• Why? Because they say we can’t. The Japanese business newspaper is following the lead of a lot of newspapers worldwide by adding a paywall, but their paywall is way beyond that of, say, the Wall Street Journal. First, you have to submit a written application to link to the site (which we didn’t do). And second, they’ve gone and disabled the copy function on their site. Why? Because they’ve seen American papers open the floodgates and lose readership as a result. source

• Google faced a similar painful dilemma in China. With potentially billions of dollars at risk, it stuck to its principles, and The Times applauded editorially. I think Google set an example for everyone who believes in the free flow of information.
• New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt • Regarding Google’s China example for free speech and what that means for the Times and its Singapore interests. The company is considering leaving Singapore, where its International Herald Tribune has a major foothold, due to the government clamping down on their free speech. Why? The IHT dared call the current government a “dynasty.” Twelve years ago, the IHT agreed not to do that anymore, but broke their promise when they noted former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong in an article about dynasties. The Times won’t work that way anymore, kids – some are surprised the free-speech defenders did in the first place. source

• Our take? It depends on the app. Right now, the iPad does three things really well. It allows you to surf the Web at nearly the same clip as a laptop, it rules at non-Flash video playback, and it allows you to read the news better than either a newspaper or Web browser. For a 1.0 product, this is polished. But we’re journalism nerds that read a lot of links, so let’s focus our appeal. How is reading and curating news on this thing, anyway? (Hint: Pretty good.)

First: What a good news app needs

• one A simple format that makes it easier, not harder, to read the news. It’s not a newspaper or a Web site; it’s a little of both
• two An easy way to share content – you should be able to copy quotes, tweet links, and e-mail articles to a friend (or yourself)
• three A solid offline reading mode – these apps need to be able to work without a wi-fi connection nearby; all of the apps had this

Second: The best news apps

• best The Reuters app is
  super-readable,
  easy to scan, and
  best-formatted for
  the iPad. It’s also
  the one that tried to
  look least like a
  newspaper.
• great The USA Today
  app has a mix of
  strong readability,
  easy organization,
  and smart uses of
  swiping. It’s nearly
  as good as the
  Reuters app.
• eh The New York
  Times app isn’t
  bad, but its body
  type isn’t on the grid. The Wall Street Journal app tends to overreact
  to tiny movements.
• wtf The Associated
  Press app went all
  scrapbook with
  their format, which
  is OK – for a
  scrapbook. For
  reading hard news,
  it’s very annoying.

Third: Twitter on the iPad

• 
  Best balance Twitterrific was designed for the iPad the way that one would expect someone to use an iPad Twitter app. The use of Twitter lists, for example, makes for great news-reading. Less is more in this case.
• 
  Most complex TweetDeck could stand to be a little less complicated right now. It loads too many windows at once and comes across as a bit bloated and overwhelming. A bit more interface furniture to clean up the look would help this greatly.
• 
  Best mashup As many people know, the EchoFon/Firefox setup is hard to top for reading linked tweets, and TweetBrowser goes a long way to replicate that on the iPad. Only issue: We wish we could hide the feed in the horizontal format.

• » One side note: Webkit’s skills at rendering the Twitter web apps are mostly pretty good. The web version of Hootsuite is actually better than the iPad-native version of TweetDeck on the iPad. Threadsy also works great, as does the Web version of Seesmic. You’ll have to use a two-finger swipe to navigate, though, which can be cumbersome.

Overall: What did we think?

• » What we like: It’s a good reading format, and Safari could handle nearly everything we threw at it (except the TinyMCE rich-text editor, which means it sucks for blogging because WordPress uses that). The format is awesome for video and music. Once Hulu and Spotify get apps on here, it’s seriously a one-stop shop. Also, being able to load articles on the device and take it on the wi-fi-less D.C. Metro was downright perfect.
• » What we don’t like: It can be hard to hold the device upright, especially if you’re not sitting at a table. It’s strange that Apple didn’t consider putting a kickstand on the back. The keyboard is usable but not heavy-duty. Apple should consider putting in (or allowing) additional keyboard setups that make it more usable for typing in HTML. Right now, it’s a serious chore.
• » What we want to see: Surprisingly, we don’t miss multitasking on the iPad – it actually wasn’t noticeable for most apps. But we think someone needs to create a single app that mixes social media, web browsing and blogging/word processing. TweetBrowser gets the first two down, but WordPress‘ app isn’t designed for this at all. We smell opportunity (eh, Tumblr?).

• Actually, she’s joining it at the end of April. The longtime CNN anchor, famous for her international coverage, will helm “This Week,” replacing George Stephanopoulos. It’s a bit of a change, but just look at the comments on this CNN post. Amanpour is universally loved and probably won’t damage the “This Week” brand. CNN, on the other hand, is looking like a rickety old ship that just lost its first mate. source

• Were the job cuts needed? After a report came out yesterday on the unofficial Gannett Blog noting the executive pay of the company’s chief executives, there’s definitely some deserved anger due to the number of layoffs that the newspaper company had. Truth is, though, their salaries, while high, are only a dent in a much larger pie, and from one perspective, they did their jobs well.

Executive salaries vs. 2009 job cuts

• 6,000 number of jobs that were lost throughout the company in 2009 through cuts and layoffs; many workers were also furloughed
• $4.7M the amount Gannett’s chairman and CEO, Craig Dubow, made in 2009, up $1.6 million from 2008 (including a $1.5 million bonus)
• $4M the amount president and COO (and former CFO) Gracia Martore made in 2009, up $2.6 million from 2008 (with a $950,000 bonus)

Would lower executive pay help? Not really

• $240M the amount the laid-off workers’ collective salaries would be if they were each paid $40,000 per year, around average for journalists (though some are paid higher)
• $700 the amount each laid-off worker would get if that $4.2 million difference between 2008 and 2009 executive pay was spread out evenly amongst them

Where the cuts helped most: Stock prices

• 907% the increase in stock price since 2009

Uncomfortable reality

• » The business consideration: Truth of the matter is, from an investing and financial perspective, Craig Dubow and Gracia Martore look very smart for cutting off some of the dead wood, even if it screwed over thousands of journalists as a result.
• » The real problem? Same as many other newspaper conglomerates: Gannett’s simply too big. It holds jurisdiction over many markets large and small, and as a result of heavy debt burdens from the financial crisis, it and companies like it, including McClatchy and Tribune, have had to make some tough decisions to protect the whole beast. Seems like all these mergers and buyouts had the effect of damaging local newspapers and local journalism. Financial sense and editorial sense are two different senses. source

• 35% of news readers have a favorite news site
• 57% of readers use between two and five sites
• 7% are willing to pay to read the news online source

• 16% of all links on the blogosphere last week were related to same-sex marriage, as many as Chile
• 0.1% of newspaper coverage focused
  on it, and instead was health-care-obsessed source

• After hearing from Rich Pearson of Attributor, we think it’s at least fair to articulate what we think a content-licensing agreement should be like for bloggers. Because it seems like, while Attributor has a good point (and is apparently following a don’t-be-evil pathos), their business model comes across almost as a debt-collector role regarding the copyright of content. As far as content-charging goes, what we’d like to see is a storefront approach as a way to add value to the proposition. A bit of explanation:

How newspapers get wire content:

• This is AP Exchange. We have access to this resource due to the fact that we have a day job. We don’t use it (or link to any AP content, preferably) on ShortFormBlog because recent statements from the wire service have raised a lot of red flags for us about the usage of its content on blogs. Anyway, your mom-and-pop bloggers don’t have (and may not need) access to something this elaborate, but there are things that many bloggers could really use – budgets of upcoming stories (allowing for planning, not reaction), high-resolution photos, and graphics in vector format which can be easily reworked. Unfortunately, it requires a huge contract and newspapers have to give years-in-advance notices if they choose to quit the wire service. Most blogs aren’t that big – unless you’re HuffPo, you can’t afford it.

Business model points of comparison:

• » Photoshop Elements: Not everyone needs the full version of Photoshop, an incredibly complex product with a lot of knobs to twiddle. So Adobe created Photoshop Elements, which offers many of the features at a cheaper price. Simpler, cheaper – that’s what we’d suggest.
• » Lala/Spotify: iTunes isn’t exactly the model we’d suggest for this. An all-you-can-eat model like Spotify is nice, while an ultra-cheap micropayment distribution model like Lala might be ideal. Many news stories don’t have a ton of currency beyond the first day.
• » Typekit: Typekit, which is trying to do something similar for typography, has a very polished interface on the developer’s end which makes it incredibly easy to find the right font to use. Their use of javascript is a little annoying, but ultimately, it strikes a good balance between making rights-holders happy and giving Web site owners more options.

What we’d like to see:

• one We think bloggers need an interface for content-gathering on a wire service, something that they could use as a resource just like Google News and Twitter.
• two We think Automattic or Six Apart (or Publish2, even), which already have significant ties to the blogging community, would be great choices to run a site like this.
• three And – this is the important part – it needs to be done well, in a way that doesn’t talk down to them, that emphasizes quality, not assuming the worst of its users.

Why we think Reuters will come up with this:

• I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.
• Thomson Reuters President of Media Chris Ahearn • From an article he wrote back in August. We wrote about it then, too, and we think it suggests that Reuters will figure this out before the Associated Press. The AP is more beholden to its newspaper partners, and companies like News Corp. and Tribune Corp. have too many interests in their own products. We think offering diverse options would be great for bloggers and would help take much of the stigma away from what they do. But not everyone’s there, sadly. Fingers crossed that the concept behind Attributor is a good first step, not a bad last one. source

• Apparently, Attributor plans to go after blogs for copyright usage. Does our blog use more than 80 percent of your average news article? No. In fact, we go to great lengths to rewrite the content and link to everywhere we post about. Which is why we’re curious as to how Attributor plans to tackle ShortFormBlog.

• What is it? Attributor, if you’re not aware, is a Silicon Valley startup whose entire business model is based around going after Web sites posting news or eBook content, forcing them to take it down or pay for a license, pushing ad providers to remove advertising from the site, or even forcing hosts to shut down a site.
• Sound familiar? If these tactics sound familiar, it’s because the exact same kind of tactics were used by the RIAA for years when handling copyright violators. Jammie Thomas-Rasset could tell you a thing or two about how this shakedown model works, and it’s not pretty. The only difference is that they aren’t suing.
• wrong approach We feel that Attributor is a bad harbinger for this industry of news. What we’d rather see is a version of the AP and other wire services designed specifically for small-to-mid-sized blogs, with a reasonable cost. Bloggers like us would pay $20 a month for Reuters or AP. Just an idea, dudes. source

• Good news, everyone! Fans of reading Associated Press stories now have a lot to look forward to with the iPad. They plan to charge readers for some stories with an app on the device. If we could make a suggestion: Don’t charge for the blades – charge for the razors. And make the razors unlike anything else already on the market. We know it inverts the Gillette model, but it’s also the only way anyone’s not just going to open up a Web browser and grab your news that way. Unless you have a better idea. source