The London Paper set to close

Como no Brasil, a imprensa ainda leva dez anos para ver o que vai acontecer, uma dica sobre qual o futuro dos jornais dados de graça na rua e tidos como "o futuro da mídia".

• Stephen Brook

The London Paper: lost £12.9m in year to end of June 2008

News International said today that it planned to close its afternoon freesheet, the London Paper.

The paper will continue publishing for about a month while News International consults with 60 staff members. It is understood that the London Paper's final day of publication is likely to be Friday 18 September.

Today's announcement signals an end to the London freesheet wars, which began almost exactly three years ago in August 2006, when News International decided to launch an afternoon freesheet and Associated Newspapers retaliated to protect the London Evening Standard and its morning freesheet Metro by launching London Lite.

"The strategy at News International over the past 18 months has been to streamline our operations and focus investment on our core titles," said James Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive, News Corporation Europe and Asia.

"The team at the London Paper has made great strides in a short space of time with innovative design and a fresh approach but the performance of the business in a difficult free evening newspaper sector has fallen short of expectations. We have taken a tough decision that reflects our priorities as a business."

A spokesman for Daily Mail & General Trust, which owns Associated Newspapers, said: "We are watching developments with interest."

The London Paper recorded a pre-tax loss of £12.9m in the year to 29 June 2008 on a turnover of £14.1m. In the previous 10 months it had lost £16.8m. The paper had a free distribution of 500,348 copies in July, about 100,000 more than London Lite.

London Lite got to the streets first on 30 August 2006, while the London Paper launched on 4 September. The ongoing battle hit the Evening Standard's paid-for circulation and eventually forced DMGT to sell control of the title to the Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev earlier this year.

News International's other aim in launching the title was to take on DMGT's successful morning freesheet, Metro, which in good times before the recession made profits of £8m a year.

The company hoped ultimately to bid against Metro for the morning London tube distribution contract. But News International did not reckon on the ferocity of DMGT, which counterattacked with its own freesheet, published through its national newspaper division Associated Newspapers.

Associated had already given up its rights to the afternoon tube distribution contract following an Office of Fair Trading ruling in 2005.

The former London mayor Ken Livingstone tried to sell an afternoon distribution slot on the tube network after the OFT's 2005 ruling, prompting interest from Richard Desmond's Express Newspapers and News International.

But the afternoon tube contract became redundant when, instead of bidding for it, both NI and Associated decided to employ an army of distributors to hand out their rival freesheets to commuters.

From August 2006 the streets of central London were flooded with copies of the two freesheets, with evening commuters running the gauntlet of London Paper and London Lite distributors attempting to thrust copies of the brightly-coloured papers into their hands outside tube and mainline train stations.

The problem of what to do about the discarded copies of the free papers that littered the streets of central London soon became an issue, leading to rows with London councils, particularly Westminster, which demanded that both companies pay some of the costs of cleaning up the mess.

In January 2008 NI and Associated finally agreed to install 35 recyling bins each in the West End and Victoria at a cost of £500 each. Six months later Westminster council revealed that 120 tonnes of paper – the equivalent of 1,920 trees – had been collected via the recyling scheme.

The announcement of closure comes two weeks before Sun editor Rebekah Wade becomes chief executive of News International. She had reportedly been tasked with negotiating an agreement with Associated's parent company Daily Mail & General Trust chairman Lord Rothermere to stop the heavy losses at both titles.

Digital Britain: 'Broadband tax' will cost £6 a year for every landline

Levy will help to fund the rollout of superfast broadband across the country, says Lord Carter

Chris Tryhorn

Landline owners will pay £6 a year to fund the rollout of superfast broadband across the country, communications minister Lord Carter said today as he launched the government's Digital Britain report.

In his long-awaited blueprint for the future of the UK's communications infrastructure, Carter also said the surplus from the BBC's digital switchover help scheme would help to fund the £200m cost of providing universal access to broadband.

The government wants everyone to be able to receive broadband of at least 2Mbps by 2012 as it puts more public services online.

It is also anxious that remote or underserved parts of the country are not left behind when the "next generation" of superfast broadband is built.

"True superfast broadband will be concentrated in the first two-thirds of the market in the next decade, leaving the 'final third' served only with current generation broadband," today's report said. "This would be undesirable."

The report proposed a charge of 50p a month on the UK's copper lines to help upgrade the country's fixed-line network, a project on which BT and Virgin Media have already embarked.

This levy will raise between £150m and £175m a year to extend next-generation broadband to the "final third" of the country that will not be reached by the market.

It will act as "seedcorn funding" – to attract commercial operators to roll out networks further – rather than attempts to cover the total costs of the project.

Carter acknowledged that the levy would hit consumers in the pocket at a time when many households were feeling the pinch.

"How will the public react? We will find out," he said. "Our view as a government is that it's a good exercise of judgment."

He said the decision should be seen in the context of a real-terms decline in telecoms prices over recent years.

The move would require legislation, Carter said. "We are consulting on it, but it's a firm proposal," he added.

The report gave more details about how the government aims to achieve its goal of providing universal access to a minimum 2Mb broadband connection, the so-called Universal Service Commitment.

Part of it will come from money left over from the BBC's fund to help people switch to digital television by 2012, with contributions from private partners and public sector bodies also among the other sources of funding.

An estimated 2.75m homes, around 11% of the UK's households, are unable to receive a connection of at least this speed at the moment.

The report said that 1.5m households with little or no broadband connection might be able to get access to next-generation broadband as a result of the commitment.

Carter said the 2Mb speed was like a "technological minimum wage". "We are not specifying a ceiling, we are specifying a floor," he added.

The commitment is expected to be achieved through a combination of upgrades to BT's fixed-line network, mobile broadband and satellite broadband.

"Pirataria é impossível de ser detida"

Do Guardian

Charles Dunstone says illegal downloading cannot be stopped

Trying to stop people sharing copyrighted material over the internet is a game of cat and mouse in which the pirates will always win and calls for internet service providers to halt illegal file sharing are "naive", according to the boss of Carphone Warehouse.

Instead, Charles Dunstone said, the solution is education about the benefits of respecting copyright coupled with services that allow consumers "to get content easily and cheaply".

Speaking after the company announced a jump in annual profits and plans to split its TalkTalk broadband business from its retail stores by July of next year, Dunstone said people had become "obsessed" by peer-to-peer file sharing but "there is a myriad of ways that you can share content on the internet".

"If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid."

His comments come before the publication of Lord Carter's final Digital Britain report this month. The communications minister has made protecting the UK's creative industries from the online piracy one of his key aims and he has promised legislation to back up his proposals. Under a government-brokered deal last year some ISPs sent letters to persistent illegal file-sharers warning them that their actions could result in legal action by media companies and that process is expected to be codified by the new legislation.

The music industry has long maintained that internet service providers (ISPs) must work harder to prevent their customers from engaging in online piracy. More recently, the film and television industry has called for ISPs to introduce "speed humps" that would slow down the connections of persistent illegal file-sharers and pop-up warnings on known file-sharing sites. Many in the media industry have taken heart from the recent Pirate Bay trial in Sweden that saw the four founders of the site, which did not host pirated material but made it easier for people to find copyrighted material, given prison sentences and a hefty fine.

But TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry. Dunstone said any technical measures to try and clamp down on sharers of copyrighted material would soon be bypassed by pirates.

"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," he said. "It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."

Carphone Warehouse announced annual pretax profits of £133m, up from £4m last year, and set out a timetable for the planned demerger of TalkTalk from its retail business, which it last year spun into a joint venture with US electronics retailer BestBuy. Dunstone hopes to have the demerger completed by March, although that may slip to July if the company is unable to get all the necessary paperwork sorted in time.

Carphone Warehouse's results were in line with analysts' expectations for its TalkTalk operation, which last month acquired rival Tiscali to become the UK's largest player, seeing revenue dip to £1.38bn from £1.4bn but profits rise as it moved more people onto its own network. The retail business, meanwhile, increased revenues to £3.56bn from £3bn but the recession has forced the company to offer better deals to mobile phone customers so profits before financial charges dropped to £188m from £217m.

Dunstone, however, said high street traffic had held up well in recent months. "We all thought after Christmas, having seen what happened in October and November, that it was going to be the end of the world. That has not happened – the consumer has been more resilient than people had imagined. They are demanding very good value, so you have to be very sharp on price and deals, but it has been OK."

The mobile phone market in the UK has polarised since last autumn with customers choosing to take a smartphone, which can play music and access the internet, or cling to their existing phone in order to qualify for a cheap SIM-only deal.

Carphone Warehouse has benefited from being the only independent stockist of the most desirable smartphone – Apple's iPhone – which is available only on the O2 network in the UK. But Dunstone said as the year progresses there will be a number of new "must have" handsets that should persuade SIM-only customers to take a new phone.

"The team are very excited about the product pipeline – they think there are going to be more products coming out that are going to drive people into the marketplace than we have seen in the last six months," he said.

New devices include the N97 from Nokia, out next month, and the Palm Pre, which will be in the UK in time for Christmas.

But he refused to comment on intense speculation that a new version of the iPhone will be unveiled at Apple's worldwide Developers' Conference on Monday, saying: "It is more than my life's worth to ever say anything. They keep us terrified."

TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London with a view to rolling out even faster services. BT has pledged to spend £1.5bn over the next three years putting a super-fast network within the reach of 10m UK households.

"What BT want to be sure of is that there will be enough customers to use it after they have built it," said Dunstone. "So, although we have not talked in any detail about it, I can imagine a situation where we would give some kind of an undertaking as to how many customers we would buy for, so they can be certain when they started digging the roads up that they will be able to get enough users to pay for it.

"If we can get enough people to take it up it will be cheap enough that a lot of people will take it up but the danger is it that it is very, very high priced and very few people take it."

Dunstone reckons super-fast broadband – offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second – will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.

PS: um pequeno adendo à matéria do Guardian: é verdade, a transferência de arquivos "ilegalmente " na Internet é uma batalha perdida para as autoridades. O espírito das leis reza que elas devem refletir o comportamento de uma sociedade. A saída não é educar: a saída é reconhecer que transferência de informação não é crime...

Para 'Economist', má qualidade da educação 'freia' desenvolvimento do Brasil

Para quem está procurando faculdade para fazer, um aviso: faculdades particulares no Brasil estão entre as atividades mais enganosas do país.

Um artigo na edição mais recente da revista britânica The Economist traça um panorama da situação da educação no Brasil e afirma que a má qualidade das escolas, "talvez mais do que qualquer outra coisa", é o que "freia" o desenvolvimento do país.

Citando os maus resultados do Brasil no Pisa (Programa Internacional de Avaliação de Alunos), realizado a cada três anos pela OCDE (Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico), a revista afirma que, apesar dos grandes investimentos e progressos em setores como política e economia, em termos de educação, o país está "bem abaixo de muitos outros países em desenvolvimento".

A publicação compara a situação brasileira à da Coreia do Sul, que apresenta bons resultados no Pisa.

"Até a década de 1970, a Coreia do Sul era praticamente tão próspera quanto o Brasil, mas, ajudada por seu sistema escolar superior, ela saltou à frente e agora tem uma renda per capita cerca de quatro vezes maior".

Sindicatos
Para a revista, entre os principais motivos para a má qualidade da educação no país está o fato de muitos professores faltarem por diversas vezes às aulas e os altos índices de repetência, que estimulam a evasão escolar.

Na opinião da Economist, o governo precisa investir mais na educação básica. "Assim como a Índia, o Brasil gasta muito com suas universidades ao invés de (gastar) com a alfabetização de crianças".

A publicação afirma ainda que o Brasil precisa de professores mais qualificados. "Muitos têm três ou quatro empregos diferentes e reclamam que as condições (de trabalho) são intimidadoras e os pagamentos baixos".

Afirmando que, apesar da situação, os governos de Fernando Henrique Cardoso e Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva conseguiram avanços - embora vagarosos - no setor, a revista afirma que os sindicatos de professores "representam um grande obstáculo para melhorias".

"Quase qualquer coisa que atrapalhe sua paz causa greves", afirma a publicação britânica, dizendo que o sindicato dos professores do Estado de São Paulo, por exemplo, se opôs "a uma proposta que obrigava os novos professores a fazerem testes para assegurar que são qualificados".

A Economist defende que a receita para melhorar a educação no país seria "continuar reformando o sistema escolar, enfrentar os sindicatos dos professores e gastar mais em educação básica".

"A conquista do mundo - mesmo a amigável e sem confrontos que o Brasil busca - não virá para um país onde 45% dos chefes de famílias pobres têm menos de um ano de escolaridade", diz a publicação.

News Corp will charge for newspaper websites, says Rupert Murdoch

(Do Guardian)
Rupert ­Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ­"malfunctioning" business model.

Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an "epochal" debate over whether to charge. "That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience," he said.

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: "We're absolutely looking at that." Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin "within the next 12 months‚" adding: "The current days of the internet will soon be over."

Plunging earnings from newspapers led the way downwards as News Corporation's quarterly operating profits slumped by 47% to $755m, although exceptional gains on sale of assets boosted bottom-line pretax profits to $1.7bn, in line with last year's figure.

Dwindling advertising revenue across print and television divisions depressed the News Corp numbers despite box office receipts from Twentieth Century Fox movies such as Slumdog Millionaire and Marley and Me. But Murdoch said he believed signs of hope were appearing.

"I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good," he quipped. "But it is increasingly clear the worst is over."

He continued: "There are encouraging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous declines are done, and things are beginning to look healthier."

News Corp's newspaper division barely broke even, with quarterly profits collapsing from $216m to $7m year-on-year. Advertising revenue in Britain fell by 21% and Murdoch revealed the Sunday Times is struggling: "It's still in profit, but only just so." The tabloids had fared better, aided by price battles at supermarkets which spend heavily on print promotions.

Television profits also shrank dramatically, falling from $419m to $4m due to a loss of Superbowl revenue and weaker advertising at the group's Fox channels in the US and its Star network in Asia.

News Corp has cut 3,000 jobs over the last year, although Murdoch said very few affected journalists or "creative" personnel. Its filmed entertainment division enjoyed an 8% rise in profits to $282m, while Fox News Channel in the US helped push profits from cable subscription networks up by 30% to $429m.

But News Corp revealed that its interactive media division, which includes the social networking site MySpace, had turned in a lower contribution. MySpace's management was recently replaced as News Corp struggles to build sustainable profitability but Murdoch dismissed competition from its larger rival, Facebook.

"We're not going for the Facebook model of getting hundreds and hundreds of million of people who don't bring any advertising with them at all," he said.

Meanwhile a threat to close the Boston Globe was averted today as its owner, the New York Times Company, struck a deal with the daily's largest union after a week of talks; the 137-year-old publication is the 14th biggest-selling US paper.

Dan Froomkin: Shout truth from the rooftops; passion is part of our job

By Dan Froomkin, Nieman Journalism Lab

[Here's part two of Dan's essay on the ills facing American newspapers; part one ran yesterday. —Josh]

While we legitimately want to keep partisanship and polemics out of our news coverage, we need to stop banishing our humanity and the passions that made us become journalists in the first place. When we find a great story, why shouldn’t we shout it from the rooftops? Web sites like the Huffington Post and Drudge succeed not just because they so intelligently aggregate the most eye-catching items from others, but because of the palpable joy they take in plastering a big headline across their homepages. That they prosper largely by linking to our work is not lost on us, but is too often leading to the wrong conclusion. It’s not that we shouldn’t let them link to us, it’s that we shouldn’t cede our passion to anyone.

And rather than play it safe, we should be brave enough to call things as we see them, and not be limited by the conventional wisdom or political triangulation. Indeed, playing it safe is often transparently bogus — and boring, too boot. I would also argue that the notion that by hiding our voices we are maintaining political neutrality is a fig leaf. Much of what we do is inevitably political; choosing what we write about, who we quote, what ideas we take seriously and which we disdain and ignore. Making political decisions through triangulation – trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political decision. It’s just often a not very good one.

Those who argue that truth-telling has become too political for us to engage in need to reexamine why they are in this business. Our job is to expose and combat lies and propaganda, not pass them along for fear of appearing partisan. That seven in 10 Americans at one point believed that Saddam Hussein had a role in the 9/11 attacks is a profound indictment of our reluctance to champion the truth when it is under attack. We should consider it a key part of our job to differentiate for our readers between things that are true and untrue, arguable and inarguable.

The high priests of the church-state separation may take offense, but the fact is that there’s long been a confusing continuum in journalism ranging from straight news to opinion. And I suspect our hairsplitting distinctions have been lost on our readers. In the Internet age, the answer is not censoring ourselves in the name of obscure in-house rules, or trying to put inscrutable labels on everything. The answer is for us to call things as we seen them, and be up front about it.

So let’s keep a stable of true “opinion” writers — whose job is explicitly to take sides and polemicize on controversial issues. But let’s allow the folks on the “news” side to give members of the public the kind of analysis they’re craving. That means putting things in their proper context. It means not being afraid to explain that one position on an issue is better supported by the facts than the other, when that’s the case. It also allows for the advocating of basic human and journalistic values. I don’t think that conveying outrage over nondisclosure of public records — or children going hungry, or torture — disqualifies someone from calling themselves a news reporter. In fact, it’s what people expect from us — and are probably disappointed that they don’t get.

Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers

By Dan Froomkin / today / 8 a.m.

[You probably know our friend Dan Froomkin as the man behind the terrific White House Watch on washingtonpost.com. We know him best from his other day job, deputy editor of our sister site, Nieman Watchdog. When Dan told me he had an essay he wanted to share with us on his prescription for the news industry, I knew it would be something our readers would enjoy. So this week, in four brief parts, Dan will diagnose a few problems, argue for more voice and perspective in our stories, and share his thoughts on how the business can move forward. —Josh]

We’re all in a state of despair these days over our inability to monetize our journalism online the way we’ve been used to doing in print.

A big part of the problem is that we’re doing a really poor job of connecting buyers and sellers on our newspaper Web sites. Solving that problem should be the top priority for the folks on the business and technology sides of our business.

But some of our shortcomings are purely journalistic. We need to come to terms with the fact that one reason we’re having such a tough time is that we are still fundamentally failing to deliver the value of our newsroom to Internet users.

Our reporters and editors are curious, passionate, and voracious discoverers and devourers of information; talented storytellers; and smart people with excellent bullshit detectors. As long as human beings are curious about each other and clamor for trusted information, there’s a place for us out there. The Internet hasn’t changed that. In fact it’s increased the market for what we’ve got: The Internet highly values people who know things, who can find things out, who can distinguish between what’s important and what’s not, who can distinguish between what’s true and what’s not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively.

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)

If we were to start an online newspaper from scratch today, we’d recognize that toneless, small-bore news stories are not the way to build a large audience — not even with “interactive” bells and whistles cobbled on top. One option might be to imitate cable TV, and engage in a furious volume of he-said/she-said reporting, voyeurism, contrarianism, gossip, triviality and gotcha journalism. But that would come at the cost of our souls. The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

Obviously, we do some of that already. But I would argue that even then, we do so in a much too understated way. We stifle some of our best stories with a wet blanket of pseudo-neutrality. We edit out tone. We banish anything smacking of activism. We don’t telegraph our own enthusiasm for what it is we’re doing. We vaguely assume the readers will understand how valuable a service we’re providing for them — but evidently, many of them don’t.

Tomorrow: Why he-said-she-said journalism doesn’t serve readers.

Photo by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license.