The future of newspapers? Who knows? But there is one.

I don’t know where books are going. I don’t know what will happen to newspapers. But I am confident that both will survive and perhaps even prosper in the new environment we find ourselves in. John Lanchester’s article in the London Review of Books on the future of newspapers is well worth reading. Among other things, he reminds us that the future cannot be foreseen:

As for the new media, they are clearly a work in progress, and it would be premature to say what their impact will be on the fundamentals of public and political life. Their impact on private life is more apparent, and seems to focus on an increase in the number of ways for people to meet and connect, both online and off. In some ways, the story of text messaging is a parable for the way the net has evolved. SMS messaging was taken up by Nokia in Finland as a way of allowing engineers to communicate short, factual messages about where they were, what they were doing and how long it would take. Nokia then made the service available on their phones, since, well, there it was, so you might as well let the punters have a go. They were amazed to see the spike in data traffic which suddenly showed up. The reason: Finnish teenagers were using SMS to organise their social lives. From there, texting hasn’t looked back. Nobody decided what the purpose of SMS would be, it just evolved. It would be hard to deny that texting is a new thing; also hard to argue that it has fundamentally changed the world. I’d say that’s roughly where we are with the journalistic uses of the new media. Their democratising and decentralising effects have barely begun, and aren’t going to go away. In a sense, the WikiLeaks episode(s) shows both what the digital media can and can’t do. Its release of information is unprecedented: but it is not journalism. The data need to be interpreted, studied, made into a story. For that we need . . .  the press.

And the elimination of printing and distribution costs is profound. Lanchester explains that the New York Times could give its subscribers for free four Kindles with worldwide 3G per year coverage for the costs it currently expends in printing and distributing its newspaper:

If newspapers switched over to being all online, the cost base would be instantly and permanently transformed. The OECD report puts the cost of printing a typical paper at 28 per cent and the cost of sales and distribution at 24 per cent: so the physical being of the paper absorbs 52 per cent of all costs. (Administration costs another 8 per cent and advertising another 16.) That figure may well be conservative. A persuasive looking analysis in the Business Insider put the cost of printing and distributing the New York Times at $644 million, and then added this: ‘a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.’ Taking the lower figure, that means that New York Times, if it stopped printing a physical edition of the paper, could afford to give every subscriber a free Kindle. Not the bog-standard Kindle, but the one with free global data access. And not just one Kindle, but four Kindles. And not just once, but every year. And that’s using the low estimate for the costs of printing.

I might even subscribe if they did that. Though my e-reader is not a Kindle.

When law doesn’t match up to reality, law loses – Connie Schultz makes an unworkable proposal.

I deeply admire Connie Schultz, but I think she was mistaken in her column yesterday that called for a change to federal copyright law that would give “news originators” the exclusive right to the news they report on their web sites for the first 24 hours after publication. The “remedies” to enforce this exclusive right would include (1) a requirement that online “aggregators” would have to “reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports” and (2) “injunctions” to “bar aggregators’ profiting from newspapers’ content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.”

Ms. Schultz shows her desperation to save newspapers in calling for immediate action, implying that waiting even 6 months before enacting this law would be to wait too long.

There’s a lot wrong with this proposal I won’t go into right now with respect to the purposes of copyright law (h/t to Natalie Gauthier, on Twitter @nggautier). Here’s my problem with it merely in my capacity as a business advisor (as much a part of being a commercial lawyer as knowing the law). It’s utterly unworkable. An injunction against use is no remedy — to be effective, an injunction needs to be enforceable. How in the world is a newspaper going to enforce its exclusive right to a story against use by anyone anywhere in the world on the internet? Second, to whom do these rights and restrictions really apply? Who’s a news source? Am I when I publish something online based on my own research and thinking? When is what I publish my own research and thinking and when is it merely “aggregation.” And am I an aggregator, or just a unicellular organism floating in the vast oceans of the information and news available around the world? When would I cross the line?

It’s an utterly unworkable proposal.

I have a lot of sympathy for Ms. Schultz and her position. I’ve grown up worshiping journalists. (To be an adolescent leftist poseur back in the early ’70′s meant worshiping the New York Times and the Washington Post.) And, as my dad complains, there is a really profound problem in the loss of the check newspapers have traditionally provided with respect to local events.

But there’s no going back. Law is not going to stop the inevitable consequences of the change in technology we’re experiencing. I’m not suggesting we’re in for a wonderful new world. We’re losing a lot, and I share with Ms. Schultz the desire to save it all. But we’re not going to. We’re going to have new things. Here’s one, for example, courtesy of the artist Daniel Nolan (on Twitter @danielnolan). There’s been very little news out of Iran. What’s going on in the streets, if anything, is a matter of intense interest around the world, but newspapers have largely been rendered unable to report on events thanks to the moves of the Iranian regime. But yesterday I received a tweet from Dan that referred me to Andrew Sullivan’s blog that was reporting that instead of appearing in front of his supporters in person Mir-Hossein Mousavi “instead delivered a speech to his supporters via cell phone. The speech was then captured on camera by a demonstrator, uploaded to Facebook, picked up on Twitter, and delivered to you through this blog. And now it’s on YouTube.” As Dan put it on Twitter, “[i]f scoring at home, that’s Mousavi – cell phone – camera – facebook – twitter – blog – youtube. Now that’s an alternative info stream.”

I’m not suggesting that is the equivalent of haveing a foreign corresondent on scene (but there are no western jounralists in Tehran as far as I know), but it’s extraordinary. There have got to be better ways than Ms. Schultz’s ill-conceived proposal to make the transition to what the new technology makes available and what the new technology makes inevitable. The way is not going to be through a rather simple law. When law doesn’t match up with reality, law loses, but worse, so do we. Make intoxitants illegal, and our prisons become jammed with non-violent offenders. Don’t provide legal means to immigrants motivated to get here, and you end up with millions of undocumented residents. Outlaw abortion and you expose the poor to unregulated and unsafe medical procedures. Refuse to adapt the marketing of your product to new technologies, and engage in ineffective litigation that results in blatant injustice. . .

The Associated Press seems bent on waging an unwinnable war.

The Associated Press has made a number of moves in recent times that demonstrate a indefensibly broad reading of the rights of copyright holders to protect their content.  Techdirt explains that the AP now threatens to require payment for access to its online content. Not only does it seem the AP has a remarkably narrow reading of the law; it also has a tin ear when it comes to navigating the new world of information.  Putting its content behind a pay wall open up the field of wire service reporting to competitors who would not do so if AP’s online content remained free (including CNN, which is apparently eager to do so).  Doing so would also be a stupid business move — not only would internet users likely not pay to get AP’s online content (just ask the New York Times).

As Techdirt points out, all of these moves seem to be the result of the AP’s fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is used for –  communal sharing and commenting on the news:

The paywall itself is what takes away much of the value by making it harder for people to do what they want with the news: to spread it, to comment on it, to participate in the story. Until newspaper execs figure this out, they’re only going to keep making things worse.