The New York Times has become one of the first major media outlet to pull out of its deal with Apple News, citing conflicting strategies.
Apple set out to reimagine the news industry, while at the same time providing a way for beleaguered newspapers to reach new customers in the digital age. Apple News hit the 125 million monthly users milestone earlier this year, and boasts some of the biggest names in news.
Despite the platform’s success, The Times has announced it will be leaving Apple News, effective June 29. The organization wants to focus on its own distribution and direct relationships with customers, rather than working through a third-party.
“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”
It remains to be seen if The Times is a one-off, or if other publishers will follow suit.
Chilling new details have emerged in the death of Lowndes County High School wrestler Kendrick Johnson. The 17-year-old was found suffocated inside of a rolled up gym mat in January, and now an independent pathologist has found that most of his organs were replaced with newspaper, upon an exhumation of the body for a second autopsy.
State medical examiners had initially concluded that the three-sport athlete suffocated after getting stuck while reaching for a sneaker. Johnson’s parents never fully bought that story, and won a court order for a second autopsy. To their horror, the independent pathologist they’d hired discovered that the brain, heart, lungs, liver and other viscera were missing.
Dr. Bill Anderson, who found that every organ from the skull to pelvis was missing, said, “I’m not sure at this point who did not return the organs to the body. But I know when we got the body, the organs were not there.” Dr. Anderson also found that newspaper had been stuffed into the body where the organs should be.
Kendrick’s father Kenneth Johnson told CNN, “We have been let down again. When we buried Kendrick, we thought we were burying Kendrick, not half of Kendrick.”
Typically, after an autopsy, organs are placed inside plastic bags, and then put back inside the cadaver. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted the first autopsy in January, and the Harrington Funeral Home in Valdosta did the teen’s embalming and burial. The GBI has claimed that the organs were put back into the body before it was released to the funeral home. Funeral home director Antonio Harrington told the Johnson’s attorney that the organs were missing when they got it. Harrington claimed that the organs “were destroyed through natural process” due to the position of the body upon suffocation, and “discarded by the prosecutor before the body was sent back to Valdosta.”
Stuffing a body with newspaper is not “consistent with the standards of care”, according to Vernie Fountain, the founder of a Missouri embalming school. Dr. Gregory Schmunk, the president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, added, “I have never heard of this practice.”
The second autopsy suggests that Kendrick Johnson took a blow to the right side of his neck that was “consistent with inflicted injury,” in contrast to the state’s finding of positional asphyxiation.
Lowndes County Sheriff Chris Prine stated that Johnson’s death a closed case, and refused to comment. The U.S. Justice Department announced in September that it wouldn’t open a civil rights investigation. Still, federal prosecutors in south Georgia are considering commencing their own investigation. U.S attorney Michael Moore said, “This is about getting to the facts and the truth, and we want the Johnson family and the community of Valdosta to have confidence in the process. I am cognizant of time, and we continue to move the process along.”
Kendrick’s mother Jacquelyn Johnson commented, “It’s unbearable, just about. The only thing that wakes you up in the morning is to just keep pushing.”
In yet another sign of the effect the internet has had on physical newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times this week announced that it has laid off all of its staff photographers.
The newspaper released a statement on the move, saying that its audience is “seeking more video content with their news.” The statement, in full:
The Sun-Times business is changing rapidly and our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news. We have made great progress in meeting this demand and are focused on bolstering our reporting capabilities with video and other multimedia elements. The Chicago Sun-Times continues to evolve with our digitally savvy customers, and as a result, we have had to restructure the way we manage multimedia, including photography, across the network.
According to a Chicago Tribune report, the Sun-Times’ financial situation also heavily contributed to the layoffs. The Tribune cited an unnamed “knowledgeable source” as saying the Sun-Times is not currently profitable due to several recent failed initiatives, such as the short-lived online video segment The Marin Report.
The Chicago Newspaper Guild, the union that represents many of the laid-off photographers, has stated that it will fight the layoffs. Guild President David Pollard called the move “shocking and disheartning.”
“The photojournalists that have contributed to this company over the years have been invaluable and it is appalling that the Sun-Times has made such a move that will impact the quality of photojournalism the newspaper produces,” said Pollard.
Old guard media like newspapers and printed books have not sustained well into the digitized age of information. E-books are selling more than print books and newspapers can’t seem to find a way to keep from revenues from scraping the bottom of the well. Even the cozy neighborhood mainstay of movie rental stores are quickly disappearing from the street fronts (can you even remember the last time you visited a Blockbuster, if you can even find one these days?).
These institutions may pluck a nostalgic chord in the minds of consumers and although emerging technology still hasn’t been able to duplicate certain aspects of print media (to this day, I cannot abide an e-reader due to the inability to leave marginalia as I read), pithy attachments don’t keep the coffers full. These media facets continue to try to find a way to survive yet it’s possible that it may be too late for any of them to avoiding a daisy-pushing future in the next twenty (or less!) years. To illustrate the dire straits of traditional media, the aptly titled website Totalbankruptcy.com put together the following inforgraphic. Given the steady decline evident from this graphic, the forecast appears to hold few if any sunny skies for traditional media outlets.
U.S. newspaper advertising revenues fell by 7.3% in 2010, and print advertising in general fell by 9.2%, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Likewise, the industry posted a decline of $1.9 billion in total ad revenues in 2010, bringing the number to $23.9 billion.
The National Newspaper Association didn’t post current numbers regarding circulation revenue, contract printing or event and social media assistance to businesses, but Rick Edmonds of Poynter estimates an extra $10 billion.
This would put the U.S. newspaper industry as a whole at roughly $34 billion, which is less than Google, who posted $37.09 billion in revenues in 2011.
The NAA site also reported that digital newspapers saw a quarterly traffic increase, with 110 million unique visitors, with smartphone and tablet use bolstering readership.
It is approaching the three year mark since Apple introduced the iPad and since that time tablet computers have become extremely popular. Well over half of tablet computer owners get their news from the tablet everyday as opposed to print media or television.
This trend has publishers scrambling to design media that is friendly to readers where traditional web content has focused on videos, interactive graphs, and podcasts. Part of that design will be aesthetic but there is more to it than that.
Imagine tablet news as a source that is continually upgraded right in front of your eyes. All related products and events can appear on your screen.
Mario Garcia has spent over forty years designing newspaper layouts and scrutinizing ways to make things more appealing and now he is faced with the new challenge of tablet computers.
“The tablet is a very unique medium, and you simply do not dump content from the newspaper into it,” says Garcia.
He continues,”Print is designed for the brain and the eye – the tablet is designed for the brain, eye and finger.”
For Garcia it more than just aesthetic design, its about the psychology of the user and creating an experience on the tablet that other mediums don’t provide.
He explains, “People expect more of a relaxing experience there, but every time we go for a total lean-back experience, we discover that people also want to lean forward, for news updates before bed, or whenever they want to get that last update of the day”.
When asked about who he thinks is getting it right with tablet computer editions of news he says The Orange County (Calif.) Register has got his vote. In magazines he claims that Readers Digest has really caught his attention.
It will be interesting to see how tablets continue to change the way we read, dicepher information, and subscribe to periodicals. It’s something I haven’t given much thought to until now.
If you ever need proof that truth is stranger than fiction, simply give this story a read. It tells of how a newspaper site ripped off a blog over a story concerning the legitimacy of DirecTV’s viral campaign regarding fictional Petite Lap Giraffes.
Ian Dennis Miller runs a site called localshow.tv, a nifty music video player. He also writes on a personal blog, of which he released an article titled – “Petite Lap Giraffes: Real?” In the article, he writes about research he conducted to find out if Petite Lap Giraffes are real or not. He cites some specific research, concerning the Petite Lap Giraffe site’s URL registration, by way of a WHOIS query, and this photo which originated from a stock photo website.
The story becomes particularly interesting when Miller discovers that LongIslandPress.com used his research to release their own article , without a creditable link directed towards Miller’s website. As any blog owner would do in his situation, he called LongIslandPress out on their exclusion. He did so by posting a comment on the article, getting straight to point without being nasty.
Let’s see if you can guess what LongIslandPress did next, after Miller called them out. Did they:
A.) Admit to the link exclusion, apologize, and keep the story up on their site since it’s sort of funny in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.
B.) Retract enough information from the original article so they could use information that is attainable through easy means.
C.) Take the article offline, and wash their hands of any wrong doing. Even after search engines crawled their site for content.
Sorry, it’s a trick multiple choice test. Answers B.) and C.) are both correct. The original article written by LongIslandPress included Miller’s research regarding the stock photo image. However, Miller kept up with the article and discovered the stock photo information was taken down. However, the WHOIS domain information, which can be discovered easily by anyone was left up.
Miller’s story caught a bit of steam, and was eventually posted on Slashdot. All the negative attention lead LongIslandPress to take down the story.
Go ahead and file this story under “Newspaper sites that aren’t ready for the internet“. While LongIslandPress is a regional paper and doesn’t have the attention of other major newspaper sites, it paints a portrait of how the needless fight between newspaper sites and blogs rages on. Miller could have really made more of his story, but instead had a bit of fun with it and kept everyone updated with the proceedings. The remarkable part of the story is all of this could have been avoided if they just posted a single link to Miller’s site.
If you haven’t seen the latest DirecTV commercial with the Petite Lap Giraffe being featured, here’s the YouTube video. It’s really quite genius.
UPDATE (04/18): The official Petite Lap Giraffe website has received a rather interesting update. The original video posted on the front page featured a recording, which could have easily have been doctored. They’ve now added a live feed, which has an up-to-the second time code in the top left corner.
The caption below the feed reads: See what our Bull Vladimir do around farm! If not see him, don’t worry he come back.
If people were ready to believe in Petite Lap Giraffes before, imagine how they’ll be fooled by a seemingly live video feed.
