from the waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh! dept.
New York Times CEO warns publishers ahead of Apple news launch
Apple Inc is expected to launch an ambitious new entertainment and paid digital news service on Monday, as the iPhone maker pushes back against streaming video leader Netflix Inc. But it likely will not feature the New York Times Co.
Mark Thompson, chief executive of the biggest U.S. newspaper by subscribers, warned that relying on third-party distribution can be dangerous for publishers who risk losing control over their own product.
"We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else," he told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. "We're also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix (blender) with everyone else's journalism."
Thompson, who took over as New York Times CEO in 2012 and has overseen a massive expansion in its online readership, warned publishers that they may suffer the same fate as television and film makers in the face of Netflix's Hollywood insurgence.
See also: Apple secures deal with WSJ for paid Apple News service, NYT and Washington Post opt out
Apple reaches deal with Vox for upcoming Apple News subscription service, report says
Apple is on a hardware-launching bonanza ahead of its big TV announcement
Apple teams with media literacy programs in the US and Europe
Previously: Apple in Talks to Create "Netflix for News" Subscription Service
Related Stories
Apple CEO Tim Cook alluded to more services coming this year, and this week we're learning more about what the company has in store for news. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Apple has been in talks with publishers about a subscription news service that would be a new paid tier of its existing Apple News app. However, the company has been butting heads with publishers over monetary details—Apple reportedly wants to keep 50 percent of subscription revenue from the service.
[...] In addition, Apple wouldn't share customer data with publishers. Information including credit card numbers and email addresses would not be provided to publishers if they agreed to Apple's terms as they currently stand. That information can be crucial for publishers to grow their subscriber base, market new products to readers, and more.
Will news publishers take half of the subscription revenue and forego money from customer profiling and tracking?
Apple just announced Apple News Plus, a news subscription service for $9.99 a month
Apple announced a new subscription news service, Apple News Plus, on Monday during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. Starting Monday, the company said, Apple News Plus will curate articles from more than 300 news outlets and magazines via the Apple News app for $9.99 a month.
Apple says magazines and articles included with the Apple News Plus subscription will appear in a new tab on the Apple News app in a redesign released later Monday as part of an iOS software update.
Apple News Plus will feature content from several major news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Vox, and the Los Angeles Times as well as the more than 300 magazines that were included with Texture, the digital magazine app Apple purchased last year. Notably absent among national news brands are The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Though Apple's app offers a significant discount for publications like The [Wall Street] Journal, which charges $19.50 a month for an all-access digital subscription, it appears that Apple subscribers will not have full access to all the partners' content. Reports Monday cited an internal memo as saying only some Journal articles, for example, would be offered via Apple News Plus, with The Journal's business reporting remaining exclusive to direct subscribers.
Apple Arcade Announced: New Game Subscription Service Coming To iOS, Mac, Apple TV This Year
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @01:21AM (4 children)
Who calls a blender a "magimix"? These people live in their own bubble and have nothing to share with the average american.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday March 24 2019, @01:32AM (1 child)
I would've given him a pass if he had said Cuisinart. But yeah WTF.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @10:34PM
Wiki seems to indicate that Magimix (1974) predates Cusinart by a bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @09:38AM
My guess is that it's a kind of a portmanteau of "magazine" and "mix".
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday March 24 2019, @07:09PM
I'm no fan of N.Y.T., but a lot of people have Magimix. My daughter says it's absolutely amazing for smoothies!
(Score: 3, Disagree) by RamiK on Sunday March 24 2019, @01:59AM (11 children)
It's 4th party... 1st party is the author. 2nd party is the readers. 3rd party is the New York Times. And 4th is potentially Apple.
But yeah, he's right. Signing away your copyrights to a publisher might earn you a salary, but you will indeed lose control over your own product. Now wouldn't it have been nice if we had some technological marvel that lets you self-publish the written word in an electronic format that is transmitted to people's homes without having to surrender your rights? And just imagine, you could even replicate the business model of the newspapers and attach ads!
compiling...
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Farkus888 on Sunday March 24 2019, @03:08AM (2 children)
They do this to their writers now and they know it. If Apple makes this work then step 2 easily becomes cut out the middle man. You may think "why bother", really it is "why not". For example, Amazon makes batteries even though they already get a cut of Energizer and Duracell sales. For the managers it is only the hassle of waving a magic do this for me wand at employees to get that slightly larger slice of the pie. As long as the protection says profit and you can do it without hurting something more profitable you'd be silly not to.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Monday March 25 2019, @04:45PM (1 child)
The question then becomes: What kind of a platform is Apple creating?
The NYT *does* have a reputation for maintaining a certain quality level. And while it may be slipping in recent years, they're still reasonably trustworthy. "I read it on Facebook" vs "I read it in the NYT" are going to be interpreted *very* differently by whoever you're talking to. Is Apple planning to hire their own editors and such (seems doubtful), or are they going to rely on the reputations of the publishers they're reprinting? A random former NYT employee who goes freelance might not actually be as valuable to Apple as a reprint of an article published by the NYT themselves. Same thing with your Amazon batteries -- one reason they still sell Energizer and Duracell is because some people just aren't going to trust the low cost Amazon batteries. Even if they're just a re-badge of the exact same cells.
NYT is probably trying to play the long game...they've seen the cesspit that Facebook "news" has become, and they think they can keep their customers by playing (or at least pretending to play) to quality rather than raw quantity. If they were smarter I think they'd try to establish their own platform, selling on the editors and management of it rather than being a raw dump of any freelancer's garbage. They're fighting the wrong war IMO, but taking a reasonable position in it. News is more than just some guy writing some words.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday March 26 2019, @02:23AM
Heh, about a third of the country doesn't trust either one :-P
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @03:28AM (5 children)
Now wouldn't it have been nice if we had some technological marvel that lets you self-publish the written word in an electronic format that is transmitted to people's homes without having to surrender your rights?
There is, but your ISP probably prohibits you from running a self publishing service. You have to sign a contract with GoDaddy or somebody like them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @06:07AM (4 children)
You can get a vps for much cheaper than your home Internet service. Host your site on that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @08:00AM (2 children)
You can get a vps for much cheaper than your home Internet service.
That's exactly the problem.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @09:41AM (1 child)
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @02:03AM
Absolutely wrong. The solution is to have my own server that can't be shut down by arbitrary authority through the ISP or the vps
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 24 2019, @02:08PM
You appear to be in the "owning a domain and leasing a VPS ought to be considered part of the total cost of ownership of a personal Internet presence" camp. Do I understand you correctly?
But if everybody leased a VPS, how would they all have an IPv4 address? There are already roughly twice as many people as IPv4 addresses. I guess VPS providers could put them behind some sort of load-balancing reverse proxy, using name-based virtual hosting (TLS SNI or HTTP Host:) to route the request. But that'd leave the servers unable to accept connections from viewers behind legacy networks on any ports but 443 (HTTPS), other TLS ports, and 80 (clear HTTP), and thus unable to offer any service other than a web server. In particular, SSH and SFTP access would be problematic. Or should everybody behind such a legacy network subscribe to an IPv6 VPN too?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 24 2019, @01:57PM (1 child)
This establishes that you are referring to an individual author, not to a corporate author pursuant to "work made for hire" law.
It'd also be nice if we had some technological marvel to cover the cost of performing the investigation that results in said written word. But electronic payments on the order of magnitude of a tenth of a dollar or euro don't appear viable quite yet. You attempt to address that:
I'm interested in how an individual author, as opposed to a corporate author, can efficiently make advertisers interested in placing ads on the author's site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @11:17PM
There's plenty of low-key web-novel authors, musicians, streamers and comics artists making a living off ads and donations without signing away copyrights. Translators even. Reason you're not aware of them is because the moment they start getting famous they get targeted by pirate sites and are forced to sign with publishers for the legal services. What's even stranger is that as soon as they sign the pirates leave them be... As if they're working with the publishers in some sort of legal protection racket...
But to answer directly, Google lets you place ads on your website and pay you by the page hit and all they ask is your bank account number and a valid ID in a web form.
Anyhow, another common practice you can verify easily is to look up youtube for the sheets of some song and find dozens of musicians performing their arrangements and linking to their web stores. Google isn't getting a cut off the sales. They're even paying the musicians for the subscriptions and video ads... And they don't mind at all. They're not trying to sign you for a record deal. They don't want a huge cut off your live performances. They won't take away your band's name too. And if you publish a book or a dvd, you can take off those videos at a moment's notice.
And journalist can stream there too. Plenty of right and left wing nuts do exactly that while promoting their web sites and self-published books. Some history books authors upload talks and such from conventions. It's basically everything authors always did only efficient and cutting away publishers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jimbrooking on Sunday March 24 2019, @02:23AM (9 children)
...and forget about or deny the influence of Facebook, Twitter and other "news" sources' effects on public opinion - particularly voter opinion. The Gray Lady (NYT), WaPO, LAT, Chicago Trib have humans curating what you see, not bots. Humans are accountable and have journalistic standards and ethics that moderate what you see on their sites and in their print editions. Pose questions about standards and ethics to FB, Twitter, etc., and see the blank stares: who cares, not our problem, sorry we'll try to do better. Equating "news" on FB to news in the NYTimes isn't unfair, it's apples and oranges. And Apple's entry into the quest for viewer eyes as a moneymaker? No better, or worse, than the kids at FB and Twitter peddling "News" instead of News.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Sunday March 24 2019, @02:49AM (5 children)
I'll just leave this here. [fyngyrz.com]
--
Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 24 2019, @02:15PM (4 children)
The linked essay on a domain matching your username gives "mechanisms for all kinds of spin and/or information hiding" that arise from journalism in a capitalist economy. This raises one question: In not-$$$-based journalism, who feeds and shelters reporters and otherwise pays the cost of journalism?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday March 24 2019, @06:02PM (3 children)
Here's the same answer I gave when you asked on my website:
I think the best possible answer to that in the context of our present system is the same as payment for, and regulation of, provision of medical care: Through taxation, government.
Of course, getting to that point… very difficult.
--
Science. It's like magic, except real.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 25 2019, @11:16AM (2 children)
Particularly when state-funded journalism has been seen to produce such fine publications as RT and Sputnik News.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday March 25 2019, @03:19PM (1 child)
On the other hand, capitalism has produced Fox "News", a pure agitprop outlet driving the oligarchy's narrative, and AM talk radio / "news", a wholly-corporate-owned garbage-spewing operation; and states do differ. The USA, for instance, still has a well armed populace and the ability to speak mostly freely, and is working its way (slowly) out of its superstitious funk despite constant pressure from those who wish to keep the populace as befuddled as possible.
I'm certainly not making the case that US state-run news would be perfect, or even that I'm certain it would work at all. I do think it's now pretty obvious that the only way our current news can be used in any really informative way is to range far and wide across as many outlets as possible, figure out as much of what is currently happening as one can (which requires checking news sources outside the US at this point), then consider each US news outlet in the light of that information, note what stories they didn't bother to cover, note the spin they put on what they did cover, then rinse and repeat all across the spectrum until one has sifted out the baby-down-the-well | if-it-bleeds-it-leads | OMG Terrorism | WeMustSaveTheChildren | DrugWarScareProp | CopPorn | Nationalism | Jingoism | OMG Immigrants | LeftTrash | RightTrash | LibertarianTrash | SCOTUS-Trash | MommyismTrash | OMG SexTrafficking | OMG LGBT/etc. | OMG WeMustDisarmThePopulace... and so on and so forth. I really could go on for quite some time. Our news is currently an outright sewer.
You're quite right in that state media under US control could also go very wrong here, potentially in new and unpleasant ways, while not solving anything.
But if it were possible to try (dubious, but you asked), I'd like to see it tried. Because capitalist media has already gone horribly wrong. Again, right along the track of medical care. There was a time when I would have said our capitalist medical system was fine, and I still, looking back, think it was. Today, it's a lawyer-addled financial nightmare with poorer outcomes than other countries for those non-rich people who have to use it, and government control over how those costs are managed is looking a heck of a lot better to me than letting it continue to financially run away with itself as it has been doing for some time now.
I can also point to some US government controlled areas that work fairly well. In spite of all the corruption, entrenched bureaucrats, mommyism, etc.
Examples that come immediately to mind include the CDC, food inspections, the air traffic control system, a considerable degree of environmental cleanup, and support of many kinds of useful and informative research.
Which is not to say the government would manage not to screw this up. But again, it's already screwed up. Badly. So worth trying. IMHO.
Capitalism has had its chance here, and it has roundly failed. I'm ready to entertain some different implementations, if 'twere possible.
--
Kleptomaniacs always take things literally.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday March 25 2019, @04:58PM
Why not both? Corporations publish their own press releases, non-profits have their own newsletters and news websites...lots of organizations have motivation to invest in private news outlets, and as long as we've still got free speech*, the more propaganda the state news feeds, the greater their incentive will be to push back with their own couter-publications. It doesn't have to be one or the other. We still (for now...) have great technologies like RSS. You can have you US State Department feed right beside your Amnesty International feed. And maybe an "OPEC News Coalition" feed beside that too if you're into that kind of thing.
But there's some news that's important even though nobody really has an interest in publishing it. That's where it would be best for government news services to step in to fill the gap. The stuff that's highly controversial and likely to be twisted into propaganda is probably going to be covered from a half dozen different angles no matter what.
*And if we don't have free speech, the question of who is publishing the news becomes entirely irrelevant.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @03:15AM
Sure there may be 'people' looking at this stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA [youtube.com]
Humans are accountable and have journalistic standards and ethics that moderate what you see on their sites and in their print editions
But I would posit they are lazy and not doing a good job.
Once you think about how news is made and designed you realize it has very little to do with reality. They rush to print/say anything, *A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G*. Better to get the scoop and redact something later than do it right the first time. Then on top of that our news can be bought. On the old green site Slashvertisiment was something thrown around a lot. But they did do it. They allowed people to buy stories or would run someone elses. 'normal' news does that too (a lot). Do you think political groups would not stoop down to the same things? Hell many times they have their entire segment written up. All the 'news' has to do is run it or read it with some pretty face with conviction. It is 20 mins to air/print and you have a gap in your layout/show the size of the titanic. You have a pre-canned thing ready to go. What do you do? Sit in front of your audience and shrug and say 'sorry we fucked up no news tonight', or jam something in there that is kind of flashy and keeps people engaged?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @03:45AM (1 child)
I still check those sources every now and then to see what the official Five Eyes propaganda is.
So really an Apple News Service likely won't be worth reading either.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 24 2019, @09:22PM
Agreed, maybe mark Thompson would be a lot more credible had he said this back when the NYT was a respectable publication and not globalist Democratic Party deep-state trash.
Fuck them both for asking money for their trash content.
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday March 24 2019, @04:16AM (2 children)
Some have been waiting since Saturday of last weekend. And 4 or 5 of them could easily fit in the HUGE Blank Space in the (very dumb) Department Line of this one. But, oh, the C.E.O. of the Phoney Failing Fake News New York Times said something! And a very special Submitter made the Sub about it, that one must go through very quickly. Sad!
And, Mark is sooo predictable. He doesn't want N.Y.T. stories next to other stories. Doesn't want "people" to see, oh here's what the N.Y.T. says. And here are the other stories -- from Fox News, O.A.N., Breitbart, Washington Times, Sinclair, The Missoulian, The Whitefish Pilot -- that say it's Fake News. Because Tim/Apple brought them together. Go Tim!!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @09:44AM
Sorry, Donny, but since the editors here at SN are volunteers they have to supplement their income some how. Right now they are working of editing a report from some guy named Mueller. I'm sure they'll get to you once they're finished.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24 2019, @09:38PM
Its Muller time!!!!!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday March 24 2019, @04:19AM
Probably the same reason many sites no longer offer RSS, people have forgotten what the word "syndication" means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_syndication [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication [wikipedia.org]
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