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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
(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.