Posts tagged criticism

Bypassing the NYT Paywall, Redux Edition

Yesterday I reblogged a Reuters post that reports that The New York Times will limit free articles to 10 per month. After the repost I linked to a short video we created a while ago about getting around the paywall. To make sixty seconds short, it shows that you just need to delete everything after the “?” mark in the URL and reload the page to access any article you want.

Here’s some criticism for doing so:

  • Via Morgan Little from the LA Times: Seems a bit off for @the_FJP to be advocating paywall workarounds…
  • Via OnTheChangGang: Don’t be a jerk, if you really want to support journalism and journalists pay to gain access to their hard work and efforts. C’mon use your mind grapes where do people think the money for salaries and investigative stories come from?
  • Via SammyStokes: or you know, you could pay for a subscription so the world’s most important newspaper doesn’t go under.

I should say that the criticism is more or less valid. I should also say that my language (“FJP: Paywall got you down? Here’s our 60 second tutorial on getting around it.”) doesn’t help.

Here’s what I should have written if I was thinking at the time:

  • The New York Times has about 450,000 digital subscribers. Good for them. I set my parents up with both digital and print editions.
  • The New York Times has about 30 million unique visitors a month. Thirty million, if you do your math, is much larger than 450,000, impressive as that number may be.
  • This simple hack of removing everything after the “?” mark in order to access articles tells us that the New York Times is still focussed on the 99% of traffic that isn’t subscribing, and is trying to figure out how to monetize nytimes.com to make sure that those non-subscribing uniques can still access, share, and distribute content so that they can grow that number.
  • This leak is basically a punt on monetizing the 99% aside from the (considerable) revenue they’re pulling in from advertising and other related businesses.

And so, with that as my backstory to posting a link to a video about how easy it is to get around the NYT paywall, I wrote shorthand about how to do so.

Sometimes when you’re in the weeds you forget the forest for the trees but my link to circumventing the paywall is part of a larger and longer discussion that’s been going on at the FJP about paywalls and how they might work.

The New York Times is very much aware of how leaky their paywall is. It is very much aware that deleting a string from a URL gives anyone access to their content. This is a both a design and business decision that I can’t imagine they’re very much worried about. Otherwise, they’d close this gap.

So, in the meantime, I’ll post again — with the caveat that if you can afford a subscription, purchase a subscription — if you want to view a New York Times article but have bumped up against your monthly allotment, follow the instructions posted here.

If the New York Times wants to shut down this access they can do so quickly and easily. Until then, have at it — Michael

Now imagine if Bon Appetit, instead of The Little Owl, ran with a cover photo of some Kamakaze Kool-Aid Roll from Monster Sushi or wherever. Well, that’s essentially what’s going on here with Groupon, a national brand is giving national attention to a local joint that doesn’t deserve it, and as a result, a lot of people’s money is being misallocated. It’s anti-economic. Groupon is the invisible hand of capitalism sucker punching good restaurants that deserve to succeed and helping out mediocre venues that deserve to fail.

Ryan Sutton, Bloomberg critic, on why he started The Bad Deal (it’s a Tumblr):

We have to hit the deal sites back, and hit them back hard. That’s why I started The Bad Deal, because daily deals don’t have any major critical counterweight, nothing to consistently keep them in check.

Via Eater.

Jon Stewart on how the media drives consensus on our top-tier candidates: “Even when the media does remember Ron Paul, it’s only to reassure themselves that there’s no need to remember Ron Paul.”

Update: Over at Salon, Steve Kornacki comes in with a counterpoint and says Ron Paul isn’t getting the media shaft.

Stephen Colbert on the Norway terror attack: “Some say these false reports of Muslim involvement were a widespread failure of the media, but I say that by going with their guts these journalists were able to get the story they wanted and scoop reality. And even if there was a rush to judgement, we must not repeat that mistake by rushing to accuracy.” 

On Language: What is a Terrorist Anyway? Via Glenn Greenwald: In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know — by definition — that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant — also by definition — that it was an act of Terrorism… What [this means] is what we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn’t Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn’t). That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly. When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances… That is why, as NYU’s Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language. Yesterday provided yet another sterling example. Twitter post: @MazMHussain

On Language: What is a Terrorist Anyway?

Via Glenn Greenwald:

In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know — by definition — that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant — also by definition — that it was an act of Terrorism…

What [this means] is what we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn’t Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn’t).

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly. When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances… That is why, as NYU’s Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language. Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

Twitter post: @MazMHussain

Earlier this year NPR’s On the Media host Brook Gladstone released “The Influencing Machine”, a history of media and journalism illustrated by Josh Nuefeld.

Actually, “illustrated” leaves us descriptively short: it’s a comic book romp that traces modern journalism back some 2,000 years to the shysters of yesteryear.

Here, Gladstone tackles the idea that the media is manipulating us.

Not true, she says, instead, media culture is a hall of mirrors. One where we just don’t really like the reflection that is us.

Rachel Maddow and Bill Moyers on News Corp., corporate media, power and influence.

Bill Moyers: 

This is how societies, particularly democracies, self destruct. We have seen the danger of the collusion between private power – Rupert Murdoch’s empire and the police… We have also seen the danger of collusion between political parties and powerful media conglomerates. I mean both parties in England caved to Murdoch. The politicians were cowed. They would not stand up to him. And that, too, is what happens to democracy when the political class becomes frightened of and in league with these incredibly powerful media conglomerates.

The Daily Show: Jon Stewart and John Oliver take on the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

With the 10th Annual Lebowski Fest kicking off later this week in Louisville, Kentucky, Miiller-McCune looks at scholarly papers inspired by the Coen brothers 1998 film. To wit: Grasping to explain this appeal, Comentale and Jaffe point to a minor character in the film: “The Stranger,” portrayed by Sam Elliott, a veteran of numerous Westerns. Dressed in traditional cowboy garb, he emerges occasionally to provide background information, analysis and commentary. In their words, “he just points at something interestin’ and gently nods” — a watch-and-learn stance that is the foundation of academic research. The Dude abides, but The Stranger annotates. Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune. Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude.

With the 10th Annual Lebowski Fest kicking off later this week in Louisville, Kentucky, Miiller-McCune looks at scholarly papers inspired by the Coen brothers 1998 film.

To wit:

Grasping to explain this appeal, Comentale and Jaffe point to a minor character in the film: “The Stranger,” portrayed by Sam Elliott, a veteran of numerous Westerns. Dressed in traditional cowboy garb, he emerges occasionally to provide background information, analysis and commentary. In their words, “he just points at something interestin’ and gently nods” — a watch-and-learn stance that is the foundation of academic research. The Dude abides, but The Stranger annotates.

Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune. Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing The Dude.

CNN’s “Let’s Leave it There” Problem

Via Jay Rosen:

The problem is this: CNN thinks of itself as the “straight down the middle” network, the non-partisan alternative, the one that isn’t Left and isn’t Right. But defining itself as “not MSNBC” and “not Fox” begs the question of what CNN actually is. To the people who run it, the answer is obvious: real journalism! That’s what CNN is. Or as they used to say, “the news is the star.”

Right. But too often, on-air hosts for the network will let someone from one side of a dispute describe the world their way, then let the other side describe the world their way, and when the two worlds, so described, turn out to be incommensurate or even polar opposites, what happens?… CNN leaves it there. Viewers are left stranded and helpless. The network appears to inform them that there is no truth, only partisan bull. Is that real journalism? No. But it is tantalizingly close to the opposite of real journalism. Repeat it enough, and this pattern threatens to become the network’s brand, which is exactly what Stewart was pointing out…

…Meaning: You can’t keep “leaving it there” and claim to be the one dedicated to real journalism. You can’t have a “he said, she said” brand and yet stand out as the quality network. That doesn’t work. But it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that it kinda sorta works because journalists in the U.S. are trained to believe that “not ideological” means…. good!

Somewhat related: Way, way back in 2009 Michael Hirschorn summed up the decade for New York Magazine by observing that we live in “a media age that lacks a central authority to referee reality.”

The observation was neutral and intended as a starting point to explore how we win and lose in a roiling media landscape where there’s no longer a there, there.

Which is precisely where Rosen (and Jon Stewart in the video) contends CNN leaves things.

If we accept Business Insider’s diagnosis of Patch as a business failure, will anybody step forward to make the case that the sites are a journalistic success? I’ve yet to read that piece.
Jack Shafer, Slate, Hyperloco: Why I find AOL’s Patch sites so off-putting.

Jon Stewart.

Chris Wallace.

Media Criticism.

So what’s your proof again about the ‘partisan agenda’ and what I do? That’s the embarrassment. The embarrassment is that I’m given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does.

The snuffing of Osama Bin Laden has already filled the Snake River Canyon with a torrent of coverage from newspapers, the Web, and television. The news output will only expand in the coming days, and as it does, remain skeptical about it. As we know from the coverage of other major breaking-news events—the Mumbai massacre, the death of Pat Tillman, Hurricane Katrina, the rescue of Jessica Lynch, to cite just a few examples—the earliest coverage of a big story is rarely reliable…

…[T]he fog of breaking news almost always cloaks the truth, especially when the deadline news event is a super-top-secret military operation conducted by commandos halfway around the world and the sources of the sexiest information go unnamed.
Jack Shafer, Slate. How To Read the Bin Laden Coverage: Skeptically
Television-based analysts are already asking if the killing of Bin Laden will provoke revenge attacks by al Qaeda. Is there a stupider question in the world? The implication, of course, is that now, al Qaeda will truly be pissed off at the U.S. Unlike in 2001, when al Qaeda was only marginally angry at the U.S.
Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic. The Meaning of Where Bin Laden Was Killed, and Where Is Zawahiri?