Chris Boese's Weblog

Steve Yelvington frames a tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

Link: A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) | yelvington.com.

Great post here, and an interesting frame for thinking about these issues. Not many mention the CNN.com topic pages (which came out with the redesign launched in 2007)... maybe folks aren't thinking about them because they are less well executed (I don't know if they are or are not, this is a newer genre that owes more to blog "carnivals" than anything else), or because they appeared BEFORE all this talk about topic pages caught fire...)

Anyway, it means approaching the informational side of journalism from OUTSIDE the frame of the inverted pyramid and more actually as technical writers. Isn't that interesting?! Summaries that give context. Unbound, decontextualized content that assumes the hypertextual link is the norm, rather than linear thinking and reading and linking. Fascinating!

What I think we may really, finally be seeing is the true modification of journalism and journalistic discourse for the Web medium, rather than doing the horseless carriage jive, the way early TV looked so much like an old time radio program, only with pictures.

Marshall McLuhan would be proud.

A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

May 18, 2009 - 12:59pm — yelvington

Everybody is different from everybody else, and there are lots of ways to group people. But when looking at the audience of a newspaper website, there's one way that I continue to find compelling -- and troubling.

When we group users by frequency, we get something like this:

Our news websites tend to have a huge reach. This is the cumulative monthly unique-user count that we all like to brag about. It's the number newspapers tout when they claim they've grown total audience when print and web users are combined.

But this big reach is made up mostly of occasional users -- once, twice a month. Many come from search engines. Many aren't in the target market at all. And since advertising requires repetition to be effective, these folks don't constitute a very attractive audience from an economic perspective.

There's a much, much smaller component that's radically different from the big group. These are the loyal users, the people who come not once or twice, but 20, 30, 50 or even hundreds of times a month.

[...]

Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn't directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency -- and along with it, engagement with civic life.

On the Web, there's no home delivery -- you have to take an action to visit a website. The results are directly measurable, and painful to look at.

This isn't 1956, but we still typically write like Dwight Eisenhower is president.

That isn't a bad thing for everybody, but it fails for many.

[Heh. Great line!]

For the people in the small "loyal user" circle, it actually works pretty well. News stories tend to report incremental advances in an underlying tale that unfolds slowly, over time. If you're following along, the incremental story makes perfect sense. You might want more depth, more detail, but you won't want to be told what you already know. You won't want the background.

The problem is with the occasional user, for whom the incremental story may seem to be just so much monkey screech.

[...]

The topics page is the piece that offers the greatest opportunity to connect with the big circle.

[...]

Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too.

Done poorly -- and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl -- a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments.

The biggest dangers come from these sources:

1. 1.  Lack of a synopis that makes sense. Some sites don't even both writing a synopsis. Others seem to have assigned the work to interns from the marketing department.
2. 2.  Misplaced trust in automation. I found a USA Today topics page about the BBC. A bot had assembled it. Every oblique mention of the BBC was churned up. The page made no sense at all. If I want to run a search, I'll go to Google, thank you.
3. 3.  Inflexible formatting. A format or template should be a starting point, not an ending point. If your community has an awesome hip-hop culture, your hip-hop page should be awesome and hip-hop.

The "Great Wall" in journalism is not to blame for the decline of newspapers

Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.

I recently posted a longish comment on a post on the Lost Remote blog (I don't think it is strictly a TV blog anymore, as the masthead says "local media and the battle for the web"). Like many of us have, Lost Remote has engaged in a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong and what factors are to blame for this major shakeout in the Fourth Estate and the forced removal of what have to be thousands of veteran journalists from commercial participation in the profession (most blogs they are moving to are not yet commercially-viable).

At this point in my life, I've watched such shakeouts happen far too often, from my first days out of Journalism School in the mid-80s, although nothing as bad as what we see now.

I watched Radio majors graduating a few years after me immediately abandon their careers because of Reagan deregulation that allowed massive media chains to consolidate and automate radio properties on a scale that made that profession virtually disappear, just as print journalism is very likely equally hopeless for new journalism grads in the pipeline right now.

I watched 2-newspaper cities and towns become 1-newspaper monopolies, with the staff of one of those papers all let go (no matter what those bogus joint-operating-agreements stated). I was utterly demoralized then, yet that was nothing compared to what is happening now.

Much later, after teaching college for many years, I returned to journalism, this time in cable TV news, and again watched television newsrooms go through rounds of layoffs so regularly you'd think management was dosing on Ex-Lax.

These weren't Howard Beale-style layoffs made by cut-throat Faye Dunaways looking to corrupt the product (although there were those as well). Also rolling through TV and newspaper newsrooms were the deliberate purging of age and experience (where age became a liability in TV once you were over 30-- not on air, in the newsroom-- and over 40 in print) BECAUSE too much journalism experience meant you were more likely to protest at the full-on abandonment of journalistic standards and the embrace of presenting PR-created material as "news."

All small potatoes compared to what is happening now. Entire metropolitan areas may find themselves with NO newspaper of record very soon. This isn't just a convulsion in the field. It is a death rattle. I'm even following a Twitter feed called "Newspaper Death Watch."

So into this conversation comes analysis and blame, and the folks who are ready to pile on and claim traditional journalism was too hidebound and principled and worked itself into an anachronism (this argument is in alignment with the management philosophies that practiced illegal age discrimination in newsrooms, for its most crass purpose, because 20-somethings can be so green and easily intimidated as to abandon journalistic principles in ways that most veteran journalists are not).

So much of the blame centers around bizarre wrong-headedness in how to handle companion web ventures for newspapers, a primo opportunity that most newspapers missed out of sheer blindness to the media shift. Perhaps that is all that is happening now, paying the piper for believing the web was nothing more than a "horseless carriage," rather than a serious competitor for print, TV, and radio.

But with all the blame to go around, some go after the so-called "Great Wall" erected in the U.S. press between business/advertising and editorial content, a means to ensure that editorial stories were not being influenced by interested parties with axes to grind (a more than respectable purpose, and one I take a lot of comfort in, even though it may be, as Shakespeare put it, "more honor'd in the breach than in the observance."

There are many voices today arguing, "Tear down that wall!" They want to unleash journalism online and unite it with "pay-per-post" and sweetheart deals with advertisers, "creative" entrepreneurial solutions that will maximize SEO and online distribution systems with social media (the latter generally a good thing), while taking a pencil eraser to some seriously enshrined principles of journalistic ethics, even when only honored in the breach, because those things can serve to distinguish journalism from interested public relations and bald-faced marketing copy masquerading as editorial content.

I am not a fan of "objectivity" in journalism (pseudo-objectivity), a fiction which really only holds court in the U.S. press, and is dealt with far more sanely in international journalism. Removing point of view from reporting created a fiction, a lie, a form of posturing that hurts basic U.S. journalism to this day. All observations have perspectives, and good journalists will OWN and CLAIM their perspectives (as bloggers do), rather than pretend their eyeballs do not reside within their own heads. U.S. journalists are  usually forced to adopt a floating disembodied deity perspective, WHICH IS A LIE.

But I remain a supporter of keeping advertising and business interests separate from editorial interests, and working hard at keeping editorial copy, no matter what form of delivery it takes, from morphing into primarily marketing copy, essentially pissing away journalistic credibility in the process. Newsrooms and editorial filters don't create that credibility (and they've already lost a lot of it). It is earned every day with readers/listeners/watchers/co-creators.

So I say, "Don't Tear Down That Wall!" And here is my response posted to the Lost Remote blog post (sorry about the length, but I care too much about this topic to not carry on about it). I'll also quote some bits from Cory Bergman's original article to set some of the context.

Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.

Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business

Cory Bergman February 26th, 2009

With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer likely in its final days, I’ve been attending a few of the many panel discussions and meetups in town about the future of journalism. Here in Seattle, the home of Microsoft and hundreds of other technology companies, surely we can figure out a way to bring journalism back from the brink. Right?

But nearly every one of these discussions, attended mostly by journalists and academics, downgrades into a frustrating and largely meaningless exchange of ideas. The problem: journalists wash their hands of the business side of the equation. That’s the business guys’ problem, said one newspaper journalist. But it’s not. It’s everyone’s problem. And the “Great Wall” separating news and the business side has expedited newspapers’ decline.

Now, I’m not proposing using journalism to influence business decisions, directly or indirectly. I’m proposing leveraging a community through technology to help people make better decisions about their lives — including decisions to buy products and services — which dramatically increases revenue potential. Does Yelp violate journalism ethics by allowing a community to self-organize around business information? Of course not. Does it help serve the user? Absolutely. How about Zvents, a popular social events calendar? Same thing. Can the “business guy” build this all by himself, without the help of journalists, the people arguably closest to the user?

By splitting journalism and business into two buckets separated by a longstanding cultural divide, the two groups fail to collaborate on ideas that tap the strengths of both.

[...]

This level of collaboration and organization-wide commitment has been painfully missing in local media companies. Journalists want to do traditional news, which is repurposed online. Sales folks want to do traditional reach advertising, which is repurposed online. And technology folks, well, they’re usually understaffed and misinterpreted as the “IT folks.”

[...]

Some really great comments available at the original post as well, comments as valuable as the posting. Go read them.

Meanwhile,

Here's my response to Bergman and his commenters:

(I've tweaked my grammar a bit for clarity)

I personally find it extremely hard to believe there is a working journalist who doesn't know that the newspaper's costs are not covered by subscriptions and single copy sales.

This is a core principle of Journalism 101, and every possessor of a journalism degree (I can't vouch for the others) would have had to DITCH quite a lot of classes to have missed that key principle that is instilled in every budding young journalist from day 1.

And if not then, they hear it very quickly on the job, the first time they propose doing a story that has ANYTHING to do with a supermarket, which, as we all know, are TABOO simply because for most small newspapers, they are the biggest advertisers.

I patently disbelieve the problems facing this industry right now have anything to do with the so-called "Great Wall," which in and of itself has become so corrupted over the years by supermarkets and other big advertisers (back to school "special sections," anyone?) as fully as it has by the euphemism of "video press releases" and other similar "interested content suppliers" to newsrooms.

Holding the "Great Wall" to blame is nothing but a rationalizing scapegoat, a paper tiger, a straw man, and journalists are right to defend the little corner of that wall that is left.

Remove the wall, put the column inches up for sale (online or off) and you might as well forget about even calling it journalism, and let it all blur into the amorphous PR that is the REAL corporate agenda behind all this transitional cost-cutting. Hell, let's make them all look like the annual report dittoheads and fluff they will become (worse than it is already).

Whatever you do, don't blame corporate management for carrying too much debt, for sucking up too many papers into their massive behemoths, or for making these overly thick monsters into a giant red herring for the nuggets of real journalism that one has to look to find between all the fodder inserted for the advertiser and not the reader. It sure is awfully convenient for media conglomerate management to blame working journalists and throw us off the real trail.

Now, I will grant you this one primary point: journalists have become too disconnected from their communities, too isolated, too much in a bubble. That is their own fault, but it is also the fault of being part of a massive carpet-bagging corporate newspaper chain (as most of them are), parachuting into distant communities, with management brought in from outside and journalists encouraged to climb climb climb to ever distant metropolises.

Even with that weight, my friends over the years have mostly stayed rooted in communities, been part of them, stayed at single papers far longer than I could have. And do you know what they have faced? Constant corporate cutbacks on local coverage and reporters, CONSTANT, 20 years worth of constant. They fight to get inches for local stories around the AP copy used like so much filler, like so many Ann Landers columns or syndicated comics pages.

Section fronts, in some small towns, are all you get for local from the corporate chains. And barely the staff to fill section fronts. Inside those section fronts, it is worse than fishwrap. These papers in many cases were 100-year institutions and participants in community life, BEFORE the carpet-baggers moved in in order to build a pipeline to syphon local ad revenue out of communities and back into the coffers, or the corporate debt service so they could buy and gut more small town papers.

Journalists not knowing that subscriptions and single copy sales don't pay the bills? Get real. They are reminded of that fact every day that they go out into their communities and attempt to cover stories.

The bigger problem is that by letting advertising drive the bus (and I do support the ad model over a paid subscription model online) is that the advertisers became the REAL audience for the paper. Journalists who stubbornly refused to believe this are a dying breed, especially if they still wrote for communities and readers instead of winning awards and striving for their next step up the corporate chain ladder.

But the bulk of that 66% ad-supported content was as throwaway for readers as you could imagine. The ONLY reason many of those stories even existed was for the advertisers to read and file.

That's the disconnect that the online model will solve, with massive structural changes in the field. Just like women's magazines that place how-to put on make-up stories across from a make-up ad, newspapers allowed their relationships with advertisers to corrupt the papers to the point that their product became too irrelevant for real readers.

Journalism has to court readers again, to be sure, and teach advertisers that readers have more power than the advertisers' push model arrogantly denies them.

Some sure do like thinking turning journalists into entrepreneurs will save the world, and I seriously doubt that. Journalists getting even more cozy in bed with the people (advertisers) that drove their audience away will not bring the audience back.

PR Response Flow Chart: How the Air Force Responds to Blogs

Great cheat sheet to remind one of the most effective ways of managing blog/social media mentions of your brand, product, or service.

If this were my job, I'd print it out and laminate, keep at my desk. It's the sort of quick check that reminds you not to respond emotionally or feed the trolls. It also reminds you to be proactive rather than strictly reactive. I like that.

Link: Diagram: How the Air Force Response to Blogs.

Thanks for the find to Jeremiah Owyang. He credits:

Joey DeVilla for posting this, who learned of this from David Meerman Scott who was in contact with Capt. Faggard who’s involved with the Airforce’s social media team:  Twitter, and a blogspot blog.

Steve Smith: Still A Newspaperman A holiday wish…and reminder

I am still struggling with the current decimation and carnage in the field of journalism, and it will never sit well with me. I've mourned the decline of this field since I was first released from J-School with my undergrad degree, right into the world of Reagan media ownership deregulation, the beginning of the end.

Historic 100-year-old papers started closing back then, in the late 1980s, bought up by chains, multiple-paper cities turned into media monopolies overnight. The Clear Channeling of the rural U.S., where I'd come from, was beginning, and it has taken all this time to penetrate to the biggest metropolitan news-gathering organizations in the country.

For a time, some things ran counter to the trend, idiosyncratic things. USAToday was founded, as if to thumb its nose at the decline, yet its modular design spread virally, literally vaporizing page real estate set aside for the work I did best: full page and double-truck photo essays and stories. I fled to grad school, fully aware I was being put out of business.

And Ted Turner, whom I got to meet in 1986, dared to open international bureaus, to populate the landscape with MORE news-gatherers while chain consolidation was reducing them. Fate favored Turner in the form of the Gulf War of 1991, vindicating his international coverage. Before then, people laughed at his staff-heavy spending as an indulgent whim of a boy-man who liked to race sailboats.

But Ted didn't work hard enough to fend off Time Warner, the chains bought up everything, profits rolled in at 20-30% for shareholders in those newly-public corporations, and the shareholders came to regard those kind of margins as a guarantee.

Much is made of the current debate about the newspaper numbers trending to zero. Much more of the debate between Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and traditional journalists (on Christmas Eve, Jarvis proclaims: "No Hope").

[Pissing Match Links: Ron Rosenbaum Slate Salvo, Jeff Jarvis Snark Return]

I'm not surprised at the debate, just at its intensity. Clay Shirky reminds us that he predicted this vaporizing industry in the late 1990s. I was on the World Wide Web Artists Coalition listserv with Clay back at that time, and remember well when he was first making those arguments.

I did not dispute him then because of what I saw happening to photojournalism at that time: the value of my work, of most photographers' work, was trending to absolute zero, which also happens to be the value of poetry, another field in which I have a degree. Royalty-free CDs had already forced me to realize my copyright-based stock photos had just become worthless, because it cost me more to make the images than the market would pay, ever.

To paraphrase a familiar quotation: They came for the Image People, and the Word People said nothing. They were happy to let us fade away. More space in print for words (the more important bits, was their unspoken righteous assumption).

The Word People didn't want to see their own end coming. They didn't want to think that same trend would ever apply to them. But I was certain at the time that it would.

And then, in the early 2000s, the blog and citizen journalism movement arose, and I enthusiastically championed it, participated in it, and would again in a heartbeat. It was overdue. It was necessary. The gatekeepers HAD become drunk on their own power, not sloppy drunk, just too used to holding the keys to the kingdom. Ironically, I was by then working at CNN, covering another war in the Persian Gulf (from Atlanta), and building blogs for unembedded journalists on the ground in Kurdistan.

Now, the unthinkable is happening right before my eyes, the thing I have been preparing for for the last 25 years, and my heart just aches. I DO NOT WANT THIS FUTURE.

It was some of my J-School students at University of Montana who turned me on to The Spokesman-Review as a paper with an online site I really admired, ESPECIALLY because of the way it integrated photojournalism the way I remembered it, before images morphed off into newsprint postage stamps, like it used to be.  I often linked to original reporting from there, once I started following the paper. It reminded me of the old Detroit Free-Press, had that same feeling in the online edition.

So I knew the name Steve Smith before encountering this story, just as I knew Clay Shirky online when he was making his prophecies. But it is Steve Smith who reminds me below why I am so heartsick, and why I will continue to fight against this watchdog-less future.

Smith's sad post below reminds me of why this will always be my life's work, no matter what I end up doing for a living. Go read the unexcerpted original, especially if this is or was your field too. 

Link: Still A Newspaperman | A holiday wish…and reminder.

A holiday wish…and reminder

Good morning,

For all of the years I worked as a senior editor, I tried to end each calendar year with a memo to my staff thanking them for their hard work, reminding them of the good journalism we had accomplished and wishing them well for the coming year.

I have been struggling in recent days trying to craft a note from my voluntary exile, something appropriate for my former staff and, maybe, appropriate for others who follow this blog.

And I’m finding the words are not coming easily. Maybe it’s the bleak, snowy landscape in Spokane that has left me feeling so inadequate to the task. Or the knowledge that this holiday season has found so many of my former colleagues unemployed and struggling, sitting on the sidelines while our industry stuggles for survival.

[...]

But I am not, by nature, melancholy and certainly not so when I think about the profession to which i have devoted my life. I remain an optimist, if not about the future of newspapers, certainly about the future of journalism.

In struggling to find words for this post, I went back to a speech I gave some years ago to a convention of college journalists. I excerpted a portion of that speech for my farewell note to the staff of The Statesman Journal in 2002. As I re-read that excerpt this morning, I found it still conveys my core beliefs. It expresses my optimism as well as anything I could write today. And so I am going to plagiarize myself for this year’s holiday note.

This is what I wrote in 2002. I re-dedicate it to the staff of The Spokesman-Review, which is doing such good work during the current weather crisis, to my professional friends and colleagues and to the countless students with whom I have worked in the last year.

[...]

Several years ago, Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University penned a book titled “What are journalists for?”

What a terrific question that is.

Here’s my take:

Journalists exist to serve – not ourselves, not our bosses, not our friends, boosters, advertisers or benefactors.

We exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.

Let me say that again…we exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.

And in serving citizens we adhere to certain core values:

Values of community
The marketplace of ideas
The First Amendment
Honesty and truth-telling journalism
Voice to the voiceless
Defense of the defenseless
And in all of this, we are fearless.

That is our calling.

And it is a calling – I believe that with all my heart - a call to service.

If you pursue this calling, this is what you can expect:

Long hours

Low pay

Disappointed parents and frustrated lovers

Generally primitive working conditions in buildings you hate in cities where you’d never want to live.

Your friends will be people just like you, except there won’t be too many of them.

Public officials will distrust and despise you. But, not to worry, many of your loyal readers or viewers will distrust and despise you, too.

A good day will be one in which no one calls to scream in your ear – except that’s a bad day, too, because you obviously haven’t written anything important enough to arouse anyone.

Your spouse will wonder why you don’t know the meaning of a 40-hour, five-day workweek.

And your kids, should you be in a meaningful relationship long enough to have any, will describe you as a “writer” during their show and tell in the hopes classmates will think you do something respectable, like writing pornographic romance novels.

Statistics say you will experience divorce, alcoholism and heart disease at rates higher than the norm. You’ll probably smoke – or wish you could.

You won’t retire to a beach house in Florida. Hell, you probably won’t live to retirement.

But even knowing this in advance, some of you in this room, most of you I hope, are going to pursue the call to service. Already, you can’t imagine doing anything else.

And I am so grateful for that.

I am grateful for the people just like you who work in my newsroom. They are our best and brightest and I am proud every day to be their editor.

They have brains. They have heart. The have the fire in the belly and the courage of their convictions. They bring guts to the party. They work harder than sane people should work and then, on the day when something happens in our world that could change everything, when history hangs in the balance, they are there to write the story.

[...]

And by following in their footsteps, no matter the challenges, you are sustained, whether you work for The New York Times or the Statesman Journal or The Oregon Daily Emerald. You are part of a great tradition that stretches back 250 years. And while we are humbled daily in the practice of that tradition, we must also be proud and honored and steadfast as its stewards.

Ad Age says news-oriented websites have a future, but only if they colonize interactive media in the name of one-to-many MASS media content and push a dying ad model on a rejecting audience

Warning: Highly opinionated rant follows. Blah.

Link: Report: News-oriented Websites Have a Future - Advertising Age - MediaWorks.

This article from Advertising Age is purely E-VILE, so I say. It lives deep in horseless carriage-land, or as another version of "Give a mass media-paradigm-biased analyst a hammer and he suddenly decides everything needs pounding."

The advertising model is dying, and THAT MODEL itself is what's killing newspapers, but what does this analyst call for but MORE PUSH ADVERTISING TO MASS AUDIENCES OF BILLIONS?

Adage.com benevolently decides that there's still hope for the dying newspaper industry, but only if it forces the one-to-many broadcast model to more fully colonize the interactive, many-to-many online ecosystems that are rejecting the ad-supported content model in the first place through time-shifted, ad-skipped viewing, social media interfaces, and unbound content feeds.

But nooooo, what AdAge says newspapers need to do to become more profitable and viable online (and to pay actual quality reporters) is to go back to that Old Time Religion.

The challenge for all sites is garnering enough traffic and creating a discernable enough brand to make advertisers seek them out.

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes.

Those ambitious numbers, she continues, show how hard it is for local news sites to be really profitable, and underscore "why local papers will have trouble offsetting traditional media declines" with revenue from their websites.

The report also looks at whether the Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.

Another sign of the short-sightedness of this approach:

Yahoo, AOL at billion mark
Ms. Fine said sites such as Yahoo News and AOL News already get in the neighborhood of a billion page views a month, and it's not out of the question that NYT.com could too.

"The fact that there are sites out there that are already achieving that suggests that this could work," she said in an interview.

Yahoo and AOL are diverse and INTERACTIVE portals, not finely honed and researched creators of quality content.

In other words, Yahoo and AOL may feature internally-generated content, but it sprawls across a virtual destination that is not fixed or funneled into a narrow set of editorial standards. To compare the NYTimes and its communication model to Yahoo and AOL (which easily pipe out the same AP and Reuters wire content as NYTimes does, but deliver nothing like the same content) is to reveal the lack of understanding of both the content model AND the communications model by people with an inherent MASS media, PUSH ADS, passive consumption bias.

It's like the very idea of Long Tail interactivity patterns never even entered into this analysis, which is based entirely on economies of scale in mass form only.

What's happening to journalism and journalists right now

You hear the news of the layoffs across the board, hitting the big papers, the big TV stations, the big chain media conglomerates (Gannett, Time Warner, Tribune Co).

But it doesn't really sink in until you understand an ENTIRE GENERATION of experienced journalistic talent is being lost. Yes, that was also lost in the late 1980s (I remember 800 people laid off in a fell swoop when the two Little Rock, AR newspapers merged, because that town wasn't big enough for the two of them, according to Gannett. That was repeated in Tulsa, repeated in Anchorage, AK, repeated everywhere). 

But the current purge is making the Reagan media deregulation, which ushered in the era of media monoculture monopoly, the anti-thesis of the "penny press" which, like the blogosphere, let a thousand journalistic flowers bloom, look like child's play.

Instead, the consolidation of the Reagan years left the media ecosystem INTENSELY vulnerable to a single attack of a bark beetle that seems to be wiping out dead tree media, among other things. And that was all in the name of protecting 20-30% shareholder profit margins in the 80s (not exactly an easy PR move to make, to tell all those people you were depriving of their livelihood that it was all in the name of profit margins that retailers and manufacturers haven't seen in decades).

The excuse now is that the gaping pie hole of the Internet isn't sucking up enough of the costs of print media, so to old media monopoly barons that means CONTENT CREATORS have to go. Because no one on the Internet craves news content and analysis, or topical or beat coverage at all, nuh-uh.

You don't think this is screwing up our world? Read the story below, and cry, not for this resilient laid-off reporter. Cry for yourselves, because we will all be deprived of ready access to his and other talented writers' work.

Except for that profitless, frictionless, RSS distribution system that is the Blogosphere.

All Hail the Long Tail!

Link: Gannett reporter made "independent" by noon: Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon.

Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon

By Bruce Richie

I started out this morning as a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. I ended the work day as an "independent journalist."

At 8:45 I headed over to Marpan Recycling to work on a story about the state's goal of achieving 75 percent recycling by 2020. That was the goal spelled out earlier this year in a comprehensive state energy bill. And the goal is about three times as much as the state is recycling now.

At Marpan, they're recycling about 2/3 of the construction waste that comes in. Concrete, metal, cardboard and wood are the main products that are sold to recyclers along with mulch.

Marpan's Kim Williams said the state could boost recycling if people purchased more products from recycled materials to boost markets. Starting in January, all construction waste now going to Leon County's landfill will go through Marpan first for recycling.

Upon heading into the office shortly after 10, I was called into the office of Executive Editor Bob Gabordi. I knew what was coming, especially when I saw managing editor Africa Price there.

I was being laid off, Bob explained, and he asked if I had any questions. I could have responded more politely but frankly I was annoyed. My job had already been changed three times this year, and now I was being put out of work. But we shook hands, they offered to help me and I offered to help them in the future. There was a modest severance package.

   Then I went home. I checked my e-mails. I returned a few phone calls. And I didn't know what to do next.

   So I ate my lunch and went to work.

   I went to the same state hearing that I had been planning on going to. But now I wasn't a Tallahassee Democrat reporter.

[...]

About 100 people attended, many of them from county recycling programs. Speakers chimed in with ideas about how the state could better educate residents to recycle or how it needs to create new markets for recyclable materials.

It seemed like news to me, but I was the only reporter there to cover it. And I wasn't even a newspaper reporter any more. Perhaps the other media were at the Environmental Regulation Commission meeting across town, where an important vote was scheduled on whether to adopt California's auto emissions. Or maybe they were not there either.

Earlier this year I would have covered the ERC instead. But my environmental reporting job got axed on Aug. 1 and I was reassigned to cover Leon County. Since recycling is inherently local, I figured I could at least cover the interesting concept of recycling 75 percent of our waste.

In this age of change, I feel certain there is a place for me to report on the important issues in Florida's Capital. Maybe I'll become a blogger, combined with some freelancing, combined with being on welfare. The reality hasn't really set in yet.

[...]

Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free

Link: Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free | The Blog Herald.

Link: TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program

Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.

Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.

We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported online journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worrried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence.

Wow, this is wild. I knew there were many reasons I've always got on so well with the folks over at Six Apart, since back in the early days, but here's something amazing. Turns out my old acquaintance Anil Dash is behind it. I love his post about the rationale behind it, here.

As demoralizing as all the newspaper, magazine, and media layoffs are, and despite Tina Brown over at The Daily Beast trying to scoop up all the laid off journalism talent she can snag away from Arianna Huffington over at Huffington Post (What, are Daily Beast and HuffPo going to become like the Elephants' Graveyard, the place where old journalists go to die?), good old Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, Typepad, Vox (and do they still own LiveJournal?) is opening the door to journalistic self-publishing.

What a relief! The problem I had with using Typepad with the sometimes technophobic journalists that I built blogs for (not all) is that they often have trouble setting them up in the first place, putting up the basic design. On the other hand, Typepad usability is the best (I think) for handholding noobs, and its interface still after all these years FEELS the most friendly.

When I was teaching my journalism seminar at the University of Montana, I could have gone with a free service, like Blogger (WordPress wasn't really a player yet at that time), but I forced the students to use the paid Typepad service, and because of it, got them up and running in the shortest time possible.

And the moral of this story, imho, is never underestimate the amount of handholding new users may need.

And at the same time (from Typepad's POV) it may also attempt to hang on to a professional user base that is being increasingly lured away to module, online magazine-style themes that are increasingly becoming popular on WordPress.

I'm looking forward to a new slew of journalists taking control of their profession from the corporate publishing interests, dictating better story selection, sounding off about the state of the field, with this terrific move from Six Apart for Typepad!

Link: Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free | The Blog Herald.

Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free

by Thord Daniel Hedengren

Six Apart has a clever “program” up to get recently laid off journalists to start blogging. They’re calling it the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Basically, it gives journalists these things for free:

• A TypePad Pro account for free. Usually costs $14,95/month.
• Enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program, to get the ad dollars rolling.
• An extra push on blogs.com.

They also offer support and whatnot, all for free. The only thing the journos need to do is send a link to their last piece for a newspaper or similar. And according to the post, there’s been an overwhelming interest in this, so they’re lagging a bit behind on setting the accounts up, but no word on closing the program.

You know what? This is brilliant!

My hat’s off to whoever on Six Apart that came up with this idea. It’s a great way to get journalists blogging, since most of them (or us, in some cases) just need an economic incentive and a set platform to get started. The pure notion that you’ve got everything set up, and ads rolling right away, well, that’s bound to attract a lot of people.

Me included, actually. I’m a bit curious to this, but since I haven’t been sacked from any of my writing gigs yet, I don’t think I can apply. Too bad.

Great work, Six Apart, and a great PR stunt as well!

 

Now this is one hell of a Dutch mint!

Link: Cool new Dutch coin.

How cool is this? Yeow! I just couldn't pass it up. Thanks to Kottke.org.

Cool new Dutch coin

Matthew Dent's new coinage for the UK was pretty great, but this Dutch commemorative coin is a fully contemporary chunk of wow.

On the front, the names of famous Dutch architects form an image of the queen while some Dutch architecture books on the back form an outline of The Netherlands. The design was done using free software running on Ubuntu/Debian. (via design observer)

 

Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering "citizen media" Publish-On-Demand market?

UPDATE 3/30/08: A commenter below (A.F. Stewart) has left a link for an online petition against Amazon's new policy, and I wanted to make it live and promote it also up here at the top of the post:

Buy buttons have now been disabled, (PublishAmerica and Whiskey Press) and Amazon's policy is to do it to all who don't fall into line.

Voice your protest, sign the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectPOD

Thanks for the link, A.F.!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

I am republishing this courageous post from Writer's Weekly in its entirety, in order to help spread the word. That Amazon.com (normally quite supportive of key aspects of the Citizen Media Movement and its most democratizing elements) would attempt such a thing just leaves me speechless.

I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that the negative PR from such a heavy-handed move by a key gatekeeper rebounds badly and forces Amazon to allow the POD books the same rights and privileges as ANY published book with its own ISBN number.

Could you imagine Amazon dictating such a policy to any small university or literary press? What about selected political publishing houses devoted to giving voice to the Thomas Paines of our day?

Amazon made its name by becoming an online equivalent of our Library of Record. Google has now entered that arena, and the competition was necessary, but we can't expect the Barnes & Noble to take up that mantle, and I don't think it could; its interface is too weak and its devoted user base too also-ran. Many of the affected writers are turning to B&N as an alternative, and that could be a good move, if for nothing else, it could help B&N become a better true competitor to Amazon, but B&N has a long way to go.

Could it really be that Amazon is trying to bite the Long Tail that feeds it?

The Internet can be a truly open space only so long as our searches remain honest. Both Amazon and Google have an obligation to citizens of cyberculture not to go all border collie on us and use their power as gate-keepers at their leveraged choke-points of power as oppressive agents of social control against more democratizing forces online.

I hope to follow this issue more in the future, as I learn more about what's happening here, and Amazon's reaction to a public backlash. I should note that key groups particularly affected by this development are FANWRITERS, a massive constituency of fan fiction writers online who develop their skills and corpus of works in specific fandom communities. I have analyzed this social citizen media phenomena in my dissertation, and in the years since, have followed the careers of many successful writers who have "graduated" from fandom audiences to POD, often bringing their own quite sizable audience of fans with them. The effects of this move by Amazon below on the vast worlds of specific fandoms is just chilling.

The good news, which Amazon may not have realized, is that online fandoms are not simply intensely-focused affinity groups. As I also found in my dissertation, they are highly-organized activist organizations. While charities (on the positive side) cable television production houses and networks (on both the positive and negative side) are most often the targets of their organized activism (other sectors of politics and business should take note!), these fandom groups can easily turn on a dime and activate their bases against any target.

If Amazon should step back from this oppressive policy and I somehow miss it, please let me know, so I can also note the change here, when it happens. I have no interest in sharing this outrage in error, nor do I want to lose my faith in Amazon.

Say it ain't so! Please!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

March 27, 2008

Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else...

BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the "buy" button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the "buy" button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.

PublishAmerica issued a press release today that states, "PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon's ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica's books, and at what conditions."

~~~~~

Some Print on Demand (POD) publishers are privately screaming "Monopoly!" while others are seething with rage over startling phone conversations they're having with Amazon/BookSurge representatives. Why isn't anybody talking about it openly? Because they're afraid - very, very afraid.

Amazon.com purchased BookSurge, a small POD publisher/printer back in 2005. Amazon also lists and sells titles for the largest POD printer, Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram (the large book distributor). According to their website, Lightning Source serves more than 4,300 publisher clients and has more than 400,000 titles in their system.

You'd think Amazon's purchase of BookSurge might have made things a bit uncomfortable between the two companies. However, they continued to work together, getting books on demand to Amazon.com's loyal customers. Things appeared to be cruising along just fine, but perhaps not anymore.

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon's Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted "free shipping" that Amazon offers.

Don't believe it? I didn't believe it either. I am Angela Hoy, the co-owner of POD services company BookLocker.com and publisher of WritersWeekly.com. I am well-known in the industry for my activism performed through WritersWeekly Whispers and Warnings. Over the years, we have helped writers recover tens of thousands of dollars in fees from deadbeat editors and publishers, helped them negotiate better contract terms, assisted writers in obtaining payment after their copyrights have been violated, and even assisted police in collecting evidence to prosecute criminals who have preyed on writers. I am also the author of 11 non-fiction books.

Still doubting the reports could really be true, I emailed an Amazon/BookSurge representative who's been trying to get us to talk to him by phone. John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge called me at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

My first comment was to tell him we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn't use BookSurge would have the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.

He said, "What? Who told you that? That's not true!"

I told him I'd heard some rumors from the "POD underground."

He said he'd previously tried to talk to my husband, Richard Hoy, the President and CEO of BookLocker. I explained that we had a very bad experience with BookSurge in the past and that he was, naturally, hesitant to do business with them again. (Google the words BookSurge complaint without any quotes to see other customers' comments about them as well.)

He claimed the people who worked for BookSurge back then are probably all gone (but that didn't explain the more recent complaints). He made his sales pitch, talking about percentages and such, and said many POD publishers are resisting their attempts to convert to BookSurge. Mr. Clifford also said BookSurge's aim was to help Amazon customers get their books faster.

What he didn't say was that Lightning Source not only packages books for Amazon customers in boxes that feature an Amazon.com return address label, but also drop-ships those orders directly to Amazon customers at Amazon's request. Hmm...

He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge's system would be "taken down." Since that wasn't exactly what we'd heard, I asked about books that perhaps weren't selling well, that aren't good candidates for converting to BookSurge (books that would remain for sale through Lightning Source, but would never be converted to BookSurge due to the time/expense involved).

Contrary to what he stated at the very beginning of our conversation, Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.

Mr. Clifford said authors of those books could participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program, meaning they would have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year PLUS 55% of the list price of their book, as well as buy and then send those books to Amazon directly for them to warehouse and ship to customers.

I explained to him that we had more than 1500 books in print and that it would take quite awhile to convert all of those over to BookSurge's system. He said as long as the relationship was "moving forward" that the "buy" button would remain active on our authors' books that had not yet been switched.

Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!

I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos is even aware of what is going on within his organization. Here is Amazon's Vision Statement, taken directly from their website:

"Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

What it doesn't say is, "Our customers can buy any print on demand book they might want online...as long as we also get paid to print it."

Nobody likes being backed into a corner, and saying "do this or else" naturally breeds angry rejection and hostility. If we did agree to sign the contract, pulling and transferring files to Amazon/Booksurge would take an enormous amount of time and money. From the POD publishers we've talked to, and from our own experience at BookLocker, we could all be looking at a dire and immediate threat of revenue cuts if we refuse to sign the Amazon/BookSurge contract. Most importantly, there could be an outcry from and potential financial hardship on the authors, who are completely innocent in all of this.

In BookLocker's opinion, and the opinion of all the fellow Lightning Source customers we talked to, the Amazon/BookSurge proposal does not appear attractive at all (yes, we obtained the contract and the file submission specifications). Amazon/BookSurge would make money two ways on Amazon.com sales - first the fee for printing the books, and then 48% of the list price of each sale through Amazon.com. Lightning Source allows its customers to set their own discount rate for Amazon and other retail sales, and does not force POD publishers or authors to pay "48%."

Furthermore, it could take the larger POD publishers months to submit their book files to Amazon/BookSurge, at a considerable cost and number of man-hours. This makes the deal even less attractive. Finally, while the initial list of books submitted by POD publishers could be submitted to Amazon/BookSurge for free, the contract states future books would cost $50 each to process. The cost for individual authors to publish through BookSurge is considerably more, with an average publishing package cost of more than $1,000.

Since Amazon/BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution (Ingram distribution is considered imperative in the industry for bookstore sales), any company that accepts the Amazon/BookSurge deal, who desires to keep offering Ingram distribution, may need to maintain two copies of the book files. Since the Amazon/BookSurge current specs don't match the Lightning Source specs, future book files, both interior and cover, may need to be formatted separately. So, they would have to pay double the setup fees and might have to do double the formatting work as well...or pay designers to do double the formatting work.

Likewise, self-published authors who believe they must have Ingram Distribution AND an active "buy" button on Amazon to be successful may need to pay double the setup fees (to a POD publisher AND Amazon/BookSurge), and also may need to create two separate sets of formatted files.

In the event where two versions of a book might be available, Mr. Clifford said the Amazon/BookSurge version of the POD book would trump (override) the version offered by Lightning Source on Amazon.com.

AMAZON WAS BUILT BY BOOKS....That Were Written By AUTHORS

When authors get wind of this, we believe they are going to be livid. Authors are also readers. They love books. We suspect they buy from Amazon in droves. I, myself, have been an Amazon junkie for years, not only heavily promoting Amazon.com in my non-fiction books for writers and on our very popular website, WritersWeekly.com, but also listing my own books for sale there, ordering other authors' books, DVDs and numerous other products as well. I pulled up our Amazon customer account and looked at our receipts. We've spent $1508.81 at Amazon.com in the past six months. Multiply that by the number of authors this will affect...authors who, like me, have a multitude of websites to choose from when doing their shopping online.

In addition, authors participate in the Amazon experience, via blogs on the website, by posting reviews about other books, and more, activities that help to continually make Amazon bigger and better. Authors are a loyal bunch! For years, they've been faithfully sending their readers to Amazon.com, again and again, even when they earned lower royalties for doing so.

It's not inconceivable to think that this group, if shoved against a wall like this, won't simply pledge their allegiance elsewhere. Let's face it, BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more, too. Authors can change the links to their book pages on their websites, in their ezines and press releases, and even in their email signatures to their book's page at BarnesandNoble.com. Authors can spend their own money elsewhere as well (as I plan to do). I imagine BarnesandNoble.com will be very happy to process the extra book sales that could result from all of this.

Amazon.com might also upset countless companies that have Amazon Affiliate bookstores on their websites (many authors have these, too!). If Amazon/BookSurge were to follow through with turning off the "buy" buttons for thousands of POD titles, customers following those links from other websites could be confused and annoyed. After clicking on a link, they would find no easy way to purchase the book directly from Amazon, and no way to obtain free shipping on that book, even if they're willing to buy more products to meet the $25 free shipping threshold. One would think Amazon must know the free shipping strategy works to upsell customers on additional products. That's why they offer it. Without it, these customers could have no incentive to buy more products because the product they surfed in to buy does not qualify.

One has to wonder if traditional publishers will be next? Will Amazon eventually require all books sold through Amazon.com to be printed by BookSurge?

Let's all hope and pray this situation is one huge, misguided idea from some mid-level management person and not corporate policy being dictated from the office of Jeff Bezos.

What can you do? Let Amazon know what you think about this "offer" by Amazon/BookSurge.

The names of their Officers and Directors are here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govManage

Amazon's Investor Relations Team email address appears near the bottom of this page: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq

Their address is:

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Next, tell your author friends, your book buyers, your website visitors, your ezine subscribers and everyone else about this situation. Amazon.com was built on books. Books are written by authors. Unfortunately, it appears authors may ultimately be the innocent pawns in this power struggle.

~~~~~

[...]

Angela Hoy is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, which offers free job listings and paying markets for freelance writers every Wednesday. Subscribe at WritersWeekly.com. She is also the publisher at BookLocker, which offers full-service, affordable print on demand publishing and free ebook publishing.

~~PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHORS FROM ANGELA~~

There is no reason to panic. We are not aware of any cases yet where the "buy" button has been removed. It is possible, after recognizing everyone's concerns, that Amazon might change its mind.

If they do turn off the "buy" buttons, though, not having an active "buy" button on Amazon.com is not the end of the world.

After selling books for eight years, it has been our experience that "chance purchases" of self-published books on Amazon.com are not the norm. Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don't market them, and sell zero copies. For most self-published authors, sales are almost always author-driven, meaning the bookstore link you use in your marketing efforts is what's driving your sales, not just simply having your book listed on Amazon.com.

We know from experience that the customer is going to buy your book from where you tell them to buy your book. If you want your customers to qualify for free shipping, you can send them to BarnesandNoble.com, and tell them their order might qualify for free shipping (many people don't know BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping!).

Jury backs Blackboard Inc. patent claim against Desire2Learn

This is killing me just so badly, I had to post on it. Those who know me well know the reason why the entire saga sticks my my craw, beyond the reasons cited in the article below. I'm hoping for a drawn-out appeal process, perhaps all the way to Supreme Court, with a lot of mainstream media attention.

Here's a bit from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (I can't believe the content is outside their oppressive firewall... that's an odd change)

Link: Blackboard Inc. Is Awarded Payment From Competitor in Patent Case - Chronicle.com.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Blackboard Inc. Is Awarded Payment From Competitor in Patent Case

By KATHERINE MANGAN

Austin, Tex.

A federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard Inc. $3.1-million on Friday, saying that a smaller Canadian competitor, Desire2Learn Inc., had infringed its patent for a system of delivering course materials online. The jury also found that Desire2Learn had not shown clear and convincing evidence that Blackboard's patent was invalid.

Blackboard's general counsel, Matthew Small, said the verdict validated the company's assertion, which has been challenged by many higher-education technology experts, that its system was unique when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Blackboard the patent in 2006. The office agreed last year to take another look at the patent after Desire2Learn and others challenged its validity. That review is still pending.

"They won this round, but the battle is not over by any stretch of the imagination," John Baker, president and chief executive of Desire2Learn, said in an interview Friday. "We'll continue to fight and hopefully remove from the educational community this very dark cloud."

The company is considering several options, including appealing the verdict, continuing to challenge the patent at the federal level, and modifying its software so it does not infringe Blackboard's patent.

Mr. Baker said he was "shocked" when the jury announced its decision after deliberating for nine hours over two days in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin. The trial lasted two weeks.

[...]

Blackboard, which is based in Washington, sued the smaller, Canadian-based company in 2006, saying Desire2Learn had infringed its patent and taken away customers that should have been Blackboard's (The Chronicle, Aug. 2, 2006). The Canadian company has been one of Blackboard's primary competitors since Blackboard took over another rival, WebCT, in 2006.

'Prior Art' Dispute

Desire2Learn, which has its headquarters in Kitchener, Ontario, argued that Blackboard's patent was invalid and should never have been granted in the first place. Lawyers for the company said that Blackboard officials were aware of similar technology, or what's known as "prior art," that existed before it filed its patent application, and that the company had failed to divulge that information to the patent office.

The judge in the case, Ron Clark, rejected that argument.

Mr. Small said Blackboard never claimed to have invented the course-management system. What the company did invent, he said, is "a course-management system where a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles across multiple classes." For instance, a person who was a student in one course and a teaching assistant in another could log on once and access all of his course materials.

"It really was transformative for the industry," Mr. Small said. "We knew we were the first doing it at the time, and that's why we applied for the patent. People look at the technology now and say that's obvious, but at the time, we were the first, and we're very proud of it."

[...]

"This is a signal event in educational technology," said Alfred H. Essa, associate vice chancellor and deputy chief information officer for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. "It means that the big boys are playing for keeps and will use their patent portfolio at any cost to crush and deter new entrants. As a community, it will take us a long time to recover from this mess."

[...]

Eben Moglen is founding director and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, an advocacy group for open-source software that has challenged Blackboard's patent. Mr. Moglen, who is also a professor of law at Columbia University, said there is plenty of evidence, presented both in the trial, and to the federal patent office, of similar technology that existed before Blackboard's patent was issued. He added that his group plans to continue fighting to invalidate Blackboard's patent.

"We see this attempt to strangle or force licensing of Desire2Learn on the basis of an invalid patent as clear evidence that Blackboard cannot be trusted," Mr. Moglen said.

[...]

But Mr. Small, the Blackboard lawyer, said the "highly educated jury" included two people with master's degrees in information systems, two others who were academic-computing administrators, and the city's postmaster."

Their decision left many in the industry wondering just how much power Blackboard now wields.

Peter A. Schilling, director of information technology at Amherst College, said colleges may decide it's too risky to use any course-management system other than Blackboard's. The patent, he said, is so broadly written that professors may be afraid to even use wikis or blogs.

Blackboard's president, Michael L. Chasen, testified during the trial that his company will not sue colleges that use open-source software to create their own online learning systems. Mr. Small repeated that promise during the trial and pointed out that his company signed a legally binding pledge promising that it would not take action against colleges that use free, open-source software.

[...]

It's that bold paragraph above (emphasis mine) that chaps my hide so completely. As I was reading all the court materials and blog postings about this, I found myself thinking the exact same thing as Peter Schilling above.

It is just chilling. I really don't trust what Blackboard says in the paragraph after that, simply because of the way this patent was set up, and now, so oppressively enforced.

Backstory: at one time I was working on an interface design (very different in its foundational model from Blackboard's, partly because I was so dissatisfied with the Blackboard products), an interface for which I also entertained the notion of submitting for a patent.

I still have those materials and that model, which is why I was looking at the Blackboard patent claims so closely, and while I still need to read more of the fine print, I have to say, if what they have is their criteria for a patent, there are quite a lot of us who worked with educational and groupware software interfaces who could have patented our work 15 years ago or more. What a scam!

I'm not quite sure why the prior art claim was dismissed so easily. I expect that to come back up again. I hope there will be more to come, and that this ridiculous decision will not be left to stand.