links for 2009-07-27

  • Kevin: Steve Dennen at comScore Voices writes: "These trends demonstrate the challenge for newspapers to more deeply engage online with the growing number of consumers who do not get any of their news information from the print or online editions of their newspapers. Beyond looking for approaches that will attract these consumers to their own sites, the newspapers must explore alternative ways – including using social media or distributed content as potential distribution models – to reach this audience as the Internet becomes the preferred medium for news consumption. By continuing to evolve their services in a way that aligns with their consumers’ preferences, they may be able to identify alternative ways to offset the revenue lost from their declining print channel."
  • Kevin: The criticicism of the Associated Press continues to roll in. Scott Rosenberg writes: "“A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now. But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article."
  • Kevin: Josh Karp, founder of The Printed Blog, provides this excellent advice about starting a business, content or otherwise: "It's really important to strike a balance between product development, or available functions, and revenue generation. You want to develop the smallest amount of functionality you need to generate the maximum amount of initial revenue. We focused too much on the product, and not enough on proving that we could make money, and that was a big part of our downfall."
  • Kevin: Paul Bradshaw highlights two posts comparing Associated Press' plans to add content protection to the failing effort of the Recording Industry Association of America to protect content through litigation and fighting music consumers.
  • Kevin: Hat tip for this to Cyberjournalist.net. Scott Porad, part of the team behind the LOLCat site, I can haz cheezburger writes: "Previously I addressed the misconception that user-generated content is free. To make user-generated content work, Cheezburger expends significant cost to sift through all the user submissions to find the best quality content. However, including this expense, content costs us less to acquire and is undoubtedly of higher quality. This fundamental win-win is the promise of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content."