a power move on the print side at Forbes Magazine. “What’s your take?” emails are hitting my inbox.

So rather than indulge in some sort of retromingent nyah-nyah-told-you-so crap — it’s been eight years since I’ve darkened the Forbes door and I have nothing but positive memories (save for the f@#king CueCat). Let me give some useless armchair quarterbacking. First, read the Valleywag stuff:

“A tipster tells us that a “big shakeup” is coming, with the editorial staffs of both magazine and website getting “smashed together.”

Death Of Print: Forbes.com exacts revenge of nerds on Forbes.

My take:

1. Forbes.com’s president and publisher, Jim Spanfeller, is a magazine publisher first and foremost. It’s in the guy’s blood — Inc Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life — the man is a publisher’s publisher and essentially would now be (if the rumors are true) be rushing into a void left open for the past decade when former publisher Jeff Cunningham departed for CMGI. The “publisher” named to replace Cunningham was Rich Karlgaard, the founding editor of the late tech mags Upside and Forbes ASAP. Rich was given the publisher title in the late 90s when Forbes was hot to establish a toehold in the Valley — opening a big bureau in Burlingame near the row of airport hotels so they could get some logo love visible from 101.

2. Karlgaard is an editor first, and not an ad guy. Where Cunningham was a classic space salesman — the guy who could sell pages, Karlgaard was the intellectual technology front man, a great speaker who had a solid tech network in the valley. Forbes brought in former American Express publishing exec Jim Berrien to semi-fill the Cunningham shoes in NYC at 60 Fifth Ave.. update: Berrien is no longer with the business, and I have no insights into how the ad side of the magazine is organized.

3. Spanfeller consolidated Forbes.com following the interim CEO reign of Jeff Killeen, who was brought aboard during my stint at the dot.com to put a professional CEO face on the business during the pre-IPO planning of 1999. When the bubble popped, I bailed, Killeen hung on a year, but without a solid publishing/ad sales background, was outgunned and moved on to become the CEO of GlobalSpec. Enter Spanfeller.

4. Spanfeller took the business separation put in place during my tenure and by the pre-IPO structuring to really set Forbes.com off on its own trajectory.  That separation gave Forbes.com its own corporate structure but an exclusive reprint license to the magazine content. The new editor in chief, Paul Maidment, came in from the Financial Times. With no past allegiance by Maidment to the print side (but interestingly an executive editor’s title on the print masthead), the beginning of a serious separation from the magazine side was underway, paving the way for Spanfeller and Maidment to build Forbes.com into what it is today — a completely independent operation with a robust balance sheet and a business model fundamentally different from the mag. The mag and the dot.com never played well together (update: no print/digital operation ever has and ever will anywhere IMHO). I was able to hold things together in the early political years as an alumni of the dead tree, but with me out of the way, I understand things drifted further apart, with some experiments in “loan-a-writer” going on with print people serving in the dot.com newsroom, etc.. Efforts by some of the print side to get involved — Dan Lyons asking for a blog, getting rejected, starting Fake Steve Jobs — never were really welcomed.

5. The mag feels and reads like a deer in the headlights. All mags do, but Forbes is sort of where it was in 1995. Bill Baldwin, my ex-boss, is the smartest man in the room, but he’s a contrarian and happiest in a geeky tax code/mutual fund fee story. He has not put Forbes in a miniskirt and halter top the way Andy Serwer has tarted up Fortune.

6. Forbes, as a brand, is very very proud of the dot.com — Forbes.com kicked the snot out of its print competitors early on because Tim Forbes gave it carte blanche to do what it needed to do without any political bullshit from the print side. Now I think Forbes and Elevation Partners are killing the division between the two properties — likely undoing the corporate separation put in place during the IPO process — and co-locating the edit teams.

Predictions:

1. Baldwin moves upstairs and a new EIC comes into the print side. I’d bring Gretchen Morgenson — Forbes alum — former contender to replace Jim Michaels, back from the Times.

2. Ad sales get merged.  Spanfeller becomes the main man on the business side for both print and dot.com sales.

3. Karlgaard remains in the same role. After all, he brokered the Elevation investment.

4. Elevation starts to throw its weight around more. I agree with Valleywag. This mashup is their doing.

Sorry publishers, but a sure sign that you suck is when you start running those deceptive double-underlined Vibrant Media/IntelliText ads on your articles. Forbes.com had the wisdom to crush these long ago (after an tribute to slain Moscow bureau chief Paul Klebnikov carried a double underlined link to a life insurance advertiser). I just went to PC Magazine to read a perfectly decently article about PC vendors and crapware/bloatware, and lo, hover over the wrong thing and this black hole sort of appears (like the second coming of the popup from hell) and obscures the text. Do I really need to see the word “laptop” emphasized and see this black chasm until the unit renders?

Want to know why Engadget and Gizmodo and TechCrunch and GigaOm are eating the lunch of the tech press? Because of crappy shenanigans like Vibrant’s. Or rather, lack of. update: and kudos to sites like CNET that also forego the linky-badness.

Geez PC Mag. Maintain your dignity. I have told our teams NOT to run these types of intrusive tactics out of respect to our customers and readers. I may have to do the same with our agency when it comes to running on sites that permit this stuff.

This is a very important column by David Carr on the effects the Web 2.0 Games are having on the containment of content by the mainstream media. Very important. This is it ladies and gentlemen. Image of little boys with their fingers in leaking dikes comes to mind. Take 10,500 athletes, give them video cameras, cell phones, whatever, and watch them share what they see with the world.

“On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.

Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC’s game of “whack-a-mole” as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free, its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived.

The Media Equation – All of Us, the Arbiters of News – NYTimes.com.