The Google Public Policy Blog recently posted a summary of a speech by Chief Economist Hal Varian on newspaper economics. Alongside the we-are-not-your-enemy message that Google is hoping newspapers will someday listen to, it contains useful insights on the challenge of succeeding as an established print publication in the digital world. Varian suggests a few potential courses of action, but the real value of the piece is that it highlights the obstacles in a way that can be tackled by experienced insiders—especially marketers and salespeople, which newspapers employ in abundance but often fail to set free on experimental strategies.

One of the first things Varian establishes is the volume and value of online news readers, and then he looks at the difficulties of turning that value into revenue. The numbers may be discouraging for newspapers, but they could also become the basis of several important short- and long-term goals in an online strategy:

Varian talks about the need to increase leisure involvement with online news, and in the full speech, he lists ways this might be done: leveraging new technologies like smartphones and tablets, developing more engaging formats for journalism (like Google Living Stories, which recently went open source), and creating multimedia experiences.

These are all important ideas, but to some extent, they miss an opportunity by focusing on ways to get people reading at home instead of work: namely, don't at-work readers have value too?

For a long time, newspapers have used "business purchasing influence" as a prominent reader statistic in media kits. But we now live in a world where business purchasing influence is a much more distributed thing, hardly limited to managers and IT folk: employees at every level in every field make use of online services to expedite their work. Web services subvert the top-down model of corporate IT, allowing workers to seek out the tools that work best for them. These services usually have freemium models, with prices that suit small departmental budgets, and since there's no software installation there's no need to involve IT staff.

Think web blockers (plenty of companies still have laughably low email attachment limits). Think Flash-based presentation tools (graphics departments hate PowerPoint). These are bottom-up business services: a few employees get free accounts, a few more get on board, and before you know it a whole department is more than happy to pay a monthly fee for such a useful tool. These are the companies that want to reach people at work, during those 70 seconds they spend reading a news story while wondering how to transfer a 50-megabyte PDF.

There are some other excellent parts of Varian's post, including a look at the goldmine vertical markets which have traditionally sustained newspapers: automotive, travel, home & garden and the like (he oddly fails to mention real estate, which is a biggie). These are the same verticals that sustain Google's search advertising—the problem is that the end market is now specialty sites, not news publications. Though Varian doesn't discuss the possibilities, this is an area where newspapers still have a chance: they should be leveraging their community respect while partnering with specialty purchase sites through advertising and affiliate programs, ensuring that they continue to be an important link in the chain. TechCrunch recently reported on a Forrester Research study that estimates that web-influenced offline sales in the U.S. (purchases where the consumer made their decision online then went to a retail store) are worth nearly a trillion dollars, and news websites should absolutely be a part of that.

It's well worth reading Varian's post in full, but in the end, his core piece of advice is what counts:

That really is the core of it. Newspapers must experiment with new ways to report the news, new ways to engage their readers and new ways to get advertisers on board, while embracing the fact that their readers are switching to a medium that costs them less. There are over 70-million Americans reading news online—if newspapers can't turn those eyeballs into money, someone else will.

The Guardian.uk has an article about how the New York Times and CNN are becoming technology companies.

How the New York Times and CNN try to keep up with the tech companies

"The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company," its executive editor Bill Keller said recently.
...
While CNN.com closely collaborates with technology companies like Facebook, Apple or Google, the New York Times anticipates technical change in-house with the help of its research and development department.
...
"We made an experiment and put an RFID chip into the phone, the computer and the television. The chip was there to track the user's reading. When a user stopped reading a story on the phone as he or she arrived at work, it opened it again on the desktop. When the user entered the living room, related videos to the story were presented on the television screen," explains the NYT's Nick Bilton.
...
CNN has launched an iPhone application, redesigned its website and reached out more to social media. CNN was among the first TV broadcasters to understand the full impact of social media on television, and teamed up with Facebook for the presidential inauguration.
...
Today, CNN's iPhone app is as much a news-making as a news delivering application, and as the iReporters can add their telephone number, email and location to their report, CNN's editors can get back to them or even assign them to certain content CNN is looking for.
...
...it looks like the news organisations that tear down the wall and build a bridge between editorial and technological thinking will be most likely to survive.

I'm glad to see these types of stories. For the past five years I've been writing about the need for 'media engineers' - part software engineer and part media professional. And also 'media architects' the people the create the media technology infrastructure for media companies (BTW every company is a media company.)

Media engineers will be better paid than software engineers because you need a broader skills set.

- - -
Please see my PearlTree on 'media engineers.' [PearlTrees is an SVW client and its a great media technology that organizes web pages in a visual way.]

“The web is becoming a live medium — sales and auctions happen in time, product launches, chats with celebrities, live video events and audio, games, events in virtual worlds — there are a huge amount of scheduled things taking place,” says Nova Spivack, who recently sold off his semantic web search engine Twine to Evri. Now he’s setting out to create a massive programming guide to those live online events, called Live Matrix.

Spivack last year brought on Sanjay Reddy, who’d done corporate development at Gemstar-TV Guide and led its sale to Macrovision for $2.8 billion. Reddy knew from experience that TV watchers spend 10 percent of their time watching TV on the interactive programming guide (per set-top box data). The web has much more going on at any one time, but nothing like an IPG.

Does that metaphor carry over? That’s what Spivack, who’s serving as Live Matrix chairman, and Reddy, the CEO, want to find out. They plan to launch in May and gave me a look at the pre-release site under the condition that I not release screenshots. I’ll tell you a bit more about what they’re doing and describe in words what it looks like.

First of all, there’s the prototypical grid interface — though instead of listing channels due to preset numbers like on TV, they’re dynamically ordered based on demand. Log in during March Madness? That’s going to be on top. If a web metaphor is more your style, you can look at all the events in a Digg-like interface. Users can pull events into a personal playlist and receive reminders when they start. If you actually want to watch something, Live Matrix sends you to the host site rather than framing the content.

These ideas do need a bit more nuance — for instance, personalized ranking rather than global popularity will often be more helpful, and on days like the Obama inauguration there are going to be tens of duplicate or near-identical feeds running on various channels. Spivack and Reddy do say they’ll provide recommendations as well as social filtering based on what your friends are planning to watch. They’re also planning to provide widgets for syndication around the web.

I totally see the need for what they’re doing — in my time at NewTeeVee, we developed the “where to watch” franchise of posts after seeing the amount of people coming to our site trying to find the actual URLs for live video streams of major sporting and pop culture events.

The main way Live Matrix expects to list events is by partnering with content providers, plugging into publisher APIs and using a small editorial team. Then, it will sell advertising on programming based on demand expressed by its users. It will also maintain a page for every event after it’s over, pointing to archived video (which is excellent; so often people who do live completely forget about on-demand). And Spivack notes that pre-recorded videos released at a certain time will be considered “live” as well.

Live Matrix has a good problem but, like its on-demand cousin company Clicker, the web TV guide, it will need to aggressively build an audience for its site and through distribution partners, including hardware companies. The key is to make an interface that’s a significantly better option than searching for such events.

The company, dually based in San Francisco and Los Angeles with offshore development, has raised money from angel investors including Allen Morgan at Mayfield Fund.

With pre-orders for the iPad off to a fast start in preparation for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) product’s release next month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations has modified its guidelines for counting sales of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada. The old standards have always required that in order to be considered as part of a periodical’s circ, the e-paper version must include an exact replica of a print edition’s full editorial content and advertising. The change is that an e-paper edition no longer needs to be presented in a layout identical to the print version. Replica digital editions will continue to be included in a magazine’s circulation guarantee, or rate base.

With pre-orders for the iPad off to a fast start in preparation for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) product’s release next month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations has modified its guidelines for counting sales of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada. The old standards have always required that in order to be considered as part of a periodical’s circ, the e-paper version must include an exact replica of a print edition’s full editorial content and advertising. The change is that an e-paper edition no longer needs to be presented in a layout identical to the print version. Replica digital editions will continue to be included in a magazine’s circulation guarantee, or rate base.

Staff at IslamOnline have gone on strike. But is it about workers' rights, religious principles or national rivalries?

Islamic advice websites aren't the first thing that spring to mind when talking of strikes, sit-ins and workers' occupations, but if there's any proof needed that Egypt's extraordinary wave of industrial action is every corner of the nation, then today's drama at IslamOnline.net fits the bill.

With more than 120,000 hits a day and a global reach that extends through several languages, IslamOnline is one of the biggest and most influential Muslim websites. From Baghdad to Basildon, Muslims use it as a key source of scholarly advice on everything from impotency to the insurgency in Iraq.

So the question of who owns and controls the site is a vitally important one. And that's the question being wrestled over today, after hundreds of staff walked out in protest over what they say is an attempt by conservatives in the Gulf to hijack the site and force it to pursue a more traditional and hardline agenda.

Tension had been simmering for months between the website's Cairo-based editorial offices and the managers in Doha, whose plan this week to fire many of the 350 employees in Egypt led to an all-night occupation of the company's offices, which was still continuing at the time of writing.

"We're all resigning," Fathi Abu Hatab, a former IslamOnline journalist and one of the strike leaders, told me over the phone from inside the building. "If we lose this battle then IslamOnline as we know it will be dead. We were an exception – in our professionalism, in our moderation, in our refusal to be bound by hidden agendas. And like all exceptions in the Arab World, we've come to the end of the line."

So what is the battle, exactly? There's not a lot of agreement on this point, with a host of competing explanations trickling out of the IslamOnline offices on to Twitter, Facebook and even a live online video stream that the workers set-up to show their grievances to the world. Some of the staff believe this is primarily a business dispute over pay, conditions and company management but others are reading more into it, placing the tussle over editorial control at IslamOnline into a wider political rivalry between Egypt and Qatar, and an even broader context of cultural warfare between Egypt and the Gulf.

As detailed in the news reports, there's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that a new board of directors in Doha has been throwing its weight around in debates over the site's content. Analysts have argued that the site's relatively open and inclusive nature (where discussions over homosexuality sit side by side with the latest fatwas on vegetarianism, martyrdom and T-shirts) has unnerved some of IslamOnline's more conservative financial backers in the Gulf. At this stage it's hard to verify that one way or another, but if true it would only be the latest salvo in a long-running campaign by the Gulf to wrest cultural ascendancy in the Arab World away from Egypt.

In the often febrile Middle Eastern media market, domination of the cultural landscape has tended to go hand in hand with political ascendancy. Historically the biggest centres of cultural production were Beirut and Cairo; the latter's singers, film-makers, actors and writers were untouchable in the 1950s and 1960s.

Egypt's status as the capital of Arab culture mirrored its political fortunes under Gamal Abdel Nasser; Umm Kolthoum sang, Youssef Chahine directed, and Nasser was the all-singing, all-dancing leader of the "Arab street" who faced down western colonialism at Suez in 1956 and swaggered across the world stage.

Then came the oil explosion of the 1970s, and the Gulf states suddenly found themselves with a load of petro-dollars at their disposal. Over the next couple of decades, with Lebanon mired in civil war and Egypt rocked by the assassination of Sadat and the beginning of the moribund, bureaucratic rule of Mubarak, Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent the UAE) embarked on an ambitious and eye-wateringly expensive programme to force control of the region's culture away from their rivals.

The Arab culture wars are open on a number of different fronts, but all involve Egypt losing its grip on the Middle East's cultural tiller. On television, for example, Egyptian soaps and serials have long dominated prime-time schedules, but now the UAE is fighting back with multimillion dollar productions like Million's Poet, an insanely popular reality TV show that commands 70m viewers from across the Arab World, yet is based around an obscure form of Gulf Arabian poetry. The result has been a hitherto unknown appreciation for the Gulf dialect across the Middle East.

The whole show is funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority of Culture and Heritage, and forms part of a much wider push to make Abu Dhabi the capital of culture in the Middle East, with local versions of the Louvre and Guggenheim under construction.

It's not just a matter of the Gulf producing new cultural products to rival Egypt's; investors are actively taking over Egyptian cultural institutions and reshaping them to reflect more conservative Gulf values. Egypt's film studios were managing to produce only about five or six films a year in the early 1990s; now, almost solely because of Saudi investment, they're churning out around 40, some of which now have to conform to the "35 rules" of piety laid down by the Saudi backers – a huge shift away from Egypt's traditionally more pluralistic Islamic values to the much more austere form of Wahhabi Islam prevalent in the Gulf.

This "Saudisation" has left some Egyptians, such as the billionaire communications tycoon Naguib Sawiris, feeling like a foreigner in their own land. "As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest problem in the Middle East right now," he says. "Egypt was always very liberal, very secular and very modern. Now ... I'm looking at my country, and it's not my country any longer. I feel like an alien here."

As the IslamOnline workers prepare themselves for a second night of occupation in an attempt to assert their editorial independence over those that bankroll them, a broader upheaval is under way in every corner of the Arab media world, one that could prove dangerous for cultural pluralism.

"There is an Egyptian taste to IslamOnline at the moment which is very discernible; if the site packs up and moves to Qatar the spirit and attitude of the site will change," says Khalil al-Anani, an expert on political Islam at Durham University.

"That would be a big loss to the Muslim community globally, because we are facing a wave of Salafist media at the moment – on the internet, on satellite TV, and elsewhere – and IslamOnline was one of the key outlets resisting that trend."

• Egypt
• Islam
• Religion
• Middle East
• Digital media

In recent weeks, conservative media have promoted a number of myths and falsehoods about the possible use of the budget reconciliation process to finalize passage of health care reform.

On Fox News' Special Report, host Bret Baier said that the Senate process of reconciliation "was once called the nuclear option" and aired clips of what he claimed were Democrats criticizing the nuclear option "when Republicans were using it." Fox News hosts and guests have repeatedly pushed the falsehood that the term "nuclear option" refers to the budget reconciliation process. The Fox Nation and Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Dick Morris, Bret Baier, and Bill Sammon have all falsely compared reconciliation to the "nuclear option."

Fact: "Nuclear option" was coined by GOP to describe a process to change Senate filibuster rules. The term "nuclear option" was coined by former Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), one of the leading advocates of a 2005 proposal to change the Senate rules on filibusters for judicial nominations. After Republican strategists deemed the term a political liability, Republican senators began to attribute it to Democrats. As Media Matters for America noted, at the time, many in the news media followed suit, repeating the Republicans' false attribution of the term to the Democrats.

The Washington Post published a March 2 op-ed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in which he claimed: "This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope. And the havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government and damage the prospects of bipartisanship."

Fact: Reconciliation requires majority vote. The U.S. House Committee on Rules defines the budget reconciliation process as requiring a majority of both houses for passage. From the Rules Committee:

Once a reconciliation bill is passed in the House and Senate, members of each body meet to work out their differences. A majority of the conferees on each panel must agree on a single version of the bill before it can be brought back to the full House and Senate for a vote on final passage. Approval of the conference agreement on the reconciliation legislation must be by a majority vote of both Houses.

In a National Review Online column titled "Unprecedented," the Heritage Foundation's Michael Franc referred to reconciliation as "an arcane budgetary procedure." In a February 23 editorial, The Washington Examiner accused Democrats of "running a Washington con game" in considering the use of reconciliation to pass health reform, asserting that the process is "an arcane legislative magic act." Additionally, in a February 23 article reporting that centrist Democrats were weighing the implications of using reconciliation to pass health care reform, Politico claimed that Republicans may be able to convince voters that the procedure "is an end-run around the normal legislative process."

Fact: Reconciliation is part of congressional budget process. The budget reconciliation process is defined by the U.S. House Committee on Rules as "part of the congressional budget process... utilized when Congress issues directives to legislate policy changes in mandatory spending (entitlements) or revenue programs (tax laws) to achieve the goals in spending and revenue contemplated by the budget resolution."

Republicans repeatedly used reconciliation to pass Bush's agenda. Republicans used the budget reconciliation process to pass President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as well as the 2005 "Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act." The Senate also used the procedure to pass a bill containing a provision that would have permitted oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (The final version of that bill that Bush signed did not contain the provision on drilling.)

In a February 25 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bill Frist claimed: "Using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform would be unprecedented because Congress has never used it to adopt major, substantive policy change." In his February 25 Washington Post column, George Will suggested Democrats were "misusing" reconciliation for trying to pass health care legislation. Will wrote: "The summit's predictable failure will be a pretext for trying to ram health legislation through the Senate by misusing 'reconciliation,' which prevents filibusters."

Fact: Reconciliation has repeatedly been used to reform health care. On February 24, NPR noted that many "major changes to health care laws" were passed via reconciliation. Additionally, during a February 24 broadcast of NPR's Morning Edition, correspondent Julie Rovner quoted George Washington University health policy professor Sara Rosenbaum saying: "In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process."

Congress used reconciliation to pass Medicare Advantage and SCHIP. As part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, enacted through the reconciliation process, Congress -- which was controlled by the Republicans at the time -- created the "Medicare+Choice Program," currently known as Medicare Advantage or Medicare Part C. The program allows seniors to enroll in HMO-type plans rather than the traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan. The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), was also passed through reconciliation as part of the Balanced Budget Act. It provides federal matching funds to expand health coverage to children in low-income families who are not eligible for Medicaid.

Congress used reconciliation to pass COBRA. As part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, Congress gave "workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances."

Congress used reconciliation to pass Patient Self-Determination Act. As part of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1990, Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, which requires hospitals, nursing homes, HMOs, and other organizations that participate in Medicare or Medicaid to provide information about advance directives and patients' decision-making rights.

During the February 25 edition of Hannity (accessed via the Nexis database), Fox News contributor Sarah Palin suggested that congressional Democrats plan to "cram through via reconciliation this scheme, this government growth takeover of too many aspects of our health care." She went on to warn about "the risk is this one-sixth of our economy being so controlled and 1/6 of our society being so controlled by government with this takeover of health care." Similarly, Politico published a February 4 op-ed by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) warning that "Democrats may attempt to use reconciliation to short-circuit every senator's right and responsibility to fully debate a measure that will affect one-sixth of our economy." Also, CNN political analyst Gloria Borger asked during the March 12 edition of The Situation Room (accessed via the Nexis database): "[S]hould you pass something that affects one-sixth of the American economy with just a majority vote?"

Fact: Dems say they plan to use reconciliation only to tweak aspects of bills already passed by House and Senate. As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein reported, congressional Democrats are planning to pass "the 11 pages of modifications that President Obama proposed to reconcile the House and Senate bills with each other." From Klein's March 1 blog post:

Second, Democrats are not proposing to create the health-care reform bill in reconciliation. Rather, they're using the process for a much more limited purpose: passing the 11 pages of modifications that President Obama proposed to reconcile the House and Senate bills with each other. This is not a particularly ambitious use of the reconciliation process, and it's certainly not unprecedented. Republicans are arguing otherwise, of course, but the record belies their rhetoric.

The Hill: Reid says Dems "would likely use the budget reconciliation process to pass a series of fixes to the first healthcare bill passed by the Senate." The Hill reported in a February 20 article:

Democrats will finish their health reform efforts within the next two months by using a majority-vote maneuver in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said.

"Reid said that congressional Democrats would likely opt for a procedural tactic in the Senate allowing the upper chamber to make final changes to its healthcare bill with only a simple majority of senators, instead of the 60 it takes to normally end a filibuster.

"I've had many conversations this week with the president, his chief of staff, and Speaker Pelosi," Reid said during an appearance Friday evening on "Face to Face with Jon Ralston" in Nevada. "And we're really trying to move forward on this."

The majority leader said that while Democrats have a number of options, they would likely use the budget reconciliation process to pass a series of fixes to the first healthcare bill passed by the Senate in November. These changes are needed to secure votes for passage of that original Senate bill in the House. "We'll do a relatively small bill to take care of what we've already done," Reid said, affirming that Democrats would use the reconciliation process. "We're going to have that done in the next 60 days."

During the February 25 edition of Fox News' Special Report (accessed via the Nexis database), correspondent Carl Cameron reported that "Republicans demanded Democrats abandon any plans to drive health care through the Senate with only 51 votes under the rarely used legislative maneuver known as budget reconciliation, instead of the normal 60 votes needed to advance major bills."

Fact: Senate already passed health care bill with 60 votes. On December 23, the Senate passed a cloture motion on H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with 60 votes. On December 24, the Senate passed the bill with 60 votes.

Numerous right-wing media figures have promoted video of Obama discussing the difficulty of governing with "50 plus one" votes on legislation to assert that Obama has broken a promise not to pass health care using reconciliation. For instance, during the March 3 edition of his radio show, Glenn Beck said: "New audio for you from Barack Obama saying that we cannot, cannot pass it with a simple majority vote. Health care has to be supermajority, has to be done that way. You can't just slip it by the American people, which they are now saying they're going to do. Yet another broken promise from Barack Obama." Similarly, Jim Hoft posted the video at his Gateway Pundit site and wrote: "But, of course, like everything else Obama promised, this statement came with an expiration date. Today Obama will announce that Democrats will force their unpopular nationalized health care bill through Congress using a simple majority to ram it through."

Fact: Obama didn't "promise" not to pass health care with 50 + 1 votes. In fact, in the video promoted by conservative media figures, Obama said it would be more difficult to govern without broad support, not that he promised not to use reconciliation to pass health care reform. The video shows several clips of Obama on the campaign trail in 2006 and 2007 discussing how he expected to pass health care reform. For example, in a September 2007 speech, Obama says of health care reform, "This is an area where we're going to have to have a 60 percent majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We're going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk that is not just a 50-plus-1 majority." In another clip, Obama discusses how he wanted to campaign in a way that brought more than a "50-plus-1" majority because "you can't govern" after such a victory and predicts that "you can't deliver on health care. We're not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-1 strategy." In a 2006 speech, Obama says, "If we want to transform the government, though, that requires a sizable majority." At no point does he "promise" not to use reconciliation in health care reform.