The New York Times is launching new video ads to convince people they should pay for its content. Here’s a thought. If the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal for that matter, want to be paid what they’re worth, how about giving subscribers a set price they can depend on? A price that doesn’t overcharge the digital subscriber? Below, a case study on the deliberate pricing confusion both publications pursue.

How I Got My WSJ On

Way back in 2009, I received some junk mail from the Wall Street Journal offering me the paper for $100 per year. For me, it was a no brainer. I love reading a print newspaper. Getting a high-quality paper six days per week for cheaper than I could get my own local paper, the Los Angeles Times? Bring it on, especially since I’d also get easy access past the long-existing WSJ paywall.

After a year, my subscription expired. I got a few notices, but I balked at paying the $250 (if I recall right) that the WSJ wanted me to pay to renew. If it was worth $100 for an entire year, what made it suddenly worth 2.5 times that amount the next?

Of course, the answer — in part — was that I’d been given an introductory rate. The goal was to get me hooked. Unfortunately for the WSJ, I didn’t need the paper that bad to stay hooked for the higher price. I chose not to renew.

That didn’t stop the papers from coming. Nope, for three months, they continue to be delivered. It was even inconvenient that I couldn’t put them on a vacation hold, since I no longer had an official account.

About a week after they stopped coming, I got a phone call. It was the WSJ, wanting me to renew and offering me that same $100 rate. I was happy to take that again.

In late 2011, the notices came again that my subscription was expiring. By this point, I’d learned that if I just let the paper expire, I’d probably continue to get it for free. If I didn’t, inevitably I’d get a call urging me to renew at a lower rate. So, I let the subscription expire.

The call didn’t come soon enough for me, however. In January, there was an article that I really wanted to read. It also wasn’t one that I could unlock using the usual trick of going through Google News. I ended up renewing at the $260 (or so) per year regular rate. Actually, the regular rate is even higher than that, as I’ll get into further below.

Why Do You Want To Keep Overcharging Me?

Success for the WSJ, as I even noted in a later article explaining why that Google News trick had been deliberately blocked as part of a changing policy with the Wall Street Journal (see WSJ Pulls Back On What Google Searchers Can Read For Free). Restricting the content got me to renew, even at a higher price.

Success was short-lived, however. About two weeks ago, my phone rang. It was the WSJ (well, a telemarketer working for them) offering me a $100 per year deal. Did I want this? The rep was very eager for me to take it. So was I. Naturally, I signed up. At the very end, I asked what about that subscription I’d just renewed.

Much confusion then followed. I was told that I couldn’t have the offer, if I had a subscription already. I was puzzled. Surely the Wall Street Journal should know that I already had a subscription, right?

The telemarketer really didn’t care. She’s stumbled into an area that was clearly off the playbook, with a subscription that probably wouldn’t count to her quota, so simply wanted me off the phone. She told me I couldn’t have the deal, and that I’d need to call the Wall Street Journal directly to follow-up. Funny how quickly she went from being the Wall Street Journal to having nothing to do with them.

I hung in there. While we were talking, I looked up my account online. Here’s exactly what it said, except for me removing my account number:

See under “Status?” My account was shown as “Active” but with an expiration date of 2/23/2012, which at the time the telemarketer had called me had passed two months prior. I said that as far as I could tell, my subscription had expired two months ago.

That was enough for her, in the end, to declare she could let my subscription go through. A few days ago, I received a paper “renewal acknowledgement” of it. Actually, I received two. Going online today, one renewal was for the account I renewed in January. Another was for a “renewal” of the new account the telemarketer had created for me. For the past two weeks, the WSJ has maintained two different subscriptions for me, under the same exact name, at the same exact address. I’ve been double-dipped! And I’ve only gotten a single paper delivered each day!

Hey, I’m not complaining. I got a bargain on that second renewal. The WSJ can keep the extra $10 or so it made during my double-dip period. I called today, and my January subscription was cancelled. My “new” one is good through April of next year. I’m happy.

Really, You Want Me To Unsubscribe To Save?

Of course, I’d have been happier if I hadn’t gone through this in the first place. Why not offer me a reasonable price in the first place? Why train me to think it makes more sense for me to just cancel? I’ll get back to some answers on this, but let’s talk about the New York Times now.

Last March, I took the New York Times to task over its paywall. The pricing made little sense. It limited visits from search engines but not from social media for archaic reasons that seemed stupid. But I also signed-up for a subscription. I appreciate good journalism. The New York Times has some of that. I thought I’d show support with my pocketbook.

I enjoyed getting the paper each day, and the initial rate made it a good deal. I think I paid about $4 per week or around $200 per year.

Later that year, I realized my rate had doubled. Ah, yes. The introductory rate was only for the first 6 months. After that, there was an increase to around $400 per year.

That was too much. I already had the Wall Street Journal coming, along with the Los Angeles Times. I didn’t need the New York Times delivered as well. In fact, the main reason I was getting the print edition was because it was cheaper to do that for digital access than pay for ONLY digital access.

I called, to see if I could get a better rate, but I was told that was only possible if I let my subscription lapse. Yes, the New York Times would rather have me not read its paper for six months than to continue reading it and seeing all those overpriced print ads.

Please Come Back….

Fine, I let it lapse. Then about three weeks ago, the NYT emailed that it wanted me back. From what it sent:

Oooh! A special offer. That I was selected for unlike all those other suckers out there. Because I’m special. So special that I can 50% off the regular price of any digital package for 12 weeks:

Of course, when the special 12 week/three month rate expires, I’m right back to that regular rate that made me quit in the first place. Which may or may not be cheaper than if I didn’t take the offer.

The New York Times Subscription Pricing Matrix

To figure that out, I have to literally fire up a spreadsheet:

Oh dear, oh dear, what to do? What am I in the mood for? If I want to pay the least — and have no idea that I can simply tweet any article to myself to bypass the paywall — I guess I can shell out $195 per year for web and smartphone access.

If I’m really into reading through a tablet app, I can go up to $260. But darnation, what if I want to read on both my phone and tablet? The technology required to make that happen costs about $140 more. I need to pay $400.

At that rate, I might as well pay to have the damn paper delivered each weekday. If I do that, then I actually save $55 and get unlimited digital tossed in for free. That calls into question the value of the digital subscription. How on earth does the New York Times find it costs less to throw a physical paper on my doorstep each day than to sell me a pure digital subscription?

Again, I’ll get back to that. Meanwhile, the introductory offers are all confusing. Online, there’s a four week discount. The email offer I received gives me a 12 week discount. If you go print, you get a 12 week discount. Anyone thinking they wanted to do digital only, but who is really worried about the money, might be better off taking the 12 week print weekday+digital offer, then switching after that. You’ll save a lot over the additional two months.

Is your head hurting? Mine sure is, and I haven’t even mentioned that an email I got last year from the New York Times still works to give me a 26 week intro period on digital products.

The Wall Street Journal Subscription Pricing Matrix

Now let me go back to the Wall Street Journal. Compared to the New York Times, the pricing is a refreshing bit of simplicity. You can buy digital-only or print that includes digital access. There’s none of this smartphone versus tablet nonsense. No, the Wall Street Journal saves the nonsense for prices it pitches across different marketing channels:

Online, the WSJ pushes either digital or print+digital. By phone, it pitched print, as I’ve explained. Then there’s direct mail. Sitting on my desk are two separate offers, both sent to the same name (me) and to the same address that my existing subscription is registered to, enticing me to subscribe at an $11.99 per month rate:

That’s not an intro rate, either. It lasts as long as I act within five days. I’ll tuck these offers away. Somehow, I suspect in a year, I’ll find they’ll still work if I need to use them.

Of course, I probably won’t. In a year, my intro rate that the telemarketer gave me will expire. I’ll probably let the paper lapse again, then I’ll get a call, and, well, I think we know the score.

The Overpriced Digital Paywall

Let’s recap. Net neanderthals encouraged by Google to believe everything is free were so harming major papers like the Wall Street Journal with their worthless visits that we even had to have an FTC workshop/hearing to let Rupert and Arianna square-off about what’s fair.

Meanwhile, the New York Times finally unveiled its paywall last year just in time for publishers to start deciding that getting some of those ad views wasn’t so bad, so let’s leave a billion holes in the paywall, because heaven-forbid we don’t get traffic from places like Facebook or Twitter, when people complain about the paywall blocking them.

Let’s do all this and assume no one will figure out that we’re charging less for digital access, in some cases, even when we assume the physical costs of actually delivering a paper.

Our readers are intelligent enough to be told they must pay to support quality journalism but apparently not intelligent enough to figure out that it shouldn’t cost $55 less to have the New York Times delivered each weekday and get digital access versus digital-only access. Or that it shouldn’t cost only $88 per year more for the Wall Street Journal to have someone throw a paper on my doorstep six days a week versus just giving me a digital product.

Again, take in the numbers:

• Cost of digital New York Times: $455
• Cost of digital plus weekday delivery of New York Times: $55 LESS than digital
• Cost of digital Wall Street Journal: $413
• Cost of digital plus daily delivery of Wall Street Journal: only $88 more than digital

The Undervalued Digital Reader & Stupid “Circulation” Figures

The digital products are overpriced compared to the print products. That’s because, in all likelihood, a print subscriber is still stupidly deemed worth more to advertisers, even though I’d wager most of us ignore most of those print ads.

Heck, digital readers are so undervalued that the New York Times can count us up to four times, it seems. Buy a print subscription to the New York Times, and you’re counted once. But since you have a digital subscription, you’re also counted as a web subscriber, a tablet subscriber and a smartphone subscriber. From the New York Times about recent circulation figures:

Under audit rules, newspapers can count paid digital subscribers more than once if they have daily access to digital content on multiple platforms like mobile apps or tablets as part of a bundled subscription package.

Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but then again, it doesn’t matter. The circulation figures are an artifact from the past. They are a figure used by sales reps to convince advertisers how many people view their ads, as if those 800,000 print subscribers to the New York Times look at each and every print ad. Now another 800,000 digital subscribers can be added to the mix (many of whom might also be print subscribers), so the numbers get bigger but still mean little.

If you’re talking digital, you’re talking pageviews. And if you’re talking digital ads, then you know the exact impressions of those ads plus some sense of engagement by clickthrough or other metrics. So why count “digital circulation,” and what’s it really mean?

In the end, it makes lots of sense for newspapers to have a balanced model of ad revenue along with subscription income. Paywalls aren’t bad. I’ve run them myself. But what is bad is overcharging your digital subscribers in a way you’d never do to print ones, simply because you’ve overvalued the print ones for too long.

Today, the New York Times is taking a major step forward as we introduce digital subscriptions in the United States and the rest of the world. Since we first announced the plan 11 days ago, we’ve heard from so many of you, our readers. We’ve also heard from a bunch of noisy bloggers, but they just rip us off anyway, so we’re ignoring them.

We’re grateful for the feedback from our loyal readers (not those blogger brats) and, most of all, for your commitment to the The Times. So grateful, indeed, that we think you should start paying us, even though we’ll still be showing you all those ads.

As you may know, on March 17, we introduced digital subscriptions in Canada. That’s because we figured, “Who gives a crap if the Canadians complain?” Plus, Canadians are known for being pretty polite. We figured we’d be good there.

Officially, the Canadian launch allowed us to test our systems and fine-tune the user interface and customer experience. Today, we are launching globally. I know, I said that already in my lead, but I enjoy repetition.

Memorize These Print Subscription Costs!

If you are a home delivery subscriber of The Times [we like to say "The Times" as if there are no other "Times" newspapers out there], you will continue to have full and free access to our news, information, opinion and other features on your computer, smartphone and tablet. International Herald Tribune subscribers will also receive free access to NYTimes.com.

We have three home delivery options, so you’ll pay:

• $193 for Monday-Friday delivery
• $270 for Friday-Sunday delivery
• $385 for all seven days in the week

Now memorize those figures, that we’ve shoved over on a page where they’re only accessible after you enter a ZIP code, and where you can’t easily compare them to our three different digital subscription prices. As a news publication, we wouldn’t want to make any of this stuff easy. We can do interactive graphics on elections, nuclear meltdowns but our pricing plans? Maybe we’ll do a flowchart in the future.

If you are not a home delivery subscriber, you will have free access to 20 articles (including slide shows, videos and other features) each month.

By the way, because we break our stories up into two, three or more “pages” on the web for no other reason to shove more ads your way, you won’t really get 20 “articles” but rather 20 page views. Bonus tip: even if you use the “print” option to view an article in one single page, that will have cost you a second click.

Our 20 Article “Limit” [Chuckle]

If you go over those 20 articles, you’ll be asked to become a digital subscriber. You won’t be able to view any more articles on our site, sorry. No ifs, ands or buts. Except…

If you use our smartphone or tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free. But that’s it! Except….

If you come through links from search engines, blogs and social media, you’ll be able to read any article, even if you’ve used up your 20 limit already. Except….

If you come to the site through ANY link, you’ll be able to read any article, even if it’s not a link from search engines, blogs or social media sites. Except….

If you come from search engines, even though we already said you’ll be able to read any article even if you’ve hit your 20 per month limit, we actually meant any article except if you’ve already read five articles via search engines on that day. Get it? No? Yeah, it makes our heads hurt, too.

Why are search engine links so special? The short story is we’re pretty messed up about all this stuff. The long story, well, there’s a link below.

People Who Don’t Know We Exist [Shudder] Deserve Freebies

We’re doing all this, giving away all this free access, because we don’t think “new” and “casual” users will:

• Cough up the same money that you, our loyal users will
• Or link to us giving us all those ad views that we earn money from, but not enough money, apparently

Our home page and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times. That’s because those new and casual freeloaders never come to our home page or section pages. But our regular users do, and we hope you’ll keep doing that, use up your free clicks and pay to get rid of a barrier that a 12 year old child could figure out.

Real Readers Whip Out Their Wallets

But you’re not 12. You’re 55, and paying the money is worth it to you. Pity you’re not really our future, though. Then again, we’ll be long gone before that issue gets even worse. Let those suck-head social media yapping editors and reporters deal with it, when their time comes around, they think they’re so smart.

Memorize These Digital Subscription Costs!

How about those digital options? Well, you can buy:

• $195 for web and smartphone app access
• $260 for web and tablet app access
• $455 for web, smartphone & tablet app access

Killing Trees Saves Us $70 Per Person In Journalism Production Costs

Now I hear you asking yourself. Is it true? I can get a human being to throw a hard copy of the New York Times on my porch seven days a week for $385 — and that comes with digital access on ANY device — but if I just want digital access, it costs me $70 more?

Yes. You see, despite all our yapping that we don’t make enough money off digital visitors, if we can just throw more paper copies on porches that people don’t actually read, we still make money, because we can continue to sell overpriced print ads to all our print advertisers as if they are somehow more valuable unseen on dead trees than when viewed through electronic pixels.

Displaying Content In Tablet Apps Costs $65 More In Journalism Production Costs

I hear you asking, why should I pay $65 more to view the exact same content on my tablet app versus my smartphone app.

Um, because we can do that? Look, we don’t really have much control over all this digital stuff, so we take what we can get.

Access To Both Tablets & Smartphones Costs $260 More In Journalism Production Costs

And I hear you asking, why’s it cost $260 per year more to view things on both your smartphone and your tablet?

Again, because we can. Why don’t you just take the paper edition, smart ass?

Coming In Next Week’s Wall Street Journal, A Guide To The New York Times Paywall

As you have seen during this recent period of extraordinary global news, The Times is uniquely positioned to keep you informed. Except about all these plans, and how they make much sense. In that regard, we’re banking on a convoluted system that will let anyone who doesn’t want to pay to keep reading whatever they want while those who don’t know better, or those who figure “What the hell, I just want that nag screen to go away,” to pay.

What, still got questions? Here, go read these:

• All The New York Times Paywall That’s Fit For No One To Use
• The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How “Google Limits” Led To “Search Engine Limits”
• The New York Times Paywall Meters All Google Visits, Not Just Search Visits

So the New York Times is finally getting a paywall. I’ve got no problem with paywalls. I’ve run my own membership based services for almost 15 years. My issue is with paywalls that make little sense.

How’s the NYT paywall going to impact me? Apparently, not at all. That’s because I read most New York Times stories by either:

• Finding them via Google News
• Finding them via social media, such as Twitter

All New York Times stories you find through Google News will remain free, though Google’s First Click Free program does let the NYT and any publisher limit you to five stories per day, per visit from Google.

If you really read that many NYT stories via Google each day, then you probably know that you can clear your cookies or use another browser to get around this. But really, are most people from Google going to the New York Times more than five times per day?

There’s no limit whatsoever for those who come via Twitter or Facebook. None. In fact, none of those visits will count against your free 20 visits that everyone gets. Says the New York Times:

Not all visits to NYTimes.com will count toward the 20-article limit. In an effort to avoid deterring as many as possible of the Web site’s more than 30 million monthly readers, The Times will allow access to people who arrive at its Web site through search engines like Google and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. There will, however, be a five-article limit a day for people who visit the site from Google.

To spell it out more, want to read an article on the New York Times, if you HAVE gone over your free 20? Copy the link, tweet it to yourself, click on the tweeted link. Enjoy. Rinse and repeat, at required.

I struggle to understand who exactly among the “freeloaders” out there, as viewers to newspaper web sites are sometimes considered, just because viewing ads isn’t enough, are going to convert to this new paywall scheme.

I’d assume there are some people who go to the NYT site each day, as their starting point, and consume so many articles that they’d like to read with unfettered access. But then I’m supposed to believe that these hyper-internet based readers are also apparently ignorant of using Google and social media, right?

These are people who only know how to get online, type into www.nytimes.com, and when the paywall screen goes up, they’ll decide gulp — I need to pay?

Maybe. And if so, the paywall’s sad on two accounts. First, it rewards casual readers of the New York Times and punishes the most loyal. It also assumes that the most loyal user are also the most un-web savvy.

In the end, it seems like you want a paywall that gives your most loyal users something you don’t give the drive-by readers. I suppose convenience is part of that, but right now, as announced, the paywall is so riddled with holes that drive-bys won’t be inconvenienced at all.

A sad and strange story — a man in the UK killed after a text was misread as saying “nutter.” Even stranger, how I came to be reading it via the Huffington Post — several sources removed from the original story. My discovery chain.

I follow the Huffington Post’s tech account on Twitter, so I saw the story hit my Twitter feed, as shown above. That took me to the Huffington Post’s article:

Here, I see from where the first arrow points that the Huffington Post seems to be summarizing a CNET article. But then, there’s a Daily Mail reference, as the second arrows shows. Oddly, the third arrow shows the Huffington Post shoving some of the story into what appears to be an ad box — which contains one of those misleading acai berry ads I wrote about. Sigh, Huffington Post, sigh.

I suspected that the CNET article itself was drawing from the Daily Mail, so I headed to CNET next:

The arrow shows how the Daily Mail is cited, making me think it was indeed the original source for CNET. But notice the box — the story itself is attributed to the UK’s Bolton News. Hang on to that.

Off to the Daily Mail. I hate going there because the Daily Mail used one of my images without permission and is still using it after I contacted them. Anyway, what did the Daily Mail write?

If you read the story, it seems like there’s more going on that just a single word that got corrected that lead to the murder. A string of abusive messages is said to have been exchanged between the two men. The person convicted of manslaughter was actually the person who sent the “nutter” message, not the person who received it.

But beyond that, notice the arrow. The Bolton News is again cited — the Daily Mail appears to have done nothing here but work off the Bolton News report.

As for the Bolton News, while it was credited by the Daily Mail –  and then again by the News.com — it got a link in neither place. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post doesn’t bother to credit it at all.

As it turns out, the original story is online. It wasn’t hard for me to find it. I went to the Bolton News, searched for the victim’s name and found it along with several others.

Bottom line? It’s can be difficult to draw the line between fair use. The Bolton News is published by Gannett’s Newsquest Media Group. Maybe Associated Newspapers’ Daily Mail has an agreement to use anything from Gannett. I doubt it. A quick scan suggests that the Daily Mail merely rewrote what the Bolton News published, which was kind of sucky — but even that might not be against fair use.

What really sucks is that the Daily Mail gave the Bolton News no backlink. This is the 2010s, folks — you link back. And if News.com if working off the Daily Mail’s rewrite — at least try to find the original source, since the Daily Mail cited it.

As for you, Huffington Post. You’re all growed up and part of AOL now. You should backtrack to the original source as well — and provide a link.

It’s not always easy to track an original source, especially when a story has gone far and wide. I know. I deal with this all the time at Search Engine Land. But we should all try — and it wasn’t even hard to do, in this case.

Also see my past post: How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit.

On Friday, I broke a tasty story about a woman suing Google, claiming bad directions caused her to get hit by a vehicle. Today, I discover our story is everywhere, often with no attribution. Come along and watch how the mainstream media, which often claims bloggers rip it off, does a little stealing of its own.

Woman Follows Google Maps “Walking” Directions, Gets Hit, Sues was the story I posted on Friday afternoon, Pacific Time. I was tipped to the lawsuit by Gary Price of ResourceShelf. Gary hadn’t written about it himself but thought Search Engine Land would be interested in it. He came across it through the regular monitoring of search-related news that he does across a variety of resources (Gary watches many, many things — he’s a research guru extraordinaire). Gary downloaded a copy of the suit via the PACER Service and sent it to me.

No one had written about the case before I put my article up. I know. I checked before publishing. There was nothing out there. So what happened next?

I’ll Steal Your Image, But I Won’t Link To You

Let’s start with the Daily Mail’s story here. We get no attribution, but I know they found the story from us. My evidence? They’re using a screenshot I made, without my permission and without credit.

It’s a screenshot of the route from Google Maps. Sure, the Daily Mail could have generated their own route using Google Maps. But, they didn’t. “Their” image is cropped exactly the same as mine and includes an arrow I added to point to a warning on Google Maps.

Since the image was created by me, for Search Engine Land, and is a transformation of the original Google “work,” the copyright that the Daily Mail is violating belongs to Search Engine Land.

Postscript: There’s some debate in the comments on whether altering a Google screenshot as I did provides me with a copyright. Let’s say it doesn’t. That still doesn’t excuse the Daily Mail in my books for just taking the picture without any credit at all. Common courtesy still has a place.

The Financial Post does the same thing, uses my exact image — so they had to have seen my story — but they don’t bother to link over or provide attribution.

Postscript: Jameson Berkow from the Financial Post got in touch soon after I posted my story to apologize, saying there was originally a link to our article in his piece but which got lost along with other links through some technical glitch (which I can totally understand happening. I’ve lived through those myself). When he fixed the missing links, ours got overlooked accidentally but now has been restored. I’m also good with the usage of our illustration, since the article links over to me.

I’ll Link To Your Source Document, But Not You

Over at PC World, a different twist. Rather than link to my story, they linked to the source documentation — the lawsuit — that I uploaded to my personal Scribd account.

I created this account on Friday, so it’s not something you’d just stumble upon in the course of independent news gathering. Maybe PC World saw someone else linking to it and so never saw my story.

Maybe. Then again, as part of the news reporting process, I think tracking down originating sources is important. Where did this document come from? The Scribd file links over to my original story. If you wanted to backtrack the origin of this document (say, perhaps, to know if it was actually real), you’d probably head over to my story.

Either PC World did this, and didn’t think credit was necessary, or it failed to fully fact check the story.

Postscript: PC World has added a link now, thanks, and the author commented about coming across my story after finding other ones about it.

By Omission, Someone Else Becomes The Source

Regardless of how it happened, the PC World story is an example of something else, how a second party can become the originating source.

That PC World story? CBS News cited it as the source for its own story. That, again, makes you question some of the news reporting that is supposed to go on by the mainstream media. The reporting, that accounts often say, blogs themselves fail to do.

CBS simply seems to have summarized the PC World story, ending with a link to PC World plus a link to the complaint itself — the complaint I uploaded. Clearly no one tried to track down the complaint’s origin more. No apparent attempt to independently verify if the case was real. (FYI, unlike CBS, I actually did call the legal firm in the case on Friday).

That CBS story also flowed out to affiliated CBS news stations, such as here and here.

Postscript: CBS, after seeing this, added a link — thanks!

Over at the Atlantic Wire, PC World again gets cited, but not us. News.com also is cited in that Atlantic Wire round-up of commentary on the case. Despite the fact News.com prominently links to us (thanks!), that doesn’t make it into the Atlantic’s story.

Postscript: They’ve since added a link, thanks!

Time Magazine also does the same, linking to the Scribd document and the PC World story.

Postscript: They’ve since added a link, thank you.

AOL News did similarly, linking to the complaint — which was almost certainly found by reading our story — but not to our story itself. As a result, places like the New York Daily News, nineMSN and The Register cite AOL News as the source.

Postscript: AOL has since added a link, thanks!

It’s not just mainstream media that screwed up, however. Even Gizmodo, a well known tech blog, overlooked us. They linked to Fortune, which in turn linked to us. But we didn’t get a mention at Gizmodo.

Postscript: Originally I’d had written further below:

Semi-thanks to Gizmodo. They linked to Fortune, which linked to us. But hey Gizmodo, next time, show a brother-blog some love and give us a direct link.

It came up in comments that this was being too soft on Gizmodo, compared to some of the mainstream publications that I dinged for linking to an intermediary source. I agreed, explained why this happened and have changed the story to ding them properly.

Having said that, about an hour after this story when live, Gizmodo added us as a source like this:

[Search Engine Land via Fortune]

I’ve often seen them show the story trail across multiple sources this way, which I think is well done.

Want to see attribution done right? Over at Inc, they appared to have spotted the PC World story first. But further down, there’s this:

First reported by SearchEngineLand

Thanks! And thanks to others who linked, including:

• Google Watch
• News.com.au
• TechDirt
• Toronto Star

The News, It Just Sprang From Our Forehead

Though I’m a traditionally trained reporter, most of my journalism has been online, where documenting how a story has been found is both easily done (through links) and often done. Bloggers generally explain how they discovered a news item.

As a result, bloggers also set themselves up for accusations that they’ve just “ripped off” some traditional news outlet. By carefully listing an originating source, and sometimes a “via” source, they expose how news flows.

In contrast, a traditional media outlet typically does not document how a story came to life. It’s all a mystery. News just seems to emerge magically out of thin air in the middle of a newsroom. Or, it’s down to all those hard-working reporters out there defending democracy despite newspapers earning less these days because of all those rip-off bloggers.

For example, the Salt Lake Tribune published the Google Maps story yesterday, three days after our story went up. How did the paper discover the news?

In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court for Utah…

Well, lawsuits are public. Newspapers regularly check on them, in their areas. In fact, that’s exactly what Tribune reporter Chris Smart told me, when I called him today to ask about the origin of his story. Smart said the Tribune has a federal courts reporter who checks for filings each day.

I used to work for daily newspapers. I know courts reporters do this. But our story went up late on Friday afternoon Pacific time. How come the Tribune didn’t have its own story then? A full day had passed from when the case was filed to when it could have been written up. But it wasn’t.

Did the reporter come in on Saturday, Sunday or Monday — over a holiday weekend — and check the records?

There was some discussion between Chris and someone else in the newsroom, then I was handed over to the federal courts reporter herself. She eventually said that someone in the newsroom heard a rumor about this case, and she was called in to help locate it on Monday using the PACER system.

Now let’s imagine how the Tribune’s story would have looked, if that fact had been reported:

After hearing a rumor about a case involving Google Maps, which someone saw on TV or read on a blog or we don’t really know where, we checked court records ourselves to find the case which says….

Whatever rumor the Tribune heard, which finally got them to cover a story three days late in their own backyard, that rumor started with our story. Despite this, the Tribune became the originating source as cited by places such as About.com, the San Francisco Business Times and elsewhere.

Postscript: The SF Business Times, after seeing this, kindly added a link!

Beyond the Tribune, there are plenty of other places where the story was apparently just discovered out of the blue, including:

• KSL TV & Newsradio
• DB Techno
• ChannelWeb
• Metro

I especially like how this happens over at The Sun. The story there, by “Staff Reporter,” gives no clue about how a British tabloid owned by News Corporation came across a story that happened over 5,000 miles away. Wire report? Saw it on a blog? Is there a Sun reporter based in Park City, Utah?

We’ll Cite You, But Not Link To You

Mashable reported on our story, and like a reputable blog, they linked to us. But Mashable’s content appears to be syndicated into places like the Sydney Morning Herald — and our link got dropped in that.

That’s bad for us, as we lose traffic. It’s also bad for Sydney Morning Herald readers, who may want to read our original story.

Postscript: They’ve since added a link, thank you.

Related to this, both Fox News Memphis and Fox News LA cite Mashable for their story, which makes me think all Fox News affiliates are sharing this piece. Since Mashable is credited, was it too hard to cite Search Engine Land as the original source?

Postscript: The story has since added a link, thanks!

The Salt Lake Tribune also gets cited, which underscores a point I made earlier. Instead of original reporting going on, plenty of mainstream publications are happy to simply “echo chamber” a story that originated on a blog in the same way that blogs are often accused of doing to mainstream publications.

And Now, It’s From The AP

The Associated Press has filed on the story. Here’s the entire thing so far (the story will no doubt grow as they do more reporting). I’m going to reprint the entire thing. I feel this is allowed by fair use, as it’s required to show the entire story in order to fully comment about it:

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — A woman who says she relied on Google for walking directions in Utah that got her hit on a major roadway has filed a lawsuit against the Internet company claiming it supplied unsafe directions.

Lauren Rosenberg filed the $100,000 lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Utah. It also names a motorist she says hit her.

A Google spokeswoman also did not return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Rosenberg says she used her BlackBerry to download walking directions from Google Maps between two Park City addresses.

The Los Angeles County resident claims the directions led her to walk through Park City on a road without sidewalks that she says isn’t safe for pedestrians.

Rosenberg couldn’t be reached Tuesday. Her attorneys did not return messages.

As with the Tribune, where’s the information about how the AP discovered this story? Did the reporter come across someone else writing about it? If so, how about a credit? And if so, did they actually pull the case itself from PACER? Or did they download the document I put out there, like many others seem to have done?

Speaking of the Tribune, that paper is owned by MediaNewsGroup, which is led by Dean Singleton, who is also chairman of the Associated Press. Singleton and the AP have been vocal that blogs often rip them off for news content.

My Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories? story has another example of a story that emerged from blogs and into the AP wire without attribution.

I think that if the AP or traditional publications like the Salt Lake Tribune documented exactly how they “found” news in the way blogs do, there’d be a fair reassessment of just how much flows back and forth. It’s not all a one way street, from traditional news outlets to blogs.

Can’t We All Get Along?

That brings me back to another piece I wrote last year, Blogs & Mainstream Media: We Can & Do Get Along. I’d like to see a lot less finger-pointing and much more acknowledgment that the origin of news is a messy business.

So why am I pointing fingers in this case? To help keep things even. I think it’s very well known how traditional sources get cited by alternative ones. But while the opposite is true, that’s a story that’s rarely illustrated.

I’ll also add that I know mistakes and misunderstandings can happen with attribution. I try to get it right, but I know I’m not perfect. I also know there are times we’ve reported on a story, credited someone else but nonetheless ended up as a originating source. News is messy. But we should all try to do better attribution.

Postscript: Aside from the fairness of attribution, linking to sources brings those sources support with traffic. Our story at Search Engine Land has had 30,000 page views just from being mentioned in the Toronto Star’s write-up. If other places like the Daily Mail or the Sun had linked, we’d have even more visitors, which is important to a relatively small publication. My Thanks For The Link, Mainstream Media — Now Let’s Have More! post from 2007 has more thoughts on wanting to see more mainstream linking.

How many times have you watched a movie where part of the backstory is told by magazine covers or newspapers headlines that make up part of the eyecandy of the film? I got my latest dose yesterday when watching Iron Man 2.

Hey, I loved the movie. Really loved it. But let me ask you this. You’re this super smart physicist in Russia, with the ability to create your own Iron Man suit. Lots of computers all around. But rather than print articles about Tony Stark being Iron Man from the web, apparently you’ve been running to the local newsstand each day to clip hard copy articles about him for your Wall Of Pain.

Well, those print publications do look better than web publications. Heck, I always feel sad walking the halls of Google, where you’ll often find magazine article-after-magazine article framed and posted for visitors to see. Articles from web publications like my own Search Engine Land rarely get such treatment. It’s understandable. We just don’t look as good.

So as long as we have movies, I think newspapers and magazines will continue to have a long life. Really, they needn’t worry until the day we have Iron Man 3, where on the wall are printouts from places like Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch and the Huffington Post.

Each day, I get an email from the Los Angeles Times updating me on the latest stories. It’s nice, convenient and often drives me back to the site. But insanely, the LA Times wants to screw it all up for me and probably thousands of other subscribers.

Earlier this month, I got a notification that my subscription would come to an end:

Your e-mail newsletter subscriptions are about to end

We’ve given our newsletters a clean new look. And we’re cleaning up our subscription lists too.

We’re asking all existing subscribers to confirm they’d like to continue receiving our newsletters at no charge.

Plus, you’ll be automatically entered to win one of twenty $50 American Express gift cards.

What??? My subscription was working perfectly fine, and the LA Times just suddenly decides it needs to screw everything up? What’s going on?

It really makes no sense to me. I’ve run my own email newsletters for over 15 years. I’ve “clean” the looks of those email newsletters plenty of time without having to threaten my readers that they’ll be dumped off the list if they don’t resubscribe.

As for cleaning a list, email management software makes it very easy to dump bad addresses. There’s no need to force your readers to do more work.

I expect the LA Times is going to lose thousands of email subscribers because of this idiot move. People just won’t bother to reconfirm their subscriptions. Worse, it’s painful for those who DO decide to renew.

Clicking on the renew link takes you over here, where you’re told to register for the LA Times web site. Got it — you want a newsletter, you have to have a web site subscription.

That’s kind of like saying that if you want to listen to a radio station, you need to register with a TV station. Email and web browsing are two completely different mediums. Email can drive to the web site — sure. And if you really want people to register to read, then hit them when they show up over there. But that’s not how the LA Times operates now. You can read without registration. So why on earth do you require people to register for an email update of articles they may want to read.

Oh, already registered, like I am? Then there’s this note:

Already registered? To start or manage newsletter subscriptions, go to your user profile. To get there, click on “Register” and sign in using the login information you registered with. Once signed in, click on your name on the top left-hand corner of the latimes.com home page.

Are you kidding me? You want me to do all this just to keep my email newsletter going? But OK, I’ll play along.

Heading over to the “Log In or Register” link at the top of the LA Times home page, I get a box that pops-up (see it here) telling me that I can only login using a third-party account from:

• Facebook
• Google
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Twitter
• Myspace

Um, what happened to using the “login information you registered with,” you know, that I registered with years ago before we even had some of these services. I’m not alone — surely there were thousands of people who registered with the LA Times using one of these accounts. I guess those are dead. And I guess everyone has to trust that they want to give their personal info to one of these third party firms for the privilege of getting a freaking email update from the LA Times.

When you do that, by the way, you don’t save any time. I used my Twitter account to “register” with the LA Times. After doing this, I still had to create an LA Times-based username — plus provide the heart of what this entire exercise was all about, my ZIPCODE, Gender and Birth Date. Get that data about registered users, and you can better sell ads online.

Hey, I get that. But there should have been a far less painful way to do this for those getting email newsletters from the LA Times — and a far less riskier way to avoid losing readers.

Heaven help them. I chose the easier option. I just unsubscribed.

When I tuned into Twitter this morning, like many other people, I saw tweets about a bomb threat of some type in Times Square. How serious was this? So I went looking for news and found an erectile dysfunction ad along the way. Classy Fox News — and shame on you CNN and the New York Times for being screwed up, as well.

I started looking for news about what was happening when John Battelle tweeted:

Bomb threat still not on nyt.com but it’s all over Twitter

I hit Google and ignored the main search results with their real time tweets that were integrated, going straight to Google News. The only article I could find was from a site I’d never heard before, DNAinfo, which I gather covers local news in Manhattan.

It was useful. I’d been hearing things about NASDAQ and a bomb threat but I quickly learned this seemed to be a suspicious van parked near Times Square. Probably nothing at all.

Still, I wanted to learn more from news sites. Maybe they had articles out that Google News hadn’t picked up. So I headed over to CNN.

There, I couldn’t find a news story, but there was a live feed being offered. It was buried way down on the page, nearly similar to where I’m pointing in the screenshot below:

I fired it up. A commercial loaded, which I found odd. Here’s a potential emergency — I could know people in the area and be extremely frightened and worried — and I have to wait for a commercial, first? Worse, after the commercial played, there was no live feed. They were showing the weather, instead.

Hey, I know news sites are looking to monetize stuff and there’s that whole debate about people expecting news for free when they should pay. But give me a frigging break. In an emergency, that’s what news sites do. You get the news out first and worry about the monetization later. That’s your job. Make up the money in other ways.

I went to the New York Times next and found nothing, just as I see now as I write this about 30 minutes after I first went there:

Figuring they probably had something, I drilled into the local area of the site and there, buried, was a news article:

Why wasn’t that on the front page? Seriously, the editors at the New York Times didn’t think when this news broke that people might think they should find it? I mean, it is after all happening in New York, from which the Times takes its name.

But really, Fox News beat them all. Similar to CNN, there was a live video feed about in the same place as the screenshot below shows:

I clicked on it, and a Viagra ad started playing.

Look, I’m not a prude, but I kind of got enough of those freaking Viagra ads during the Major League Baseball playoffs. They’re really fun to watch with your 8 and 10 year old. It’s one of those cases where I appreciated how in the UK, certain types of ads simply could not be shown before a certain hour, when kids were assumed to be bed — or in association with certain kinds of TV shows.

But imagine the scenario. You’re a family worried about other family in New York. You head to Fox News on your computer, all the kids gathered around, and here’s the Viagra ad. Nice.

OK, if it’s a real disaster, you might not have the kids sitting next to you. So set that argument aside. The “why the hell are you showing me a commercial” one still stands up. Someone’s worried, concerned, perhaps freaked out. They’ve come to your site, grateful to discover they can get some type of live information, and you first make them watch and ad about how to get their dick hard.

Really, really classy.

Connect the dots, see if you can spot the picture. Some news publishers call visitors they get via search from Google worthless. Meanwhile, you’ve got online media companies directly looking at search activity as a way to make money. Who’s not getting it?

My If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then? post last week covers the latest anti-Google trend, to argue that millions of visitors its sends for free to news sites are nearly worthless. I disagree, as my post explains, as do my comments at Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer from Steve Yelvington.

Today, there’s news that AOL is almost finished with a system to deliver news stories in response to searches. From the Wall Street Journal article about AOL’s plans:

The predictions, it says, are based on a wide swath of data AOL collects, from the Web searches people make on its site to the sites visited by subscribers to its Internet services….

AOL says its new system determined that the most popular topic on the Web last Tuesday was “crib recalls,” following news of a massive recall by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. AOL had only one story on its sites on the recall. But, if the new system had been live, editors would have geared up to supply stories on the subject from a number of angles, the company says.

Now where have I heard this before. Oh, yes — Yahoo does this. As I wrote last year in Yahoo: How Open When You Compete With Others?:

Scott Moore — who’s in charge of Yahoo’s media operations, — started talking about Yahoo News. He described how during the Olympics, Yahoo could watch the query stream coming in real-time and craft articles that matched the most popular requests….

Um, but aren’t those publishers also your partners? I mean, as part of the open mantra of the day, we were told how Yahoo is planning to make it even easier for publishers to put their content on Yahoo News pages. That’s nice, but doesn’t it kind of also backstab those partners if you’re also vying with them for page views?

I talked with Moore after his presentation a bit. He agreed there was competition that was happening. Indeed, he kind of smiled and said it was “coopetition,” smiling I think because on the web, we’ve been kind of used to companies that compete with each other also working with each other….

Moore also got me riled when he talked about how Yahoo’s openness can be seen in terms of the sites it links to. I didn’t get the quote exactly, but it was something like: “There aren’t really many other news organization that will put in links that take you away from their own content.”Except Google, of course — where practically every link takes you away from Google News, with the key exception of some wire content. And in that case, Google does that primarily because the AP was threatening to sue it.

Again, I asked Moore about this later, and he made a good point of explaining that Google News isn’t a news organization — it’s not a news publisher. True, but I guess that brings me back to thinking that Yahoo shouldn’t be a news publisher either.

You get all that? Yahoo rarely takes the same heat as Google does over Yahoo News, despite it having three times the traffic and actually having journalists who work to compete against publishers. Meanwhile you’ve got news publishers who pretend that Google is somehow a news publisher. Moore certainly doesn’t believe that — nor does Moore believe those search visitors are worthless. Instead, they’re a gold mine he was tapping at Yahoo.

Was tapping? Oh, yes — Moore’s now at MSN, as executive producer in the US. You know, the recently redesigned portal owned by Microsoft, the company that is is currently positioned as some type of newspaper savior versus Google because of rumored talks for Microsoft’s Bing to exclusively list News Corporation content (see Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News”).

Now in the past, Moore’s not suggested he plans to ramp up MSN’s original content to the degree that he was pushing at Yahoo. But still, he does want MSN to have its own material in addition to being a news aggregator (those terrible creatures as viewed by some news publishers). As he said in a Techflash interview earlier this year:

The thing that worked really well for me at Yahoo was the combination of aggregation — licensed content — and a small amount of original content that you can’t get anywhere else….

I don’t think it would be wise for Microsoft to go into a huge amount of original content creation. They already have some and probably it’s a matter of tuning that programming and seeing if there are some other things that we might want to do that are original that will set us apart and attract people to us as a result of it.

In the same interview, he talked about being interested in local news and information, something that he said again is a key area for MSN after it relaunched.

I’m not saying newspapers should immediately start writing anything to tap into search traffic. In fact, I’ve warned against that. But I do think they need to understand that visitors from search are indeed valuable. Some of Google’s competitors sure think so.

Like many, I got a laugh out of the Daily Show piece earlier this year poking fun at the New York Times for selling “aged news.” But a talk I heard by Kevin Marks this summer made me realize that newspapers don’t push aged news. They push TiVoed news, or recorded news or stored news. Call it what you want, thinking of newspapers as efficient storage devices, rather than being out-of-date, might increase their respect these days and potentially, their value.

Sadly, I can’t find a video or slides of Kevin’s talk, which he gave at Foo Camp 2009 at the end of August. But it was based off his The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing post. If I can find any multimedia resources, I’ll add them later.

In his talk, Kevin discussed how despite our current infatuation with “real time” whatever, there are cases where we prefer that things be stalled, stored — yes, even aged. In fact, that we’ll even pay for delay. That we’ll pay a lot for that “free” television show to be recorded on our DVRs, so that we can view it when convenient. We’ll pay for the storage of music on our iPods, so we can listen when we prefer.

It was a really good talk and got me thinking. Hey, newspapers store news for us as well. They’re actually a convenient digest of what’s happened, all carefully compiled for our perusal. So I tweeted back in September:

newspapers aren’t aged news. they’re TiVoed news. it’s a convenience we pay for. but they don’t position themselves that way

That got a lot of retweets, many of them positive, so I’ve been meaning to get a proper post up about it. Robert Scoble finally got me to do it, after tweeting this evening “I wonder how many of them would subscribe to week old newspaper.”

I’m not trying to get into the middle of a “real time news” / “Twitter news” is good or bad argument between mainstream sources. I think they both have their places and both have advantages and disadvanges.

Instead, I mainly wanted to say again that what Kevin pointed out is true. We value storage. We pay for it. We like that convenience. And newspapers are news storage devices.

Usually each day, I read a paper at lunch time, either the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. It’s a break away from the computer, and a chance for me to catch up on the world away from the tech and search-dominated stuff that consumes me when I’m online.

I can read about some political development or disaster knowing full well that some of it is already outdated, and that I could run into the house and get fresher news on my computer or television. Despite this, stories that are even a day old are still useful. They get me up to speed. They bring me some recorded news that I haven’t yet encountered. They’re valuable to me.

Newspapers in print are going to find it harder and harder to be places we turn to for breaking news. Online is going to win. We know this already. But as storage devices, newspapers have got online beat.

On a mailing list I’m on where newspapers and books were discussed, there was an interesting exercise people were doing. They were walking down the aisles on airplane flights and noticing how many people were working on laptops, reading kindles, reading magazines, books and yes, newspapers. When I tried this on a short flight, newspapers were by far the “device” still in use.

Hey, that’s just one flight. It’s not a comprehensive survey. But I still see newspapers in plenty of places. And in a world where people seem to be predicting the death of papers or abandoning them, let’s add storage to the list of things that papers provide. They’re the iPods for news, never needing batteries.

If you missed it, here’s the Daily Show segment: