As Felix Salmon has pointed out, the NYT paywall model is different from other high-profile attempts such as the FT’s and the WSJ’s. The NYT does its best to integrate its subscriber model with the open web: Users coming to a page on nytimes.com via links on other websites or search engines, will not see the wall. Regular users have 20 free articles per month. If they read an article more than once, only the first time is counted.

More efforts are made to entice the user to pay. When you are logged in, a module in the right column is telling you how many articles you have read during the past 30 days, and showing you ten recommendations based on your behaviour on the site. Of course, the more articles I read, the better the recommendations get. If the NYT can continue to pile up such incentives, chances of making me pay will increase.

As a contrast, the FT and the WSJ paywalls try to shut you out. Especially the FT is bombarding you with user-unfriendly messages that are annoying even to paying subscribers, as Salmon shows.

It’s too early to tell if the NYT paywall is a success (others have criticized the pricing model). Are happy users really more likely to become paying subscribers? So far the signs are encouraging: By making the paywall so porous, the NYT can uphold its commitment to the open public sphere. The porous paywall has been ridiculed by many tech-savvy users, but actually the ease of sneaking past the wall is the point, as Salmon concludes:

Paying for something you value, even when you don’t need to, is a mark of a civilized society. The NYT treated its readers as mature and civilized adults, and outperformed internal expectations as a result. Meanwhile, the WSJ and FT are still treating their readers with mistrust, as though they’ll be robbed somehow if they ever let their guard down a little. It’s a sad and ultimately self-defeating stance, and I hope in future they learn from the NYT’s embrace of the open web, even in conjunction with a paywall.

It is becoming more and more clear that the NYT functions as a leading innovator for all the world’s established news media, both on the business and editorial side (see beta620 for examples). It is now really a global Leitmedium.

Foto: Riksarkivet/Landslaget for reiseliv i Norge. (No known copyright restrictions).

Riksarkivet er blitt den tredje norske institusjonen til å legge ut fotohistorisk materiale på Flickr Commons. Dette prosjektet vokser støtt og stadig; nye arkiver, biblioteker og museer kommer til, og de som har vært med lengre legger ut nye bilder. For to år siden skrev jeg en artikkel i forbindelse med at Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek ble den første norske deltakeren i prosjektet.

Germany is probably one of the countries in the world most able to deal with such a serious epidemic. However, looking at media coverage and the way public health agencies are informing citizens, I think a different approach could speed up the crucial process of finding the source.

A similar, though not so quickly developing epidemic occurred in Norway in 2006 (link in Norwegian). 18 persons, 16 of them children, were hospitalized with e.coli. One of the children died. Research by the public health agencies, including of course interviews with patients and their families, pointed initially towards ground meat as the culprit. But this turned out to be a wrong lead (as many of us following the news had suspected). Several weeks went by until the bacteria was found in “morrpølse” and traced back to a specific production facility.

The story and the “ground meat hypothesis” dominated the media, and this was a hot topic for discussion around breakfast and lunch tables all over the country. At the time, I wondered why the public health experts didn’t disclose more of their findings. If they had published all data and information from interviews and research (of course anonymized for privacy), then other experts, and smart people in general, could have contributed their own analysis. Perhaps they could have pointed to leads that officials had overlooked, patterns they hadn’t observed. Can we for example rule out that some IT experts have better tools at their disposal, or at least other tools than the officials in charge? Of course, data should be published in English so that foreigners also could weigh in.

One obvious counter-argument is that asking for ideas and analysis from the public would open the floodgates and confuse rather than help researchers. But this is again a question of having the right tools available for filtering and analysing contributions. After all, crowdsourcing research processes has been tried before.

In the ongoing German epidemic, online media could play a constructive part by starting such a process of asking the audience for advice and ideas. At least they should start by offering more in-depth interactive presentations of how the epidemic is spreading. Detailed maps would be interesting and helpful in itself. At least some government agencies are providing quite specific information about where cases originated (Schleswig-Holstein, pdf). Media could in general use this opportunity to file requests for data and demonstrate the potential of data journalism.

***
UPDATE June 5: The suggestion above more or less takes for granted that the responsible government agencies, hospitals etc. at least have an efficient way of collecting and disseminating information among themselves. But this is doubtful, as criticism in the German media the last week of several aspects of how the epidemic is handled shows. Hospitals complain about the late arrival of questionnaires to be used in interviews with patients. The Robert Koch Institut does not disclose much information on how they are working to find the source of the epidemic, one hospital director says. By tomorrow, June 6, a new Internet government platform for sharing of information between agencies will be launched — another indication that the information infrastructure part of dealing with the epidemic has had flaws so far.

UPDATE June 15: On Zeit Online’s Data Blog, some of the same questions are raised and debated, with comments from the Robert Koch Institut.

Right Wing Radio Duck, also on Open Culture’s 2010 Best of-list.

In the meantime, we just have to conclude that it’s fairly simple to keep links working when switching systems, even simple bloggers can manage with a little help from their friends (link in Norwegian).

How to find the link: First, you need to be on post/article level (not on the home page, archive pages or tag pages). Hover at the end of the paragraph, and a # will appear with the link.

Given how useful this feature is, it’s strange that it hasn’t been developed for WordPress or other blogging tools before.

(See also: Nieman Lab on the redesign of PressThink, which also has this feature).

Among the curiosities of the 1930s “social realism” was the “Mass Observation poem” attempted in England, originating in those who wanted to be both surrealist and communist. Thousands of people all over the country were supposed to send in their literary reports on a single event, the coronation of George VI, from which a composite poem wold somehow be created. Predictably, the result was not impressive.

It will be much easier to do something similar at the next royal mega-event, with Twitter and all!

(via indicommons).

The US startup ambitious journalism projects that have sprung up recently, wholly or partly funded by foundations, in essence share the “steal this story” approach:

Instead of planning how to get the story published before word of it leaked, the excited editors started throwing out ideas for how they could share Johnson’s reporting with a large array of competitive news outlets across the state and around the country. No one would get a scoop; rather, every outlet would run the story at around the same time, customized to resonate with its audience, be they newspaper subscribers, Web readers, television viewers, or radio listeners.

The quote describes California Watch, who also have case-studied themselves.

The huge advantage that “steal this story” in its different versions has over “please pay here”, is that it helps to sustain and modernize a broad, inclusive networked public sphere just at the moment when (some) established media institutions are retreating from their old strong positions (newspapers, broadcasting) due to the technological shifts and from their web strongholds (from free, ad-based websites to subscriber-based services/apps).

In Europe, this trend will play out differently because of the still strong role of license-fee based public service broadcasting. “Steal this story” seems like the perfect chance for these giants to reinvent themselves and secure their legitimacy in the digital era. Their self-image has always been the guarantor of a public sphere based on high quality journalism, culture and entertainment. But it is far from certain that they will succeed. For one thing, they are deeply embedded in a pre-digital culture of copyright regulations. Huge resistance is to be expected to any radical move towards the two mentioned versions of “steal this story” — publish material under Creative Commons licenses and/or let “competing” media organizations re-publish. One symptom is the seemingly endless negotiations needed before historical broadcasting archives can be made available for re-use (or any use at all).

The challenges facing public service broadcasters will however open up possibilities for new initiatives. In a networked public sphere, there is no reason why public service content must be produced by one huge, centralized organization. In the current situation, even small-scale funding (such as the British 4iP) can have great impact. In Europe, this is an argument for redistributing some of the funding for public service broadcasters to new and innovative projects.

Today, it is more than likely that a new “Goethe” would submit the documents to WikiLeaks instead of contacting a book publisher or media organization. The recent strange and consequential case involving the arrest of Bradley Manning and his alleged involvement with leaking the Iraq helicopter attack video which was published by WikiLeaks demonstrates the potential of such a global whistleblower site, though we do not know all the details of Manning’s actions yet.

In April, I heard Daniel Schmitt of WikiLeaks present the concept and thinking behind the site at a conference in Berlin. WikiLeaks will factcheck all submitted material thoroughly in a verification process where they can draw on more than 1000 anonymous experts in different fields. If they conclude it is genuine and of public importance, it will be published — and crucially, all the material a source has sent in will be published, not only edited excerpts. This principle sets WikiLeaks apart and constitutes much of its appeal. A new “Goethe” would not have experienced the same as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers — indeed, Ellsberg has said that today, he would have posted them on the internet.

WikiLeaks try to build a structure than can withstand attacks from any government or other powerful institutions, using cryptography and different safety mechanisms to ensure that no document first published can be made to disappear from the internet again. Also, Schmitt and founder Julian Assange claim that WikiLeaks is “lawyer-proof” (the new Icelandic media law might help them here).

WikiLeaks guarantees to always protect its sources and in this subscribes to classic principles of the press. But as I interpret them, WikiLeaks claim that their guarantee is more credible than a similar vow from traditional news media. That is because they are not constrained by the ties of traditional media organizations — ties to national power structures, personal ties connecting elites, the need to protect an established position in society.

Schmitt emphasized the neutral character (again, my interpretation) of WikiLeaks: A true, important document will be published in its entirety. Just the facts, make your own interpretations and judgments. He was asked about the Collateral Murder video, which had been published shortly before and was strongly edited to achieve maximum effect on the viewer. Assange went on a promotion tour in the US to present the video. When does WikiLeaks cross the line to editorial comment? Schmitt claimed that Collateral Murder was distinct from the WikiLeaks project, the result of journalists editing the material, but he acknowledged that the line between the publication of the raw source material and the edited version was not drawn clearly enough in that case.

As we now know from the New Yorker report on how Collateral Murder was created, this was very much an Assange/WikiLeaks production. Assange does not seem to be content with the neutral, facts-only approach, being the world’s whistleblower supporter — he crosses over into activism. But on what basis? Is transparency alone enough as ideology? As Raffi Khatchadourian puts it the New Yorker:

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

News media have often been criticized for being secretive, but WikiLeaks beats them all. It is hard to see how WikiLeaks can become more transparent. In the end, a new “Goethe”, the journalists and audiences of the world will just have to trust them. Is that pact sustainable in the long run?