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Here is a fairly poor recording of the Oct. 6, 2011 fund-raising luncheon for the Worcester, Mass.-based Center for Non-Violent Solutions. The recording has a lot of echo because it was made from an MP3 recorder just sitting on one of the audience tables. Click on the carat of the bar below to launch an audio stream, or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening (75 minutes, 75.3MB).

For more than a decade, Bryan Stevenson has headed the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative. EJI lawyers and staff use the courts to seek to overturn convictions, seek rehearings or exonerations for inmates under 18 who have been incarcerated for life without parole, on the basis that life  imprisonment for crimes committed during youth -- other than homicide -- represents cruel and unusual punishment.

Now Stevenson is working on a broader initiative that will spotlight racial injustice and poverty as key social problems which are part of what causes youth to be tried and imprisoned as adults.  On Oct. 3, 2011, Stevenson spoke to approximately 150 New York University law school students about EJI's work.

Click on the carat to the left of the bar below to launch an audio stream, or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening.

Listen to Journal Register Corp. CEO John Paton address and answer questions from employees of the Denver Post and MediaNews Group on Sept. 7, 2011 in Denver in this 36-minute MP3 podcast. Click on the carat to the left of the bar at the bottom the launch the audio stream, or download the MP3 podcast for offline listening.

The original audio was posted as a WMA-formatted file HERE. And it is linked from THIS PAGE.

The MP3 format can be played on Apple devices more readily than WMA. The only editing of this MP3 version was to eliminate a minute of whitenoise at the beginning of the session and pauses of more than a couple of seconds. The audio level of some questioners was also boosted.

Paton is introduced for a few minutes by Dean Singleton, executive chairman of Media News Group and a co-founder of the company. The person first heard introducing Singleton is not identified in the recording. For a partial transcript of this audio and Paton's remarks and answers, go to billdensmore.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/paton/

Writing at the All Things Digital (ATD) tech blog site, John Paczkowski quotes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in seeming to support the premise of a non-profit Information Trust Association consortium — creating a new web infrastructure for trust, identity and commerce that isn’t controlled by a single company. Schmidt was speaking in Q&A format at a May 31 event organized by ATD.

In context, Schmidt was discussing the importance of user identity as a web service, because “in the online world you need to know who you are dealing with.” His remarks also came a minute or so after he said he admired some of what Facebook has done. Facebook’s “Facebook Connect” service is used by thousands of websites to provide single-sign-on identity. As quoted by Paczkowski, Schmidt added: “Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn’t be owned by a single company. I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that . . . . “

Paczkowski’s post is HERE. Schmidt was at the D9 Conference at Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. There are video exerpts, but the part quoted by Packowski of the Schmidt interview by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher didn’t make the edit for the video archive.

We exchange email yesterday with my CircLabs Inc. colleague, Jeff Vander Clute, about a blog post written by venture capitalist Bill Gurley. Gurley's post  (LINK) argues that Google is giving away the Android operating system -- and many things around it -- because no one can compete with free and the mass adoption of these free services is making Google's advertising business unassailable.

Vander Clute remarked about Gurley's thesis:

Fascinating points leading up to the legal destruction of wealth. It stands  to reason that the marginal cost of software development going to zero in the  long run means upside going to zero. Entrenched players for whom software > development is cheap or a byproduct can choose to give away a version of  *your* product for free or less than free.

Right. So one begins to realize this essential truth -- Google is neither a technology company, nor a search company. It has become a marketing company. Currently its business is the selling of advertising. It didn't start out that way. It started out intending the organize the world's information and make it useful and accessible. But now Wall Street expects it to feed its advertising juggernaut first.

For the advertising to remain effective, Google is going to have to learn more and more about us. The looming battle: On what terms does it learn about us and operate in what I've begun to call the "advisor-tising" space? For Google the engineering and software -- Android, maps, apps, wallets -- is now focused on drawing more and more of us in, and learning more and more about us, so that we can be better and better packaged and presented to people who want to sell us something.

At least in the world I come from, there is the intention to provide a service -- civic information -- that rides atop advertising and is served by it rather than vice versa. At least that's been an aspiration for the news industry and the continuing focus of its best thinkers.

The good news: Gradually, Google -- and Facebook -- are going to figure out that being the "infovalet" requires a new kind of trust relationship with the user if you want to remain their most-favored agent. And that will involve providing something of value beyond a lot of free, ad-supported services. How about news? Google has for now one of the must trusted and recognized brands in the world. It will need to adopt the role of infovalet to keep that enviable position.

Figuring out that relationship is the next phase of the web and what fascinates me and why I crafted our RJI white paper as "Paper to Persona." And it's a playing field where news organizations have strength -- if they can just learn to use technology as adroitly and innovatively as do Facebook, Google and Amazon.

This post links to audio and video resources supporting the white paper:  "From Paper to Persona," is to view a 35-minute talk and video slide presentation delivered April 27, 2011 by Bill Densmore at the Fred W. Swmith Forum of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Jouranlism.

VIEW VIDEO (first frame)

DOWNLOAD ACCOMPANYING SLIDES (pdf)

AUDIO OPTION . . . .

You can also listen to streaming audio  (or download a podcast) of the  session.

Click on the carat to the left of the bar below to launch the audio stream, or download the MP3 file for offline listening.

News organizations are looking for additional revenue streams in addition to advertising to support local news and content services on the web. In this 80-minute session, three New England Newspaper & Press Association members discuss their experience:

• Terry Carlisle, vice president of the weekly Ellsworth (Maine) American, describes with Chris Crockett their decision to close their newspaper websites and replace them with a new branded community information service. Meantime, they developed an interactive, PDF-like version of the physical paper and asked subscribers to pay for it online.
• Mark Henderson, online director of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette, which is is owned by The New York Times Co., describes their use of Clickshare Service Corp. technology to "meter" access to exclusive local news and other content -- and the results so far.
• Terry Williams, publisher of the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, who introduces the panel, explains their decision to experiment with a paid niche-content service, "The Lobby," focused on New Hampshire's active national and state political ecosystem.

The discussion took place on Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011 at the annual winter meeting of NENPA at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel.  Click on the carat to the left of the bar below to stream audio of the 80-minute audio. If you don't see the bar or want to download the MP3 podcast for offline listening, you can DOWNLOAD NOW.

Bill Densmore notes: We talked to Ben Ilfeld, COO of the online-only Sacramento Press, at a conference a few days ago in Chicago and found we agree that the initial rush of publishers to view the Apple iPad as a savior for their business is misplaced, for two reasons: (1) Apple controls the user and (2) Apple controls the platform. It's akin to putting your subscribers and your presses in a black box with no key. In this guest post, Ben explains. 

By Ben Ilfeld

I love my iPad, but it won't save journalism, newspapers or my online publication, The Sacramento Press.

 American mass media is built on the ownership of the means of production, distribution and broadcast by a few large corporations. These monopolies control closed systems and sell scarcity. The newspaper itself is a completely closed system. If it is in the paper, management has signed off  -- that simple. Barriers to entry are high, like building a factory to produce newspapers and a fleet of trucks to deliver them.

The Internet, on the other hand, is a network of networks and operates mostly as an open system. The barriers to entry are much lower -- competition is more fierce, and information can be replicated at costs approaching zero.

Even worse, the Internet is much more a set of communications protocols than a media consumption platform. Social media and blogs represent the most popular activities online. All of these things make doing business the same old way very difficult for American mass media outlets.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad there was a sort of euphoria among some executives (one more)  at mass media companies. Aha, Here is a closed system! Here is a place where we can dream up something beautiful and replication will be tough. Here is a place where we can act just like we used to act.

Even then, most technologists and economists  thought this kind of thinking was silly. For one, the iPad was great at accessing the open web. Two, the iTunes App store was closed, but still had low barriers to entry unlike, say, building that printing press. Three, and most importantly, the mass media would not own the keys to the closed system -- Apple would.

Apple makes and sells the scarce resource: the iPad itself. Apple takes a healthy cut of app revenue. And when Apple sees something like ads making money in its sandbox, it can trump the competition with its own product that uniquely benefits from deep integration with the device, iAds.

Now is a good time to look back and revisit the issue. We know that Apple has  one an amazing job marketing and selling iPads. Has this benefited mass media? Not enough that anyone is breaking out any reports or numbers. In fact, there are already examples of third-party developers creating
super-valuable ways to access news -- by aggregating sure to anger some original creators.

What seems clear is that Apple is and will be the big winner here. The mass media have been relegated to being . . . wait a minute, they have been relegated to being content producers. And mass media ought to know how little there is to be made in that profession, just look at the paychecks they
send out to their writers and editors!

Stinging a little

This is gonna sting a little: Closed systems and high barriers to entry made for monopolies that are slipping away as the latest wave of open systems with low barriers to entry reach their peak. Instead of retooling and finding new scarcities they could sell to partners, some executives hoped to jump
into a new closed system for the comfort and safety of their old business models. But upon entering the cave they found high competition and a devaluation of their own competencies. They are weaker than ever and caught relying on someone else's means of production for their livelihood.

I'm excited about the possibility of touch computing, but The Sacramento Press  (an online-only, local new source) is built to play on the current dominant topography of the open Internet. It is in our interest to push for increased openness and competition. It is also our job to draw out what we do really well, then sell services to our partners to make money.

Sometimes this is online advertising, sometimes it is consulting on social media engagement, and sometimes it is distributing fliers at neighborhood events. We monetize our connection to our community online and in person. One thing we won't be doing is waiting for any device to free us of the competition or openness of the new media ecosystem.

Sep 10, 2010

It takes someone with the animal energy of a Bill Kling to announce both a retirement and a grand, new quest in the same breath. Yet, that’s so Klingesque.

Kling announced today that he’s retiring as head of Minnesota Public Radio in June, 2011 — and that he’s off on an adventure to greatly multiply local public media news coverage across the country. That’s fitting and true to his career.

via newsonomics.com

Great piece by Ken Doctor speculating on how Bill Kling will help reinvent local news in America.

What will pay for journalism in the new news ecosystem?

Lecture by researcher William Densmore

When: Wednesday, August 18, 5:00 PM
Where: American Center, Tržiště 13, Prague 1 - Malá Strana

As the news and paper come unglued, what will pay for journalism in the new news ecosystem? Researcher William Densmore sketched a vision for a new digital marketplace for news and information, and explain efforts underway in the United States to make it a reality. LINK TO TEXT/SLIDES

via prague.usembassy.gov