In the case of the Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast, the companies are borrowing the language of the TV industry and inviting advertisers to sponsor “documentaries,” “shows” and “original programming slates.” The actual content, however, is typically a collection of 2-4 minute web clips and the marketing pitch often invites a single brand to slap their name on the entire package.

Will it work? Both the Journal and Conde Nast are relying on their historic brand power to attract video sponsors and, like everyone in media, are serving up their wares on all screens. But the two companies are also taking different approaches to scale and strategy. Here’s a look at their offerings, and how the companies are framing their new video identities.

A video start-up inside 100-year-old magazines

Conde Nast wields considerable cultural and political power through titles like Vogue and Vanity Fair and GQ — but that doesn’t mean the company and its famous editors Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter, who were on an hand at Conde’s ad event, know much about making video. Many readers, meanwhile, may not even know the videos exist.

Appearing to recognize that print prowess doesn’t automatically transfer to video, Conde Nast went on a hiring spree, bringing in “video natives” from companies like the Huffington Post and CW Networks, and giving them rein to create content in a hands-off environment. The “start-up” (that’s Conde Nast’s word for the venture) is known as CN Entertainment and is also working with TV veterans who produced fare like Mad Men and Project Runway.

CN Entertainment’s output has been trickling out for a while, and includes video series like GQ‘s “10 Essentials” and Glamour’s “Elevator Runway.” On Wednesday, the company announced over 30 new “original programming slates” that include Wired’s “Angry Nerd” and programs tied to titles like Teen Vogue, Epicurious and Vanity Fair.

The new offerings represent a big expansion for Conde Nast’s video efforts. But they but also come at a time that other companies are rushing to offer original programming too — AOL, Yahoo and the Weather Company were just some of sites who made similar announcements this week.

To avoid being over looked in this flood of content, Conde Nast is relying on syndication deals with sites like Twitter and YouTube. The company is also promising to spend heavily on marketing in order to assure advertisers that someone will actually watch the videos.

“It’s on us to make people know the brands are in the business to create video. A lot of people fall down with the philosophy of ‘build it and they will come’” Fred Santarpia, Chief Digital of CN Entertainment, told me at the event. He said the company might, for instance target GQ magazine readers with Facebook ads to make sure they’re aware of the brand’s videos.

Santarpia said he could not disclose revenue figures, only saying they were “healthy.”

Not your father’s Wall Street Journal

For the last year, the Wall Street Journal has been pursuing its “WSJ Everywhere” strategy that involves producing a lot of content and putting it in as many places as possible — from the iPhone to the X-box and more.

Unlike Conde Nast, the Journal has been relying heavily on its existing print teams to crank out the content. This typically means pulling reporters before a makeshift studio in the Journal offices or even recording them via Skype from their homes and hotel rooms. The result has been plenty of video but a mixed bag in terms of quality.

Now, the Journal appears to be increasing its efforts to pluck out the best stuff and package it as discrete channels. At a splashy event on Monday morning, executives touted the Journal’s proximity to power brokers and invited advertisers to become exclusive sponsors of fare like “Seib & Wessel,” a senior journalist chat fest.

“This isn’t your father’s Wall Street Journal,” war reporter Michael Phillips told the crowd. Perhaps to drive home the point, the event also featured appearances by rapper MC Hammer and a Bloody Mary stand to help ad and media executives start the week off right.

The Journal also announced a new documentary series “WSJ Startup of the Year,” sponsored by the NYSE, that will feature famous entrepreneurs like Richard Branson kicking the tires of upcoming companies. The paper is also betting on lifestyle video content like “WSJ Cafe” and clips from popular sports writer Jason Gay.

According to Chief Revenue Officer, Michael Rooney, people are watching the videos because they are attached not just to the paper but to the Journal name.

“They want to follow this brand anywhere and anyhow they can get the content,” Rooney told me at the event, adding that advertisers understand the viewers are high income people and will pay top dollar to reach them. WSJ is now streaming 20-25 million videos a month with premium cost-per-thousand view rates coming in at $40-$60 a month.

Early innings for old brands and new video tricks

This week’s ad outreach by Conde Nast and the Journal comes at a time when digital display dollars are proving insufficient to offset the inexorable decline of their legacy print products. The turn to video promises higher ad income as online viewing takes off, and big brands contemplate moving more of their TV budgets to the web.

The video strategy seems obvious but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. To actually pull this off, the print companies will have to persuade advertisers that their videos can reach a wide enough audience to be worth their time (this is likely the reason the New York Times pulled down its paywall for online video last week).

At the same time, they will have to compete with a host of other media outlets suddenly jostling for video dollars too, as well as newer outfits like PopSugar and Break Media who have already figured out how to produce compelling videos on the cheap.

This flood of content from all corners could also depress the high rates that are attracting brands like Conde and the Journal to video in the first place. And while a tilt of ad dollars from cable to online video seems inevitable, no one knows when this will actually occur.

“The market is growing. Everything points to more money moving into space,” said CN Entertainment’s Santarpia. ”It’s early —  only time will tell.”

Asked to frame it in baseball terms, Santarpia said it’s only the second inning for the online video industry — and the first for companies like Conde Nast.

(Image by Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock)

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Click to enlarge

Several hundred newspapers now have paywalls of some kind, but for the most part, it’s the small and mid-size papers that have been the early adopters. Last year, for example, Gannett put all 80 of its community newspapers’ websites behind metered paywalls, while keeping its flagship paper, USA Today, free online.

But the New York Times‘ ability to attract subscribers in the two years since its paywall went live – combined with the increasingly tough digital advertising market – seems to have caused some of the bigger newspapers to reconsider. In the last year alone, six of the biggest newspapers in the U.S. have announced plans to start charging for their digital editions: the LA Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Orange County Register.

As of now, 12 of the top-20 U.S. newspapers (by weekday circulation) have either enacted a paid scheme or plan to do so.

Click the graphic to the left to see which of the biggest newspapers have paywalls.

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The Wall Street Journal is attempting to do this with the launch today of six new digital verticals that match the special sections that appear in the Journal’s print edition about 60 times a year (Wealth Management, Retirement, Energy, Leadership, Health Care, Small Business). According to senior editor Larry Rout, the idea is to ensure this content doesn’t sink as quickly when it goes online.

To keep up the chatter around the special topics, the Journal is asking a stable of thought leaders and public personalities — including Dilbert creator Scott Adams and author Amy Tan — to blog and offer opinions in a live stream. The site is also hosting periodic “Google Hangouts” where business experts will chat and take questions from viewers.

The idea is fine in theory but will anyone actually show up in the online verticals? After all, the web is awash with financial and business chatter, meaning the Journal Reports may have a hard time standing out. On the other hand, Rout says the Reports’ contents have done very well when published as individual stories on the WSJ website; placing that content in dedicated verticals and combining it with marquee personalities and the WSJ brand mean the Reports have a chance to gain online traction. We’ll check back in half a year to see how it pans out.

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I started things off with a critical tweet about a Bloomberg story by Edmund Lee on how the New York Times paywall was working “better than anyone had guessed,” which I contrasted with a post of mine about the decline in traffic to the NYT site (as measured by comScore) and what appeared to be a corresponding decline in advertising revenue — including digital revenue. Edmund responded that his story said circulation revenue has made up for the shortfall in ad revenue.

Edmund is right, of course — he did mention this in his story, using numbers from an analyst (which of course are estimates). And so I acknowledged that saying he “ignored” the shortfall was too strong — but still, his piece made it sound as though all you have to do is put up a paywall and your problems are solved, which I think is a Pollyanna-ish viewpoint. At which point, Josh Sternberg of Digiday noted that ad rates haven’t gone up at the NYT, as detailed in his recent post, even though that was the assumption on the part of many paywall advocates — i.e., that a paying audience would be worth more to advertisers:

@joshsternberg @mathewi fact is CPMs are going down for everyone -- paid sites at least have stemmed those webwide declines in ad rates

—
Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) December 23, 2012

At this point, I made the same point I’ve tried to make before about paywalls — that they aren’t a solution for everyone, and that even for those where such a strategy is working, they can’t be the entire strategy:

@joshsternberg @edmundlee: the reason I harp on this is the impression that a paywall is *the* answer -- where is the rest of the strategy?

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Peter Kafka of All Things Digital also jumped in to confirm that the NYT says the paywall has had virtually zero effect on ad rates:

.@mathewi @edmundlee @joshsternberg NYT people tell me pay wall has zero effect on cpm.

—
Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 23, 2012

@pkafka @edmundlee @joshsternberg: the assumption was that paying customers would be seen as more valuable -- what happened to that idea?

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Raju Narisetti, head of the Wall Street Journal’s digital unit, responded that one rationale for paywalls is that it allows newspapers to learn more about their readers, and thus hopefully target ads better — which is part of why I am in favor of membership-style approaches rather than blanket paywalls:

@rajunarisetti @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg: exactly why I think a more membership/tiered approach is better than a plain wall

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

I noted that the latest estimates are that the online advertising market grew by 18% in the third quarter to $9.3 billion, and yet few newspapers — including the NYT — have seen anything like that kind of increase. Why?

@edmundlee @joshsternberg: relevant stat -- digital ad sales up 18 percent. how much of that growth are papers getting? adage.com/article/digita…

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Former Wall Street Journal managing editor and co-founder of paywall provider Press+ Gordon Crovitz then chimed in with a stat about how most paywalled sites see as much as a 30% premium for their ads — raising the obvious question of why the NYT hasn’t seen that:

@crovitz @rajunarisetti @pkafka @edmundlee @joshsternberg: so then what does it mean that the NYT has seen none of that?

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Bill Grueskin — former WSJ deputy managing editor and now academic dean of Columbia’s journalism school — also jumped in to add that paywalls can harm a content business because they reduce the number of readers, and that affects the scale of the business:

@rajunarisetti @mathewi @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg But scale is so diminished by most paywalls. And advertisers demand scale

—
  (@BGrueskin) December 23, 2012

At which point, former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton said that quality is more important than scale:

@BGrueskin @rajunarisetti @mathewi @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg More advertisers are looking for quality not simply scale

—
Les Hinton (@leshinton) December 23, 2012

And Crovitz came up with what for me was the quote of the day regarding ad rates and the newspaper business:

... Of course with plummeting CPMs, flat may be the new premium for paid pages @rajunarisetti @pkafka @mathewi @edmundlee @joshsternberg

—
Gordon Crovitz (@crovitz) December 23, 2012

I suggested that it would be nice to see the industry spend as much time and resources on trying to get creative about advertising instead of just writing off the whole business as a lost cause, and Jon Steinberg — president of BuzzFeed — agreed:

.@joshsternberg @edmundlee: I'd like to see as much innovation around monetization as there is around display or design like Snow Fall

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

.@mathewi @joshsternberg it's amazing pay walls and not better ad products were the solution. Agree that creates a much smaller business.

—
Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) December 23, 2012

And Grueskin said that the biggest issue for newspapers and advertising is that they no longer have the kind of pricing power they used to when they controlled the platform:

@BGrueskin @leshinton @rajunarisetti @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg: that is the entire newspaper industry problem in a nutshell

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

@mathewi @bgrueskin @rajunarisetti @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg True. Trite, but: quality & ingenuity score - no shortage of them

—
Les Hinton (@leshinton) December 23, 2012

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni

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According to an SEC document filed on Friday, news operations, which make up about 80 percent of the restructured News Corp and include the flagship Wall Street Journal, made a 2012 operating profit of $939 million after special items. The books division, which includes publisher HarperCollins and accounts for 14 percent of the new company, had a profit of $86 million.

These figures are the EBITDA (“earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization”) — the number investors examine closely when looking at the health of a company. Other reports today say News Corp’s publishing business is “losing money,” but that is only the case when one-off items like restructuring costs and payments related to the hacking scandal are included. The EBITDA is the more important number.

So what does all this mean for a nervous news and book industry? The good news is that the publishing operations have a fighting chance to flourish on their own. Recall that the split came about in part because many investors believed the newspaper and book businesses were a drag on the company’s money machines like Fox TV and movie studios. Until now, though, it was unclear what cash and assets the new company would be given to start its new life.

The new SEC filing clears up some of these questions by showing that “new News Corp” will have around $1 billion in cash on its balance sheet and little debt. And, in a surprise sweetener, the company will hold on to Fox Sport Australia, which will provide it with a cash cow in the future.

Going forward, though, the company’s news operations are still overly reliant on advertising, a business that is declining dramatically. While the New York Times‘ revenue is now roughly evenly split between advertising and circulation, the ratio at the News Corp properties are closer to 3:2.

The new filing, unfortunately, does not break out financials for individual newspaper properties such as the Wall Street Journal, which has a robust digital subscription model, or The New York Post, which is reportedly losing millions of dollars a year.

Overall, the bottom line is that News Corp’s publishing operations have been thrown out of the nest with a fair parachute. If certain positive trends continue — including the growth of ebooks and the Dow Jones brand — the company will be fine for a few years at least.

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The New York Times has dropped its paywall before for similar incidents, including last year’s Hurricane Irene, but has kept the subscription barrier up for a host of other important news stories — including the death of Osama bin Laden. As a post at the Nieman Journalism Lab described last year, it’s not clear how the newspaper makes the decision about what to keep behind the wall and what to release to the general public. All the paper has said is that it is decided on a “case-by-case basis.” The Wall Street Journal also periodically removes certain stories from the paywall and makes them free of charge, but in many cases this appears to be a marketing move rather than an editorial one.

Public interest or smart business decision?

When I suggested on Twitter that the NYT might have removed the paywall for a combination of reasons — including the fact that the news was in the public interest, but also as a marketing strategy — I got bombarded with criticism from a number of people, including Branch co-founder Josh Miller, who suggested that this was somehow crass or unfair of me to even mention:

@mathewi @emilybell you didn't tweet a curious quesiton, you said: "presumably to try and convince people to subscribe," assuming malintent

—
Josh Miller (@joshm) October 29, 2012

But why would it be unreasonable to assume the New York Times might make such a decision for a multitude of reasons? As I tried to argue in a conversation with Miller on his own platform, it seems pretty obvious that commercial or marketing or other business-related motives might be part of such a decision — especially in advance of the storm. After all, the NYT is a business and not a charitable entity or non-profit emergency information system, so why would ascribing commercial motives to it be unfair? I’m not arguing that crass commercialism was the only rationale, just one of many.

Another reason why the NYT or the WSJ might decide to drop their paywalls (as other newspapers including the Boston Globe and New York’s Newsday also did) is that emergency-related information about subway closures or street shutdowns or other preparations would to some extent be commoditized news — since versions of the same thing would be appearing on every television station, radio program and local news website — and therefore there wouldn’t be much value in keeping them behind a paywall in the first place. And anyone searching for that info from the NYT and being met with a subscription barrier would likely be doubly irritated, which is just bad business.

In a comment on Twitter, former Washington Post managing editor and now Wall Street Journal editor Raju Narisetti confirmed my suspicion that the decision was made at the WSJ for a number of reasons, some business-related and some public-interest related:

@mathewi how about: a lot of print circ on east coast so a good proactive alternative to subs plus public service plus because we can.

—
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) October 29, 2012

The key question: What is a newspaper for?

I think the debate over whether the NYT’s decision (or the WSJ’s) was made for purely public-spirited purposes highlights one of the dilemmas behind the rise of paywalls: namely, the tension between the public purpose that many media outlets feel they have — to spread important information as widely as possible to those affected by it — and the need to commercialize that information in order to make money. As more than one person pointed out, newspapers have always charged for the news in print, but the contrast between a paywall and the free spread of information is more obvious online, where the costs of distributing that information are a lot lower.

As Josh Stearns of Free Press asked on Twitter: “When is the news important enough to remove the paywall?” The answer is far from obvious. Several people noted that the hurricane was an imminent danger to people’s lives, and therefore it deserved to be outside the paywall — but what about some of the crucial issues that are at stake in the federal election? Are they not important enough or critical enough to deserve more widespread readership? Just because they may not be urgent enough to cause immediate physical harm doesn’t mean they aren’t important to people’s lives.

Hurricane Paywall: The news is worth paying for unless it's really important news. Then it's free.

—
Dave Pell (@davepell) October 29, 2012

As I’ve tried to describe before, the question that is at the heart of this dilemma is: What is the purpose of a newspaper? Is it a vehicle for spreading public information that might help people — in which case it should be spread as far and wide as possible — or is it a business whose primary aim is to make money? There are obviously many who believe the former, or there wouldn’t have been such an outcry when Advance Publications said that it would be reducing the frequency of the New Orleans Times-Picayune earlier this year, which caused a storm of outrage in that city.

Newspapers have played the public-interest card for some time, and always when it suited their purposes. Perhaps it was never as true as some made it out to be, but it has become part of the mythos that surrounds them, and it is part of the reason why the response to paywalls from some readers has been less than enthusiastic. Events like Hurricane Sandy just make the tension between that vision and the reality of the newspaper business a lot more obvious — and as the NYT and more newspapers become primarily reader-funded, it is likely to become an even bigger issue.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and George Kelly

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The story turned out to be baloney and was quickly debunked by Willis’ wife. But the tale still raises an important point: how do you leave digital books and music to your loved ones?

The Problem

Last week, a Wall Street Journal story called attention to a long-standing issue that many people are just beginning to discover: we don’t own our iTunes songs, Kindle books and other digital debris.

Here’s why: When you click “I agree,” you don’t receive a piece of property but instead get a license from Apple, Amazon or whoever. And the terms of the license say the media in question is just for you. Unlike a book or a record, digital media can’t be transferred to your friends or, say, to your beloved grandson on your death.

Professor Richard Gold, an intellectual property expert at McGill University, summed up the legal implications of iTunes after death in an email to GigaOM:

Apple presumably has a license to distribute music and it then sublicenses to customers. Licences provide them more control on our use — the number of computers, sharing, etc. The benefit of the contract (licence) should become part of the estate but this would depend on the wording of the licence. This would not necessarily permit a transfer — you cannot force Apple to agree to an assignment of the contract — so would not be of much use. The only way I could imagine around this would be to say that a property right of some sort was transferred through the contract but I can’t think of an example that would work.

The upshot is that you can’t leave iTunes as property in your will because it’s not your property in the first place. State legislatures are beginning to take up the issue but it will be years (if at all) before we have a “who gets your iTunes” law. But don’t fret. Despite the weird licensing rules, you still have options to ensure Junior gets your digital Beatles collection:

Option 1:  Create a fancy legal trust

The original U.K. news story reported that Bruce Willis was asking his lawyers to create “family trusts” to hold his digital music. Since then, others have reported on fancy legal tools like “DAP Trust” to circumvent the iTunes rules. David Goldman, the man behind the DAP trust, says he is working on software that will let estate lawyers offer digital inheritance to their clients.

The problem here is that there is no guarantee a trust will work. After you die, the benefit of the trust would transfer to someone else — which appears off limits under Apple’s rules. “I would want to see the contract,” says Gregg Weiss, a New York estate lawyer. “You can’t change a policy in a license through a trust.”

Option 2: Burn your media onto a device and put the device in your will

Apple, Amazon and other retailers permit users to download digital books or music to multiple devices. This means that Bruce Willis and the rest of us can load up an e-reader or an MP3 player with content and then bequeath the device. Unlike the digital media, you do have a property right in the device.

Sticklers might note that Apple or Amazon have the right to take the digital content away from your chosen heir or heiress, leaving them with a barren Kindle or iPod. But we’re betting the lawyers for those companies have better things to do than crash wakes and inspect devices.

Option 3: Write down the darn password

This is the simplest and most obvious answer — simply provide your media passwords to your loved ones. Weiss, the estate lawyer, says it’s already common practice for attorneys to advise their clients to prepare a list of banking passwords. Simply add your iTunes account to the list and place it an envelope or an email to be sent when you die.

If you want to be technical, you could also provide the password in your will. Your digital songs and e-books are not your property — but your password is. Handing it over will let your digital media live on.

(Image by Chris Harvey via Shutterstock)

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Through the month of September, readers will be able to use, courtesy of the Journal, 1300 hotspots blanketing large swathes Manhattan, including high traffic neighborhoods like Times Square and West Village. The service is also available in parts of three other boroughs. In San Francisco, the Wi-Fi will be available in places like Nob Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf.

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So why is the conservative Journal giving out free internet service to all comers? According to a spokesperson, “We’re always looking for ways to give people the opportunity to sample The Wall Street Journal. This is the latest in a long history of those efforts.”

This is one of the paper’s more novel initiatives but it may prove effective. While it’s unlikely that an iPad-touting tourist in Central Park is going to whip out a credit card and subscribe, the free Wi-Fi could be a terrific way for the Journal to let new users encounter its homepage (provided the service doesn’t have the janky qualities of some other free Wi-Fi initiatives).

The paper will also garner valuable customer data since non-subscribers must register to access the WiFi. Existing subscribers can simply log-in using their accounts; this too promises to deliver a trove of marketing data about the places that Journal readers frequent.

Here’s a screenshot from the Journal page promoting the service (sorry Uptown, no Wi-Fi for you!)

(Image by phloxii via Shutterstock)

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Just a few weeks ago we wrote about how Twitter was dipping its toes into the media business by hiring editors and producers to curate content, followed by the launch of a NASCAR media hub that made it obvious where the company’s intentions lay. Now it is about to jump into the global media game with both feet: As reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by us, Twitter will launch a landmark partnership with NBC Universal for the Olympic Games later this week that will see a team of curators or editors producing a Twitter-based news hub — turning the service into what the Journal describes as “the official narrator” of the games. The deal marks another step on Twitter’s path toward a media-based future, one in which it tries to navigate the gray zone between being a partner for media companies and being a competitor.

The Journal story describes what sounds like a fairly traditional editorial operation: a team of Twitter staff will be based in an office in Boulder, Colo., and will spend their days filtering through a never-ending stream of reports about the Olympics, picking out the interesting or newsworthy ones from participants, onlookers, officials and others. The only different thing in this case is that all of those editing and curating functions will be directed at the stream of tweets coming through Twitter and the people doing it will be employed by Twitter, in concert with staff from the NBC Olympic team. Says the WSJ report:

Twitter’s Olympics hub . . . is one of the first times Twitter will serve as an official narrator for a live event. NBC will tout the website with on-air promotions and links to athlete interviews or video clips.

Twitter’s role as a media entity is increasing

This kind of operation, which Twitter confirmed it is launching later this week, seems like an obvious extension of the moves the company has been making recently to expand its media relationships — and in the process it has become more of a media entity in its own right. The tiptoeing started with the acquisition of Summify and the launch of a curated email for users based on Summify’s recommendation algorithms and then progressed further with the hiring of a “sports producer” for the NASCAR partnership that Twitter ran in June. Along the way Twitter has also announced new features such as expanded tweets that highlight content from media partners (while keeping that content contained within Twitter’s apps and website).

Much like the description of the Olympic offering provided by the Journal, the NASCAR arrangement involved a news hub for the event featuring curated and filtered content from a host of different Twitter streams, including those from drivers, official team accounts, fans and others. Although Twitter has downplayed the work involved in doing this — describing the producer’s function as simply reading the stream and “pinning” noteworthy tweets to the top of the NASCAR hub — it’s pretty clearly an editorial function, very similar to what news entities like NBC and the Journal do (or could do) with similar events.

For NBC, partnering with Twitter makes sense: The network and its staff understand the dynamics of the Twitter stream and can make sense of things more easily, and having real-time tweets appear on a branded news hub and on television during the games probably still seems like a cool and geeky addition to the broadcaster’s coverage, in the same way that newscasters now seem to see reading celebrities’ tweets on the air as a necessary part of almost every news event.

What happens when Twitter no longer needs NBC?

The deal clearly makes sense for Twitter too, since it gets a big marketing boost from being associated with the games, and that will likely translate into a bunch of advertising revenue. And there is probably also some Facebook-related jockeying going on as well: The giant social network has its own deal with NBC for the Olympics, in which the two have agreed to provide content to each other (no money is changing hands in either the Facebook or the Twitter partnership) so that NBC can show viewers what is being talked about on Facebook and the social network gets access to NBC videos and other material.

As I have tried to point out before, these kinds of deals are a natural extension of Twitter’s decision to become a media entity powered by advertising — something that has been the subject of much debate recently and has led at least one entrepreneur to try to launch his own user-supported alternative to Twitter. But they are also a double-edged sword for traditional media companies: They get the benefit of access to curated streams of content, but they are also providing more fuel for Twitter’s own ambitions in the media department, as critics such as blogging pioneer Dave Winer have noted a number of times.

In a sense, Twitter doesn’t really need to partner with NBC to provide this kind of curated news content. It could hire staff and filter public tweets and create a news hub without the broadcaster’s help, just as it could with any other news event. For now, partnering with media outlets makes sense for the company, especially for a tightly controlled one-off event like the Olympics, but that might not always be the case. And Twitter’s ambitions are clearly growing.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin

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Schumer has been in touch with the WSJ about the ebook pricing suit for awhile. “Rarely have I seen a suit that so ill serves the interests of the consumer,” he told the paper in April.

Schumer’s overall argument against the agency pricing lawsuit is that the lawsuit hurts competition by making Amazon the dominant player. “While consumers may have a short-term interest in today’s new release e-book prices, they have a more pressing long-term interest in the survival of the publishing industry,” he writes.

Overall, Schumer says, the lawsuit also has broad implications for “other industries that are coming up with creative ways to grow and adapt to the Internet.” He says, “The administration needs to reassess its prosecution priorities. Justice Department officials currently have comprehensive guidelines in place to determine when they should challenge mergers, but they have no such guidelines for non-merger investigations. It’s time to come up with some.”

The Department of Justice is suing Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices. Three of the publishers — HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — have settled, while Penguin, Macmillan and Apple will fight the suit in court. The DOJ received over 800 public comments on the proposed settlement and is expected to post all of them, along with its response, around July 20, with the proposed final judgment on the settlement going through on August 3. The trial is set to begin June 3, 2013.

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