Price Increases
As it tries to grapple with industry-wide a significant drop in advertising revenues and circulation, The New York Times is expected to announce a newsstand price increase in the coming days. The market predicts that the New York Times could increase its price 25% from $1.50 to $2.00 for Monday to Saturday editions and 20% from $5 to $6 on Sundays. A bold move and a bold increase, especially considering it raised its cover price of its Monday to Saturday editions by 20% or 25 cents to $1.50 only last year.
The NYT is not alone in price increases with the Wall Street Journal raising the cover price by 50 cents in each of the last two years and the Financial Times implemented 50 cent increases in US cover prices in 2005, 2007 and 2008. The Boston Globe raised its weekday cover price to 75 cents from 50 cents and is expected to rise to $1 within the city and $1.50 outside Greater Boston. The Sunday Globe will rise to $3.50 in the city and $4 elsewhere.
iPhone Free
Despite charging for its website and print version, The Wall Street Journal has a new iPhone application that is free. The technology platform to enable the app to be charged isn’t live yet and may not be up until the second half of the year! It will be interesting to watch them wean free users onto subscriptions but until then the content remains free on both their Blackberry and iPhone apps and charged elsewhere.
More Closures and Lay Offs
The New York Times is planning to notify federal authorities of its plans to shut down the Boston Globe and the newspaper could cease to exist within weeks. The paper's circulation has dropped 14% in the last six-month period and is expected to lose $85 million this year. If union negotiations fail to deliver additional savings then the axe may fall and its fate follow that of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Kindle 3?
On the Digital front, Amazon has announced that will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning at a Pace University building New York. What is special about the news conference? First its on the site of the old New York Times offices and secondly its is widely predicted the announcement will launch K3, a Kindle with a larger screen.
Why a bigger screen and why the Pace location? Again it’s widely predicted the K3 is their answer to the newsprint and magazine sector – a larger screen Kindle. Amazon needs to head off Plastic Logic and the rest of the larger readers and try to capture those digital subscriptions today and not wait for others to take them. Are the NYT involved or merely a spectator -we will discover on Wednesday.
Showing posts with label belgian newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label belgian newspapers. Show all posts
Monday, May 04, 2009
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Be Careful What You Wish For
CopNews often comes in a series of blips and joining those together starts to give you the bigger picture or raise questions not answered in the often sanitized press releases. Last week we wrote on the then breaking news of Microsoft’s decision to walk away from Live book search and its impact. Today we read in the Guardian, that Belgian newspapers are asking for €49m in damages from Google for publishing and storing content without paying, or asking permission.
Whether we are talking Google News or Google Books we are talking ‘digital land grab’. The process is simple - digitize and be dammed, or scan first and ask later. In the US the pending Orphan Act will make this sort of activity easier, but although we see the omnivore that is Google, there are others busy exploiting the availability of materials and the inability of many to achieve, digitize or in some cases know who owns what. Public domain book works are being scanned and digitised in droves by many. Some are also venturing into that murkier area between public domain and in print.
We see two problems, one controlling the hovering up of today’s material and secondly the question of who owns what?
Last year Google lost a lawsuit to a number of French-language Belgian newspapers and was forced to remove their content from Google News and their search engine that had been taken without permission. Copiepresse, an organization that represents the French and German language Belgian press, is now seeking damages based on articles stored via Google Search since 2001 and on Google News since it was launched in Belgium in 2006.
Google has deep pockets and has taken a position which has contested the ruling, arguing that they drive traffic to publishers' websites and that Google News only shows headlines and snippets and thumbnail images. That’s ok then! Search and index the total work, take ownership of the digitalized content, but only show limited content today. The arrogance of such logic is at best questionable and at worst fascicle.
Today, we now find ourselves at the mercy of Google and without that other omnivore predator. Publishers have in many cases argued it is healthy to give them content as they drive up sales, others that they are stealing it. Whatever your viewpoint the question that must be answered is what do they intend to do with it tomorrow? Will they always us it as they do today? Can they re assign it to others, either in part or whole? Can the copyright owner revert rights, given or taken, if the copyright ownership of the original work changes? Can the originator object? History is littered with cases where the result was not what people expected to happen at the beginning and where market dominance created a new venture not previously envisaged.
Publishing is a rights business yet we often seem to struggle managing them and the older the content the murkier rights become. Today is the right time to revisit the question of Google’s Book programme and not continue to go blindly forward as if nothing has changed.
Whether we are talking Google News or Google Books we are talking ‘digital land grab’. The process is simple - digitize and be dammed, or scan first and ask later. In the US the pending Orphan Act will make this sort of activity easier, but although we see the omnivore that is Google, there are others busy exploiting the availability of materials and the inability of many to achieve, digitize or in some cases know who owns what. Public domain book works are being scanned and digitised in droves by many. Some are also venturing into that murkier area between public domain and in print.
We see two problems, one controlling the hovering up of today’s material and secondly the question of who owns what?
Last year Google lost a lawsuit to a number of French-language Belgian newspapers and was forced to remove their content from Google News and their search engine that had been taken without permission. Copiepresse, an organization that represents the French and German language Belgian press, is now seeking damages based on articles stored via Google Search since 2001 and on Google News since it was launched in Belgium in 2006.
Google has deep pockets and has taken a position which has contested the ruling, arguing that they drive traffic to publishers' websites and that Google News only shows headlines and snippets and thumbnail images. That’s ok then! Search and index the total work, take ownership of the digitalized content, but only show limited content today. The arrogance of such logic is at best questionable and at worst fascicle.
Today, we now find ourselves at the mercy of Google and without that other omnivore predator. Publishers have in many cases argued it is healthy to give them content as they drive up sales, others that they are stealing it. Whatever your viewpoint the question that must be answered is what do they intend to do with it tomorrow? Will they always us it as they do today? Can they re assign it to others, either in part or whole? Can the copyright owner revert rights, given or taken, if the copyright ownership of the original work changes? Can the originator object? History is littered with cases where the result was not what people expected to happen at the beginning and where market dominance created a new venture not previously envisaged.
Publishing is a rights business yet we often seem to struggle managing them and the older the content the murkier rights become. Today is the right time to revisit the question of Google’s Book programme and not continue to go blindly forward as if nothing has changed.
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