Alan D Mutter reports on the Miami Herald’s abandoned tip jar scheme, a short-lived attempt to collect voluntary donations from its readers. But the scheme has now been pulled.
Did the comments put the paper off the idea?
“Yeah, I’m going to tip a for-profit business,” said a commenter identified as lucky0111. “I’d rather burn my money.”
The New York Times reports that the reporter accused of plagiarising parts of articles from rival titles has resigned.
Wall Street Journal managing editor, Robert Thomson, had complained to the New York Times over an article by Zachery Kouwe last Friday.
According to the NY Times, the Times editors “investigated and found other examples” of copied passages in Kouwe’s work:
The Times made the matter public on Monday, when it published an Editors’ Note stating that Mr. Kouwe had copied passages from Wall Street Journal and Reuters articles, and used them “in a number” of his articles and in blog posts, without attribution. It did not say how many times that had occurred.
Also related: Alan D. Mutter reflects on the concept of plagiarism in the age of the internet, in his most recent blog post:
[B]ecause the web is open, easily accessible and readily searchable, it is more likely than ever that cheaters will be discovered faster and more surely than ever before.
Alan D. Mutter declares news embargoes ‘meaningless and unenforceable’:
“For those unfamiliar with the concept, newsmakers historically distributed press releases, speeches and other documents to the media prior to their official release so journalists had time to read them and prepare stories in advance. The idea was that the story would not be published or aired until the time specified in the embargo.”
Related: an upcoming event – ‘Embargo 2010: Industry Conversation on Future Rules of Media Engagement’ with SiliconValleyWatcher’s Tom Foremski, Mike Arrington from Techcrunch and Mark Glazer from NPR’s Media Shift, moderated by Sam Whitmore from Media Survey.
“Publishers groping with the question of when, whether and how to charge for interactive content often raise the issue of what they could sell, if indeed they ever decided to try,” muses Alan D. Mutter. So, he provides them with a quick checklist. Are they ready?
You could just predict the backlash on this one: David Carr’s latest piece in the NYTimes outlining a dream editorial meeting:
“No more free content. The web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free – the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the ‘original sin’ – has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.”
And here’s Jeff Jarvis’ take on it over at BuzzMachine:
“David Carr sounds like an oldies station as he replays the same old record about charging for content (hey, Carr, would you please walk down the hall and do some reporting in your own damned building – I’ll give you the phone number for the right person – and find out why your own friggin’ paper made its own good economic decisions to stop charging?!?)”