

Dow Jones CEO: Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts  - ilamont
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-world-newspaper-congress-dow-jones-ceo-beware-of-geeks-bearing-gifts/

======
Kliment
"algorithm and blues" - the entire article's only redeeming point. But the
content itself is the same old. Professionally produced content costs money,
he says, and you will pay for it. Fine, I say. Pay for whatever you feel like
paying. I'll keep ignoring things I can't find. The best quality material is
no longer exclusively at high-reputation big-name sources. As soon as the
distribution is more level, and the major differentiating factor is what can
be easily found, searchable online content will win. No matter how many CEOs
claim otherwise.

~~~
ilamont
Rupert Murdoch has already made many of the points that Les Hinton discussed
in this speech, but I think the most interesting item was his claim that
click-oriented ads are relatively worthless, compared to simple display
advertising on quality news sites like the WSJ.

Another thing that's apparent from reading this is Dow Jones believes Fair Use
and weak enforcement of copyright laws are impediments to their operations. It
wants to set back the clock to the good ol' days of the news media oligopoly,
when information was controlled by a small group of very profitable
publishers. But as long as Twitterers, bloggers, and aggregators are able to
talk about/reprint small excerpts of news reported by MSM outlets, that will
lessen audiences dependence upon the large outlets and keep ad rates down.

------
dpatru
I think there's a fundamental misalignment of interests in the news business
between 1) readers who want high-quality, unbiased reporting, 2) advertisers
who want to sell something to the readers and are thus biased, and 3) the news
companies who want to satisfy both readers and advertisers. The problem is
similar to the interaction between a customer seeking financial advice from a
financial consultant who makes money selling securities: a consumer can't know
whether he's being given unbiased information or a sales pitch.

Perhaps people don't pay for "news" because they don't usually pay for sales
pitches.

One way to solve this is to openly declare one's identity. Consumers of
unbiased news or entertainment are willing to pay; but the consumer of
unbiased news will be more intolerant of paying for the news by seeing ads:
how can someone deliver the unbiased news while at the same time being a
salesman?

Providers of unbiased news should sell their service, unbiased news, to their
customers. Consumer Reports does this very well. They stress the fact that
they don't sell advertising and that therefore, their only aim to please their
only customer by providing unbiased information.

Most other media have a hard-time selling non-bias because they're not really
in the non-bias business. They want to have it both ways: they want to sell
unbiased news to readers while at the same time pitch their readers on behalf
of their other customers, vendors. To do this they have to sell (perhaps
implicitly) their readers on the proposition that bias doesn't matter. At this
point most media companies have already lost the customers who understand and
value unbiased news. The customers that are left are really looking for
entertainment.

If this analysis is right, you should not expect to see the most successful
ad-supported news media be unbiased.

------
Hoff
Does anyone seriously think these folks don't know about robots.txt?

Folks, it's clearly a form of institutionalized trolling. Various of the folks
involved are clearly piling onto the best troll since, well, since the
marketeers of some movie managed to get their 2012 troll onto HN.

Like spam, trolling is now a business model.

Please don't feed the trolls.

~~~
leviathant
While I agree that they know about robots.txt and are trolling, these are not
your average trolls. They are able to get serious traction because they
control a lot of the more traditional venues for information, it's a little
more important to call them out.

While a bunch of people at HN saying "robots.txt, duh" will not directly
communicate the idea to said CEO, perhaps at some point someone doing research
on the topic will go searching for information on the topic. The more counter-
FUD we put out there, the better.

~~~
Hoff
These folks +know+ about robots.txt stuff. If not directly, then because some
staffer and most any sycophant in range has already pointed to it.

The folks have almost certainly explicitly told the staffers involved not to
enable robots.txt, too. (If they truly were fools, they've have already
enabled the robots block.)

The point is to trigger the response to the troll, and the hope that the CEO
will be able leverage the response to better their own business position. Some
trolls deliberately stick typos or errors in their posts. Some folks show
their naughty bits. Some make outrageous statements.

The point is not the tech. The point is not the truth.

The point is the the schtick, and the profit potential.

This is the basis of modern media.

It's an effective form of attention-seeking spam.

This doesn't mean I don't think Google should just "accidentally" drop one or
two of these organizations from the search indexes. "You're not listed?
Whoops. We thought you wanted out of the Google indexes. Our bad." But that'd
be both juvenile, and would serve only to get the regulatory folks and legal
teams involved all spooled up.

~~~
microtherion
_The point is to trigger the response to the troll, and the hope that the CEO
will be able leverage the response to better their own business position. Some
trolls deliberately stick typos or errors in their posts. Some folks show
their naughty bits. Some make outrageous statements._

I've always felt that News Corp was the journalistic equivalent of Mr. goatse.

------
sophacles
So for years most newspapers have been little more than AP aggregators,
offering local opinion pieces and a few local stories. Then the journal comes
in, with a bunch of specialist content, and respected editorial bits, makes a
profit selling this, and somehow is in the same market? Isn't that like saying
Google and Dell are in the same business because it is computers?

Vaguely related: what ever happened to the micro-payment idea?

~~~
Gormo
At a higher level, even the specialist journals are still essentially
performing an aggregator function. The most well-researched, insightful
reporting is still just a recapitulation of something else, some a set of
facts or opinions that exists independently of the reporting. Journalists do
not create content in the same way as authors, musicians, software developers,
etc. They go out, gather information of interest to their audience, filter it,
repackage it, and distribute it to their readers.

Traditional journalism is effectively information retail. The internet
threatens it not by making content free - there is no copyright on reality;
the content is already free - but by connecting audiences directly to primary
sources. The main advantage that journalism still maintains - a critical and
thorough filtering function - is now being challenged by new infrastructure
developments, social networking platforms, Twitter, increasing maturity of the
blogosphere, etc. These factors diminish news reporting as a packaged product,
and return it to the context of an open conversation.

What I think Murdoch and Hinton are really attacking is not news content being
made available for free, but the internet revealing that news isn't actually
"content" at all. Their business model isn't undergoing a paradigm shift; it's
simply going away. Apart from shifting their operations to an entirely
different industry, fighting this battle is the only option they have.

------
va_coder
Message to pointy-haired executive: Google robots.txt

Ironically, not only does the foxnews.com/robots.txt not block search engines,
it has sitemaps for helping them.

~~~
igrekel
I don't see what the relationship should really be with robots.txt. Block
their site will not make them profitable, it doesn't provide a source of
revenue.

~~~
jpwatts
They claim to be generating the revenue, only to have it stolen by Google and
others. If this was the case, /robots.txt could go a long way towards
preventing billions of dollars from "leak[ing] onto the Internet" each year.

~~~
igrekel
I had a different understanding of what the core point was, the google part
felt more like a sub point.

My understanding was that since the content is freely accessible on the
internet, people don't need to subscribe to newspapers, and that online
advertising can't cover for the difference.

------
giardini
"Geeks Bearing Gifts"

This was funny the first 7,000 times I heard it, but it's lost its lustre
since. Can we call a time-out on this phrase?

------
rbanffy
I wonder how much their advertising teams cost and if wouldn't it render
better results just to fire them and replace all banners with AdSense (or
something like it) and live off their ever elongating tails. Those teams are
pure overhead - news companies are in the business of reporting news. They
should get rid of their fat. This world does not tolerate it.

~~~
sahaj
my guess is that they've run this calculation and have decided against it. or
there are top level execs that are in charge of the marketing divisions who
don't want to lose jobs and learn something new.

~~~
rbanffy
I bet on your #2. There is a lot of money being pocketed in the media market
in form of incentives. It's only natural they want to hold on to their jobs.

------
jasonlbaptiste
In general, I'm a fan of this talk. I think these guys are arguing these
things for the wrong reasons and don't understand the tech. At its core, they
should be playing hard ball. We're becoming a society that just expects
everything to be free (in price) and as cheap as possible. Mark Cuban said it
best: you live and die by free.

