Rabu, 04 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Why the Denver Post is putting more local news on A1

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 01:49 PM PDT

The Denver Post building

Denver Post editor Greg Moore penned a surprising announcement on the front page of the print edition today: “Every day except Sunday, the front page and the first part of Section A generally will be devoted to our metro report, what we call Denver & the West…The second part of the A section will be focused on national and world news.”

That’s a bit unusual for a major metro paper — relegating national headlines to inside pages. I called Moore (a former Nieman advisory board member) for more details.

We had to make some space reductions. Once we realized we had to make some space reductions, we tried to figure out: What’s the smartest way to do it? Our philosophy has long, long been that we really swing out with our local stuff. That’s the unique, unduplicated content that you can only really get from your local newspaper. We felt like our A section, which had the bulk of our space, was really devoted to something that was a little bit secondary to us. And so we just took the opportunity to use that news hole in a more aggressive way to promote and showcase our local coverage.

(As Denver writer Michael Roberts noted, it looks a bit like the late Rocky Mountain News.)

Newspapers have an ever-growing burden to demonstrate their value to readers. What can I get from The Denver Post that I can’t get (free) from The Huffington Post?

The Post’s national content is typically provided by The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Often, these are commodity stories, stories that readers can easily find elsewhere on the web — and, in many cases, stories that readers aren’t seeing for the first time in the morning paper.

“You’re trying to really show people that the reporting that you spend the bulk of your time and money on is really unique, can’t be gotten anyplace else,” Moore told me. “We really want to promote the fact that we are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to promote our local communities, and this demonstrates it better than any words can say.”

The newspaper’s shift comes not long after last September’s announcement that MediaNews, the chain of which The Denver Post is a part, would be coming under the management of Digital First Media, the John Paton-led vehicle for Journal Register Co.’s management team. Digital First’s mantra — repeated here at the Nieman Foundation just last week when Jim Brady was in for a visit — is own your community. (And let the other guys handle the rest.)

Moore would not tell me what or how much was cut from the print edition, but he said it’s “pretty substantial.”

So why no change to the Sunday edition? Readers use the paper differently on Sunday, Moore said. They spend more time with it; they expect something more comprehensive. “Sunday is our signature product…It’s the driver for everything: our reputation, our influence, and our revenue,” he said. “I felt like it was not really something I had to mess with.”

Reaction in Denver has been mostly positive, Moore said. “I’ve also gotten some critical emails from people who think that we’re becoming a small-town newspaper and we’re de-emphasizing our national and foreign news — which, of course, neither is true.”

Photo of the Denver Post building by Alfonso Pierantonio used under a Creative Commons license.

Nonprofit status: A maybe for news orgs, a yes for the NFL

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 11:25 AM PDT

I like football, so I was interested in this piece over at Pro Football Talk that details the salary of National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell. (That’s $11,554,000 — not bad.) But then I was surprised to see that this information came from the NFL’s just-filed Form 990.

Wait — 990? As in, the form nonprofits are required to file once a year?

Yep. At a time when civic-minded news organizations are battling for recognition from the IRS — in some cases waiting more then two years to hear whether they’ll be allowed to be nonprofits — the NFL is a not-for-profit. Filing 990s and everything. (Here’s a link to the NFL on Guidestar. The league describes itself as a “trade association promoting interests of its 32 member clubs.”)

Technically, the NFL isn’t a 501(c)(3) — that allows orgs that “Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition.” It’s a 501(c)(6), “Business Leagues, Chambers of Commerce, Real Estate Boards, etc.” And NFL teams themselves aren’t tax-exempt. But the NFL proper still managed to rake in $207 million in 2009, a number that’s no doubt grown since then.

I’m sure there are good legal reasons why the NFL is a nonprofit. But this isn’t the Nieman Football Lab. (Interesting take from Brian Frederick here. And this paper by lawyer Andrew Delaney argues the NFL is a “glorified tax shelter.”)

The future-of-journalism point here is that the NFL has found a spot in the vagaries of the tax code — a defined niche in which they can fit. Journalism doesn’t have that kind of a spot, as we’ve explored. I just wish the IRS could find a way to give dozens of small, community-oriented news organizations the same sort of status as one of America’s most successful companies.

Image by Jonathan Moreau used under a Creative Commons license.

DocumentCloud removes email dump after legal threat

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT

When the Australian Financial Review blew open a new front in News Corporation’s ongoing scandals last week, it did so with the help of DocumentCloud.

That’s because the Financial Review’s investigation hinged on 14,400 emails connected to the NDS Group, of which News Corp holds a minority stake, that implicate the tech company in a plan to undercut rivals by hacking their satellite TV software. All those emails? Indexed, annotated, and hosted on DocumentCloud. Or at least they were until recently, when attorneys for NDS asked that the emails be taken down.

On Saturday, NDS — which has confirmed the authenticity of the emails through legal correspondence with The Australian Financial Review  and DocumentCloud — asked that they be removed.

DocumentCloud asked Fairfax Media, publisher of the Financial Review, to indemnify it against any future legal action. Fairfax Media declined to give this assurance.

The emails are already, in Internet fashion, out there, and the Financial Review has already began rehosting some of them in .zip form on its own server.

The legal risk of an intermediary

What’s interesting about this story is it demonstrates the tricky position DocumentCloud can find itself in when acting as an intermediate layer for sensitive information. Just as Amazon opened itself up to legal pressure when it hosted WikiLeaks on its cloud service, DocumentCloud could face potential legal risk for the documents it hosts.

That’s a line DocumentCloud lays this out fairly clearly in its terms of service, which includes language stating users will not use DocumentCloud “to publish or otherwise make public (collectively "publish") documents that you do not have the legal right to distribute publicly” or “to infringe any copyright, trademark, patent, or other proprietary rights of any person.”

When I spoke to Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, he said the Australian Financial Review case is only the second take down notice they’ve faced since DocumentCloud became a part of IRE last year and the first time they’ve had to remove information from the site. In the other case, lawyers claimed, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that hosted documents infringed on copyright. In the Australian case, the legal claim centered on the allegation that the documents contained confidential information and potential trade secrets, Horvit said.

Horvit said they followed the same procedure they always do when contacted by an attorney about removing documents, asking the news organization if, first, it can provide justification (legal or otherwise) for posting certain information, and second, if it will indemnify DocumentCloud against any legal action. Horvit said Financial Review and its parent company declined to do both, which meant the emails were taken down.

Distributed document hosting

It’s important to note that, along with its hosted service, DocumentCloud releases its work as open source software. That means any news organization — or anyone else — is free to use DocumentCloud’s code to build its own hosted version, on its own secure server, with many of the same capabilities, Aron Pilhofer, DocumentCloud’s co-founder told me. Pilhofer, who is also interactive news editor at The New York Times, said that provides a little bit of breathing room for news organizations whose lawyers may be wary of exposing newspapers to risk through partnering with a third-party. “Our goal was to protect both our members, but also provide protection for newspapers,” he said.

When I asked Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project, about what protections news outlets and partners such as DocumentCloud have in cases like this, he told me there is some precedent that favors protecting news providers. Over email, Hermes said it’s uncertain if that also includes sites that collaborate with news outlets. (Not to mention that adding Australian law into the mix would complicate things further.)

In the U.S., the Supreme Court held in Bartnicki v. Vopper that the First Amendment protects the republication by a news outlet of illegally-obtained material on a matter of public importance, so long as the news outlet did not itself participate in the illegal activity. (In the Bartnicki case, the material at issue was an illegal recording of a conversation between a labor official and other union members about a strike which was leaked to a media defendant; the media defendant had nothing to do with making the recording.) Ever since Wikileaks burst upon the scene, it has been a matter of debate whether Bartnicki extends to online hosting services.
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