King Kaufman's Open Salon Blog

Gawker steps up as GQ cowers

Fri, 4 Sep 2009 17:09:37 -0400

OK, old media defenders. Let's hear you on the case of Condé Nast trying to keep its own journalism out of Russia.

Let's hear about how long track records of publication, big, expensive newsrooms and stables of press-freedom-safeguarding lawyers serve as foundations for the difficult work of investigative journalism, while bloggers and other new-media types are -- what was it? Ah, I remember -- "a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do."

Condé Nast's GQ magazine hired veteran war reporter Scott Anderson to write about Russia. His piece, published in the U.S. September issue, is about a series of bombings in Chechnya that killed hundreds of people. Those attacks have been blamed on Chechen separatists, but Anderson quotes a former KGB agent at length, on the record, implicating then-Prime Minister, now President Vladimir Putin.

As David Folkenflik of NPR reports, the Russian government has been known to "turn up the heat" on journalists when it doesn't like what they write or say. The heat can take the form of defamation lawsuits or, even more punishingly, politicized audits that can, in the words of one expert, "paralyze a publication for months and send advertisers fleeing."

A top lawyer for Condé Nast, which publishes Russian editions of several of its magazines, including GQ, issued a memo saying the September U.S. edition of GQ should not be distributed in Russia, nor should the Anderson article be posted on the Web site or allowed to be shown to Russian officials anywhere. Condé Nast executives and lawyers refused to talk to Folkenflik, he reports.

It's a paradox of legacy media: The very things that make expensive journalism possible in the first place -- corporate and legal muscle -- began working against that journalism as soon as it saw daylight because the journalism threatened to damage the corporate and legal muscle.

Folkenflik quotes Jane Kirtley, an attorney and professor of ethics at the University of Minnesota journalism school, criticizing Condé Nast by saying, "It goes with the territory of a news organization to speak for those who can't speak —- and to bear the consequences."

Kirtley also points out that as a practical matter, trying to throw a blanket over the story won't work. "These stories will get out, they will get read in Russia," she says. "They're being somewhat naive to believe that by limiting this to their American edition that somehow they're preventing this from being read."

And that's where new media comes in.

Gawker grabbed a copy of the magazine, scanned in the story and crowdsourced a translation.

"In an act of publishing cowardice," Gabriel Snyder writes, "Condé Nast has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent Russians from reading a GQ article criticizing Vladimir Putin. As a public service, we're running it here and ask for your help in translating it."

As of 2 p.m. EDT Friday, about an hour and a half after Snyder's original posting, he updated to say that volunteers were at work translating the piece. Gawker's headline was in Russian, and a translation of the opening page of the print piece was already online.

So yes, Anderson's piece cost a lot of money. He likely commands top dollar and he had to travel to Russia and spend some time on the story. No one's pretending that sites like Gawker are currently able to produce much or even any of the kind of important journalism that Anderson practiced here. The problem of online journalism needing to come up with a business model is real.

But once the story was in print, who was doing the real work of journalism? The pipsqueaks!

Of course, if and when the new media types, the bloggers and citizen journalists and all the rest of that crowd, put together a workable business model and become able to do expensive, investigative journalism of the kind Anderson did for GQ, they'll be in danger of becoming beholden to the business side as well. Nothing about being online, rather than in print, would make a news organization less likely to want to protect its legal and business interests in the same way Condé Nast has done in this case.

But can the Case of the Cowering Corporation move us off of this idea that legacy publishers, with their big newsrooms, deep pockets and powerful lawyers, are necessary for important journalism to happen? All that's necessary is a desire to see it and some money to pay for it. Once someone has those things, it doesn't matter what form the published work takes, how big the newsroom is or what's been published in the past.

The man in charge of online news, 1981

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 13:09:55 -0400

We talked yesterday about the YouTube-classic 1981 TV news report about a primitive experiment with making newspapers available online, which at the time meant through the CompuServe service.

One of many amusing, ironic moments in the piece is when the guy in charge of the experiment at the San Francisco Examiner, one of the participating newspapers, says, "We're not in it to make money. We're probably not going to lose a lot but we aren't going to make much either."

Well, when it came to online news generally, David Cole, then the Examiner's systems editor, was half right. Partly, though not entirely, because of the influence of the Internet, the Hearst-owned Examiner continued a long decline over the next two decades and ceased to exist in 2000. A different newspaper now publishes under the Examiner name.

I caught up with Cole by phone Wednesday. Now 55 -- though in the interview he mentions having a "56-year-old guy's memory" -- Cole lives in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco, where he publishes the newspaper business newsletter NewsInc. and does consulting work.

Our thinking of newspapers is that they were so slow on the uptake with the Internet, and here they were 15 years earlier working on it. Can you tell me how it came about?

This was really driven first by the Columbus Dispatch, which was in the hometown of CompuServe. The Dispatch had gotten involved with CompuServe posting a daily newspaper, you know, ASCII, 24 columns across, all caps. [Laughs.] If we had done it in Morse code I guess it would have been more basic but it was about as basic a way to broadcast news as you possibly could.

Anyway, they had gotten involved in the late 1970s, and they then promoted the Associated Press to come, because they realized that if they just posted their local content, that wasn't a whole newspaper. So the Associated Press took a look at the idea and realized that they wanted to deal with it more as an experiment, and they wanted to involve a representative group of newspapers in the experiment.

And so they kind of cherry-picked 12 newspapers, and among those 12 newspapers that they picked were the usual suspects, as we say. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, but also in that group was the San Francisco Chronicle. Now, at this juncture in the relationship between the Hearst Corporation and Chronicle Publishing [which had a joint operating agreement], things were at best chilly between the two partners, and the Examiner executives were always willing to go to the mat with Chronicle executives about things that they thought extended more rights to Chronicle Publishing than to Examiner publishing.

So this traveled up the Hearst Corporation, and somebody in New York went to AP and said, you know, "Twelve, 13. Does it make a difference?" And the answer was no, I guess it doesn't make a difference. So the Examiner was involved. Well, now all of a sudden the Examiner had to do this, and the only person in the building on the Examiner side who knew anything about computers was me.

What was your job the day before this came up?

[Laughs.] I was systems editor. That job in those days was theoretically the interface between the newspaper agency and the newsroom, in terms of the publishing system.

I left the Examiner in '96. The Internet was starting to get on its feet. The Web, I mean. I would say that in general in the newsroom, the attitude towards the Web was hostility.

Oh, yes. Very much so.

And I wonder what the attitude was toward what you were doing in 1981, or were you just off in a corner and hardly anyone knew about it?

There were just essentially two of us over in a corner, but everyone at the paper knew what we were doing. Which is to say yes, there was a lot of hostility.

You know, the comment in the video clip of spending two hours to download the paper, at a cost of $24. Who in their right mind would want to do this? And our answer was, "Well, we don't know. But this is an experiment." And of course from the perspective of the city editor, I was taking basically two reporters. From the perspective of the copydesk chief, I was taking two copy editors. From the perspective of the sports editor, there are two more slots that they could have had, but no, I had them, to do this crazy thing.

There wasn't really a lot of support even in top management at the Examiner for the project because this essentially had become a mano a mano bargaining chip with the Chronicle. For the Examiner itself, it had less to do with the actual experiment and more to do with the relationship with the people at the Chronicle.

How long did it last and what happened to it?

The experiment, quote unquote, ended up lasting 18 months. It was originally only supposed to last nine, and it got a lease on life at the nine-month mark. Then a couple of papers continued to participate, and the Associated Press continued to participate with CompuServe, but most of the 13 participants just stopped.

Part of it was that this was an experiment, it had a fixed time frame, we weren't expecting to make money, we weren't expecting to do anything except learn how to produce the news in an alternate delivery.

Were customers paying for this? They were paying CompuServe, right? But were they paying the Chronicle or the Examiner?

CompuServe was paying us. If memory serves, and I have nothing to fall back upon except my 56-year-old guy's memory, but if memory serves, it was $5 an hour, and we got something like $1.

It was an experiment. What did you learn from it?

OK, so I have to go to these editorial meetings and I have to go to these marketing meetings, and every time we go to a meeting and every time we get a piece of information from CompuServe, you know, which are the top papers in the program? Just guess.

The New York Times and the Washington Post.

And the Columbus Dispatch. Those are the top three papers because everyone at CompuServe was participating in the Columbus Dispatch, and pretty much regardless of where you lived, you were interested in looking at the New York Times and the Washington Post. So there I am looking there and the Examiner is number, like, nine out of 13. The Chronicle is No. 4 or 5 or 6 or 7, out of 13. We're all getting drubbed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So the guy that management had given me to be my able aide in this project, a fellow by the name of Floyd Fessler, may he rest in peace, I trained him how to do this, so he'd do it, and then he found that our account with CompuServe allowed him to do anything on CompuServe. So he started kind of hanging out in various what we would today call chat-rooms, or IM'ing, or something like that.

He starts hanging out and he finds there's this cadre of people who basically camp on CompuServe 10, 12 hours a day. And there are maybe 250 of them, 300. So one day we're sitting there talking. He's regaling me with stories. People had bizarre handles. Floyd was 6-foot-3, had red curly hair and he had a big red beard. And this being the early 1980s, we had just recently had the movie "Star Wars." So Floyd used the handle on CompuServe, Wookie. So he would sit there after he spent time in the forums and he would regale me with stories about what these people were doing online.

And one day kind of the proverbial light bulb went off over my head, and I said, "So, why don't you take an hour a week and write a gossip column about what's going on in the forums?" So he starts doing this, and I go to the next marketing meeting, and the Examiner comes in No. 3.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Columbus Dispatch, the AP people, they're all on top of me. "What did you do to drive up traffic?

I went, "OK, we took a look at: Who's the community? The No. 1 thing I learned in journalism school is write about your community. So we started writing about our community."

"Oh, but you're cheating."

What?

"You're creating CompuServe-only content about CompuServe. That's cheating."

I went, "Yeah, but I'm No. 3!"

So what I learned was just the reinforcement of the stuff I'd learned in journalism school. Local, local, local. Write about things that people are interested in. And then it really doesn't matter whether you're producing a newspaper or a magazine or putting print out or putting digital squiggles on a computer screen. It's all journalism, and it all works just the same, pretty much.

I'm not suggesting that at the time I could say, "Oh, in 15 years we're going to have this thing called the Internet and everybody will be connected to it." Far from it. But if I brought anything to the party, I brought the notion that, let's take a look at this. Maybe it isn't going to make any money today, but maybe it'll make money tomorrow, or 20 years from now.

Photo credits
Examiner logo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brettlider/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Trs80: Wikipedia

A look back at a primitive day: Today

Wed, 2 Sep 2009 02:09:07 -0400

It's hard to put yourself into the mind-set of another time, but if you can do it, you might get some insight into how you think about the present.

Do me a favor, give it a try and watch this 1981 KRON-TV report from San Francisco about people reading the newspaper on their home computers.

"Imagine, if you will," begins the anchorwoman, "sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper. Well, it's not as far-fetched as it may seem."

Try to picture yourself seeing this report in 1981. Maybe spend the extra two and a half minutes and watch it twice so you can get over the time-capsule humor. Here's the guy jamming the handset of his rotary phone into the acoustic-coupler modem. Check the on-screen graphic identifying him as "Richard Halloran: Owns Home Computer." Dig the primitive look of all the computers in the piece -- how about that green text? Giggle at the reporter saying the electronic version of the paper "isn't as spiffy looking" as the real thing as you see a shot of a butt-ugly, blotchy newspaper with smudged black-and-white photos.

Imagine what you'd say as you learned about how eight newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, were "investing a lot of money" to try to make it possible for customers to read the paper on their computers.

Remember the context: Reporter Steve Newman mentions that there are an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 computer owners in the Bay Area, which at the time had a population of about 5 million. This was an era, kids, when "owns home computer" was a description of a person that really made him stand out. Not even close to one person in 100 owned a home computer in the technologically forward Bay Area.

By way of contrast, a 2007 survey by Leichtman Research Group found computers in 81 percent of households nationwide.

So into this world of broadcast TV, land-line phones and the 20-cent newspaper comes a report about reading the paper -- "with the exception of pictures, ads and the comics" -- on your home computer, which, if you were like almost everyone, you didn't have one of. It takes two hours to download the entire contents of one day's paper, the anchorwoman tells us, with the connection costing $5 per hour. In 2009 money that's about $24 a day to read the paper.

And our friend Mr. Halloran, the guy who "Owns Home Computer," tells us, "With this system, we have the option not only of seeing the newspaper on the screen, but also, optionally, we can copy it. So anything we're interested in, we can go back in again and copy it onto paper and save it, which I think is the future of the type of interrogation an individual will give to the newspapers."

Let's get in the time machine, shall we? Here's the 18-year-old me happening upon that story in 1981:

Wow! For only $10, I can copy the electronic newspaper onto actual paper! Imagine that. The newspaper -- on paper! And I get to spend two hours every day to get the paper on my computer, rather than spending, oh, a second and a half bending over to pick it up off my doorstep? That sounds fantastic!
But wait, it gets better. I also don't get photos or comics, and I'll bet I don't get the crossword puzzle or TV listings either. And I can't take it to the can or on the bus, unless I print it out on paper first, which, gee, there's just something that strikes me odd about printing out the newspaper on paper for $10 a day. What could it be? Oh, I know. It's already on paper for 20 cents!

This is the Future of Journalism? Give me a break.

Back in the present, the 1981 me sounds foolish and short-sighted, doesn't he? Here was a little iceberg-tip of the future appearing before his eyes, and he dismissed it with a laugh because it wasn't what it promised to become. It was all promise, in fact, and the kid thought, "Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it."

Newman, the KRON reporter, expressed a similar sentiment by ending his piece on a street newspaper vendor selling a copy on the sidewalk. "For the moment, at least," Newman says, "this fellow isn't worried about being out of a job."

Does any of it have a familiar ring? It does to me. It sounds like a lot of the comments about experiments and innovations in our time.

Bloggers will never match what professional reporters in big newsrooms can do. EveryBlock is just a bunch of government press releases. Twitter is nothing but surface-level nonsense. Hyperlocal has already been tried and it didn't work.

On and on it goes. In the comments of this blog and elsewhere, rarely are innovations or experiments discussed without someone, often a lot of people, dismissing them, deriding them or laughing them off. Yeah, say the naysayers, I'll believe it when I see it.

But the difference between 1981 and now is that we've seen it and seen it and seen it. The people of 1981 thought the pace of change was pretty snappy. Now, it's dizzying. A decade and a half after that TV report, people were just starting to sit down with their morning coffee to read the newspaper on their home computer. Today, if there's a working prototype of some coming innovation in communications, the real thing will probably be here in a few months.

If you want to look as dumb as the 18-year-old me from 1981, keep pooh-poohing these things. Keep saying that because it's not working now the way it promises it will, you'll stick with what you know, thank you very much.

The big changes aren't just coming. They're here, and they're still coming. They won't all work out, but each one is a steppingstone to wherever it is we're headed. When we get there, let's not have to look back at ourselves the way I'm looking back at the hypothetical 18-year-old me.

You'll believe it when you see it? Don't worry. You'll see it.

"You get what you pay for" is bunk

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:08:57 -0400

Our guest on today's episode of "Newspaper Guys Whine About Money" is Benjamin J. Marrison, editor of the Columbus Dispatch, who wants you to know that "High-quality journalism isn't 'free.'"

The last guest, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times, wanted Congress to allow newspapers to form a cartel to set prices for online content. Marrison takes a different tack, arguing that "you get what you pay for," and therefore you must pay for online news from newspapers, not because it's worth anything, but because it's expensive to produce.

Once again borrowing, which is to say stealing, a format from Fire Joe Morgan, and once again encouraging you to go read the piece so you can catch me in any out-of-context or cherry-picked quoting, I give you Mr. Marrison:

Journalists can be their own worst enemies.

Except when we're our readers' worst enemies, which I have a feeling you're about to make the case for being.

We seek to be transparent, ethical and aboveboard, so we go out of our way to point out our flaws. (What other industry points out its own errors daily?)

Baseball? Points 'em out in real time. Or, to be a little serious, the NFL routinely issues a statement on a Monday saying a game official had made an error on Sunday. I think the science biz is pretty good at policing itself too. Let's not hurt our arms patting ourselves on the back, we journalists. Doctors aren't free.

In holding ourselves to a high standard, we sometimes flog ourselves unnecessarily and incessantly.

Something's piling pretty high all right, but I wouldn't have said it was the standard. I think I might plant flowers. But OK, let's skip a bit. Marrison is making the point that newspapers are dwelling too heavily on their own demise, when in fact only a handful of papers have folded and readership remains strong, though the economic slump and structural changes in the economic model have hurt them.

When word came that Advance Publications would close its paper in Ann Arbor, Mich., to experiment with an all-digital newspaper, we perceived a good opportunity to see the effects on the city, home to the University of Michigan. Joe Hallett's story about Ann Arbor appears to the left of this column.

I'm reading online. To the left of this column is a pack of gum, a stapler and a little race car my kid made out of popsicle sticks and noodles. You might have provided a link to Hallett's story, this being the Internet and all.

But this is just a story from the newspaper that you shoveled online, isn't it? And I'm supposed to pay for it? I don't pay to pick a newspaper section out of the recycling bin at the train station.

Hallett's story is here, folks.

You owe me a nickel, Marrison.

It may be too early to discern the full impact, but residents already have strong opinions about the loss: They feel disconnected.

Number of people in Ann Arbor, according to Hallett: 114,000. Number of people Hallett quotes saying they miss the newspaper: 5. Number of people Hallett quotes who say they feel disconnected, none of whom use that word: 3.

Kenneth A. Paulson, former editor of USA Today and chief executive officer of the Newseum, a museum dedicated to the First Amendment, [says] "Daily newspapers do more than report events in the neighborhood. They're voices for progress and a unifying element in an increasingly diverse society."

As a voice for progress, it's every newspaper's duty to stand in the way of technical innovation and the development of new business models that would foster a greater diversity of voices in an increasingly diverse society.

[This is still Paulson talking] "A good newspaper has always been a constructive nag for progress, and that cannot be replaced by any number of tweets or Facebook postings."

Why not? I'm really asking: Why not?

What frustrates newspaper people is that some readers expect to get news free. Certainly, some news is available free. But you get what you pay for.

I'm tired of explaining this to newspaper people: We pay for online news. We pay to connect to the Internet. If you're not getting any of that dough, that's between you and the Internet service providers. It's not our fault you haven't made the right deals. We're pulling our weight out here. We are not freeloaders.

But forget that, which you newspaper people always do and you probably already have.

Last month the Dispatch ran an obituary of Walter Cronkite, taken off the McClatchy wire. Right in the lede, Cronkite was referred to as having earned the title "most trusted man in America," a phrase that was likely repeated in every single Cronkite obit and remembrance.

It was free to watch Walter Cronkite.

Last week the Dispatch ran an obit of Don Hewitt, taken off the Associated Press wire. Hewitt was hailed as a giant of broadcast journalism.

It was and remains free to watch Hewitt's creation, "60 Minutes." But you get what you pay for, so those birds must not have been worth anything. And don't get me started on that bum Edward R. Murrow!

And, just an aside, Marrison, but do you really expect me to pay for the Dispatch online so I can read the same wire stories I can read hundreds of other places?

Good journalism takes time and money. Having people work all hours to cover, edit and package the news is expensive. Basing reporters throughout central Ohio and in Washington costs money. So does covering sporting events across North America. And employing world-class photographers and artists comes with a price, as well.

Holy smoke, dude. You need to come up with a business model!

If advertisers can't or won't pay for it, readers must -- in print and, eventually, online.

OK, good first try. But that's not a business model. That's a whine. Or maybe it's a demand. Do you have hostages?

As Paulson says: "How comfortable would you be going to a doctor who didn't charge you a fee?

First, I'd be very comfortable. Very, very comfortable. Not just comfortable. Ecstatic. In fact, now that you mention it, can you please make this happen? It happens in some of the civilized countries I've heard about.

Second, just as one example among many, there's an organization called Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, that provides free medical care to hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of countries. I think the people receiving that care are very, very comfortable with the idea that they won't be getting a bill for it.

[More Paulson] "How willing are you to entrust your finances to an accountant who's going to do your taxes for free?"

And so on. Listen: "You get what you pay for" is not economics. It's debatably wise consumer advice. You can pay a few hundred bucks for a laptop or you can buy one for $20,000. Think you'll get what you pay for?

We pay the doctor and the accountant because they have skills that are scarce and valuable, something that cannot be said about the content of almost all newspapers and news Web sites. This is not even high school economics. Stop being willfully stupid about this point, newspaper guys.

Thanks for supporting The Dispatch. We will continue to strive to make the newspaper worth your time and money.

I read this online, but you're welcome. I got what I paid for.

Newspapers and antitrust: The readers write

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:08:35 -0400

The comments thread on my post about Tim Rutten's Los Angeles Times column about antitrust and newspapers is plenty lively. When my reply to some of the letter writers went past 2,000 words, I decided to make it its own post.

Chris Rywalt: The problem is this: No one can figure out how to pay for anything besides running ads.

I believe that's a fixable failure. I think the answers are out there. And I think the number of people working on the problem has been small relative to the whole Web. A whole lot of sites have tried to make it on advertising alone, or advertising mostly, and it's only in this downturn that it seems to be dawning on a lot of people: It's never going to work.

Ads in magazines and newspapers have survived because no one can be sure how well they're working. Ads online can be tracked quite closely and what we've seen there is advertising doesn't actually work.

I wonder about this. Totally outside my area of expertise, but: Is it true? What's the definition of "working"? It seems to me the "original sin," to borrow a term the newspaper people throw around, of online advertising was to measure things in click-throughs. Is that an accurate measure of success? How many people "click through" on offline ads? That is, call the 800 number, use the coupon, whatever. Does online advertising not work, somehow, for the things offline advertising works for? Brand building, name recognition, product positioning, etc. Are there studies about this?

I don't think it's true that "Ads in magazines and newspapers have survived because no one can be sure how well they're working." Advertisers track the success of their campaigns. Do they do the same with online advertising or do they just pay for click-throughs? I'm really asking.

We've all tried subscriptions and ads but basically the only really sustainable model for paying for online content is subsidy.

I believe it's too early in the game to say that.

This problem hasn't been solved yet and it's been fifteen years.

I think 15 years is not much, especially because, as you said, at the beginning, and that's measured in years not months, making things pay wasn't a high priority for a large percentage of Web sites. I know there have been people and companies out there working on this problem since the mid-'90s. Salon is among them. But I would say that, as an industry, the journalism business has only been wrestling with it in a serious way for less than five years. Maybe less than three.

Dave Cullen: Yes, it's silly to suggest that newspapers are the ONLY form of journalism, but I don't think that's what he's really arguing. He's saying it's a crucial component of journalism in our current system, and there's nothing on the horizon to replace it, so we'll be screwed without it. He's right.

I really don't think he is.

There are a lot of things on the horizon. Local news Web sites and blogs are springing up all over the country. Ann Arbor's last newspaper just closed and several Web sites, including one run by the newspaper's publisher, are battling for supremacy there, creating an interesting laboratory.

Talking Points Memo, the U.K. Guardian and others are doing difficult investigative reporting, often crowd-sourced. Spot.Us and others are experimenting with creative new ways to fund reporting. New technologies are giving sources more ways to communicate with the public and giving the public eyes and ears in places they've never had them before.

Is any of it ready for prime time? Will any of it last? Shoot, I don't know. But there's a lot of stuff bubbling up around here, a lively ecosystem that will, I'm confident, evolve into the next generation of journalism -- one that will also include newspapers, TV, radio and maybe something else we don't even know about yet.

From reading the comments on this blog, I think a lot of people think I'm a cockeyed optimist, a utopian, that I think every new idea I hear about is The Supreme Answer and I'm ready to dump newspapers and everyone who works at them into the sea. I'm not.

I actually think we're right at the beginning of a period of utter chaos. The old model is breaking down and the new model isn't ready to replace it. To quote Clay Shirky from his essay "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable": "That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place."

It very well might suck, what's coming up. There will be subjects and geographical areas that go underreported, corruption that goes un-watchdogged. But I think we have to let it play out or we'll never get where we're going. If we artificially prop up the dominant but dying form, newspapers, we'll choke off the innovation and growth that's going on everywhere else.

And then when newspapers die anyway, as many of them inevitably will because the conditions that made their business model possible no longer exist, there will have been nothing growing in their shadows. We'll have a longer, more painful period of chaos.

Yes, the corporations pushing this are big corps and have a vested interest too, and are not doing it just for the public good. But it's a logical fallacy to suggest that because they have a vested interest, they can't also share the public interest. Here, the two coincide.

I agree it's a logical fallacy to say that because they have a vested interest, they can't also share the public interest. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to say that they don't also share the public interest.

The only question I have is whether it's ten years too late, and whether it can actually work.

Imagine where we'd be if Congress had legislated against online innovation 10 years ago. And I'm very confident that I can answer that last question: No.

Lynne K ... but there's also a lot of crap masquerading as premium. You work for [Salon], which is good, but perhaps you've been breathing your rarified air for too long; you might not understand that there are other bad bloggers out there purporting to be good bloggers.

I understand, but so what? There are a lot of bad newspaper writers too. Bad newspapers. Ninety percent of everything is crap. None of it disqualifies the good stuff.

There should be a measure by which people can trust what they read online and newspapers offer that.

Really? How were they in the runup to the Iraq War? How was Jayson Blair for you?

You're the measure. You figure out, over time, along with fellow readers, who you can trust and who you can't. I don't agree with this idea that you can trust something in the newspaper because it's in the newspaper and you can't trust what's in, say, blogs because they're not in the newspaper. If a blogger -- or a newspaper writer -- is not trustworthy, the audience will let you know. Others will write about him or her, commenters will point out the inconsistencies or half-truths.

And it's THEIR news, and I think most people agree that stealing is bad.

It's not their news, but it's their writing about THE news, and yes, stealing is bad. There are laws against it.

Maybe the anti-trust laws need tweaking. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But you're using the word "collude" like the anti-health care nuts are using "death panels" -- as a scare tactic.

Someone else pointed this out, but that's not fair. Death panels are made-up things, lies, invented to scare people into a political position. "Collude" is the word Rutten himself used, accurately. Collusion is the very thing that antitrust laws were designed to stop.

Tony Wang: You're not killing freedom of the press if you say that readers have to pay for the content.

Oh, certainly not! Charge away. No problem. If you can get people to pay for your content, you go. What we're talking about here is suspending antitrust law so newspapers can form a cartel, giving them an unfair and artificial advantage over their competition, which is the rest of "the press." That's a clear hindrance on freedom of the press.

And one of Murdoch's properties, the Wall Street Journal, has been doing it right for a long time.

Yay, Wall Street Journal. It didn't need Congress to suspend antitrust law, did it. What the Wall Street Journal does right is it has content that is distinct enough that people are willing to pay for it. It's a niche, specialty paper, and its niche is large corporations and other people with a lot of money. Good niche.

John Steiner: Now, in the Internet era, what constitutes the press is nebulous because people who act as reporters may not work for a traditional news organization nor even get directly paid for their work. So the question that arises is what is the specific definition of the press?

I don't find this nebulous at all. The press is any form of publishing. You don't have to be part of a traditional news organization or get paid for your work to enjoy freedom of the press. Who would you exclude from "freedom of the press," and why? Who would you exclude from "freedom of speech"?

Jeremiah Horrigan: Some thoughts from a life-long news hound and still-employed newspaper reporter: ...

Rutten's proposal strikes me as dicey. It has the taste of panic and looks backwards for its questionable comforts. If he sounds desperate -- and I think he does -- I'm glad he's at least standing up for newspapers, however benighted his proposal may be. In fact, I would say that rather than smugly predicting newspapers' demise, the presumptive "alternatives" to newspapers could use a dose of desperation as well.

The country's cadres of "citizen journalists" have yet to produce anything comparable to what I've outlined above. Blogging has not been able to professionalize itself to any appreciable extent.

I think there's plenty of desperation out there. And I'll refer to my comments above about the quality of newspaper alternatives. The failure of, for want of a more accurate word, the blogosphere, to match 200 years of newspaper achievement in less than a decade is not adequate reason to legislate against it. If the citizen journalists and the blogs aren't real alternatives to newspapers, why do newspapers have to go running to Congress? Why not just compete?

I'm betting that when the paywalls start dropping, people will be willing to pay for careful, professional online reporting and writing, just as they have long been willing to pay for the morning paper.

We disagree there. People paid for the morning paper because there were no realistic alternatives. Now there are thousands. And isn't it interesting that newspapers are doing a lot more talking about paywalls than building them? But we'll see together.

John Steiner: The other issue that citizen reporters and bloggers lack is press credentialing. There are simply some stories that a citizen reporter/blogger doesn't have access to without a press badge. That also will need to be addressed in the future and I am not sure how it will be resolved, especially if the newspapers continue to close and there are less options for obtaining news.

Bureaucratic detail for the most part, don't you think? If the main thing standing in the way of the Future of Journalism were a bunch of flacks having to consider credentials on a case-by-case basis instead of just automatically saying yes to newspaper, TV and radio reporters and no to everyone else, we'd have this thing licked.