These days photography is playing on my mind. As an ex-professional snapper (film, of course) I hung up my Nikons in 1999 and haven’t been back since. I’m now of a certain age where I feel that same old uncontrollable urge to have a decent camera, so I’m going digital. In all the years that I haven’t been shooting a steady trickle of royalties has continued to hit my bank account, some of which was from Rex Features. Now, Rex was the subject of a take over bid by the global giant Getty. In stepped the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) which felt the acquisition would be anti-competitive.

As a registered Rex photographer, on Friday Mike Selby sent out the following email:

Dear Colleagues,

As you know, on 26th April we announced Getty Images’ intention to acquire Rex Features and its associated companies in the US. Getty Images voluntarily informed the Office of Fair Trading of the intended transaction to enable the OFT to carry out an investigation in advance of the deal being completed. Following its investigation, the OFT has decided to refer the proposed transaction to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission for competition clearance.

Although the MMC may ultimately have cleared the deal, we feel that the six- to eight- month process which would be carried out by the Commission would be too disruptive and unsettling for our loyal staff and suppliers who have already had to endure weeks of uncertainty. We have therefore decided to call off the proposed merger and the acquisition will not now be going ahead.

Rex was never actively seeking a buyer, and we are not seeking one now. With the deal off we will continue to do what we have been doing all along — give photographers and photo users in the UK and around the world a service which is second to none.

The fact that the OFT had reason to refer the proposed transaction to the MMC is in itself an indication of Rex Features’ strength and confirmation of the Company’s leading position in the market. We had many calls from clients today after the decision, welcoming the news and the fact that Rex is going to continue to be there as their independent picture source of choice.

Our staff have been working as normal all through this period and we will continue to work as hard as ever, to compete effectively with our many industry rivals, and to build on the more than half a century of history and reputation with which the name Rex Features is synonymous.

We would like to thank you for your patience, loyalty and support over the past few weeks in particular and look forward to a successful and long-lasting relationship.

With best regards,

John, Mike & Sue Selby and Martin Hillier

8 July 2010

Rex Features Ltd

18 Vine Hill

London

EC1R 5DZ

UK

Tel: +44-(0)20-7278 7294

Fax: +44-(0)20-7837 4812

www.rexfeatures.com

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So here it comes. The Times Online paywall is set to be launched. Thanks to our friends at paidContent:UK for Stephen Brook’s posting today that reported News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks told staff that readers registered with Times Online will be invited to register for an “exclusive preview of the new digital proposition” this week.

Let me not just repeat Brook’s posting. Go over and have a look for yourself. However, I will repeat the memo reportedly sent to News International staff today, and which will be distributed to Times Online registered users.

FAIR PRICING FOR DIGITAL CONTENT

Message from Rebekah Brooks
Those of you that subscribe to The Times and The Sunday Times or have registered on Times Online will receive a communication starting from this week inviting you to register for an exclusive preview of the new digital proposition. This shows that we are getting closer to the launch of the titles’ new digital sites.
I have made no secret of our intention to start charging for quality journalism online.  As you may have seen speculation in the media about our plans, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know why we believe this is such an important development.
We are committed to producing quality journalism that is written by professionals with a profound understanding of their subject and a commitment to provide well-informed coverage of the issues. Each of our titles, in its own way, has pioneered quality, professional journalism and we are unashamed to say we believe it has value.
In contrast, the industry is making the mistake of chasing millions of unique users by giving the audience more and more content for free. An obsession with traffic just doesn’t pay.

Great journalism needs investment and we are committed to supporting the fantastic work that you are all producing and delivering to our audiences. It is the quality of the journalism that you create, and the ways in which we produce and distribute it, that will continue to set our titles apart from the competition.
And to be clear, when we talk about charging for our content online, we are talking about charging a fair price. Price alone will not be a barrier to take up.  Of course, we expect to see the numbers of unique users of our sites come down dramatically. But the people who register to our new digital products will be customers who have made a positive decision to pay a fair price for journalism that they value, and they will be those who are more committed to and engaged with our titles.
This is an exciting development for our company especially as we will be among the first in the world to take this step. There are many who declare we have set ourselves an impossible task. But our company loves nothing more than challenging the status quo.
Shortly I will update you on our plans in more detail. But, in the meantime, I believe that with the combined force of your talent, commitment and hard work, we will, in the months and years to come, define a new future in the way we create, deliver and profit from our journalism.
Rebekah Brooks
Chief Executive, News International

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New York Times to charge for online access from 2011. Photo: Andy Soloman

Has the bullet been bitten? Or is the bullet winging its way to the heart of its mark?

The announcement by top US newspaper, The New York Times, that starting January 2011 it will charge frequent users of its website has either been heralded by underfire newspaper execs, or derided as a desperate measure that will hasten the venerable institution’s demise.

The NYT‘s David Carr, in the Times’ Media Decoder blog, said the move represented a hedge.

People who remain reflexively bullish on free [content] ignore the fact that the clock is ticking on many of the legacy businesses that produce that content. The new approach is an effort to replace that ticking clock with a meter, and its success is not assured but to sit still would be dumb.

It is not the job of The New York Times or any other mainstream media company to give away its content until it can no longer afford to do so.

The charging plans appear fairly draconian. From next January visitors will be able to view a few articles free each month, but step over the threshold and they will be required to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the daily or Sunday print editions will continue to receive full access.

The NYT has yet to say how much it intends to charge, or how many articles will remain free each month.

Newspapers have been grappling with plummeting circulations and advertising revenues. Readers have increasingly turned away from being brand loyal to being increasingly varied in choosing how they access their general news. The Internet, RSS feeds or news aggregators are able to through up numerous sources to information on any particular news story.

Yes, gathering news is an expensive business, but increasingly readers have been opting for free services to keep up with developments. As circulations decline, so advertisers look elsewhere. It’s worth noting that the the New York Times Company, which also includes the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers, saw advertising revenue plunge 30% in the first nine months of 2009.

No doubt, this is a brave move by the NYT, but with technology, reader behaviour and news sources exploding by the month (think Twitter and other social networks, think of the boom in citizen journalism, and think cost) it is hard to see whether come next January the NYT is part of a crowd rushing to harvest online dollars or whether it finds itself back tracking as the “loyal” online  readers it wants to monetise dessert it for somewhere else.

As Reuters media reporter Felix Salmon wrote (and which was reported in the NYT):

Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.”

So, is the NYT going to charge into battle only to find its followers have quietly disappeared? Will its brazen war cry fade into a garbled mumble? Or has it struck gold? My take is that it is not enough for legacy newspaper businesses to think they can easily transfer the model into a successful online business. They need to find ways to serve up the exclusive essential information that people will be willing to pay for.

This isn’t the first time the NYT has charged for acces. Back in the 1990s it charged overseas readers and then again a few years ago it tried another scheme to charge poeple for reading the op-ed columns. Both failed to gain any significant traction and were dropped.

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Image via Wikipedia

Following on from my earlier post that The Times Online had barred aggregator NewsNow.co.uk from crawling its website, it seems News International as a whole has the bit firmly between its teeth and has also banned the linking service from crawling any of its newspaper sites including including The Sun Online and the News of the World.

The Guardian reported News International as saying:

“We’ve been in communication with NewsNow for several months. We asked them to remove our content repeatedly from their indexing,” said a News International spokesperson. “Now, we will update our files accordingly for all our titles.”

“NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services. They have continued to do so despite our direct requests for them to stop. As a result, we have taken the decision to disallow their indexing of our content,” the company said in a statement.

“News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected. NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch and other media organisations, including UK newspapers and the Associated Press (AP), accuse NewsNow and other news aggregators such as Google and Microsoft, of being parasites and insist they should pay for access to news content. While Google quietly stopped indexing AP news shortly before Christmas, the News International action represents the first live bullets in what is destined to be a significant battle over the right to link and the basic building blocks of the Internet‘s interconnected world.

For the moment NewsNow seems to have been singled out. From where I sit, I wonder whether the relatively small UK-based operation represents a soft target for a posturing Mr Murdoch as he tries to find ways to bolster declining circulation and revenues at his major titles?

The really big target would be Google, but here the trade off between losing the opportunity to monetise traffic driven by the search giant while trying to unilaterally build online revenue from brand loyal readers sounds a little trickier. Is this a case of wanting it both ways, or will Murdoch eventually put his money where his mouth is and try and hold back the tide of internet traffic by hitting the big boys?

Come on chaps, play the game. The financial woes afflicting newspapers and their general inability to generate meaningful online revenues are not the fault of third party aggregators, who afterall, are driving traffic to their websites. The challenge here is to adapt and develop new business models that can thrive in a new digital world. Yes, it is not cheap to produce original news, but unfortunately it is not a rare commodity. Newspapers needs to find ways to engage with ther communities, not cast themselves adrift.

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Media and digital convergence offers myriad options and opportunities. Fine, if you know what you’re talking about that is. But for many, the emerging digital landscape is confusing. Those nice chaps at Those in Media have put together a programme of free webcasts and discussions on 20 January to help you all get the most out of your content.

Topics covered include tracking content ROI, publishing as the future of marketing, reading “digital body language” and managing content to avoid information overload.

These pages have previously mentioned another Those in Media initiative — the plans to host Mediastock in Europe in the summer. Sadly, as Brent Willen says, it was just too ambitious. So that idea is on hold, but other ideas including the webcasts and a tie up with AuthorsGlobe to produce Online Executive Education Sessions, with the first due on 4 February.

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The battle of the aggregators and news providers deepened today, with UK service NewsNow.co.uk saying News International had barred it from being able to link to any content on Times Online.

The increasingly bitter confrontation over the right to link to freely available news content threatens to set precedents that fly in the face of the natural development of the Internet and the the World Wide Web where growth thrives on the easy exchange of information in an increasingly connected world.

News International owner Rupert Murdoch has had a real beef with news aggregators — including Google and Microsoft. They are, he says, parasites that steal premium content beyond what would be governed by fair use. NewsNow has been facing a concerted action from the major UK newspapers that want to stop commercial content aggregators linking to their news. Against this back drop are tumbling print newspaper revenues and titles struggling to monetise their content online.

Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow says his service has been singled out

“It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out.

We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

At the end of last year, the UK national newspaper copyright body the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), imposed a scheme that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has been referred to the Copyright Tribunal. NewsNow stopped offering links to UK newspapers as part of its premium subscription services, but continued to offer links in its free services.

My view is clear on this issue. Yes, online revenue comes from having content, but also, most importantly, generating as much traffic as possible. To use a simple analogy, if a road is blocked off traffic does not drive down to have a look, but instead seeks an alternate route to get to its destination. If newspapers are struggling to build online models that deliver healthly dollops of cash from general news content, the one thing they must do is look for ways to monetise traffic.

For the cynics among you, here is The Times online singing the praises of NewsNow in 2006.

NewsNow is also behind the Right2Link campaign.

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These pages have been a little quiet over the past couple of weeks as I have shifted my attention to other directions, namely visiting New York and getting to see those great icons of their age: the Pixies performing the seminal Doolittle and various “B sides”. Cracking stuff.

So, before normal service is resumed, and as a little bit of light refreshment mixed in with a dollop of nostalgia, I pay homage to the Pixies. Yes, their Doolittle tour is a cash cow but why the hell shouldn’t they be allowed to reap something more from a career that was stunted if not highly influential? In New York they performed four gigs on consecutive nights, and then as demand for tickets was so good they tacked on another 1am show on Thanksgiving eve.

And what was the result? Black Francis actually smiled and Kim Deal, looking every inch everyone’s favourite Mum, kept us entertained with a little refrained banter through the set. The last time I saw Black Francis perform was at a solo gig he did at a small, smokey and extremely crowded London venue back in 1991 or 1992. Back then I was a working photographer on assignment. The only place for me to perch was on the side of the stage. He took exception to his moment in the spotlight being invaded, stopped mid song, uttered some expletives and then told the crowd he wouldn’t continue until I was off the stage. I had no choice but to get subsumed in the mosh pit, cameras swinging. Back then he had attitude, but I reckon now he has also found a dose of gratitude.

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It’s always good to look back so we can understand just how far we have come. This 1981 TV news report was broadcast on KRON in the San Francisco Bay Area and showed how early home computer adopters were willing to pay $5 an hour (yes, $5 a hour) to consume their daily newspaper online. (Thanks to Graham Holliday (@noodlepie) for including this gem in his presentation “Publishing Kigali Wire”).

Billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has announced that he’s abandoning Ginx, his Twitter client project, in favour of developing a new online local news service in Hawaii where he lives.

Peer News, founded by Omidyar and fellow eBay stalwart Randy Ching in 2008, has advertised via Twitter for an editor and in a blog posting Omidyar said a lot of effort was now going into building the new service.

We have a lot of work to do before our public launch in early 2010. We’re focused on building a really talented team here in Honolulu. For our Ginx users, we’re sorry to let you know that we’ll be shutting down the service at the end of 2009. We learned a lot and greatly appreciate all the interaction and feedback from you over the past year. We’re huge fans of Twitter, so you will still see us online, but we want our developers focused on the new organization and news service.

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Further to my posting earlier on job losses at US wire agency the Associated Press, Gawker has been keeping a running total of job losses in both the United States and in news bureaux elsewhere in the world.

The list is being constantly updated as more information and tip offs become available.

The full AP layoff list can be found here.

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