But Greg Golebiewski, the founder and CEO of a micropayment provider, thinks this conventional wisdom is wrong, and that media companies are missing a lucrative opportunity.

Golebiewski’s company is called Znak It, and he says he has spent the past five years or so trying to convince publishers and media companies of all kinds that they should at least experiment with micropayments — and that they could actually make more from such a model than they do from a paywall, while also attracting new readers who might never get beyond the subscription barrier. But with only a handful of clients using his system, most of them located in eastern Europe, the Znak It founder is still very much a lonely voice crying in the media wilderness.

“I’ve been trying to sell this idea for the past five years — it’s extremely difficult to break that notion, the theory that micropayments don’t sell. [Critics] don’t have any data, it’s just conventional wisdom or common knowledge, but it’s very difficult to go to them and say we have a flexible system for payments and then when they figure out it’s micropayments, they stop listening.”

Micropayments equal being “nickel and dimed”

The idea that micropayments are unworkable for content stems in part from a piece by media theorist Clay Shirky in 2009, in which he said that users “don’t like being nickel and dimed.” The psychological friction created by this perception, he said, meant that very few people would go through with a micropayment for content. Suggestions that Bitcoins (as described recently by Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners) or some other system could make the idea more feasible are routinely dismissed by media-industry insiders.

Golebiewski, however, says that his research shows that when given a choice between a paywall or micropayments, readers are overwhelmingly in favor of paying for specific pieces of content rather than signing up for a monthly or annual subscription plan — and that this is particularly true for younger users, who are often thought to be opposed to paying for content online.

Znak It published a white paper last year (PDF link) based on the results of five pilot projects involving a variety of different kinds of media such as videos, music and text content. Out of a total of 43,000 unique users there were 1,281 buyers and the largest single group was 18-24 years of age, although that number could be skewed because music was part of the trial. In that age category, as many as 5 percent of the unique users wound up becoming buyers (paywalls usually get about one percent conversion).

Part of the problem for Golebiewski and Znak It is the chicken-and-egg factor: there are so few companies using micropayments that it’s difficult to come up with any comprehensive research to prove that they work. Znak It’s white paper is based on such a small sample size that it’s hard to use it as an argument for why the New York Times or another newspaper should go with the micropayment model. But the Znak It founder is adamant that publishers need to try it, if only to increase their reach.

This is a challenge that I discussed in a recent post — the idea that paywalls are good for monetizing your existing readers, but not particularly good for encouraging new readers (apart from the occasional dropping of the wall for breaking-news purposes). Part of Golebiewski’s point is that allowing readers to pay for a single article encourages browsing, which makes it more likely someone will convert into a regular paying customer.

Micropayments aren’t a quick fix

The Znak It founder admits that he has so far only had success with a few eastern European media companies — including a national weekly publication in Poland (where Golebiewski is from) and some small newspapers in other countries — and blames this on the deep-seated dislike of micropayments in North America.

“We started in some of the countries in eastern Europe and elsewhere that were a bit more responsive to our ideas — a bit more desperate if you will. It was easier to go to those smaller countries and start there, they’re a little more open to experiment — they don’t have the big brands and massive traffic, so they are a little bit more receptive.”

The company’s system has two different models: in one, users create accounts with Znak-It and can then use its payment process with any site that supports it, while the second is an “earn free access” option in which advertisers subsidize access for readers who provide some kind of information or engage in some kind of task — such as reading through an ad or filling out a survey. Part of the challenge for Znak It as a small provider is signing up enough clients to make it worthwhile to have an account there (Google has also experimented with micropayments via Google Wallet, and has a “survey wall” service as well).

Despite his lack of substantial progress, however, Golebiewski says he remains convinced that some form of micropayments has to be part of the future of media and content online, since subscription models are only going to appeal to small sub-segment of the total population:

“Many publishers are looking for a quick fix, and I don’t think this logic we are trying to sell is attractive enough — but it will be. It’s inevitable. Maybe if we don’t call it micropayments, maybe we should call it flexible payments. But study after study shows that flexible payments are more popular with users… it has to be the future of the internet as a marketplace.”

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For example, Bilton says his father insists on leaving him voice-mail messages but the NYT writer never listens to them, so his frustrated parent eventually called his sister to complain, and she told their father to text him instead — and Bilton adds that his mother has progressed to the point where they communicate mostly through Twitter. Is this a son helping his parents adapt, or a rude refusal to meet them on their own turf? Many saw it as the latter:

We have too many ways to communicate

Author Ian Leslie noted in a response on his own blog that Bilton’s description of what’s wrong with modern communication — whether it’s voice mail or texting or Twitter — and his relationship with his parents misunderstands what communication is for. If you look at them as pure information delivery, Leslie says, then they are riddled with problems. But if you see them as a way of socializing with others who are close to us then they look completely different:

“The problem here isn’t just that Bilton unintentionally comes off as rather rude… his argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of communication. Writing about computers a lot, he assumes communication is all about the transfer of information from one hard drive to another. That being so, the more efficient the transfer is, the better.”

I think a larger problem Bilton touches on, but doesn’t address directly, is that we have more competing forms of communication available to us than ever before — and not only are different people at different stages in their evolution from one to the other, but people also use them for very different purposes. So for Bilton’s dad, voice mail is a great way of passing on important information, but Nick prefers the real-time nature of texting or Twitter messaging.

The NYT blogger mentions how a whole new kind of etiquette had to be developed around the telephone, and how debate raged over the appropriate way to answer (Alexander Graham Bell preferred the term “Ahoy!,” which just reinforces why we shouldn’t let the inventors of things decide how we use them). But at least people in the 1920s only had one new form of communication to figure out — we have email, voice mail, texting, Facebook messaging, Twitter and more.

Increasingly feel like I don’t want to live in @nickbilton’s future.

—
Jim Maiella (@jimmaiella) March 10, 2013

It gets worse when the person you are trying to correspond with uses all of these tools: I’ve tried to contact someone I know fairly well by email, voice mail, text message, Twitter direct messaging and everything short of smoke signals, and I never know from one day to the next which of those methods (if any) are going to work. We have more ways than ever to communicate, but sometimes that just means more ways to miss each other.

Not every tool works for every purpose

In a lot of cases, I think the problem boils down to one of asynchronous vs. synchronous behavior and expectations. Part of the reason why many people (particularly geeks) dislike talking on the phone is that it forces both sides to be present at the same time, instead of allowing a user to consume or respond to the information at their own pace — or multi-task while they are doing so. Phone calls also have no natural time-span.

The other conflict is over what the purpose of the communication is. Someone who sends a long email or leaves a voice mail asking you to call them back may wish to have a long, rambling conversation purely to socialize, and get offended when you send a curt response (or no response at all). Similarly, if you only ever text or use Twitter direct messages with someone, you may be communicating really efficiently but you miss a lot of the personal nuances that still make up much of human communication.

And then there are the obvious age-related issues: I have tried valiantly to get my mother to use Facebook, arguing that this is a great way to keep in touch — however transiently — with her grandchildren, none of whom has any interest whatsoever in using email or talking on the telephone. But for my mother, email and the phone are her primary means of connecting with the world, and the former was something that took ages for her to get comfortable with. And now that she has grown comfortable with it, no one is using it any more.

All I think we can really say for sure is that this state of affairs is likely to continue, if not get worse. As William Gibson said in a different context: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And so we are all at different stages of adapting to this new communications future. Perhaps the one thing we need most is to be patient with those who aren’t where we are.

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Thompson said he wants to “dramatically expand” the number of blog posts that the site carries with the upcoming launch of a Science and Tech section, which will feature contributions from magazine regulars like Columbia law professor Tim Wu and author Ken Auletta as well as new writers. One of those new writers is former BuzzFeed staffer Matt Buchanan, who announced his move to the magazine on Wednesday:

Thanks everyone! I'm going to miss @buzzfeedben and @jwherrman BUZZFEED a lot, but I'm preeeetttty excited to be going to the New Yorker.

—
matt buchanan (@mattbuchanan) January 30, 2013

Until now, The Atlantic has been the poster child for the brainy traditional magazine that has succeeded at the new digital-media game. Owner David Bradley and president Justin Smith gambled heavily on an online strategy — one that included hiring strong writers like Alexis Madrigal and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, and online-first properties like Atlantic Cities.

These and other moves have driven large amounts of traffic, and also boosted digital revenues to the point where they now exceed print (Note: We’re going to be talking with Justin Smith about these and other topics at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 17).

The magazine has also put a substantial amount of resources into the new arena of “sponsored content” as a replacement for traditional advertising, although that has not come without controversy: a recent sponsored feature on the Church of Scientology drew a substantial amount of criticism, and the magazine said it has re-evaluated the way it handles such content as a result.

The Atlantic‘s moves have made others such as Time Inc. (which is facing some major cutbacks) look like they are stuck in neutral. Only Forbes has arguably equalled the Atlantic‘s progress, with initiatives like its “Brand Voice” platform (chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin will also be joining us at paidContent Live). Now it seems that both could be facing some competition from the New Yorker, which is encouraging to see.

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As detailed by BuzzFeed, the problem started late Christmas evening, when Vox Media staffer Callie Schweitzer shared a funny photo on Twitter of the Zuckerberg family using the social network’s new Poke feature — an app that allows users to send messages or photos that self-destruct after a certain amount of time (a feature that itself can be seen as a response to privacy concerns). Randi Zuckerberg saw the photo because she was mentioned in the tweet, which has since been deleted, and told Schweitzer that sharing it publicly on Twitter was “way uncool.”

Schweitzer apologized, and said she believed the picture was public because it showed up in her feed, and that she sees Zuckerberg’s updates because she signed up for them via Facebook’s Twitter-style “subscribe” feature. After some back-and-forth, Zuckerberg determined that the Vox staffer saw the photo because she is connected to a mutual friend — a friend who tagged Zuckerberg in the photo, and thereby shared it with her entire social graph. Zuckerberg then shared what she felt was the lesson we should all take from this incident, namely: “always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly.”

It would be nice if figuring out online privacy was that simple, but it isn’t — not by a long shot. And it’s not just Facebook, although it is the most obvious example of this problem, if only because it is so massive that virtually everyone is either using it or knows someone who is. It’s tempting to think of this as just another sign of how Facebook is an evil social overlord, deliberately tweaking privacy settings so that it can sell our private details to the highest bidder, but that’s a little too facile.

Privacy becomes infinitely more complex online

The reality is that privacy issues we normally take for granted in the “real” world become almost infinitely more complicated when we move online: if Randi Zuckerberg had taken a physical photo of her family, she could only have shared it with a small group of people — and by definition, those people would be close to her and her family, and so privacy wouldn’t be a problem. But when anyone can “tag” a photo and instantly re-share that photo to an audience of thousands, things get complicated really quickly.

Sure Randy Zuckerberg asked all in her family if she could share that pic before posting. That's just human decency bit.ly/Umu32r

—
Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 26, 2012

Should Randi have asked before she shared that picture on Facebook? Maybe. But she (perhaps naively) trusted that it would only be seen by close friends and family — not thinking of how a friend’s decision to tag it could affect where and with whom it was shared. Should her friend have asked before she tagged it? Perhaps. I tagged a friend once in a photo and she got upset with me because she didn’t want people to know where she was — not because she was doing anything bad, but because she didn’t like the feeling of being tracked. That never even occurred to me until she mentioned it.

To be fair to Facebook, figuring these kinds of nuances out isn’t easy — and implementing them in the form of software controls isn’t either. Facebook has gotten a lot of flak (much of it from Google) for not allowing people to download the emails of their friends, but it has always argued that those emails belong to your friends, and sharing them should be their choice, not yours. We may disagree, but there are good arguments on either side (Facebook now lets you do this but only if your friend specifically allows it).

There are all kinds of things we need to learn — or re-learn — when it comes to online behavior, and how to handle privacy is one of them. It’s easy to throw rocks at Facebook or make fun of Randi Zuckerberg, but the bigger issue is not going away: if anything, it is getting even more complicated.

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These are questions that seem to be coming up more and more frequently as we live increasingly large parts of our lives online: When is it okay to publicize someone’s identity for things they said on Twitter, and what kinds of consequences do we think are appropriate for online bad behavior?

The post by Jezebel co-founder Tracie Egan Morrisey — which was entitled “Racist Teens Forced to Answer for Tweets About the ‘Nigger’ President” — was a followup of sorts to a previous post that highlighted a number of racist tweets posted to the service following Obama’s election victory on Tuesday night. None of the users who posted them were specifically identified, but in the more recent piece, Morrisey identified several students at a number of schools in the U.S. who posted similar comments. The story also went into some detail about them, noting that one student “plays football for Xaverian High School, a private Catholic prep school in Brooklyn, NY,” and that others also play sports for their schools.

What is an appropriate response for a single tweet?

The point of doing this seemed to be that most schools have codes of conduct, particularly for those who represent the school on sports teams, and racist tweets would appear to be in contravention of those rules. But is publicly identifying these students — who are legally children — on a website like Jezebel really an appropriate response to what in some cases was a single tweet? In an email, Morrisey said that she felt there was no issue with writing the story, since the students in question had already publicly identified themselves through Twitter profiles and Facebook profiles:

We actually did not “out” the identities of these tweeters — they did, through their public Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles. They used their real names, listed their schools and their locations, and thus broadcasted these details to the entire world by virtue of putting them on the internet.

We chose to get in touch with the school administrators who are charged with educating these individuals because the institutions not only have mission statements about their educational goals, but they also have student conduct codes.”

Some commenters on Jezebel clearly disagreed with the site’s decision. One comment that got a lot of votes from other readers asked “Is this what we’ve come to?? Internet shaming children, blasting their crimes across the web?” And others who specialize in online behavior, including sociologist Zeynep Tufekci from the University of North Carolina, also said they found the public shaming troubling:

@mathewi Wow. Publicizing racist tweets like this is not healthy or good for combating racism, or educating teens or letting them grow.

—
Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 09, 2012

Many of those who took part in a Twitter discussion of the issue with me on Friday believed that the students in question should have to face the consequences of their actions — after all, the internet is a public place, they argued, and even children need to realize that making such comments could affect their lives. Others said that public shaming of racism is the only way to effectively fight such beliefs, and therefore what Jezebel did was appropriate.

@mathewi the Internet is not anonymous. Online comments have real world consequences. Best kids learn that lesson early.

—
  (@kathodgson) November 09, 2012

Is there no room for online mistakes any more?

One of the things that troubles me about this incident is that it shows how quick we can be to judge a person — especially someone in high school, who may be acting badly for all kinds of complicated reasons — without any real understanding of what is going on, or what the repercussions may be. Making people face the consequences for saying things online is a noble goal, but is there no room even for children to make mistakes without the full force of the internet being brought to bear? As far as I can tell, Morrisey didn’t even try to contact the high-school students she profiled, or their parents.

@pwthornton @mathewi @AdrienneLaF Or maybe they're just clueless kids who think it's cool to say wild stuff without grasping implications?

—
Elaine Clisham (@eclisham) November 09, 2012

A quick internet search of one of the individuals mentioned shows that this incident is the top result for their name. Maybe that will fade over time, especially since some of those involved seem to have deleted their accounts — or maybe it won’t. Couldn’t the same thing have been achieved by calling the schools to identify the students, without doing so in the article itself? Morrisey denied that there was any attempt to “shame” those involved, and yet the headline talks about forcing these students to answer for their alleged crimes. Is this kind of online vigilantism really going to solve anything?

@mathewi These Tweets are hateful & vicious but Jezebel could've made those calls without publishing names and school affiliations.

—
Liz Pullen (@nwjerseyliz) November 09, 2012

Similar issues came up during the recent public outing of a notorious Reddit “troll” named Violentacrez, who was profiled in a Gizmodo post, and the similar revealing of a Twitter user who went by the name ComfortablySmug, who posted inaccurate information during Hurricane Sandy. The Reddit moderator was seen as fair game by many because he created threads devoted to child pornography and other offensive content, but ComfortablySmug was a less obvious case — as we noted in a post and an internal debate that we published about the issues raised by such online lynch mobs.

Both of those individuals were adults, however, and presumably understood the consequences of their actions before they engaged in them. How much should we expect high-school students to suffer for what might have been an offhand comment or an attempt to impress their friends? How much public ridicule or online condemnation is too much, and when does it cross over into outright bullying? These are issues we are going to be confronting more and more as we live out our lives online, and the answers are not obvious.

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(Note: This question led to some heated back-and-forth between GigaOM staffers in our internal editorial chat room, which is hosted on Socialcast, so for the first time we have posted a condensed version of that internal discussion online)

Just to recap, @ComfortablySmug posted a number of fake news items during the worst part of the storm on Monday night — including what appeared to be news bulletins about Con Edison shutting down power to all of New York and flooding at the New York Stock Exchange. The Twitter account was called out by a number of journalists and other users at the time for posting these fake reports, and then the following day the user behind the account was revealed in a BuzzFeed post to be Shashank Tripathi, a 29-year-old campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate Christopher Wight.

BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.

—
  (@ComfortablySmug) October 30, 2012

Tripathi has since posted an apology, and appears to have removed a number of the offending tweets from his timeline. But his actions have clearly had repercussions that go beyond just public ridicule: it’s unclear just how much it has affected his livelihood, but he has resigned as Wight’s campaign manager, and a New York city council member is having discussions with the district attorney’s office about possibly charging Tripathi with a crime for the things he posted. “I hope the fact that I’m asking for criminal charges to be seriously considered will make him much less comfortable and much less smug,” Vallone said.

Did ComfortablySmug deserve to be outed?

In an email, BuzzFeed writer Jack Stuef said that he had no qualms about outing @ComfortablySmug because he was a public figure and his behavior warranted it:

“He was the campaign manager of a major party’s congressional candidate, so if there was going to be any question about outing an average citizen, the point was moot. He was working in the public sphere. Obviously it reflects very poorly on your campaign to have your campaign manager scaring people with willful lies in a crisis situation. And obviously the reason he thought he could get away with such behavior was because he had hidden his identity.” — Jack Stuef, BuzzFeed writer

Could Tripathi be charged and prosecuted for what he did? He definitely could, although — as my colleague Jeff Roberts noted — proving that he deliberately tried to incite panic is likely to be difficult, if not impossible. It’s not even clear that Tripathi was the original source for all of the fake news he posted, most of which I saw posted by others as well, including people who claimed to be watching a fire at the Coney Island Hospital. Should they all be identified and charged with a crime?

Everyone likes to use the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy, but as lawyer Ken Paulson pointed out to Jeff, charging someone with a crime for a couple of tweets amid hundreds of thousands or even millions would be a difficult challenge given the First Amendment. And as a legal blogger noted during the recent furore over the “Innocence of Muslims” video — when the “fire” analogy was used by many as justification for censoring the video — this theory has often been just a cover for censorship, even by its most famous proponent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The consensus when I asked this question on Twitter was that Tripathi deserved to be publicly shamed and his identity revealed because he had caused panic during a critical moment, when people were already afraid for their lives and their safety:

@mathewi Yeah, he did. Be a dick, get served.

—
Mike Isaac (@MikeIsaac) October 30, 2012

Does the punishment fit the alleged crime?

That would seem to qualify as shouting fire, but is Twitter really a crowded theater? And did the few tweets that Tripathi posted really cause panic? For someone whose family members were in the Coney Island Hospital, perhaps — but how many people who fit that criteria would have even seen his tweets? Another complicating factor is the role of Twitter itself: if it is already monitoring and blocking tweets for the German government and others, what responsibility does it bear for transmitting fake news that may be causing public panic? And what duty do other users who retweeted it have?

Sociologist Danah Boyd wrote recently about the unmasking of the Reddit troll known as Violentacrez for his behavior on the site, which consisted of posting and encouraging others to post photos of young women — and in some cases children — without their consent. As she describes in her piece, there are a host of questions raised by this phenomenon: Who decides whether someone should be publicly shamed or not? How do we respond when that impulse becomes a lynch mob, or identifies the wrong person, as happened with the alleged tormentor of bullying victim Amanda Todd?

“More often than not, those who use these tools do so when they feel they’re on the right side of justice. They’re either shining a spotlight to make a point or to shame someone into what they perceive to be socially acceptable behavior. But each act of outing has consequences for the people being outed, even if we do not like them or what they’ve done.”

The most popular response in the case of Tripathi is that he deserves everything he gets because he was “being a dick,” as more than one person described it. But does that still hold if he loses his job, or his family (assuming he has one) or is charged with a crime and becomes unemployable? What if he becomes depressed and jumps off a bridge? Pursuing and “doxxing” (i.e. forcibly revealing someone’s real identity) could be seen as a form of harassment and bullying itself — so when is that equivalent to or worse than the alleged offence that the anonymous person committed?

As Boyd points out, the more we become a networked society and live a large chunk of our lives online, the more we will run into these kinds of dilemmas. Each one becomes a kind of slippery-slope problem, where drawing the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior becomes harder, and the risk of lynch-mob type activity becomes greater. And in some cases, the penalty could turn out to be severe.

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As Alex Hern at New Statesman describes it, the issue exploded into public view after the moderators of a Reddit page called r/politics said they were banning the posting of any links from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media network. Why? Because Gawker writer Adrian Chen was reportedly planning to expose the real identity of a moderator running a page devoted to creepy pictures of women called r/creepshots (the same person was also a moderator on another sub-Reddit called r/incest, which was deleted by Reddit last year, as part of an attempt to crack down on offensive and/or illegal content).

Banning links to protect freedom of speech

The moderator in question — who went by the name violentacrez — appears to have deleted the sub-Reddit and all of its posts, and has also deleted his Reddit account completely (Jessica Roy at Betabeat also has a good roundup of the story). And moderators of other pages, including r/politics, decided to block links from Gawker as a way of showing their displeasure at the attempts to force violentacrez to reveal his true identity. The moderators of r/politics posted a statement saying:

“We feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet.”

As more than one person has pointed out, these comments are filled with unintentional irony on a number of levels, including the fact that a site which champions free speech is banning links to a specific news outlet for something it hasn’t even reported yet, and the outrage that it is complaining about is the act of revealing information about a person in public — a person who moderates a page where people post revealing photos of women without their consent. Even some Reddit defenders seemed to be taken aback by the hypocrisy of the r/politics moderators in this case.

To complicate the picture even further, a Reddit critic set up a Tumblr blog called Predditors, which posted photos and biographical information about the users who were active on the r/creepshots page, including photos from their Facebook pages, as well as racist and offensive comments made by them, details about their families, and so on. Some Reddit users responded to this attack with further outrage, saying their privacy was being invaded — even though (as Choire Sicha at The Awl pointed out) all of the information was already publicly available on the internet, and was just aggregated by the Tumblr blog’s author.

Can we count on communities to self-regulate?

The Predditors blog was removed by Tumblr, apparently because the site was afraid the photos were not legal, and then it was later reinstated, but it now it requires a password to access. The Jezebel blog (which is part of Gawker Media) spoke to the creator of Predditors, a 25-year-old woman who said she is a Reddit member but was outraged by the content on r/creepshots and decided to do something about it:

“Reddit’s defense of [CreepShots] is that it’s ‘technically legal.’ So I’m doing something that’s technically legal, but will result in consequences for their actions.”

If you’re an optimist about the power of online communities like Reddit and its cousin 4chan (which has been home to even worse content, if that’s possible), you could see this as a kind of self-regulating process at work. Given the ability to post anything whatsoever, with little or no oversight from any site editors — apart from periodic attempts to remove illegal content — it’s natural to assume that every dark element of human nature will be represented. And in some cases, moderators will actually trample on the principle of free speech even as they allegedly are trying to protect it.

At the same time, however, Reddit does self-regulate — and even the appearance of the Predditors blog could be seen as part of that process. The site has taken action in the past to crack down on offensive behavior, and it’s worth remembering that the Reddit community can also be a powerful force for good in the world, by calling attention to worthwhile causes like the fundraising for young Caine Monroy, or engaging in random acts of kindness such as arranging for strangers to send birthday wishes to a retired Army vet in a small town. Or random acts of journalism.

Maybe we should think of Reddit the same way we think about British tabloids — they contain all kinds of unseemly content, nude photos and ridiculous conspiracy theories, but occasionally they also have actual news in them, and so they are probably worth keeping around.

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There has been a lot of criticism of Newhouse-owned Advance Publications since the media chain announced it was scaling back printing of some newspapers in Louisiana and Alabama, including the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, which will now only be printed three days per week, with a website picking up the slack. Some celebrity fans of the city have written an open letter asking the Newhouse family to either return to printing daily or sell the newspaper to someone who will, but the chain has refused. Are the critics right? In a blog post on the issue, Digital First Media CEO John Paton makes a strong case that the Times-Picayune has to find some way forward in a digital world, as all newspapers do: There is no going back.

Although the changes announced by Advance affect daily newspapers in Alabama and other states, shutting down the daily printing for the Times-Picayune has attracted the lion’s share of attention, in part because of eulogies written by New Orleans fans like David Carr, a media writer for the New York Times (who initially broke the news the paper would no longer be printing daily and would also be laying off staff). Critics say the bond between New Orleans and its printed newspaper is different than it is in other towns and cities, as a result of incidents like the disastrous flood of 2005.

Change is coming, whether newspapers like it or not

Carr and others have tried to make the case that having a daily newspaper in print — rather than just an online operation — makes a crucial difference in how journalism is practiced in New Orleans, and they point to the low penetration of Internet access in the region. But Paton, who recently took the helm of Digital First Media (the parent company of newspaper owner Media News Group) after turning around the bankrupt Journal-Register Co. chain, argues Newhouse had no choice but to make some drastic moves in New Orleans and elsewhere, as print advertising revenue continues to dwindle. As Paton puts it:

An old and distinguished business in New Orleans has seen more than half of its revenue disappear in five years and has decided to change how it conducts business — before it goes out of business . . . The business is not alone in its problems. Everyone they know in the same industry has the same problems. Everyone knows something has to change.

Much of the coverage has focused on the way Advance communicated (or miscommunicated) the news, the departure of some key staffers from the Times-Picayune and other newspapers, and also the fact that the chain’s websites — including NOLA.com, which is expected to pick up coverage from the no-longer-daily paper — are underwhelming in the extreme when it comes to being bastions of local journalism. Some reporters have also been offered online jobs with odd titles such as “buzz reporter,” which hasn’t exactly helped to dispel such concerns.

No one knows what the right solution is

In his defense of the changes, Paton acknowledges the chain communicated poorly, didn’t have its new digital assets in shape before it made the announcements, let some key writers go when it shouldn’t have, and made other mistakes that “chew[ed] up a lot of goodwill.” But despite those failings, Paton — whose own chain has made some dramatic changes at many of its newspapers in an attempt to deal with a decline in ad revenue — says he supports Newhouse and its desire to try something different:

I support them because their industry is my industry and it will not survive without dramatic, difficult and bloody change. And like them I am willing to do what it takes to make our businesses survive.

In a lot of ways, the criticism triggered by Newhouse’s moves is similar to the backlash some other newspapers have faced for using outsourcing services like Journatic, which was attacked recently after using fake bylines on some of the content it provided to papers like the Chicago Tribune. As I argued in both a post on the topic and a segment on WNPR earlier this week, newspapers of all kinds are trying to find whatever means they can to cut costs, since they are facing an almost unprecedented decline in advertising revenue. Some are trying paywalls, some outsourcing: No one is sure of the right answer.

Could Newhouse have done a better job of handling the printing changes at the Times-Picayune and other papers? Almost certainly. And it remains to be seen whether the chain will actually devote the kind of resources to NOLA.com and its other online properties that they require (although it should be noted the Times-Picayune published online only for several days during the floods of 2005 and later won a Pulitzer Prize for its work). But it is no different from any other newspaper owner, all of whom are trying to find a way of salvaging what they can from the wreckage of their former business model. Trying to return to the glory days of old just isn’t an option.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Zert Sonstige

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As newspaper owners like Newhouse-owned Advance Publications try to stem the cash flowing out of their businesses by shutting down the presses, there are a number of ways to look at their decision. On the one hand, it can be seen as an attempt to manage the much-needed transition from a print-based business to a fully digital one. Media analyst Jack Shafer, however, sees it another way: he suspects that many newspaper companies are in the liquidation business — in other words, they are simply squeezing as much value as they possibly can out of their properties before they discard them. As sensible as this may seem from a financial point of view, however, it misses the larger opportunity that the web represents.

Shafer’s liquidation idea is based in part on a theory advanced by author Philip Meyer, in a 2004 book called “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.” Meyer described what he called the “squeeze scenario” a newspaper owner might use if they wanted to get out of the business but didn’t want to sell — either because they couldn’t find a buyer or didn’t want to accept a low price. In a nutshell, that owner would jack up the price of his product (as many newspapers have been doing) while at the same time cutting back on the content and the quality of the product by laying off staff, shutting down expensive features like investigative reporting, etc.

Unless you are reinvesting, you are in liquidation

While this has the short-term effect of improving profit margins for the publisher, Meyer argued that over the longer term this would amount to liquidating the main asset of a newspaper: namely, the goodwill associated with the brand. According to Meyer’s analysis, this goodwill makes up about 80 percent of a newspaper’s overall value — and particularly the value that allows newspapers to attract orders of magnitude more advertising than would normally be dictated by the amount of time that consumers spend reading them, something that was made obvious by a chart that former internet analyst Mary Meeker used in a recent presentation about media advertising.

In his post on the liquidation theory, Shafer notes that newspaper owners who are executing this strategy likely won’t describe themselves as doing this — for obvious reasons, since it would make them look cruel — and may in fact protest that they are doing the opposite, or that they have no choice. But as he puts it:

Sellers of newspaper goodwill might protest that the financial losses they’re absorbing constitute a serious investment in the newspaper’s future, that they’re harvesting nothing. But don’t be fooled. If you’re winding your company down with no strategy to wind it up, you’re burning goodwill even if you don’t acknowledge it.

Liquidating a company in this fashion is something that professional “vulture fund” investors often do in damaged industries (such as the railway business, the traditional telecom industry, and so on). That is, they acquire assets cheaply and then squeeze as much value out of them as possible until they are virtually worthless. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that investors like Berkshire Hathaway billionaire Warren Buffett are very good at — which raises questions about what Buffett’s long-term strategy is in buying newspapers. He claims that he is committed to the industry for the long haul, but what exactly does he mean by that?

Without a strategy for adapting to digital, newspapers are lost

One of the things that makes it hard to cheer for Buffett, or for Advance Publications — unless you are a die-hard devotee of print for print’s sake, of course — is that neither has advanced a plausible strategy for making the transition from print to digital. Buffett has said that he doesn’t see the point in shutting down the printing presses a few days a week, as both Advance and Canada’s Postmedia are doing, and in fact he sees this is a step backward. So then what is his strategy for moving his community newspapers online as print declines?

Advance, meanwhile, has said that it plans to invest more in digital as it cuts back on staff and stops printing every day. But those promises have been noticeably vague, and the evidence from places like Ann Arbor and Seattle — both of which lost their daily newspaper in recent years — doesn’t exactly fill anyone with confidence. One of the prominent themes in criticisms of Advance from people like actor and New Orleans resident Harry Shearer is that Nola.com, the company’s online portal, is lackluster at best and embarrassing at worst when it comes to doing actual journalism.

In order to avoid the accusation that they are just liquidating the goodwill of a generation of readers (and advertisers), newspaper owners need to at least have a plan for reinvesting some of those proceeds in the digital end of their business. The best-case scenario is that they re-engineer their papers the way John Paton has at Digital First Media, by putting the web first and print second — and by hiring or promoting people from within who understand the challenges and opportunities of an online media business. In my view, they also need to think less about how to erect a paywall and more about how to benefit from what Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger calls “open journalism.”

But the bottom line is that without some kind of strategy, as I tried to point out in a recent post, an online newspaper becomes simply another voice among thousands of other digital information sources — and that too will result in the eventual liquidation of goodwill, whether its owner wants to admit it or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Shironeko Euro and George Kelly

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Facebook is testing new features that would give children under 13 access to the giant social network, according to a report published Monday in the Wall Street Journal. Although one version of this new program would require children to have accounts that are linked to an adult so that supervision is easier, some parents have raised concerns about allowing pre-teens access the network at all due to Facebook’s past handling of privacy-related issues. Others, however, argue that plenty of younger children already access Facebook anyway despite the 13-year-old age limit, and that Facebook is wise to make it official.

In fact, the widespread flouting of the 13-year-old limit — a survey by Consumer Reports found that more than 7 million children under that age are on the network — is described as one of the primary motivations behind the proposed changes. The Journal quotes sources “familiar with the matter” as saying that Facebook is afraid it could face governmental scrutiny because of the large numbers of younger users who access the network, in many cases with the help or knowledge of their parents. The company has already been criticized and sanctioned by regulators a number of times over its handling of privacy.

Zuckerberg has said he wants to appeal to younger users

Facebook didn’t confirm that it is working on the kind of features described by the Wall Street Journal, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that the issue of allowing younger users access to the network was “a fight we [will] take on at some point.” And a comment from the company suggested that it is aware of — and concerned about — the problem of unauthorized access by kids. As a spokesman told the newspaper:

Recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services. We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policy makers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.

When I asked the people who follow me on Twitter for their thoughts on the proposed changes, one of the main arguments for not allowing children under 13 to access the social network was that they aren’t old enough to make appropriate decisions for themselves — about what to share with others, what content they should comment on, what kind of behavior is appropriate, and so on — and that many parents might not supervise them properly. Some said they were concerned children would find ways around any restrictions Facebook might impose, such as requiring parental approval for friending other users or posting content.

@mathewi Some adults struggle with privacy settings; under 13s could run into problems in that regard

—
Gary Hilson (@GaryInToronto) June 04, 2012

On a related point, some parents said they were worried about the permanence of Facebook content, and the impact that over-sharing or other bad decisions by younger children might have on their lives as they get older. Just as some university-age users have found that their behavior on the social network can cause problems for them as they apply for jobs, some parents say they don’t want the questionable choices their children might make as 10-year-olds to impact the way their families or friends or others see them. As one child advocacy group told the Journal:

The idea that you would go after this segment of the audience when there are concerns about the current audience is mind boggling.

Is it better to train kids early for online life?

The opposing argument is that social networks and the way they affect our lives are things that children are going to have to come to grips with sooner or later, and therefore it’s better to introduce them to the concept gradually rather than blocking them from it until a pre-determined age like 13. Provided Facebook gives parents enough controls over what their children see and do, this theory goes, allowing kids access to the network not only has positive benefits — since it allows them to connect with family and friends more easily — but can provide a good training ground for broader lessons about internet behavior.

Supporters of this viewpoint point out that most children are already capable of accessing plenty of other much more questionable internet sites without their parents’ knowledge, and that this can cause far bigger problems than Facebook ever could. Allowing kids access to the social network would be a better alternative in many ways, they argue.

On a personal note, I allowed my youngest daughter — now 14 — to set up a Facebook account before she turned 13, even though I knew that this was against the site’s terms of service. At the time, I felt that she was more than capable of handling the responsibilities of being on the network, and I thought it was important that she develop the skills of doing so in a relatively safe environment like Facebook. She also knew that I would be friending her and would be able to see her behavior online (and she has two older sisters who I knew would help me keep an eye on her as well, which made a big difference).

Is it better to try and stop younger users from joining networks like Facebook until they reach a certain age, even if we know that large numbers of them are going to do so anyway? Or is Facebook better off making it easy for them and then requiring certain restrictions on what they do, so that they — and their parents — can get ahead of the problem? Let us know what you think in the comments, or by taking the poll below:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users James Emery and Dutchmassive

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