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Publishers Panel promotes survival, sustainability through innovation

John Voket | NENPA eBulletin | February 25, 2020

Straight out of E&P Publisher Mike Blinder’s keynote at the 2020 New England Newspaper Convention Feb. 7, a motivated group of several dozen publishers, editors and staffers headed to a Publisher’s Panel on Leading Innovative Initiatives moderated by former NENPA Director and Vermont Standard Publisher Dan Cotter.

Cotter got the session started and kept the conversation moving with thoughtful and relevant questions as panelists each hit on a number of innovations happening at their companies that are moving – or pegging – the needle with good outcomes.

Panelists included Autumn Phillips, Managing Editor of The Post and Courier in Charleston, SC; Liz White, Publisher & EVP Record-Journal Media Group in Meriden, Connecticut; and George Arwady, Publisher and CEO of The Republican in Springfield, Mass.

Phillips, whose work has been recognized twice by Editor & Publisher Magazine’s “10 Newspapers That Do It Right,” kicked off the conversation explaining how she has used one-on-one data coaching of editors at The Post and Courier to keep the newsroom focused on audience and digital revenue strategy, and has developed a training culture focused on improving and deepening journalism.

Phillips stressed the importance of team buy-in to new ideas, programs, and ways of innovating that require every staffer to participate, even when it means doing added work or venturing into new beats developing content that resonates best with readers.

Why is that so important?

“Our goal is to keep 83 people in our newsroom,” Phillips said, adding with that sized staff the Post and Courier can handle the day to day demands while still devoting resources to in-depth and investigative reporting, as well as engaging writers and editors in special projects.

About half of those staff members are working primarily or exclusively on digital projects. Phillips said the current goal is to attract 20,000 digital Post and Courier subscribers paying $20 monthly by 2022 (up from an initial offering of $9.95 – and currently at $12.95).

Today The Post and Courier has 8,437 digital subscribers, up from 1,200 just two years ago. Phillips said her paper is running a test now to determine if digital consumers are finding enough value to pay $19.95, or if the digital monthly access should just bump to $15.95.

Her research shows attracting subscribers by discounting or activating a subscription at lower rates only produces greater churn when renewal time comes. “We’re not seeing complaints as we raise our rates,” she said. “If we can get people to pay full price for a year, that’s where we’re seeing success,” she said.

On the editorial side, the Post and Courier management is coaching reporters every day using data to look at what is converting in terms of reader interest, and talking about different digital metrics every day to enhance staff engagement.

She also calls two weekly meetings to review reader behavior with editors, so they are better equipped to coach reporters about building reader loyalty by developing stories that will peak reader engagement time.

In response to reader engagement, the Post and Courier has added two new business reporters, and is asking reporters to seek out “news you can use” subject matter, then encouraging them to write with context, analysis, and authority across all beats.

“That kind of content works for us,” Phillips said. “Readers want more ‘aha’ moments, and things to talk about.” She also briefly covered how the Post and Courier has “pivoted strongly to newsletters,” and “content-driven events.”

Bringing Strategies To Life

In Connecticut, White is the latest Record Journal executive in a multi-generational line of ownership of their 153-year-old newspaper. She said a few years ago her company committed to a strategic plan labeled “80/20 by 2020” — and she spent most of her time talking about how that plan has become an initiative “the whole company can rally around,” while building “a culture around …the most important strategic goals.”

Part of that included relocating the Record Journal newsroom to a new open floor plan workspace. “That really transformed our culture,” White said, which hastened staffers’ collective buy-in and contributed to a collaborative atmosphere.

On the subject of embracing change, White encouraged newspaper leaders and decision makers to “succeed or fail fast” mindset, and when something is working, “stop and celebrate them – people need to be excited about the things they accomplish.”

Today, White sees her company deriving 20 percent of its revenue from non-traditional sources, and finding new ways to do things through “four pillars of transformation.”

She said the first of those pillars involved developing a consumer revenue team tasked with “figuring out strategy,” that has already boosted the Record Journal’s digital subscribers from 287 in 2017, to just under 800 today – with a goal to top 1,800 by year’s end.

White’s editors and managers are similarly coaching reporters and editorial staff to constantly use analytics to build digital engagement and earn subscribers by simply asking what people want and then delivering that content.
The Record Journal’s efforts were supported and energized through its participation in Poynter’s Table Stakes program, which helps local newspapers learn how to make a successful transition to sustainable digital publishing while building a culture of performance-driven change.

“One of the Poynter suggestions was going public, and getting your entire organization to understand why” strategic changes are happening, she said. “So we’re audience focused instead of being focused on the kind of content we think people want,” she added.

White’s team is also moving from paid views to engagement – a huge shift.

“Our page views have gone way down, but the number of users has not,” she said, “that means they’re more engaged and more willing to pay [for content].”

The second pillar “owned and operated revenue,” involves revenue built around content. That means packaging and bundling advertising positioned around content, no matter which platform.

She talked about a “player of the week” sports initiative that also includes weekly video content and an annual event – that White said attracted several over the past year paying $2,500 per month. Several other sponsored packages are poised to run focusing on real estate, food and drink, and healthy living.

White said the Record Journal’s third pillar is Home Based Digital Revenue – promoting the Record Journal’s “local team with national expertise,” and promoting how White’s publications and multimedia content are local, family-owned, and innovative.

The final pillar is “Event Revenue.” White said her team is selective about the kinds of events to do, and that the sports event tied to the aforementioned athlete of the week program.

“That event draws about 400 people,” she said. The paper turned a 35-year-old “design an ad” promotion for local elementary students into an event that draws students, educators, community leaders, and parents “who are excited to be engaging with us.”

White said the company also hosts a four-Chamber event with 300-plus local business people into the Record Journal’s innovative office space so they can see for themselves that we are not a dying newspaper.

Finally, the paper’s “Readers Choice” promotion developed into a print special section that generated $25,000, and morphed into an event that White said generated $235,000 in revenue this year.

‘Money to be made’

Arwady batted clean-up, in part, updating the audience on a number of success stories working for his paper and subsidiary MassLive.com that he showcased in a session at NENPA’s 2019 New England Newspaper Conference in Worcester last October.

Session Speakers Showcase A Mix of Traditional And Wildly Creative Ways To Generate New Revenue

Arwady reassured confidently that “there’s a ton of money to be made in print,” whether printing one’s own publications, or printing for other clients. On the digital side, he said his company has seen its MassLive.com page views escalate to an eye-popping 274,332 the day before the conference by keeping content and access free to users.

“That’s why the audience has grown immensely,” Arwady said. As a result, “advertising revenue is millions and millions of dollars.”

Arwady believes he is experiencing the most exciting time in the newspaper business, but admits, “if we don’t innovate, we’re out of business folks.” That means embracing the concept that local newspapers of any size are likely the dominant news medium, information and communications media in your market.

“If you know your market, if you make friends, and if you build relationships and offer innovative products to meet people’s needs, you’re going to be around for years and years and years,” he said.

Referring to the NENPA conference keynote, Arwady said his company always has a “shiny new toy.” He said charging more for the Republican has chased away peripheral readers, and engaged those who read this paper intensely.

Among the other innovative risks Arwady thinks will pay off big is acquiring a partner providing a POP Network or “point of purchase” array of 63 video screens in the region providing a silent, 7-minute loop of news content and advertisements, with each news video or advertisement lasting 15 seconds.

“These are smart digital screens that are optical readers that look out at you, and it knows your gender and age,” he said. “We’re going after TV budgets.” Arwady said the POP Network is geo-targeted, “and we just went over 1.1 billion impressions.”

“Last year we went over $60,000 in revenue and this year, the budget is $390,000,” he added. The Republican is also still making money from obituaries and related products which have generated a 30-40% increase in revenue in recent years.

“You need to brainstorm everything to make money,” he said. Arwady’s company does a revenue retreat every year, the latest producing about 35 new ideas that they choose from to promote or pilot each year.

One of the latest event ideas is a cannabis expo fair to draw both purveyors and consumers engaged in Massachusetts’ legal recreational adult market. Adding he expects to see several hundred vendors signing on from across North America.

The Republican also publishes books, targeting myriad community landmarks, activities, personalities, milestones, and anniversaries. “We do about a quarter million dollars a year in book publishing,” he said. “If there’s an anniversary in your town, and it’s a big enough deal, and you’re not making money off it, shame on you!”

Arwady said his company is far from abandoning print. “If you do it right, print is still wildly profitable, but you have to be creative, nimble – take risks, and give [innovative ideas] time enough to work.”

John Voket is an Associate Editor at The Newtown Bee in Connecticut, Director of Public Affairs for Connecticut’s Connoisseur Media radio stations, and 2018-19 President of NENPA.

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Convention keynote message – Find out what they want and give it to them

John Voket | NENPA eBulletin | February 25, 2020

As the newly-minted owner and publisher of Editor & Publisher, Mike Blinder launched into his keynote at NENPA’s 2020 New England Newspaper Convention hearkening back to a mantra he learned from a key mentor back when he was working in broadcasting.

While the advice seems almost quaint, even eternally simplistic, Blinder believes the credo rings true today – particularly when considering the sustainability of newspapers. He recalled meeting Mike Joseph who created radio’s “Hot Hits” format, and adopting the advice that has served Blinder well for decades: “Find out what they want and give it to them.”


At the same time, Blinder advised the audience that while it is particularly important in the realm of ad sales and marketing, in order for newspapers and in fact the entire industry to survive, it’s vital for publishers and their teams to believe in – and sell themselves to readers.

Blinder suggested that if newspaper operators and staffers believe we’re in a dying industry, that nugget of negativity will eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Is print dead? The answer is no,” Blinder declared with conviction.

Pointing to a completely different kind of hero, Blinder recalled one of the greatest lines in sports coming from hockey god Wayne Gretzky and how it relates to the future success of newspapers.

In trying to explain his record breaking acuity for the game, Blinder related Gretzky once saying, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” In relation to newspapers, that means finding the sweet spot among the niche media serving one’s market.

“The world is niche,” Blinder reminded the NENPA Convention crowd, who gathered February 7-8 at Boston’s Renaissance Waterfront Hotel. “Your lane has to remain hyper-local – it’s where you have to be!”

That means hyper-local in terms of the content newspapers’ maturing readers are demanding and still consuming with significant enthusiasm – as well as how newspapers continue serving their advertisers.

Urging ad sales directors and their front line reps to be a street fighter, Blinder laid out a scenario he employed to help remind skeptical business owners and advertisers that newspapers do have impact in local communities.

On occasion, when faced with an advertiser claiming that nobody reads the local paper anymore, Blinder suggested offering to buy the business an ad in which it promotes giving $100 away to any customer who comes in.

When the business owner inevitably balks at the concept, they remind themselves that local newspapers still do have readers – readers who pay attention to the ads as well as the editorial content.

Citing the latest Borrell Associates 2020 Outlook, Blinder fortified his position about the continued value of newspapers to their business community. He said despite the fact that small businesses are subject to media approaches 40 – 60 times per month, the Borrell study affirms
that newspapers are still the #3 choice for small businesses.

“We’re still number three – but that’s not a bad place to be,” Blinder said, offering this hopeful note: “And digital spending has peaked – and it’s coming down.”

Blinder noted that the most successful newspapers are working to espouse the STS – “shiny toy syndrome.”

“Businesses don’t hate us, they know we work. So here’s the challenge guys – the perception is you’re not dead – the perception is you’re just old. If it’s new it has to be cool. But we still act old and stodgy in a shiny toy world,” he observed.

Referring to his own endeavor and the recent acquisition of E&P, Blinder first changed the cover design by adding a hashtag.

“I branded old with new,” he said. Then he (gasp! upgraded the size of his new magazine.

Then he looked at how he was going to show off all that shiny new attitude to the readers – while reeling them back to become new devotees of his long-established brand.

E-mail.

“That’s my future,” Blinder said, explaining that under his leadership, he saw the E&P e-mail database grow from 18,500 to more than 50,000 bringing an 18-25% open rate and click rates well over 10 percent.

“And every click is going to something I own.”

Then he added podcasts (“…new and shiny!”, and committed to creating virtually no-cost videos to help motivate advertising and marketing partners to put their faith and ad spending into E&P.

In the interest of better prospect engagement, Blinder also advocated morphing off-putting and difficult to digest rate cards. “Rate cards are absurd,” he chided.

Instead, create marketing promoting packages that combine legacy print with digital.

Blinder designs his E&P advertiser packages with elements that can peel away if prospective marketing partners and advertisers hit their budget wall. Referring to the practice as “downselling,” Blinder advocates ad reps going in high and working downward.

Another important reshuffling of sales behavior, Blinder said, involves completing a needs analysis before any discussion of what your newspaper has to offer to a prospect.

“Train your salespeople to lead with client goals. Don’t lead with a product, lead with determining advertiser needs,” Blinder said. The simple formula for success in Binder’s experience is the approach (getting in the door); building rapport; ascertainment (finding out what the advertiser wants); crafting a solution; and then, closing.

“Lead as a B to B advocate helping to grow their business,” he added. “Overcome objections by leading with the benefit.”

Then hit them with a shiny new toy.

“That’s the secret sauce,” he said. “Tell the client what you’re excited about – for me it’s digital.”

Then promote every single positive testimonial available. When sales or editorial hears something good, Blinder says exploit it – “tell the world!”

In response to an audience question about getting emails to drive prospects to Binders arsenal of free and no-cost self-promotional videos, he replied – “ask them for two minutes to watch a video. Fifty percent open it.”

Blinder closed with his own pitch – offering NENPA attendees a premium subscription rate for E&P, and encouraging them to get in the queue now as he slowly begins shifting from open to subscriber-only web content.

John Voket is an Associate Editor at The Newtown Bee in Connecticut, Director of Public Affairs for Connecticut’s Connoisseur Media radio stations, and 2018-19 President of NENPA.

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Digging deeper: How to find opportunities (and time) to go in-depth


Bart Pfankuch is the content director for South Dakota News Watch, an online public-service journalism group. He can be reached at bart.pfankuch@sdnewswatch.org.

Has the daily grind got you down? Are you missing on opportunities to move up in your career because your stories are stuck on average? Is it hard to remember the last time you broke a big story, produced a project or delved deeply into an important topic?

In today’s understaffed, overworked journalism environment, many daily and weekly newspaper writers are likely to answer “yes” to one or more of those questions. And while I understand why, I simply refuse to accept the notion that it is impossible for anyone to produce in-depth material.

As a quick definition, “in-depth” is coverage that includes: a higher quantity and quality of sourcing than normal; multi-part packages; projects with maps, graphics and charts; coverage of topics that are controversial or which someone wants kept quiet; use of reports, public documents and data to draw conclusions; use of multi-media and improved photography; or use of narrative form or thematic storytelling.

Here are some tips to find the topics, and the time, to do deeper work.

— Prioritize. We all have regular tasks to complete, meetings to cover or sections to fill. Commit yourself to doing those jobs more quickly and efficiently in order to maintain overall quality but to free up time each day or week to work on deeper or more long-range projects.

— Use time wisely. Sometimes you have to work late or on a weekend to land a big project. But to make in-depth work a habit, find ways to fit the work into your regular schedule. Reduce office chit-chat, avoid the time suck of social media; and stay on task when on the clock. Try to commit one hour a day or three hours a week only to project work.

— Watch for opportunities, then dive in. Great stories sometimes fall into our laps, but more often they must be found and cultivated. Always be on the hunt for topics that aren’t obvious or that can lead to change. Look for stories that involve government waste or mismanagement, those that highlight people who are in peril or who are suffering or are without a voice, or topics that powerful people want to keep hidden. When you get a reputation as a watchdog, sources with good stories will flock to you. Never, ever blow them off; listen to anyone about anything.

— Convince your editor, and yourself, of the importance. Going deeper won’t happen on its own; you will have to take the initiative and it will require extra work and energy. Don’t approach your editor with an idea until you’ve done your homework and have established a plan for what the story might say, how long it will take to complete and when it can be done. Good editors won’t turn away great work.

— Start small. Consider your first in-depth project a starter kit. Take on a story that you know can be done and completed rather quickly, but which has the potential for impact. With a small victory in hand, then shoot bigger and you’ll have the confidence to land larger stories. Try to complete a project every month, every quarter or even once a year if that is what time allows.

— Think beyond your borders. In small towns, or on busy beats, it can be tough to find topics that resonate widely. Tackle a topic that reaches beyond your town or your regular topic area by considering issues of statewide interest, industrywide reach or those that touch on an entire population of people.

— Keep clean, accurate notes. After every interview, type up or clean up the notes immediately and identify anyone or anything you might forget. Longer stories require more organization.

— Find a mentor. If there’s someone in your newsroom doing in-depth work, glom onto them and copy their best practices. If not, find someone outside the newsroom to confer with or go online to find someone in journalism to ask for help or advice.

— Emulate other good work. Keep your eyes peeled for journalism that stands out and then replicate it. Go on awards websites and click on the winners to see what type of stories, and which topics, are rising to the top of our field. Then, redo your own version.

— Keep it to yourself, at first. Do not make a grand announcement that you are working on a project. Rather, do the work quietly at first, diligently, until a project takes shape. When you know you can bring it home, then tell your editor or your colleagues. At that point, ask for extra time or open space in the paper.

— Collaborate. Once you have a green light to go deep, seek input from editors, other reporters, web folks, photographers and designers or anyone else who can help make the project shine.

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Three new publishing applications for newspapers

Kevin Slimp technology

Kevin Slimp is director of the Institute of Newspaper Technology. Email questions to him at kevin@kevinslimp.com.

I spent my morning writing about mergers, buyouts, and bankruptcies. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to spend a few minutes on something more fun.

For the past three or four months, I’ve been holding on to three new applications, waiting for the time to share them with my friends at newspapers. Now is that time.

The first, Affinity Publisher, made a lot of noise in 2019 as several online publications wrote about the similarity to InDesign, Quark and other layout applications at a fraction of the cost. I believe Rob Dump, publisher in Nebraska, was the first to write me and ask if his newspaper should cut the monthly subscription fees from Adobe and switch over this $49 (that’s a one-time process, not a monthly subscription). Others soon followed with the same question.

The good folks at Affinity were nice enough to give me free copies of each of their products: Publisher (similar to InDesign), Photo (similar to Photoshop), and Designer (similar to Illustrator). They had good reason. The products are solid and, with a few improvements, could work well in newspaper and magazine design.

However, and there always seems to be a however, Affinity Publisher is not ready for primetime yet. It’s a great product for someone designing a newsletter, poster, business card or whatever. There is, unfortunately, a major problem that makes it unusable in its current form for professional page layout: It just can’t handle PDF files in a way that makes them work correctly on the page.

I could spend 800 words explaining the issue, but I only have 800 words for my column, so let me break it down to its simplest element. In Affinity Publisher, PDF files are editable when placed on the page. That sounds good. It’s not, for our purposes. As a result, fonts are replaced, things move, and other issues appear that will not make your advertisers happy. Until that’s fixed, and I wouldn’t expect it to be fixed anytime soon, Affinity Publisher just won’t work for our purposes.

Affinity Photo, however, comes much closer to replacing Photoshop for our purposes. While still lacking many of the tools available in Photoshop, Affinity Photo is impressive and allows the user to edit a photo with good results.  There are some tools missing, or at least I’ve not been able to find them, which are important in our work to ensure optimum printing in CMYK, but there are ways to address these.

In short, I wouldn’t be tossing out InDesign (or QuarkXpress) or Photoshop any time soon. Who knows, maybe Affinity will address some of these issues and we can all be free from monthly subscription plans, In the meantime, I expect I’ll keep shelling out a monthly fee for my Adobe licenses.

Which brings us to IDMarkz

I’ve loved Markzware products for more than a decade. Heck, it might be two decades by now. 

Back when everyone seemed to be converting from Pagemaker and QuarkXpress to InDesign, we would have never made the transition without Q2ID, the InDesign plug-in that allowed users to open QuarkXpress files in InDesign.

Markzware has released several InDesign and Quark plug-ins in the years since, and their latest product will be of interest to a lot of newspapers.

IDMarkz isn’t a plug-in. It’s an application on its own. With IDMarkz, users can export InDesign files in various formats including: Affinity Publisher, QuarkXpress, Illustrator, and PDF.

One of Markzware’s chief marketing points is that users can preview and open InDesign files without having InDesign. If you’re a Quark-based publication, the ability to open an InDesign file immediately in QuarkXpress is a necessity. However, most of us already have InDesign, so what can IDMarkz do for us?

I experimented for an hour with IDMarkz and was intrigued by how well it exports files to other formats. Sure, some things move around and fonts change if you don’t have the font installed on your system. Still, the results are quite remarkable.

I can think of at least three reasons a newspaper might want to have IDMarkz on hand. First, if a newspaper is QuarkXpress-based, IDMarkz is a simple way to open InDesign files. Second, if your paper needs to send QuarkXpress files to clients, you could still design the files in InDesign and use IDMarkz to convert the files for QuarkXpress (although users are required to have Quark installed for this function to work). Finally, if your workflow requires you to create files to be converted to Affinity Publisher, IDMarkz is the best tool I’ve seen for this.

In a nutshell, not everyone needs IDMarkz, but a lot of us do. Visit markzware.com/products/idmarkz to try IDMarkz out for free. Purchases price is $199 (US).

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Google v. Oracle: Tech battle ultimately about free speech

Gene Policinski First Amendment
Gene Policinski is president and chief operating officer of the Freedom Forum Institute. Email him at
gpolicinski@freedomforum.org and follow him on Twitter at @genefac.

In what we can quaintly sometimes call “normal times,” copyright disputes are not regularly considered pressing concerns for the First Amendment.

Freedom of expression — the freedoms of press and of speech, articulated in the First Amendment’s 45 words — protects our right to speak. 

But the technology and mode of how we speak generally is the province of other areas of the law, from contract law to rules protecting our right to peace and quiet at our homes late at night to copyright, the rules and regulations that prevent someone else from putting their name or improperly profiting on something we created.

But a case to be argued March 24 in the U.S. Supreme Court dramatically engages both the “to” and “how,” by raising both tech and creative questions involving computer code.

Google has successfully gotten the Supreme Court to review a 2018 Federal Circuit Court of Appeals decision in favor of Oracle, the multinational computer technology company. The two companies have been in dispute for about a decade over Google’s use of 11,000 lines of computer code making up what is called an “application programming interface” (API), originally written by Oracle.

In simple terms, APIs are how our electronic devices share information across differing products. As one document in the case explains, it’s what allows millions to “take a photo on their Apple phone, save it onto Google’s cloud servers, and edit it on their (Microsoft) Surface tablets.” 

Here’s how to break down the two company’s arguments to the justices in this long-standing legal battle: 

  • Google says the code is not a creative work (a requirement for copyright), but a utilitarian series of computer steps that traditionally are open for all to developers to use in their own work, and thus not falling under copyright protection. (Think “set of instructions”). 
  • Oracle argues that APIs are included under copyright laws and that a major factor for courts to consider in this case is that Google used Oracle’s creation to directly compete with Oracle, thus earning millions on its Android products.

So, what is the First Amendment’s direct concern in all of this? Follow me through this.

Google supporters argue that being unable to use such common instructions will dampen the creativity of web developers and cripple software development — which for us means fewer ways to communicate by phone, tablet and such. They also warn the prohibition could cause companies to develop products incompatible with anyone else’s products, resulting in chaos for consumers.

Oracle advocates — who, at least online, seem fewer in number than those supporting Google — counter that the remedy for such a looming disaster is simple: Google pays Oracle a fee to use its product.

For all of us, the Supreme Court ruling could well help further define for the computer age a legal concept called “fair use,” which permits us to develop our own creative works by building on the earlier works of others. Such new creative work is said to “transform” the original — with a plethora of legal caveats on how closely the new work can copy or resemble the original.

Nearly 20 years ago, a parody of “Gone with the Wind” was published as “The Wind Done Gone,” taking the plot and characters of the original and revisiting the story from the point of view of an African American — and making the point about racial stereotypes in the original.

The estate of “Gone with the Wind” author Margaret Mitchell sued for violation of its copyright on what is considered the second highest-selling book after the Bible. The case was eventually was settled out of court. The author and publisher of the parody argued that by telling the same story, but from a slave’s perspective — even if followed the plot, scenes, settings and characters — the new work was sufficiently different. 

In the Oracle-Google battle, another kind of fair use is in play. In asking the Supreme Court to hear its appeal, Google said APIs should not be subject to copyright because their very purpose is to be used by others, to connect products owned by someone else. 

First Amendment advocates should watch the court’s decision — as difficult and complicated as the tech issues certainly are to track — because the potential appears to exist for limiting our ability to communicate with each other simply because our devices cannot connect. And, more broadly, we need to keep an eye on any dampening of the web’s potential for increasing public engagement in debate and decision on matters that affect us all. 

A bottom line to it all: The nine justices hearing the appeal may well decide if we will face a real-life example (or perhaps parody) of that phone commercial in which the character repeatedly shouts into a mobile device, “Can you hear me now?”

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Are TMC Products a Value or Unnecessary Expense in Today’s Newspaper Environment?

Jerry Simpkins | Editor&Publisher | February 18, 2020

Total Market Coverage (TMC) products are regarded by many as a mixed blessing. Virtually all our properties have at one time or another had a TMC. Due to declines in preprints and increasing expense, a few have shut them down. Some see a need for a TMC from both an advertising and production standpoint, and others see TMC’s as a declining segment of their operation that has lost its usefulness.

Every market is different, and I don’t believe there is any one size fits all approach to decide whether a TMC fits into your overall plan or not. Like we do in so many parts of our operation, you’ll need to carefully evaluate your TMC to determine the right fit for your franchise.
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The Information’s successful paywall strategy

Simon Owens | What’s New In Publishing | February 18, 2020

There’s a third type of paywall model that’s used by a much smaller group of publishers: the hard paywall. The upside to this approach is it requires every user to be logged in, so readers can’t use various browser tricks to get around a meter. And when done well, the hard paywall can squeeze out more revenue per reader, which means you don’t need to reach massive audience scale before you start generating real revenue.

Of course, there’s a reason why most publishers don’t pursue the hard paywall model. Without allowing readers to sample content for free, it’s much more difficult to convince them to open up their wallets and hand over their credit card information. This also limits word-of-mouth marketing, given that the publisher’s content can’t be as easily spread over social media and other distribution channels.

That’s what makes The Information’s paywall success so impressive.
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A. G. Sulzberger Receives NEFAC’s 2020 Hamblett Award on Feb. 7

A. G. Sulzberger | New York Times | February 7, 2020

The New York Times Publisher, A. G. Sulzberger received the New England First Amendment Coalition’s 2020 Stephen Hamblett First Amendment Award on February 7 during the New England First Amendment Coalition annual awards luncheon.

You can read his remarks from the event here.

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USA Today new digital edition powered by Tecnavia’s NewsMemory

Press Release | Tecnavia | January 28, 2020

Burnsville, MN — Tecnavia announced that USA Today is now publishing revamped and modernized digital print replica editions of their daily USA Today newspaper, USA Today Sports Weekly and specials. Based on Tecnavia’s NewsMemory technology, the new editions provide a cross-platform reading experience via web browser and mobile apps.

The new presentation gives digital readers a familiar and intuitive print-like experience, while still using the web and mobile platform features, gestures and conventions readers appreciate, and have come to expect. Features include multiple page and story display modes, digital language translation, story read-aloud, automated personalized topic searches, live URL links to web and rich media, access to digital puzzles and social media
sharing.
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Worcester Business Journal launches podcast

Brad Kane | Worcester Business Journal | February 10, 2020

The Worcester Business Journal on Monday published the inaugural episode of its new podcast, The Weekly Business Report, produced in conjunction with Radio Worcester.

In the first episode entitled, “Worcester’s most well-informed businessman” co-hosts Brad Kane and Hank Stolz sit down with Jim Umphrey, principal of the Worcester commercial real estate firm Kelleher & Sadowsky Associates, who discusses ongoing outside institutional investment going into city properties.

The Weekly Business Report will publish every Monday morning and offer a look ahead at Central Massachusetts business news.
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