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Rex & Getty — it’s off! A letter to photographers from Rex Features’ Mike Selby

Rex & Getty -- it's off!

Rex & Getty -- it's off!

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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Times Online tells staff its paywall nearing rollout. Roll up for trials.

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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News International confirms banning NewsNow crawlers from linking

Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive O...

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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VIDEO — $5 an hour to read online news (as seen in a 1981 TV report)

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”).

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eBay founder Pierre Omidyar dropping Twitter project for local news service

Image representing Pierre Omidyar as depicted ...
Pierre Omidyar, Image via CrunchBase

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.

Omidyar (@pierre on Twitter) said he had been interested in news for some time and that Peer News was founded with the goal of:

empowering citizens and encouraging greater civic participation through media. We believe that a strong democracy requires an engaged society supported by effective news reporting and analysis. And, we believe that this can be done in a profitable, sustainable way.

FireShot capture #055 - 'Pierre Omidyar (pierre) on Twitter' - twitter_com_pierreSo if you fancy applying to be the editor based in Honolulu, the details can be found here. Prospective candidates need to offer answers to two key questions impacting news today.

  1. In 100 words or less, when did you first realise that the Web was going to change journalism forever?
  2. In 100 words or less, what advice would you give the news industry?

News veteran Howard Weaver has been advising the Peer News team, and in a blog posting entitled “Looking toward one future for local civic journalism” he said:

The new venture intends to demonstrate that a digitally native, technologically fluent web organisation can profitably serve targeted readers who want sophisticated journalism focused on local civic affairs.

Local and regional newspapers have been hugely impacted in the crisis affecting journalism and changing reader and advertiser habits. Local publications have been closing in their scores as revenues and circulations plummet. The loss of a local newspaper closes a prime avenue for local accountability and democracy. It is a subject of heated debate, and stressed out newspaper executives will be watching Omidyar very closely to see if he can generate profits from online local news.

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Associated Press job losses update — AP layoff list

AP Associated Press LogoFurther 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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Associated Press lays off news staff as cost cutting hits home

The Associated Press Building in New York City...
Image via Wikipedia

The Associated Press has laid off “dozens” of news staff as part of the agency‘s bid to reduce staffing costs by 10% this year.

The moves come as the 163-year-old cooperative wire agency has grappled with falling revenues, mutiny from its members and well-publicised battles against search engines and aggregators that it accuses of making money off the back of its services.

While US news media was buzzing yesterday as first word of the cuts began to filter out, the AP — which prides itself on fast breaking news — was itself uncharacteristically slow in reporting what was happening.

When it eventually came, the AP story didn’t say how many staff were being laid off, but the News Media Guild, which represents around 1,300 employees in the US, said as of Tuesday evening 38 Guild-covered reporters, editors and photographers had been told they were no longer required. It dubbed the day “Black Tuesday”.

AP said its cost cutting goal was set late last year as it prepared to lower fees for newspapers and broadcasters that had been hit by recession and the shift of advertising to the Internet.

The AP story said:

AP’s revenue is expected to fall about 6 percent this year to roughly $700 million.

Hoping to minimize layoffs, the AP imposed a hiring freeze late last year and offered early retirement packages to longtime employees over the summer. About 100 opted for those packages.

It’s been a tough year for the news business in the United States. Newspaper circulation across the country plunged by an average 10.6% in the six months to 30 September, while earlier this month the struggling Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co newspapers planned to do an AP cold turkey for a week as part of a test to see if all ties with the news agency can be severed next year.

The AP has promised members rate reductions averaging around 20%, but with its content perceived to be increasingly less relevant and the costs for the service harder to sustain, many question what the future holds for the news agency.

AP supremeo Tom Curley has been aggressively fighting (alongside Rupert Murdoch) giant news search services such as Google and Microsoft saying they should be made to pay for AP content. Curley says sites such as Google have reaped a fortune off AP articles, photos and video without paying fair compensation.

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VIDEO – Old and new media lock horns to generate fascinating discussion on the future of news

Keynote discussion of the week where the future of news media was chewed over at the Monaco Media Forum 2009 by Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, and Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post fame. Conversation is hosted by Christine Ockrent, CEO of France 24.

The resulting video is a fantastic exploration of the tensions between the old and new schools of journalism, commercial pressures and just what the future may (or may not) hold.

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Tribune Co to test AP cold turkey in bid to break news wire link

FireShot capture #041 - 'Tribune Company __ Media Relations' - www_tribune_com_pressroom_index_htmlAssociated Press supremo Tom Curley will likely have gagged on his breakfast this morning as he tried to digest the news that the struggling Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co newspapers planned to do an AP cold turkey for a week from 8 November as part of a test to see if all ties with the news agency can be severed next year.

Chicago Tribune columinist Phil Rosenthal, in his blog “Tower Ticker” on the newspaper’s website, says the trial, driven mainly by the need to cut costs, will see the publications use as little AP content as possible and comes

almost 13 months after Tribune Co gave the AP a required two-year warning that it might drop the news service, effective Oct. 15, 2010. Tribune Co said at the time that it was keeping its options open while weighing what role, if any, the AP would play in its future.
Some content Tribune Co papers get from the Associated Press, such as sports statistics, will still be published during the experiment. The company also said that if the AP is the only available source for a report considered vital, it will use that AP coverage. But the company wants to see to what kind of void the absence of AP stories and photos would have.
Rosenthal said the besides self-generated content, Tribune titles would look to sources such as Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, Agence France Presse, CNN, Global Post, Bloomberg and McClatchy newspapers to fill the void left by AP.
US newspapers are having a tough time, with the latest ABCs showing average circulation decline for the six months to 30 September of 10.6%. The Chicago Tribune saw its circulation dive 9.7% in the period, while the LA Times dropped 11%. Tribune Co filed for bankruptcy protection last December due to plummeting advertising revenues and massive debts of around $13 billion.
As they grapple with ways to retain readers, newspapers are looking to develop unique content, and shared wire copy available across numerous publications or websites is seen to do little to attract eyeballs.
AP Associated Press LogoAP is a not-for-profit cooperative with more than 4,000 employees working in more than 240 news bureaux worldwide. It is owned by its 1,500 US daily newspaper members that elect a board to direct the business.
An AP news story today headlined “Tribune Co newspapers won’t use AP next week” said that at the AP annual meeting in April, about 180 newspapers had threatened to leave the news service, with many of them citing cost as the main reason.

“The Associated Press has been working with all members of the cooperative, including Tribune Co, to ensure that the AP news report retains its value to member newspapers and their readers,” AP spokesman Paul Colford was reported as saying in a statement.

AP has promised members rate reductions averaging around 20%, but with its content perceived to be increasingly less relevant and the costs for the service harder to sustain, many question what the future holds for the 163-year-old wire agency.

Curley has been aggressively fighting (alongside Rupert Murdoch) giant news search services such as Google and Microsoft saying hey should be made to pay for AP content. Curley says sites such as Google have reaped a fortune off AP articles, photos and video without paying fair compensation. Now his choices are getting further squeezed and the old agency, like so many of its traditional members, needs to find new types of revenue to replace existing and possibly diminishing streams.

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Survey gives massive thumbs down to paid news & sports content

Oh dear, another week and another piece of research delivering much the same grim message. No surprises then when a sample of 2,ooo UK respondents overwhelming gave a thumbs down to paying for nearly all forms of online content including news and sports coverage.

Who will pay for news & views? Not the readers, it would appear
Who will pay for news & views? Not the readers, it would appear (via MediaWeek)

The study, by Lightspeed Research and commissioned by Global Web Index, gives traditional media executives yet more food for thought.

Aside from the 91% saying they would never pay for news the survey also hammered a nail into the coffin of those that thought deeper, richer content would have people reaching for their wallets with 90% saying “forget it” to paid-for analysis.

The findings will only serve to up the pressure on traditional publishers looking to redefine business models for the online world.

The issues here are controversial. Murdoch is looking to charge for access to some of his newspapers and TV channels, while other British newspapers are believed to have been putting pressure on news aggregators in a bid to grab revenues via the third economy — those that simply point the way to content provided by others.

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MaYoMo video-centric citizen journalist network goes live

MaYoMo (Map Your Moments, www.mayomo.com) is a new Web 2.0 service that simply offers users the chance to ask “what’s happening, where and when” with the idea of empowering user generated content to lead the news agenda. It aims to deliver a “socially-connected, real-time platform for global news reporting — and conversation about that news.”

Beyond the usual web video fare of YouTube type clips of a French youth doing a flip over a railway line, and some nice photos of the Maldives, the site does veer more into news and offers a clear personal perspective. The protests against a trade agreement between Armenia and Turkey take news down to a local level, while users are encouraged to request news from specific places or on particular topics.

MaYoMo aims to offer breaking news on demand from citizen journalist around the world

MaYoMo aims to offer breaking news on demand from citizen journalists around the world

Hristo Alexiev, CEO and cofounder of MaYoMo, was quoted in a press release saying:

A key difference with our model is that we attract content from both young, aspiring journalists, as well as experienced independent journalists and bloggers.

The site claims that from “Alpha” and “Beta” launches over the last year it has gained users in 120 countries that have posted 57,000 news articles.

But it’s still early days. Despite @MaYoMo pouring out over 3,000 tweets since July, it still only has 340 followers, while on Facebook it counts just 146 fans.

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AP targets slower news but will it shoot itself in the foot?

AP Associated Press LogoIn a Twitter age when real time means (almost) exactly that, the comments from Associated Press supremo Tom Curley that the agency was considering offering news stories exclusively to some online customers for a short period seems to fly in the face of common sense and exhibit a lack of awareness about online news trends.

In remarks made at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong this week, Curley said deepening competition between Google and Microsoft presented content providers with a golden opportunity to cash in as the two internet giants competed to grab every bigger online audience shares.

The AP licenses its content to many online services — including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN — as well as providing content to websites belonging to newspaper and broadcast clients worldwide. The AP, in its coverage of the  comments, said Curley echoed the complaints of many news companies that say sites such as Google have reaped a fortune off their articles, photos and video without paying fair compensation.

All AP clients currently get breaking news delivered at the same time, but these ideas would end that. As an ex-agency (Reuters)  correspondent I’m deeply concerned by these developments on two counts:

  1. The AP will break very few exclusives of earth shattering importance and will therefore find itself behind the news pack, thus undermining its value to clients and readers (shoot in foot syndrome?);
  2. Traditionally, every news organisation wants to be fast and first with breaking news. As news vendors struggle to compete with Twitter and citizen journalists, this seems to be a mercenary attempt to control news output and is doomed to fail (although it may raise a little extra revenue).

To be fair, Curley did not say just how such a service would work, or what kind of premium could be charged, but he did suggest offering “exclusivity” for as little as 20 or 30 minutes. My fear is that this could be the first step in trying to sell rights to news in much the same way that rights are so strictly controlled to major sporting events. The difference here is that this can’t work.

We know that relations between Google and the AP have been deteriorating for a while now. Back in April, Curley indicated that talks between the two over content usage rights weren’t going well again, and threatened to pull the plug on the AP feed to Google.

Come on Tom Curley, think again. The challenge to build online revenues needs creative solutions, not something that ultimately devalues the core product — your news.

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Is there a future for paid content online? Poll says “No”

The latest poll on whether people in Britain would be willing to pay for online news content makes gloomy reading for the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp hounds looking to reverse their enormous £2.1 billion losses in 08/09. If they were looking for a glimmer of hope, they are unlikely to find it in the paidContent:UK/Harris interactive poll published this week.

In a nutshell — and this comes a s no surprise to me — people want to pay nothing or next to nothing.

Let’s let the graphics speak for themselves…

pcuk-harris-poll-paid-content-preferred-annual-sub-price-mpcuk-harris-poll-paid-content-preferred-day-pass-price-m

pcuk-harris-poll-paid-content-preferred-per-article-price-m

It seems to me that if as a news publisher you are dishing up the standard fare of general stories covering politics, celebrity tittle tattle and sports you are really not going to get very far with building an online revenue stream from your content alone. The key is — and will always be — just how essential, unique or exclusive is your content? If it is set to make a big difference somehow and enable people to make money or create competitive advantage then the price that can be  charged is directly proportionate to the value of the information. What hope then for the consumer monsters competing against each other, huge publicly funded organisations such as the BBC, and the legions of bloggers, twitterers and others feeding the social networks? Brand is no longer sufficient to keep and monetise readership. The days of hearing: “Don’t you know it was in The Times, dear chap” as an expression of assurance that something was fair and true are long gone.

Faced with ever expanding choice and being swamped with information, disinformation, opinion and libellous streams from each and every direction, the reader has become far more discerning in its ability to discover, verify and react. While there remains rich and varied streams of content from numerous sources, the reader will remain reluctant to pay. In the paidContent:UK/Harris Interactive poll, a huge 68% say they would be willing to pay just a penny or two to access articles, while the majority, if faced with having to pay and no choice, have indicated they would not pay more than £10 a year. Seems the thumbsuckers need to get sucking again.

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