The insanity continues. You may recall that, five years ago, a bunch of French- and German-language newspapers in Belgium, represented by the organization Copiepresse, claimed that Google was infringing on their copyrights by linking to newspaper stories. The fact that they could have blocked Google if they wanted to didn't seem to matter. They just thought Google should pay up for sending them traffic, and amazingly, a court agreed. The case has gone on for years, with Copiepresse demanding a ton of cash. The latest is that -- astoundingly -- a Belgian appeals court has agreed with Copiepresse, and said that merely linking to these newspaper websites is infringement.

I guess this means we can no longer link to any website in Belgium.

In the meantime, Google has been ordered to remove any and all links to articles and photos from all Belgian newspapers (in German or French -- as the article notes, the Flemish papers have no apparent problem with Google News). Google execs seem understandably bewildered by the decision. First of all, they're sending these newspapers traffic, which you would think is a good thing. Second, for the most part (with a few notable exceptions) courts have found that merely linking is not infringement. And, most importantly, if these newspapers don't want Google linking to them, all they have to do is set up a robots.txt file telling Google to go elsewhere.

With the NYT's latest earnings is the news that it's been able to sign up 100,000 people for its new not-really-a-paywall. However, even the NYT seems to admit it has no idea what this number really means, since many of those include discounted offerings, and there's no clear indication whether or not those people will stick around later. In fact, as reader Ragaboo suggests, the NYT was using Groupon to push super cheap subscriptions over the past few weeks, leading to speculation that it was looking for a last minute "push" to boost its numbers. Separately, we'd already seen that automaker Lincoln was offering people free subscriptions as well. So, while this is an interesting bit of data, it'll be more interesting to see what happens next. The other interesting tidbit is that digital ad revenue grew 4.5%, which seems slower than some other online properties lately, and which certainly raises questions about whether the paywall is harming online ad growth -- especially considering the rather substantial drop in traffic. Given that online ad revenue continues to rise, and subscriptions to the paper continue to drop, it still appears like the NYT is betting on the wrong horse in this race.

There's an interesting article at AdAge noting that while there are various paywalls going up, there are also a growing number of advertisers willing to pay to take down the paywall... and they're willing to pay more than it would have cost to just advertise. For example, Lincoln "paid" for a bunch of people to get the new NY Times' paywall for free, and Volvo is paying for a bunch of people to get free streaming video of Major League Baseball content. What strikes me as amusing about all of this is that the folks putting up these paywalls keep insisting that "advertising alone" can't pay enough... and yet here they are more or less admitting that advertisers are happy to pay "enough," if they're given a promotional package that brings benefits to them. Of course, the silly part of this is that part of that "benefit" to the advertisers is the perception that they're helping people take down the paywall. If that's really true, perhaps we should set up a paywall here at Techdirt just so some advertisers can "pay" to take it down. Any interest? Let us know...

Famed investigative reporter Bob Woodward apparently doesn't spend much time "investigating" the state of the internet and online news before making statements. His latest is that he's not thrilled with this whole internet thing, saying that Eric Schmidt's tombstone should say "I killed newspapers." He followed this statement up with this bit of pure cluelessness:

"There's going to be something we're going to miss in journalism that will be very regrettable. I hope the young people who have developed Facebook and Google will say, 'We need to fix the information system and we need to get information to people that's well-researched and investigated.' "

There's something beautiful in a statement that disproves itself, and Woodward's statement above fits into that category perfectly. After all, he made the statement above, and it's pretty damn clear that he made it without investigating or researching what's actually going on. The fact is that Woodward seems to have conflated two totally separate issues: the fact that services like Google and Facebook exist... and the fact that not all reporting is well-researched or investigated. The problem is that those two things are not particularly related, and most certainly not causal. There are, for example, plenty of reports in newspapers that are neither well-researched nor investigated. At the same time, there are plenty of things found online that are both well-researched and investigated. Of course, there's plenty that isn't... but that doesn't harm the stuff that is. I never understand why people automatically think that all content online gets equal attention, and that any "bad" content somehow takes something away from good content.

But rather than researching and investigating what's really causing problems for newspapers (hint: massive debt-load and an astounding failure to adapt to the times), Woodward simply does what he claims to hate, and makes uninformed and ignorant statements, blaming "search engines" for the "screwed up information system." He also seems to think that while "people" exist offline, what happens online no longer involves people. The following paragraph, for example, makes no sense:

"Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, didn't have a Facebook account. He wouldn't have had one. The news of Watergate came from human beings who were reluctant to talk. And the information was not on the Internet. You talk to college students and they say, 'Instead of two years before Nixon resigned, it would have happened in a week.' And I say, 'Why?' And they say, 'Because, people would have gone to the Internet and found it.' But I say, 'It wasn't there. Even if there was an Internet, the information would not be available.'"

Even if that latter exchange really happened (and I have my doubts), the whole thing seems to be based on the idea that a reporter today can't cultivate sources online. While I'm not an investigative reporter by any stretch of the imagination, I can say pretty clear that the internet has been a massive boon in building up a variety of sources of information that simply wouldn't be possible in the past. Just because it happens online doesn't mean it doesn't involve communicating with people. It's just that the process becomes more efficient. He's right that Mark Felt wouldn't have put info online... but would it have been possible for reporters to cultivate a source like Feld online? Absolutely.

We keep hearing from legacy newspaper folks how "news can't be free," as they look to set up paywalls and other such barriers to folks actually participating in the news process. And yet, as has been discussed time and time again, for most people the news was already effectively free. Subscription fees rarely (if ever) covered distribution and printing costs. The real money has always been in advertising. As if to make the point even stronger, it appears that the UK's free newspaper, the Metro, is doing phenomenally well, even as other newspapers struggle. The Metro has found its niche and they've taken to it. And it's not just about the "free" part of the newspaper. As the report notes, as the readership of the newspapers themselves have gone up (often during the daily commute), so too has the readership on the news organization's website. Apparently people are reading the news on paper while commuting, then once they get to the office, they are logging into the website to comment or share the stories with others. It's a lot tougher to do that with a paywall...

We were pretty nervous, earlier this year, when an FTC report with ideas on how to "save" journalism appeared to focus mainly on saving newspapers, rather than on actually saving journalism. It had a number of really troubling and potentially dangerous ideas. The FTC is now planning to release a report by the end of the year that details its proposals for helping journalism, but at least one scary suggestion appears to be off the table: granting newspapers antitrust exemptions. FTC chair Jon Leibowitz dismissed it, saying "I'm not sure that would be a good policy," and then clarified that the "government shouldn't be picking winners and losers and should be platform neutral." Hopefully the plan really does stick to that idea... though it's still not clear why the government needs to be involved in "saving journalism" in the first place.

One of our biggest complaints with news publications that insist "a paywall is the answer" is the fact that they never seem to actually add any more value to their publication that makes it worth paying. They're so focused on getting people to "pay for content," they miss the fact that there's plenty of competing content, and the real focus should be on providing value that builds a community. Thankfully, not all newspapers are making that mistake. Bill Mitchell, at Poynter, has a post about a new study looking at newspaper business models that both highlights that straight paywalls need to be about more than just paying for content, but also which highlights the success some publications are having with membership clubs, which specifically provide additional value behind the content for those who are willing to subscribe:

Take, for example, the street-level bookshop at Politiken, the leading newspaper in Denmark. I stopped in there one drizzly Saturday morning last Fall after teaching in Poynter's Scandinavian Summer School. I picked up a couple of travel guides and an English language version of a popular Danish novel. But I paid my bill and left the shop oblivious to the range of products and services available to Politiken subscribers via its Politiken Plus loyalty program.

"We can say 70 percent of (our subscribers) use Politiken Plus during the year," the paper's sales and marketing director, Poul Skott, told the authors of the WAN report. "The more products we have the better ... the harder it is to say good-bye to the newspaper. It's going to hurt a bit, because you can only get a Plus card as a newspaper subscriber."

This Google translate page will give you a sense of what the program offers, including special offers on travel, restaurants and theater, and how the activities and deals of Politiken Plus are integrated into the newspaper.

This actually fits in well with some of the suggestions that people came up with back at the Techdirt Saves* Journalism event last month, highlighting how publications can focus on building up services for the community which keep them loyal to the publication and the community itself.

It sounds like the early results from such programs suggest they work well (or, at the very least, better than comparable newspapers that don't use them). Still, reading through the analysis, it still feels like most publications are looking at these programs as ways to "retain subscribers," not as a central reason to buy. That is, they're still focused on "selling the newspaper" with this is a bonus add-on, rather than trying to sell this bundle, which is made more valuable by getting the news as well.

It appears that newspaper giant Gannett, owner of USA Today and a bunch of regional newspapers, is beginning to experiment with putting up some paywalls on many of its regional newspapers. Jeff Sonderman has been pointing out, on his Twitter feed, that many of the newspaper's announcements about their own paywalls are really bad reporting. Now it looks like Steve Buttry has written up a blog post pointing out just how bad these newspapers are at announcing their own paywalls.

They give misleading headlines, they pretend that paywalls are some huge journalistic advance (rather than just a business model choice -- and one that's been tried and failed a bunch), and most importantly, they all totally bury the lede, and don't bring up the paywall until many paragraphs into the article. In the online announcements from The Tallahassee Democrat, the Greenville News and the St. George Spectrum, the paywall isn't even mentioned on the first page of each of those articles. Instead, you have to click through to the later pages to even find out what the announcements are about! Talk about burying the lede...

All three waste the beginning of their articles talking up how great they are and how important they are, as newspapers, to their community. But it's all just a way to try to butter people up before hitting them with "so now we're charging for access to our web content." They're acting as if they think their readers are stupid -- which isn't exactly a strong selling point for getting people to pay you money.

Buttry points to other failings in these announcements that any business journalist would have certainly covered if doing the same story about another business:

The editors and publishers who signed the Gannett announcements boast of the resources they commit to covering local news, without acknowledging they have cut those resources severely in companywide staff cuts in recent years. The Tallahassee and Greenville announcements prattle on at length about their newspapers' history (appropriate, I guess, since they are clinging to a strategy rooted in the past).

None of the three announcements discloses that the papers are conducting an experiment for Gannett (in fact, none of the announcements even mentions Gannett). I'm pretty sure that the editors of those papers would expect their business writers to note such a fact in stories about any other business in town.

What we're seeing is the implicit realization that these newspapers know a paywall won't work. If it was something their audience wanted, they would be upfront and honest about it. Or if they had a good rationale for the decision they would be upfront and honest about it. Instead they have to be misleading, defensive and hide the important point. Quite an "experiment" by Gannett...

Back in November, we had noted with concern that Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel was signalling her willingness to approve special new copyright laws that would give new monopolies to newspapers, massively increasing their ability to control any part of their works online. It looks like that process is moving forward. Glyn Moody points us to an analysis of the current proposal that would massively expand copyright monopolies specifically to protect some legacy business models, but with no concern at all for encouraging actual creativity. The proposal would create new rights for scientific publishing, photographs, public performances and more. Where it gets scary is when they talk about giving newspapers the right to control their headlines. Think of this as the "anti-Google News" clause:

It looks as if publishers might really be lobbying for obtaining a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolise speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder. According to the drafts circulating in the internet, permission shall be obtainably exclusively by closing an agreement with a new collecting society which will be founded after the drafts have matured into law. Depending on the particulars, new levies might come up for each and every user of a PC, at least if the computer is used in a company for commercial purposes.

Well, obtaining monopoly protection for sentences and even parts of sentences in a natural language appears to be some kind of very strong meat. This would mean that publishers can control the wording of news messages. This comes crucially close to private control on the dissemination of facts.

Even more incredible? Some are arguing that these proposals don't go nearly far enough:

Mr Castendyk concludes that even if the envisaged auxiliary copyright protection for newspaper language enters into law, the resulting additional revenue streams probably would be insufficient to rescue the publishing companies. He then goes a step further and postulates that publishing companies enjoy a quasi-constitutional guantee due to their role in the society insofar the state has the obligation to maintain the conditions for their existence forever. As I'm not a constitutional lawyer I won't comment this here but, with all due respect, I would not be very much surprised if such sentence turns out to be lobbyist speech. Utilising the leveraging effect of this postulated quasi-constitutional guarantee, Castendyk demands to amend cartel law in order to enable a global 'pooling' of all exclusive rights of all newspaper publishers in Germany in order to block any attempt to defect from the paywall cartell by single competitor as discussed above.

Yes, the recommendation is to not just grant every newspaper publisher copyright on small snippets of words and headlines, but to then also force them all into a cartel that will put up paywalls, with no ability to get around the paywall. Talk about killing the news...

Romenesko points us to a story of a West Virginia newspaper that photoshopped three politicians out of a bill signing photo that ran with a story about the bill. Here's both the original image and the one that ran: Even the photographer was shocked that his image was modified in this manner. But what's stunning to me is that the newspaper appears to be defending the decision and not backing down:

[The] reason the delegates were removed was due to the newspaper's policy not to publish pictures of candidates running for re-election during the political season....

In the newspaper, the photo caption includes the term "photo illustration" to indicate the photo had been changed.

This is a newspaper that won't run photos of candidates running for election? It makes you wonder how they report on those elections. With illustrations? And then to claim that it's okay to edit a photograph by then calling it a "photo illustration" rather than a photo that's been edited seems a bit questionable no matter where you stand on the question of journalistic ethics.