RE piracy and copyright in general, I am surprised that papers allow themselves to be reviewed on TV, well before they are available in print, and liberally quoted – and also that they permit their journalists to contribute, again liberally, to TV and radio programmes. I suppose the idea may be to avoid creating space for competitors. However, I suspect that newspaper management has not worked out tactics for the new situation, and is still transacting “business as usual” in the style of 10 or 15 years ago.

Who gets the income when a newspaper journo appears on radio or TV?

The other issue is: There are few “brands” that can attract a paying audience. (Me, the Times is still my paper, crappy as Schulzberger and his awful editors have made it over the years, so I don’t really care so much about other papers other than the loss of the elite, excellent reporters they employ. Small pool, I know, but what about them?) Granted there are few papers whose digital editions could attract sufficient subscribers, but what about the loss of really good reporters? Where do they go?

As for the Times, it needs iOS’ Newsstand right now to look cool. The FT doesn’t care because it *is* cool.

In terms of establishing exclusivity or creating content that is protectable facts alone are tough since they’re not copyright-able. While the facts themselves might not be easily protected, presenting the right ones for the customer can be a valuable service to consumers.

The second type of value is based on what is said around the facts, the context into which the facts are put and the intelligence that the author or editorial angle can provide to readers. That kind of value is not easily replicated by aggregators. The aggregators hope is that some of the content that passes through them offers these kinds of value to the end user.

We do seem to be cycling or bouncing between preferences for curated and aggregated sources for news pretty quickly in the Internet age. Prior to the Internet access to content from publications was restricted by your physical location and or the curation of the newsstands in your area or the library. When the Internet arrives lists begin forming of all of the places we can find that have some information on the topic we’re interested in. Sites sprang up that were basically just lists of all of the pages that could be located on whatever topic you wanted. But this was akin to a flood and quickly became difficult to navigate allowing for rise of portal sites like Yahoo and AOL through their selection of *the right* links.

Ultimately though we were unsatisfied by portals, there seemed to be too much control and narrowing of the content available through them and accessing the Internet through a portal like AOL was perceived as so limited that only the uneducated would do that, a kind of nanny-Internet. Roughly about that time we saw the rise of the value that editorial oversight and authorship offers through sites like slate.com and salon.com and they took off. Though that was pretty short lived and soon enough it was back to aggregators like Google and Google News who could pull in articles of the quality of salon or slate but from even bigger brands like the top newspapers and magazines that were now putting all of their content online. Thus the diminishing of the salons/slates of the world. Now we have content creators with paywalls and a new curation dynamic through facebook and twitter and while it might feel like the bouncing between aggregation and curation is tightening and we’re getting more efficient at accessing the things we want I have my doubts about that. Our bandwidth as individuals is rather limited but our desire for more and better content is not so I don’t see this dynamic changing much in the future.

Interesting look at paywalls this morning from Frédéric Filloux on Monday Note. He analyses the reasons for the successes of the Financial Times and New York Times “progressive paywalls”, and makes some good observations about what it takes to make…..