Google Begins to Scale Back Its Scanning of Books From University Libraries

Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company's long-term investment in the work remains unclear. Google was not willing to say much about its plans. "We've digitized more than 20 million books to date and continue to scan books with our library partners," a Google spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mailed statement. Google isn't saying whether it has pulled back from its longstanding goal of collecting all of the world's knowledge. Some of its digitization efforts have shifted to Europe. Much of the company's public focus lately has been not on mass digitization but on how to use individuals' data to create more focused advertising and online browsing. Meanwhile, a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against it by authors' and publishers' groups drags on. Read more here

New Google Play combines apps, music and books

Google on Tuesday unified its digital entertainment offerings into a single cloud-based destination called Google Play. Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore are part of this new online emporium. At play.google.com, you can store all the music, movies, books and apps you've previously bought through what had been separate Google stores, or visit the site to fetch new content. Google Play is available on the Web and on Android smartphones and tablets. Inside Google Play, you can store up to 20,000 music tracks or purchase new songs from a catalog now north of 8 million tracks. Google Play also has more than 450,000 Android apps and games available for download, and more than 4 million eBooks, which Google claims is the largest e-book collection anywhere. You can also rent thousands of movies. Read more here

Plans for 'TV Everywhere' Bog Down in Tangled Pacts

It was dubbed "TV Everywhere." But for many TV viewers, it has had trouble going anywhere. Nearly three years after Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. kicked off a drive to make cable programming available online for cable subscribers, the idea of TV Everywhere remains mired in technical holdups, slow deal-making and disputes over who will control TV customers in the future. Now some media executives say the effort, aimed at insulating cable television against a rising tide of cheap online video alternatives, risks getting left behind. Read more here

A Harsh Reality for Newspapers

Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded six companies that own 121 newspapers to share private data about the financial performance of many of their papers. And the findings were grim. On average, for every new dollar the newspapers were earning in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. A report that encapsulates the data and includes interviews with newspaper executives will be released on Monday. Read more here

White-space puts Wi-Fi on steroids

“White-space” is technical slang for television channels that were left vacant in one city so as not to interfere with TV stations broadcasting on adjacent channels in a neighbouring city. With the recent switch from analogue to digital tele­vision, much of this protective white-space is no longer needed. Unlike analogue broadcasting, digital signals do not “bleed” into one another—and can therefore be packed closer together. All told, the television networks now require little more than half the frequency spectrum they sprawled across previously. White-space should help to solve the bandwidth problem that has begun to plague wireless networks in general—as more consumers download films, television episodes and other video offerings wirelessly from the internet, instead of receiving such fare from their traditional cable, satellite or over-the-air TV broadcasters. Apart from easing bandwidth problems, white-space could lead to a wireless revolution even bigger than the wave of innovation unleashed over a decade ago when Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless technologies embraced the unlicensed 2.4GHz band previously reserved for microwave ovens and garage-door openers. Some insiders even talk about white-space offering a “third pipe” that will rival cable and telephone broadband for access to the internet. Others see it as a cheaper alternative to today’s mobile-phone system. How soon before individuals can buy $100 white-space routers for the home? The consensus view is 2015 at the very latest. http://www.economist.com/node/21536999

NPR introduces new Ethics Handbook

Today, NPR is introducing staffers to a new Ethics Handbook that has been in the works for more than a year and illustrates how the organization is taking steps to safeguard against some of the ethical dilemmas it’s faced in the past. The handbook makes clear that “it includes little in the way of ‘new policy.’” Much of the guidance in it stems from best practices and case studies shared in other ways throughout the organization, such as years of columns from NPR’s ombudsmen. The case studies let staffers know who to contact when they have ethical questions. Several sections of the handbook advise staffers to seek guidance from NPR’s standards and practices editor, Stu Seidel, who is also deputy managing editor. NPR recently appointed Seidel as standards and practices editor to help oversee the creation and implementation of the handbook. The handbook has a collegial feel, with guidelines not rules. And it doesn’t get into specifics about the consequences staffers could face if they fail to follow the guidelines, Smith said, because each ethical dilemma has to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Read more here

Amazon's Hit Man

Physical book sales have been flat for a decade and are starting to get eclipsed by e-books. According to a recent report by the Association of American Publishers, sales of adult paperbacks and hardcovers fell 18 percent between 2010 and 2011. Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. Bezos and his minions will, characteristically, gauge the success of their new publishing effort over the long term. They are likely positioning Amazon Publishing for a world that is still a few years away, in which a majority of books are distributed electronically. In that world there could be even fewer traditional bookstores than there are now, and Amazon may look a whole lot more appealing to prominent authors. Read more here

Who does Google think you are?

A Google tool that's been available since 2009 but which few people know about lets users see what the search giant has inferred about them based on the websites they visit. Try searching "ad preferences manager." It should be the first link. The results can be spot on -- or wildly off the mark. They're based on a "cookie," a file placed by Google (and many other companies) on each computer browser to track how its users surf the Web. Google actually knows far more than browsing histories, though. It knows what people write in Gmail messages, what YouTube videos they prefer and where they go with an Android phone. Historically, Google's privacy policies forced it to cordon off some of its most important data sources from each other, so the profile of a given YouTube user was totally separate from her Gmail profile. It was a schizophrenic view of the world. Starting in March, Google will be able to pull together everything it knows from its disparate products. Read more here

study finds newspapers most trusted news source

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark commissioned a survey of Americans’ trust of news sources. Among the findings: Newspapers are the most trusted source of news for most respondents, but that’s not exactly something to crow about: Only 22 percent overall called newspapers “very credible” for reporting on politics and elections. Cable and networks news are a close second with 21% saying they are very credible. (A Gallup poll last fall found 55% of Americans distrust the media generally.) Read more here

'The Daily' 100,000 Subs - Ceiling Or Just A Start?

News Corp. unveiled The Daily with much fanfare a year ago, with Rupert Murdoch himself on hand at the New York launch event for the ambitious iPad-only newspaper. The News Corp. chairman set the bar high from the start, saying The Daily would have to pull in 500,000 paying subscribers to be viable, given its weekly operating costs of $500,000. On its one-year anniversary earlier this month, the company announced the publication had amassed 100,000 paid subscribers to date, making it the third top-grossing iPad app in the iTunes Store last year. It’s now the top-grossing app. Still, the paid subscribers level to date is well below the half-million goal set by Murdoch last year. Read more here

Gannett Plans Paywalls For Community Papers

The country’s largest newspaper publisher plans to create online paywalls for scores of local community newspapers nationwide, according to Gannett Co. community publishing president Bob Dickey. As with other newspapers' online paywalls, Dickey said that visitors to Gannett’s 82 community newspaper Web sites will be able to see a certain amount of content for free -- probably in the range of five to 15 articles. After that, they will be asked to buy a monthly or yearly subscription for the digital product. Earlier this month, it offered early retirement to 665 community publishing employees, in what could be the largest reduction in the company’s workforce in several years. Gannett Co.’s total revenues have declined from $8.03 billion in 2006 to $5.24 billion in 2011 -- a 35% loss in five years. Read more here

How Storify And Pinterest Are Cultivating The Wild Web, And Why Social Media Will Civilize The Internet

Pinterest gives people the ability to curate photos on various online pinboards easily and quickly, and to follow pinboards curated by others. Instead of asking users to set up their own account from scratch, Pinterest users can login with their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Integration, rather than direct competition, with the giants of social media appears to be the strategy, and it seems to be working. Storify does something similar. Not only does the “social story-telling” site allow users to login in via Facebook or Twitter, it allows them to curate stories or events on the web using Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and various other social media and news sites. Rather than seeing the internet devolve into the lowest common denominator, we’re seeing the rise of social-cultivation online. Read more at Forbes

Why Twitter Ties Resemble Airline Hub Maps

NPR talks about new research showing our Twitter ties are different than most of us imaginehere.

Is Twitter a Publisher?

Is Twitter a publisher and distributor of information like a newspaper, or is it just a dumb pipe like a telephone network? Lawyers in Australia seem to believe that a case could be made that Twitter is a publisher, like a newspaper, and therefore it can be sued for defamation as a result of a single tweet. That may be a stretch — especially in the United States, which has legislation that protects online commentary from such lawsuits — but it highlights the difficulties that Twitter could have as it tries to expand around the globe and into different legal environments.

 But the real-time information network is unlike the phone system in many other ways, some of which could be very relevant to such a case. For example, the phone company doesn’t normally listen to conversations and delete or block the ones that it doesn’t like — but Twitter has explained that it routinely blocks users and also deletes tweets for all sorts of reasons, including illegal behavior of various kinds. Doing this, some lawyers argue, makes the company a lot more like a newspaper publisher than a phone network or dumb pipe.

In countries like Australia and Canada, meanwhile, there is very little U.S.-style protection for any website or service that hosts defamatory content, which leaves Twitter open to actions like the one that was recently filed in Sydney. 

Read more here

Radio Ads Are Coming Back, and the Presidential Run Will Help

According to a report released Friday by the Radio Advertising Bureau, revenue from radio advertising last year was $17.4 billion, up 1 percent from the year before. Automotive companies, the largest category of sponsors, made up 26 percent of spending. It was the second year of growth for the industry, after three down years. Spending in 2010 was $17.3 billion, up 6 percent from the year before. But the market is still down 18 percent from 2007, when ad revenue was $21.3 billion, according to the advertising bureau, whose data is collected by the accounting firm Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Company. Read more at the New York Times

Open to Government Control

Might that Amazon Kindle in your hand be a threat to your freedom? said Husna Haq in CSMonitor.com. That’s what Jonathan Franzen, the acclaimed author of The Corrections and Freedom, suggested at a book festival last week. Sounding a “battle cry against e-readers,” the best-selling novelist railed against digital books, saying they’re “not for serious readers” and that their impermanence might even open the door to Orwellian censorship. If books are on e-readers and not on paper, he said, their texts can be changed or deleted by some central authority—a situation “not compatible with responsible self-government.” It may sound paranoid, said E.D. Kain in Forbes​.com, but Franzen has a point. To ban or burn books, authoritarian governments have to hunt down every copy. But a digital text originating from some external source “simply has to be turned off.” Without ink on paper, it’s that much easier to make “Ray Bradbury’s nightmare” a reality. Read more at The Week

Radio Holds Steady For 2011

The tentative recovery in radio advertising sputtered to a standstill in the last part of 2011, with total ad revenues declining 2% to $4.5 billion, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. This follows earlier year-over-year increases of 3%, 1%, and 2% in the first, second, and third quarters, respectively. Thanks to the earlier quarterly increases, the radio industry still saw an overall increase in full-year revenues, with annual growth of 1% to $17.4 billion. The fourth-quarter decline can be attributed, in large part, to the absence of political advertising associated with 2010’s midterm elections in November -- already cited by a number of broadcast radio groups as a factor in weak period earnings results. Read more here

Forbes Among 30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers

Forbes has joined a group of 30 publishers using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories. The New York Times revealed last year that trade publisher Hanley Wood and sports journalism site The Big Ten Network also use the tool. The company has a long list of stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign summaries sales & operations reports and market research. Read more here

Ad Industry's Overall Favorite Media Brand

Facebook, Twitter and Google may dominate the trade press and the blogosphere, but one of the most traditional media brands -- ABC -- is the most powerful in the hearts and minds of advertisers and ad agency executives, according to an annual survey of Madison Avenue’s perceptions of the media they do business with. The study, which surveyed thousands of advertisers and agency executives, is conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, which is to the ad industry what J.D. Power’s annual awards are to the automotive industry. ABC’s ranking as the most dominant “overall” media brand is a composite of all of the individual attributes that AR surveys the ad industry about, and it replaces last year’s champ, Meredith. Not surprisingly, ABC ranked No. 1 in “brand strength” among broadcast network brands for the second year in a row. Among “digital” media brands, an ascendant Facebook toppled Google from the top position in “brand strength. Read more here

Journalists connect the dots between data & reporting at Columbia J-school hackathon

Data journalism was recently singled out by an Online News Association panel in New York as one of the core skills for journalists. Students and journalists, however, often admit to being intimidated by data and coding. Both programmers believe journalists need to understand data if they’re going to succeed in their field. Read more here