StarTrib Joins Paywall Club

From Minneapolis StarTribune on 10/31/11


Newspapers ask online readers to pay

Article by: DAVID PHELPS , Star Tribune
Updated: October 31, 2011 - 7:09 AM

This week the Star Tribune joins the wave of media outlets that have adopted a digital subscription model.

Newspapers are beginning to ask online readers to pay for something that for years they have gotten for free -- the news.

Within the past year, newspapers including the New York Times, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News have adopted various digital subscription plans, or "paywalls," that require customers to be paid subscribers for unlimited access to the newspapers' content.

While there's a risk that consumers will reject paying for news online, it's one that traditional media finally are willing to take.

"It's become OK to pay for [digital] material," said Chris Wexler, group planning director for media buyer Compass Point. "As that becomes the norm, newspapers have an opportunity to do that as well."

This week, the Star Tribune will introduce a metered paywall, similar to the New York Times model, that allows readers 20 free views of articles or blogs per month before requiring a paid subscription to read further. Most Star Tribune print subscribers already get unlimited digital access.

"There was no reason not to do this from the onset [of news websites]," said Star Tribune Publisher Michael Klingensmith. "It was a mistake to go down the path that was taken. I never saw the common sense of it, to turn your back on your subscribers."

Klingensmith estimated that digital subscriptions can add 8 to 10 percent in additional revenue. In the case of the Star Tribune, that would be $3 million to $4 million a year, once the subscription model is fully functional. "It's very meaningful money with a basically marginal contribution," he said.

Growing revenue from digital subscriptions would be a huge boost for the newspaper industry, which has suffered declines in advertising and circulation, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Since the mid-1990s, the industry has wrestled with how to build online sales, while technological advances allowed an array of competitors to siphon readers and advertising revenue. As a result, the newspaper industry is now a generation removed from the days when print was the dominant way to distribute news.

The shift by newspapers to charging for digital content has become even more critical in a technological world dominated by smartphones and digital tablets that allow readers to get their news anytime and anyplace. Those devices are compatible with pay-as-you-go subscription models. Today, consumers pay for music from the iTunes store, order electronic books or stream movies from Netflix.

Regional newspapers like the Star Tribune will have to continue providing premium coverage in areas such as local government, business, state politics, the arts community and high school sports, experts said. Investigative reporting and lively feature writing are critical as well to attracting digital subscribers.

"Sports is a big differentiator," Wexler said. "The Vikings, the Twins. Major League Baseball has a paywall that is huge. For power users, you charge for enhanced elements like video or the ability to operate on different platforms."

Dan Sullivan, a professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said smaller community newspapers also could benefit from a paywall because they do something that other major media do not -- news reporting at a grass-roots level.

"Small-town papers can pitch a paywall as a community-building activity that makes people feel more part of the community," Sullivan said.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press did not respond to inquiries about whether it would seek digital subscriptions or continue providing free content.

One advantage of a paywall is the ability of newspapers to do targeted advertising by getting more information from subscribers, similar to Google and Facebook. "Then you can track their behavior -- what stories are they reading, what are they interested in," Sullivan said. "You can marry behavior with identity."

For newspapers, however, a more fundamental question persists: Will online readers pay for the news?

A study released last week by the Pew Research Center concluded that the potential for subscription revenue from tablet users "may be limited." Only 14 percent of tablet readers will pay for news on their device, while just 25 percent said they would be willing to pay $5 a month if that was the only way to access their favorite source, the study said.

"Information is very sketchy so far," said Klingensmith. "But this is part of a transformation that needs to happen to our business model."

Earlier this year, the news website Mashable concluded that traffic on the New York Times website declined 5 to 10 percent after a paywall was implemented. But since then, the Times has seen its Sunday print circulation rise, as it bundled print and digital subscription plans.

Ultimately, part of the impact on readership will depend on how much free access the newspaper allows and how much it charges once the paywall has been reached, said Bill Mitchell of the Poynte Institute.

"If the meter is set up in a way that is annoying, you can diminish the audience," he said. "All of these pitfalls are serious, but news organizations are beginning to figure out how to adjust the meter to avoid those pitfalls."

Klingensmith is optimistic that the subscription model for digital news is here to stay. "No one has done it and canceled it," he said.

What Skills Do Journalists of the Future Need?

Here is a short excerpt from a post on the skills needed by future journalists. To see the entire article, click here.

For the past two years, OurBlook.com has been conducting interviews with top experts in journalism and media about the future of journalism. In my previous post for MediaShift, I offered a collection of views about where the industry and profession is headed.

We recently began asking interviewees to outline what they see as the role and skillset of the journalist. Overall, experts agreed that the future journalist will be:

A multitasker, juggling various responsibilities and roles, many which may have nothing to do with "traditional" journalism.
Technologically savvy, having at least a basic understanding of programming, web tools, and web culture.
A gatekeeper for a particular beat, directing readers to the most current and trustworthy news, regardless of who wrote it or where it's housed.
A versatile storyteller, who knows how to present a story online in various formats.
A brand and a community manager, who cultivates a constant and interactive conversation with their readership.

Watergate Figure Kenneth Dahlberg Dies

Kenneth Dahlberg died this week. Because of his role in Watergate, and because you saw the film "All the President's Men," I thought you might be interested in this portion of an article on him from the Mpls StarTribune.


During an eventful life that spanned nearly a century, Kenneth H. Dahlberg went from a one-room schoolhouse to aerial heroism during World War II and then to vast success as a Twin Cities businessman.

But it was his brief cameo role in the Watergate scandal nearly 40 years ago that remained a footnote to his life that never really went away.

Dahlberg, a Deephaven resident who founded what became the Miracle-Ear hearing aid company and bankrolled other companies, died Tuesday. He was 94.

"His attitude was that Watergate made good copy, and that's how journalism works," said Warren Mack, who wrote a biography of Dahlberg. "Ken understood that, and even though it was a source of pain for [his wife], Ken never really saw it that way."

Paul Waldon, who worked for Dahlberg nearly 25 years, remembered him as "a patriot, businessperson and entrepreneur who was always trying to do the right thing. ... He was the real deal."

A daughter, Dede Disbrow, also called Dahlberg "a patriot -- he bled red, white and blue."

Born in St. Paul, Dahlberg grew up on a farm near Wilson, Wis., attending a one-room school before moving back to the city to finish his education at an accredited high school. After working for several years in the hotel industry, he was drafted shortly before the United States entered the war.

Shot down three times

He became a fighter pilot and on June 2, 1944, four days before D-Day, he arrived in England to join the 354th Fighter Group, flying P-51 Mustangs to support the invasion.

Credited with 15 aerial victories, Dahlberg was shot down three times behind enemy lines, escaped twice and sat out the last few months of the war as a POW in Stalag VII-A near Munich. Among other military honors, he received a Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war, he went to work for a firm called Telex, which made hearing aids and other communications equipment. He started his own company in 1948, which became Miracle-Ear, a firm he later sold to go into the venture capital business. Among the companies he invested in was the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain.

"He comes out of World War II with a thousand dollars of back pay [from] when he was a POW and was willing and able to do anything," Waldon said. "He wanted to do whatever he could to make the republic better."

In his years working for Dahlberg, Waldon recalls what he called "Ken-isms," including: "He always lived life on the edge and said if you're not, you're not using up your allotted space."

He also dabbled in politics. Dahlberg's political activities grew out of a wartime friendship with Barry Goldwater, who had been one of his aviation instructors. Dahlberg was a deputy chairman of fundraising for the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign in 1964.

No Watergate wrongdoing

As the Midwest finance chairman of President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, Dahlberg was pulled into the Watergate scandal even though he engaged in no wrongdoing. He became linked to the scandal after a $25,000 check he delivered to the Nixon campaign turned up in a Watergate burglar's bank account, tying Nixon to the break-in.

The contribution, which was legal, had come from Dwayne Andreas, a native of Worthington, Minn., who was former chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland.

Dahlberg was cleared by a grand jury of any wrongdoing, but his role in Watergate was parlayed into a moment of high drama in the movie that documented the scandal, "All the President's Men."

One scene shows Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward phoning Dahlberg to ask about the check, eliciting a tense standoff, though no allegations are made against Dahlberg.

At one point, as the White House tapes later revealed, Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, mentioned Dahlberg's role to Nixon, to which the president responded, "Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?"

Mack, a longtime friend of Dahlberg who wrote his biography, "One Step Forward: The Life of Ken Dahlberg," said that he didn't mention Watergate in the book "because it's still uncomfortable for Betty Jayne [Dahlberg's wife]. There was always this implication that he did something wrong."

Mack added that Dahlberg himself lamented that Watergate overshadowed his accomplishments in battle and in business. "He was just the victim of circumstance," Mack said.

'Flying right up to the end'

Flying remained a passion throughout Dahlberg's life. He served with the Minnesota Air National Guard until 1951, was inducted into the Minnesota and Arizona Aviation Halls of Fame, and continued flying -- either as pilot or co-pilot -- into his 90s.

"He was flying right up to the end -- he was still so good at it," Disbrow said. "And he was a funny guy -- I'd take him for rides around the lake in a convertible and he'd ask why I couldn't afford a car with a roof."

Along with his wife of 64 years and Disbrow, survivors include another daughter, Nancy Dahlberg; son K. Jeffrey Dahlberg; brother Arnold Dahlberg, and sisters Marcella Savage and Harriet Dolny.

Young White Girls--Sex, Violence, and the Media

Here's a really interesting analysis of the public's fascination (and the journalists' judgment) about young women and crime stories:

"Foxy Knoxy": Sex, violence and media hysteria

Editor's Note: Sarah Stillman, a visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is the recipient of their inaugural Reporting Award. She recently published The Invisible Army in The New Yorker. Check out her website here.

By Sarah Stillman – Special to CNN

There is something about pretty white girls, bloody knives and the slightest whiff of sex that gets the international news machine humming like nothing else. All three factors merged explosively Monday in a crowded appeals court in Perugia, Italy. There, before several hundred journalists and other spectators, American college student Amanda Knox, 24, was cleared of murdering her study-abroad roommate, Meredith Kercher, in a sexually-motivated crime four years ago. Already, feature film rights to Knox’s story are flying, and book publishers, too, are salivating.

Until recently, the prevailing explanation for “Foxy Knoxy’s” guilt had been a surreal one. A game of rough sex went terribly wrong that evening in 2007, alleged Italian prosecutors. The young American student, her boyfriend and a local immigrant man were behind the perverse ordeal - or so echoed tabloids and reputable papers on both sides of the Atlantic - ending up in Kercher’s bloody death.

This orgy-centered narrative was bandied about by lawyers in the Italian courtroom, as were terms like “she-devil” and “witch.” But was any of it true? After four years of Knox’s incarceration based on an increasingly shaky set of extracted confessions and problematic forensic evidence, prosecutors’ made-for-late-night version of the crime has finally been snuffed this week. Knox, now officially freed, is heading home to Seattle.

All this has left the press to ask, somewhat sheepishly: were mainstream theories about Knox’s guilt driven primarily, as Slate.com’s Katie Crouch argued last month, by our collective lust for a kinky tale?

This hypothesis, it turns out, does have some historical weight behind it. Since the advent of the penny press nearly two centuries ago, American journalists have done some of their briskest business when selling tales of unlikely female perpetrators - the more frail and photogenic, the better. With each successive decade, the “girl killer” genre of true crime reporting has hewed more and more closely to the fading industry model of d-list porn films: a sloppy mash-up of stock characters (the femme fatale, the lesbian psycho-slasher, etc.) prone either to overly-hasty climaxes, or, inversely, to long, drawn-out sagas that test the stamina of even the most dedicated voyeurs.

Here, briefly, are four women in American history whose sensational murder and assault trials became, much like Knox’s, vehicles for serving our most base collective appetites, sometimes spawning whole industries unto themselves and often reflecting larger cultural battles.

1. Alice Mitchell: “Girl Slays Girl”

On January 25th, 1892, a young Memphis teen named Alice Mitchell allegedly attacked her former “girl lover,” Freda Ward, with a knife, slitting her throat. Her motivation? Perverted love sickness, according to the feverish press coverage that began locally but quickly spread across the state, and then the country. American readers, it turned out, were fascinated by the prospect of female sexual deviance at the turn of the century, at a time when young women were first entering public life en masse as workers, consumers, and sexual agents, increasingly bending the rules of traditional gender roles.

The trial sparked the production of hundreds of lurid articles about the two lovers (“Girl Slays Girl”!), medical studies on the disputed topic of Ward’s insanity, folk ballads and a whole raft of other cultural products detailed in Lisa Duggan’s brilliant Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. It ultimately culminated in Mitchell’s conviction, followed by her psychiatric hospitalization, with the judge calling the crime “the most atrocious and malignant ever perpetrated by a woman.”

2. Lizzie Borden: The Girl of Forty Whacks

Just one year later, America was gripped by an even more sensationalized trial: that of Lizzie Borden, a young woman from Fall River, Massachusetts, charged with killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet. Borden’s case, too, sparked a veritable cottage industry of commentary, with hundreds of reporters covering each twist in the trial and dozens more writing books about Borden’s surprising acquittal. Again, speculation after the trial was rife about Borden’s sexual identity (was she dating female silent film star Nance O’Neil?!), as well as her sanity.

More than a century later, Borden still features in children’s jump rope rhymes (“Lizzie Borden took an axe/and gave her mother forty whacks…”), academic dissertations, award-winning documentaries, themed bed-and-breakfast retreats and a well-reviewed punk rock musical, “Lizzie Borden: A Musical Tragedy in Two Axe.” Most recently, HBO announced the development of a mini-series based around the lurid murder, starring Hollywood it-girl Chloe Sevigny, who apparently regards Borden as a “countercultural icon.”

3. Patty Hearst: Good Girl Gone Armed

How did Patty Hearst cross the line from being a perfect girl-victim to an unforgivable girl-perpetrator? Around 9 pm on February 4th, 1974, the 19-year-old heiress to the Hearst family publishing fortune was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, where she sat with her fiancé in her blue bathrobe. After ten weeks of captivity in the hands of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), Hearst was photographed participating in the armed robbery of a San Francisco bank; in a stunning turnaround, she appeared to have joined her captors as a self-proclaimed “urban guerilla.” Next came a sensational courtroom drama that many deemed “the trial of the century,” in which Hearst was found guilty of bank robbery despite pleas of having been brainwashed and sexually traumatized by the SLA.

Her case helped to popularize the psychological theory of “Stockholm syndrome,” sparking a national debate about its legitimacy as a legal defense. In Patty’s Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America, William Graebner, Hearst’s biographer, contends that the case also caught on because it provided audiences with a convenient symbol of what many Americans, particularly those on the right, feared most about 1970’s counterculture: “[F]eminism run amok, armed and sexualized; the pathology of left-wing politics; the arrogance of the moneyed elite; the coddling of criminals,” and so much more.

4. Casey Anthony: Murderous “Tot Mom”

The most recent contender for the category of femme fatale of the century, Casey Anthony, is still woefully fresh in the American consciousness. This past summer, the pert young single mom from Florida stood accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. When Anthony was acquitted in early July, many pundits visibly seethed at their certitude that a villainous “tot mom” had escaped her rightful due, with cable news star Nancy Grace erupting in an impassioned anti-Anthony tantrum that went viral.

But Anthony’s saga, and all the attention it garnered, also sparked a counter-trend: vocal and often eloquent critiques of the 24/7 news cycle that has made a lucrative enterprise of sensationalizing stories of young white female victims and perpetrators, while ignoring countless other cases of equal moral gravity (say, crimes committed against non-white, non-poster-child populations).

So perhaps kink doesn’t get the last word. Knox’s acquittal in Italian appeals court seems, at least for the moment, to mark the defeat of a racy narrative that privileged Hustler-ready “let’s imagine if…’s” over solid facts. It may even portend that accountability in well-publicized cases like hers - and, in a more surprising way, the recent case of Troy Davis - is now, more than ever, susceptible to global intervention, not just by lawyers and mainstream journalists, but also by a growing cadre of bloggers, social media users, and all manner of citizen journalists who’ve come to realize that justice doesn’t always coincide with the juiciest story.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Sarah Stillman.

Who Has Faster Internet Than the U.S.?

Guess who has faster Internet than the U.S.

South Korea, Moldova and Congo, just to name a few. There are 25 countries with faster Internet than the US. We’re ranked right behind Hungary.

A new report, from online content delivery service Pando Networks, notes that the U.S. now ranks 26th worldwide for Internet speed, putting it just behind Hungary. That country’s gross domestic product of $129 billion, according to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund, makes it the 56th-largest economy in the world, sandwiched between Qatar and Bangladesh. (The U.S., the world’s largest economy, has a GDP of $14.6 trillion.)

South Korea, with a GDP of $1 trillion, has the fastest Internet speeds in the world.