A Farewell to AdSense

I'm sure there's an economic point in here somewhere, but as of today, I'm removing AdSense from this blog.

This is mainly in response to AdSense's payout scheme: if your account is active, you need to reach $100 before getting a payout, while you can cancel your account and get paid if your balance is $10 or higher. I've been stuck in the middle of that range for months; I made a little money after my post about the Nationals ticketing office attracted a few thousand hits, but now I get about 15 hits a day. I'm sure my almost complete absence of new posts has something to do with that, but at this rate it would take decades to reach the $100 threshold.

So, there you have it: Econ Tricks, with a little less clutter. There are more than a few cautionary tales online about people getting screwed out of AdSense payouts, so wish me luck.

Why Not Sell Newsweek for Scrap?

The Washington Post Company recently sold Newsweek for $1 (source).

The magazine has recently been losing about $30 million a year, so the purchase is analogous to buying a $99 iPhone and paying $2,000 to use it, in the form of AT&T bills.

One has to wonder why the magazine wasn't just shut down outright. Surely it has some assets worth selling--such as real estate, printing presses, and office equipment--that would have netted the Post Company thousands if not millions of dollars.

Perhaps these sales wouldn't cover Newsweek's debt obligations. If that's the case, Sidney Harman did the Post Company a huge favor.

(In fairness, I realize that I argued the opposite point in February when GM shut down its Hummer brand.)

Blogging as Accountability

Sent in from reader Hal Emmer:

I think another example, at least for some people, is blogging.  Even if you don't have much of an audience, the idea that people are out there who are waiting for you to do something is enough to get some people to do it.  I think "show and tell" blogs are the best examples of this - I am willing to bet that people who write about their cooking cook more (and more interesting stuff) than they otherwise would.

He's no doubt correct. This reminded me of a friend who blogs about the U Street neighborhood in DC. I can't speak for her, but she's probably seen more of the neighborhood than she otherwise would have, in order to generate blog material. In that same spirit, my fiancee and I hope our wedding blog will inspire us to keep hammering out all the details required to plan a wedding.

Hal's example also made me of think the ABC "Primetime" segment in 2005 that promised to show unflattering bikini photos of participants on the air if they didn't drop lose 15 pounds in 2 months. You can read more about the segment here, which I first learned about from the excellent game theory book "The Art of Strategy." As the book recounts, one participant narrowly missed the cutoff and basically threatened to sue ABC, which subsequently backed off. So ABC's threat wasn't so credible after all.

The examples in this post involve exposing yourself to peer pressure or the threat of public humiliation to inspire yourself to accomplish something. My previous posts, on enrolling in school and buying a Wii Fit, focused on committing money to something in order to guilt yourself into following through with it.

Feel free to send me more ideas if you have them.

Help Amazon Sell Kindle Books and Earn $0!

Many Web sites, including this one, earn commissions when they refer customers to Amazon.com who end up purchasing items. Last week, I noticed that I earned a 0% referral fee for helping Amazon sell a Kindle book, netting the company about $9. I wrote to Amazon, and here's the response I got back:

Hello,

At this time, Kindle Books are excluded as Qualifying Products. While we don't pay advertising fees on Kindle Books, we continue to pay a 10% advertising fee on all qualifying Kindle reader sales and Kindle magazine and blog subscriptions referred to us.

We appreciate your understanding.

Kindle books are a loss leader (here's a good discussion from Newsweek). In other words, Amazon loses money on each Kindle book it sells in hopes of getting people to buy Kindles at a hefty markup. Maybe the economics of ebooks will change someday, but for now, it's understandable that Amazon doesn't want its partners to push sales of Kindle books to people who already own Kindles, hence the 0% referral fee.

However, Amazon partners can't control whether the customer will buy the Kindle or the print version. If 50% of the people you refer end up buying the Kindle version, then the nominal 4% referral fee you earn on book sales effectively becomes 2%. (This is ignoring some pricing differences and the fact that the existence of the Kindle increases overall demand for books, securing some sales that otherwise wouldn't have been made.) This decreases the expected returns to hawking Amazon's wares, which should in turn reduce the number of referrals for Amazon books, both print and Kindle versions.

UPDATE 5/4: Apparently Amazon has changed course.

Mobile Reading Format Makes Novels Less Daunting

A Guardian reader recently wrote a letter to the paper to describe how reading an e-book on his iPhone is much easier than reading a printed book.

So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don't get lost on the page. Second, the handset's brightness makes it easier to take in words. "Many dyslexics have problems with 'crowding', where they're distracted by the words surrounding the word they're trying to read," says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. "When reading text on a small phone, you're reducing the crowding effect."

I have felt exactly the same way (perhaps I'm a bit dyslexic myself but never realized it). Additionally, I can make the words as large or as small as I want, and I can bust out a few screens between Metro stops without losing my spot.

In the world of printed books, bigger fonts equals more pages, which increases printing costs and makes the book more cumbersome to hold, carry, and fit onto a bookshelf. So the trend was to use the smallest font possible that could still be legible to most people, while jamming the pages full of text.

No such printing cost restraints exist for the delivery of an e-book, so I suspect readers will start to prefer larger fonts. Of course, frequently flipping through screens can be annoying too, but e-bookers are now free to optimize the experience however they see fit.

NYT Reports Most-Looked-Up Words

The Nieman Journalism Lab is circulating a memo from the New York Times that provides a list of the words that its readers are most frequently looking up. Of the 50 words on the list, I recognize only about half.

Although the deputy news editor somewhat addresses this point, using difficult words for the sake of using difficult words should be generally avoided, especially in newspaper copy. Of course, this writerly disease stretches into all disciplines where writing to impress is the main goal, even at the sacrifice of clarity.

While the New York Times audience is more educated than most (and sometimes snobbishly proud of it), an obscure word distracts from whatever point the writer was making. Many online readers will have their attention momentarily diverted to looking up the word, while most print readers will just be left scratching their heads. A few wordsmiths will get some pleasure out of discovering a new word (on the off chance that they, being wordsmiths, don't already know it), but is that worth the inconvenience to the rest of us? Then again, maybe the paper makes more money as a status symbol of intelligence than it would as the standard for clarity, simplicity, and straightforwardness.

Certainly, one could take my argument too far and satirize it by insisting that, by my logic, we shouldn't even use words like "satirize." There's got to be a happy medium somewhere, and I suppose that's why most newspapers aim to write at the eighth-grade level.

And of course there's a difference between using a technical economic, scientific, or medical term that can't be described any other way and using a flashier and more esoteric synonym of a common word just for show.

Say Goodbye to Calif. and Okla.

The Associated Press is changing its style for state abbreviations.

AP style, which is followed by the majority of U.S. newspapers, for decades prescribed a somewhat random set of abbreviations for states, to be used when they appeared after a city name. Now, APers will spell out the name of the state each time. So, it's now San Jose, California, instead of San Jose, Calif. The old list of abbreviations can be found here.

The change makes sense from an economic standpoint. In the early days of modern journalism, space was at a premium for text sent over telegraph wires and on the printed page. Indeed, journalism is famous for eschewing the serial comma to save space.

Now, space is less of a concern, so journalism might as well save itself the trouble of implementing AP's abbreviations. Indeed, the abbreviations were so counterintuitive that they were the basis of many a copy-editing test.

The tradeoff between conciseness and clarity has tilted in favor of the latter. Newspapers are now spelling everything out so as to not leave behind any readers, especially those who don't live in the United States and aren't familiar with state geography.

Why Grades Matter in Law School but not Journalism School: Part 2

(See also part 1, where I talk the signaling effects of grades for the two professions.)

Two more reasons why grades matter in law school but not for journalism school: (1) small variances in skill are more important for lawyers and (2) young talented lawyers are easier to retain.

A small skill difference in a trial lawyer can mean the difference between a legal victory and a defeat, often with millions of dollars at stake. Thus, it's worth trying to get metrics, such as grades, on the skills of prospective lawyers, even if they are imprecise.

On most traditional newspaper beats, a highly talented journalist isn't much more valuable than an average journalist. Having the best reporter in the world on the Manatee County, FL, courts beat won't generate much more revenue for the paper than an average reporter would. The potential audience for the subject is only so big; this was especially true before the Internet and widespread syndication. There's less of an incentive to hunt for the best reporters out of college, especially based on such an imprecise measure as grades.

The true cream of the reporting crop can be extremely valuable, but once these reporters have demonstrated their talent, they have every reason to leave for bigger newspapers. There, they can earn more money, reach a wider audience, and live in a bigger city. The small papers that hired them out of college don't have the resources to make an equally appealing offer. Even if small papers are successful in hiring the very best journalists out of college, the papers will have a hard time retaining them.

On the other hand, law firms can more easily hold on to young talent. A young promising lawyer may very well stay at the firm that hired him out of college, as he will begin to gain seniority and work his way up to partner. Because law firms can expect to extract so much value from young employees who blossom, they have a big incentive to try to hire the best candidates right after they graduate.

In Defense of Driveby Culture

Marketing blogger Seth Godin bemoans our fickle online media consumption in a recent post, which of course I will excerpt for those of you too lazy to click through and read the whole thing for yourself. (You would think linking to someone else's work would be an explicit enough endorsement, but I am amazed at how often bloggers write stuff like "it's worth reading the whole thing." I sure hope you're not linking to articles you didn't even bother finishing yourself!)

Imagine if people went to the theatre or the movies and stood up and walked out after the first six seconds. Imagine if people went to the senior prom and bailed on their date three seconds after the car pulled away from the curb.

The majority of people who sign up for a new online service rarely or never use it. The majority of YouTube videos are watched for just a few seconds. Chatroulette institutionalizes the glance and click mentality. I'm guessing that more than half the people who started reading this post never finished it.

If people give up on a blog post you've written, is it their fault, or yours? In all likelihood, whatever you were saying just wasn't interesting enough. On the Internet, switching between content is extremely cheap and easy, so the standard of "interesting enough to keep reading or watching" is dauntingly high. Not to mention that much of your audience is looking at your site during work.

This is one of the starkest examples of opportunity cost I know of: time spent reading subpar blog posts takes time away from reading superior blog posts, or doing other activities. Therefore, I really can't fault online readers for being so demanding.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of this mentality is George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen. In his book "Discover Your Inner Economist," he writes:

When should we finish a book we have started? In this regard I am extreme. If I start ten books maybe I will finish one of them. I feel no compunction to keep reading. Why not be brutal about this? Is this book the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world? For me at least, the answer is usually (but not always) no. Whatever is the best possible book to be reading, I am willing to buy it or otherwise track it down. Most other books don’t make the cut.

Unless you know me personally (and perhaps even if you do), reading Econ Tricks is probably an inefficient use of your time. Why read a 2-month-old blog written by a grad student when there's so much out there on any of my topics written by people who are more intelligent, more experienced, more articulate, and more highly credentialed than I am?

RSS Feed Syndication: Full or Short?

A post from Econ Tricks' RSS feed, as it appears in Google Reader.

RSS feeds can be presented in one of two ways:

(1) Full feeds. Readers are presented with the headline and full text of each item, including any embedded photos or videos.
(2) Short feeds. Readers are presented with each item's title and one or two sentences of information, often the beginning of the item or a separately written summary. Readers must click the headline to read the entire post on the originating site.

The decision between the two is crucial for bloggers, newspapers, and other content producers. There are tradeoffs to each, though it will be soon be clear which option I'm partial toward.

The Case for Full Feeds

Full feeds are far easier for readers to engage with. They can still load the article in a separate window or tab if they want, but full feeds allow readers to read the content in a more convenient way. This is especially true for people accessing RSS from portable devices such as iPhones, as users don't have to load the original Web site in a separate window over a sluggish cellphone network.

When an RSS user wakes up in the morning to hundreds of unread items, he's likely to skip many of the marginally interesting short feed items that must be opened in a new window or tab.

For users on the fence about following a particular feed, having to deal with a short feed might be enough to drive them away. In other words, I would expect a blog to attract more readers with a full feed than with a short feed, all else equal.

Items from full feeds are more likely to be e-mailed, posted to Facebook, tweeted, or otherwise shared. Sharing tools are built into many RSS clients, and they're more likely to be used if readers can judge the quality of the article within the same window, instead of opening a separate window, reading the article, determining its merit, and then either going back and finding the item in the RSS client or searching the source Web site for its own unfamiliar version of sharing tools.

Although full feeds may generate fewer clickthroughs to the originating site per user, publishers can still monetize this readership by automatically including advertisements on each feed item or by interspersing special advertising items into the feed. I imagine that such ads would pay abysmal rates, as most RSS users are efficiency nuts and newshounds who aren't going to look very closely at advertisements at the bottom of each feed item before moving on.

Not all content producers are motivated by profit. For writers who care only about maximizing readership, full feeds seem like the slam-dunk choice.

Additionally, short feed publishers may be underestimating just how fickle online readers are. In a recent survey, a reported 44 percent of Google News readers just scan headlines and never click any of them. RSS readers are probably even more fickle, so short feed publishers may be alienating a large portion of their potential readership.

The Case for Short Feeds

As explored above, people who read a site's content only in their RSS client without ever visiting the underlying site are extremely hard to monetize. It's no surprise that all mainstream newspapers and magazines (at least to my knowledge) run short feeds. Journalism is increasingly strapped for cash these days, so advertising revenue has to be the number one consideration. Short feed publishers are betting that getting more readers to the actual site, even if it means alienating hordes of RSS users, is the best strategy in the long run.

Once readers are engaged with the source Web site, they might explore other articles, click advertisements, or even sign up for a paid subscription (though RSS users aren't usually the type to sign up for such things). Still, it's not abundantly clear that short feeds will generate more revenue than full feeds would, especially because they make the RSS experience far less useful and because RSS readers are much harder to monetize anyway.

If you haven't guessed by now, Econ Tricks uses a full RSS feed. A good overview of RSS is here.

Why Do Newspaper Hire Bloggers?

Why do newspapers hire bloggers, when most of the content they produce does not appear in the print newspaper and can only generate revenue online? For instance, the Washington Post has 99 active blogs, by my count.

A naive line of reasoning could go as follows:

(1) Generic Blog generates $5,000 a month in advertising revenue.
(2) If the newspaper pays Generic Blogger less than $5,000 a month, Generic Blogger can move his blog to his own domain and enjoy free hosting at one of several blogging services.
(3) If the newspaper pays Generic Blogger more than $5,000 a month, Generic Blogger will be willing to stay because he cannot make more money with the blog elsewhere, but the paper will lose money on the blog every month.

You might protest that most newspaper blogs are written by reporters who already work at the paper and are producing valuable content for the print edition as well. But blogging represents an opportunity cost for reporters: time spent blogging takes away time from reporting, writing, and polishing stories. Simply put, if reporters weren't working on blogs, they could put out a better print product.

However, a newspaper blog may indeed generate more revenue for the newspaper than the blogger could get by going it alone. Employing the blogger at some salary between the two amounts makes both sides better off.

Newspaper blogs benefit from network effects. A Washington Post blog has a built-in audience that a rogue blog doesn't. Post blogs can cross-promote one another, as well as other Post content. The printed paper can tease to blog content, generating more interest in the Web site. And blog content can be published in the print edition occasionally to fill space.

A blogger employed by a newspaper instantly has more credibility than most other bloggers, and we would expect such a blog to attract a relatively larger audience and therefore generate more revenue. By lending its masthead to bloggers, a newspaper is giving them a tacit endorsement of quality. Readers know that a newspaper blogger who is consistently being antagonistic or making shallow and erroneous arguments will eventually get the boot, while a self-published can rant on and on for years, no matter how little expertise he has.

There are some downsides for the blogger to working at a newspaper. The blogger must submit to the paper's editorial guidelines, and it's never more fun to work for someone else than to be your own boss. The paper may assign the blogger other reporting tasks or switch his beat to something less enjoyable. Additionally, the paper may decide to discontinue the blog. But blogs are more mobile than you might think, especially if the blogger has built a name for himself. A good example is Jon Weisman's Dodger Thoughts, which has had five homes in eight years, most recently moving from the Los Angeles Times to ESPN.com.

When to Write Poorly

Writing is a crucial skill to invest in, no matter what your field. Whatever other knowledge you have is worth little if you cannot effectively explain it to others.

In Western society, the onus for ensuring understanding falls to the writer or speaker, not the reader or listener. Malcolm Gladwell points this out in "Outliers," in which he discusses how foreign pilots would often crash because they communicated problems too subtly to air traffic control:

Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation”—that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. … But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver orientated. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

Sometimes, however, clarity in writing is sacrificed for other goals.

In academic journals, writers aim to impress. Writing that is overly technical, poorly organized, and difficult to follow can still build prestige for the writer, even if the underlying arguments are rubbish. Additionally, complicated math is often used for show, even if simpler math would be more appropriate for the topic. Making your paper easier to understand only makes it easier for others to criticize your arguments or data.

In the legal world, writers aim to complicate. Lawyers write contracts and other legal documents in language that can only be understood by other lawyers, keeping them all in business. Lengthy, convoluted documents are less likely to be read carefully by the people signing them, to the advantage of the parties creating such documents.

In academia, writers aim to meet page requirements. A high school student might make his point in 5 pages, but he is forced to include 5 more pages of tangents, needless repetition, and other fluff to reach a 10-page minimum. Similarly, the majority of doctoral students will submit dissertations that are hundreds of pages long, no matter what the topic.

How Many Blog Posts Per Page?

A blog's home page, much like other Web sites, faces tradeoffs when it comes to how much information is presented at one time.

Displaying many posts at once increases the chances that readers will see something they like. Just count the number of links in any one place at traditional news sites, such as the Washington Post's local page, though this can quickly lead to clutter. Luckily, blogs typically consist of one post after another in a vertical layout, with other page elements-- like "about me" and ads--off to one side. This linear presentation is less likely to overwhelm the reader, as the long string of posts is out of sight and mind until the reader scrolls down. The longer readers can scroll without having to click to new pages, the more likely they are to be engaged by what's being said and continue reading.

Conversely, having fewer posts per page makes the site load faster. This had been becoming less of a consideration the past few years as broadband speeds accelerated, but the issue has seen a resurgence as many people access the Web from iPhones or similar devices via 3G (or cellphone) signals. Additionally, profit-driven ventures will prefer fewer posts per page, as interested readers will generate more page views and ad impressions as they explore the site.

For many blogs, this decision will be dictated by the site's content, as pointed out by some commenters at BlogCatalog. A photographer's blog that contains a lot of high-res images should be limited to only a few posts per page, but blogs that consist mostly of quotations and short analyses can have dozens of posts per page.

The Case for Laying Off Copy Editors

This will no doubt sound like sacrilege to my former journalism colleagues, but in most scenarios, if a newspaper or other publication has to choose between laying off a copy editor or a reporter, it should can the copy editor.

Yes, copy editors perform many essential functions. They clean up grammar, spelling, wordiness, and writing that just doesn't make sense, thus saving reporters embarrassment on a daily basis. They help protect the paper against libel. They write the headlines and photo captions, and if these elements are lame, vague, or inaccurate, readers won't bother with the underlying stories. At many papers, they also design the page layouts.

But reporters provide an even more essential function: producing the stories. (The same can be said for photographers.)

When staff reductions are needed (we don't even need to get into how newspapers are becoming increasingly less profitable in the Internet age), what makes the newspaper less worse off: having relatively fewer stories or relatively less copy editing? You can't keep both sides fully staffed, so which would you cut first?

When I worked at the Washington Post a few years ago, I was assigned to copy-edit two or three stories a night. We were expected to check every fact in every story, no matter how mundane. Spending an hour on a story was typical, even though the story had already gone through an assignment editor (who checks for bigger-picture issues) and would also seen by a slot (copy chief) and a proofreader.

For instance, in this paragraph from a baseball story:

But in the bottom of the sixth, Flores drilled a 1-1 change-up from Giants starter Jonathan Sanchez to center field, tough territory for even seasoned power hitters to reach at RFK. Flores's season, though, has been about defying expectations. He is 22, had never played above Class A, was a Rule 5 draft pick whom Manager Manny Acta said the club hoped to "hide," but he has long since proven they don't need to do that.

I would check: Was it really the bottom of the sixth? Was it really Flores? Was it really a 1-1 pitch? Was it really a change-up? Was Sanchez really the starter, and is his name spelled correctly? Is Flores really 22? Did he really never play above Class A? Was he really a Rule 5 draft pick? Is Manny Acta's name spelled correctly?

The vast majority of the time, this was wasted effort. The hours spent fact-checking hardly justified the number of errors caught. In today's journalism environment, such extensive fact-checking is just too expensive.

It seems to me that cutting the copy desk in half (eliminating about 30 jobs, if I recall correctly) won't make the paper that much worse off. Sure, there will be more mistakes and slightly less compelling headlines, but this is a much better outcome than if 30 reporters were eliminated (and the hundreds of stories a week that they collectively produce).

In some cases, however, newspaper should be substituting away from reporters and instead use wire copy. I've long been critical of the Post for flying reporters to the Super Bowl, Olympics, American and National League Championship Series, and other national sporting events. Maybe there are local angles in these events, but why do the reporters need to be there to write about them? The expense of covering them is not justified, as the articles will just be needless duplication of whatever the Associated Press could have produced and thus will have dubious value for the paper's readers.

And this is all a matter of relative magnitude. If a paper has 100 reporters and three copy editors, it's better to lose one of the reporters rather than cut the copy desk by a third. Chopping the copy desk only works up until a point of critical mass, but it should still be the first department trimmed.

But in short, producing is better than polishing. The success of blogs and other online news sources shows that people are willing to put up with a little sloppiness if it means a steady stream of content.

My RSS Reader Needs an Editor

Trends from my Google Reader account.

Many people want to delay the inevitable death of the printed newspaper because of nostalgia or self-preservation. But the print model does offer one thing that we don't get from RSS feeds: someone deciding for us what's important, and what's trivial enough to skip.

In a newspaper, the most important stuff is on the front page. The bigger the headline and the higher up on the page, the more the editors are vouching for the story's news value:

Not so with RSS readers. RSS is an extremely powerful tool. Instead of visiting 90 news sites and blogs each day, you can have the latest information collected for you in one place, waiting for you whenever you're ready for it. But there is no sorting, just an endless string of items:

For those of you who use RSS, and especially if you're following dozens of feeds, you have to quickly judge whether something is worth your time. In journalism school, I was taught that a story must get to the point within the first seven words of the opening paragraph, or readers will lose interest. With so many articles in any day's paper, there was little point in continuing to read one that didn't interest you.

But with online news, the amount of competing information available is almost infinitely more. I've found that if I'm not grabbed within the first three or four words of the headline, I'll just click "next item" and skip it (yes, I won't even read the entire headline sometimes). I read only about 25 percent of the items that come over my feeds, so a lot my time is spent shifting through useless information.

And this is even after I've chosen to follow only the feeds I find most interesting. Many sites offer specialized feeds for only certain topics. For example, I don't follow everything from Greater Greater Washington, only its transit section.

Can the Web reproduce the value created by the newspaper editor, who not only decides what is fit for publication but also how prominently items are displayed? Many news sites still using varying headline sizes to show story prominence (the New York Times is a good example), but again, the point of using RSS is to avoid manually visiting dozens of sites you want to follow.

In some ways, the Web does a better job of filtering. The newspaper editor's filtering is only valuable if you and the editor have the same tastes. Instead, various computer systems attempt to automate the recommendation process based on what you're already reading, including Google Reader's suggested items feature and WordPress's related posts widget.

However, some people have stopped using RSS all together (not to mention newspapers and online news sites). Instead, they get their news from snippets and links from their friends on Facebook or Twitter. As one writer says, "It makes me feel guilty. I have 1,000 unread items. Twitter doesn't tell me that."

Online News Spoils Tape-Delayed Olympics, and What to Do About It

In sports, the headline can't be "SUPER BOWL COMPLETED AS PLANNED YESTERDAY."

NBC's prime-time tape delay of the Olympics and the ever-increasing advent of online news have created a unique dilemma (New York Times):

At 6:24 last night, more than an hour and a half before NBC began its tape-delayed coverage of the Winter Olympics, The Times reported on its home page that Lindsey Jacobellis, a popular American, had veered off course in the semi-finals of the snowboard cross and was eliminated from medal contention.

It was news, but the kind of news some readers wish the paper would hide behind a “spoiler alert” until they have had a chance to be held in suspense by the television coverage.  Jacobellis’s heartbreak wasn’t shown until 9:33, more than three hours after The Times reported it.

“Could you please ask the editor of the front Web page to not name the winners within the headlines/sub-headlines?” asked Ken Waters of Phoenix.  Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. said he was disappointed when The Times reported the results of the men’s downhill before NBC showed the event.  “This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news,” Gooch said.  “There is no meaning to this except the anticipation and suspense that sports viewers feel watching the event live.  Please help me understand why your organization needs to spoil the experience.”

I often like to watch sporting events on slight delay on my DVR (maybe an hour into the game) to be able to fast-forward through the commercials. But on those times when I've accidentally discovered the final score while checking my laptop or talking to a friend, the experience has been severely compromised. With many Olympic events shown on tape delay (especially when they're held in Asia or Europe), the potential for "ruining it for yourself" grows exponentially.

The departure from spoilers for, say, movies is most interesting to me. An online headline for a movie review will have the movie's title and some allusion to the plot, the twist, the acting, or the production values. However, it won't blare, "THE GUY IN TITANIC DIES AT THE END."

In sports, the score is the story. The front page of the newspaper doesn't bellow "SUPER BOWL COMES TO A CLOSE" in 60-point bold font. So a headline that doesn't give away the ending isn't a headline at all.

The best solution I can think of is adding some slight transactions costs to getting Olympic news. The New York Times' public editor, in the above-cited blog post, alludes to how the Times thought about putting the headlines a click away from the main homepage but decided against it. Or the headline could be purposefully vague: "Disappointment in the Snowboard Cross (Spoiler)," to be rewritten once the event airs. The hard-core fans can get the story now, while the TV-suspense-loving bunch can safely stay away.

Norman Chad, or the Art of Getting Other People to Write Your Column

CC image of Norman Chad at the 2006 World Series of Poker by flipchip / lasvegasvegas.com.

From a recent Norman Chad column:

Q. Is it okay if I sometimes skip over your column and read just the questions and answers? (Don Gallovic; Lakewood, Ohio)

A. Maybe I'll start a hidden $500 reader giveaway in the body of the column -- that will bring you back, won't it?

Norman Chad is a syndicated weekly sports columnist and ESPN poker analyst with an offbeat sense of humor. For years, at the end of his columns, he has had several questions from readers, along with his answers. He promises readers $1.25 if their questions make it into print. He often answers with a quip, but often the questions are so funny by themselves that he just responds with his signature line, "Pay the man, Shirley." Arguably, the questions are the best part of Chad's columns.

It's a clever way to get out of doing a little work and generating a lot of loyalty and goodwill from the readers whose questions are used. And, as with many media ventures, readers are so satisfied with the bragging rights that come from seeing their names in print that they will produce valuable content with little or no compensation.

On my reading list is a book called Wikinomics, which covers similar business models.

Some Newspapers Now Include Ads With Printer-Friendly Articles

A printer-friendly version of an article at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky.

As noted over at the Gannett Blog, a few newspapers are adding full-color ads to the printer-friendly versions of their articles.

Traditionally, printer-friendly versions of articles have offered many advantages over the standard versions--perhaps too many. The entire article is displayed in one place, instead of over several screens. It is free from clutter, which causes the page to load more quickly, creates fewer distractions, and allows for easier copying and pasting for other uses.

It's not uncommon for people to link to the printer-friendly version of an article. There's nothing worse for a newspaper than to have a printer-friendly page go viral instead of the main article page, because the page will generate no ad revenue (aside from generating a small amount of brand building and reader interest for future articles).

The advertisement on the printer-friendly version seems like a good solution. Even if some readers print many articles, these ads probably won't be a major nuisance. After all, it's not like people will switch news sources over such a thing, especially if it's their hometown paper.

Why Grades Matter in Law School but not Journalism School: Part 1

As with my previous post, I'm interested here in how important grades really are in terms of signaling how successful a student will be in the professional workplace.

How much grades matter depends on the field.

In law school, grades are very important. At least in a student's first year or before he gets his first internship, this is the only proxy that firms have to judge his ability as a potential lawyer. He could present examples of his classwork, but firms aren't much interested in reviewing his performance in mock court or reading essays he's written about legal topics.

In journalism school, at least for those interested in print or online journalism, grades are far less crucial. This is because the firms have a much stronger proxy for determining whether a student will be successful. All journalism programs have some sort of student newspaper or other publication (at least as far as I know), and whatever articles you can produce for the student newspaper are a direct reflection on what kind of articles you can produce at a professional paper. While a professional paper will give reporters access to better sources and (maybe) better technology, it's doubtful that the change of scenery will change the inherent quality of the reporter's work much. It's easy to spot a good writer or a good investigative journalist based on only a few writing samples. Newspapers would be wise to hire based almost exclusively on the quality of prior work, assuming that the student's grades meet some minimum acceptable level.

UPDATE 3/23: I've written more on this subject here.

After You Die, Will Your Blog Enter the Public Domain?

(It's a silly question, I know.)

In the United States, a copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author (source). With the relative infancy of the Internet, we're still several decades away from the day when practical debate is required over whether royalties are still due to the descendants of bloggers born more than a century before them.

A couple of issues drove the economics of public domain books in our history: the monopoly pricing of original content and the transactions costs of tracking down the descendants. How does these things change in the Internet age, especially for content like blogs?

Milking the Monopoly
If only I can publish copies of "Moby Dick," I can charge monopolistic prices to maximize my profits; this is assuming that people cannot easily steal the work through photocopying, downloading illegal Kindle copies, or whatever other method (I'll drop this assumption later). Some people will choose not to buy "Moby Dick" at my exorbitant prices, but I will make much more money from the people who do.

If everyone can publish copies of "Moby Dick," price falls to marginal cost, or the cost of physically making the book. If I can print and distribute a copy for $5 and choose to charge $6, someone else can enter the market and undercut my price to $5.50. And on and on until the price approaches $5.

To undermine my previous point a bit, I've noticed that several James Patterson books on Amazon are selling for roughly $10 a pop for new paperbacks, as are most editions of "Moby Dick" (though there are a few exceptions, around $5 a copy). So one has to wonder how much of a markup publishers can get away with; after all, no book is truly a monopoly, as it must compete against other books. Yet the copyright holder's markup is apparent in the Kindle market, as most eBooks are $9.99 but all the classics are free (as opposed to traditional books, each copy requires only a trivial cost to distribute).

Blogs do not face this same marginal cost dynamic. Assuming that Web hosting costs are negligible or free, each "copy" of a blog post that is distributed costs the writer nothing (after he has taken the time to write it) and the reader nothing. Each page view has a slightly positive expected profit, as some of the readers will click ads and generate revenue, so there's theoretically still some money for the descendants to collect. But because neither the publisher nor the reader has to pay to distribute or access the content, a public domain law seems a moot point: there is no monopolistic price to combat. It seems sensible to let the descendants continue to collect the advertising revenue (keeping in mind the caveats I present in the next section). What are the alternatives? We could give the ad revenue to charity or put it toward the national debt. Or the ads could be removed, but that would require a lot of legwork (how hard will it be to modify Web sites made 80 years earlier?) and make the reader's experience only marginally better.

Some online content, such as articles in scholarly journals, are behind paywalls and thus do not operate the same way. The classic public domain model used for books seems most appropriate here: under the spirit of our current laws, someone shouldn't be able to keep content behind a gate forever. Of course, as digital "theft" becomes easier and easier, perhaps the content-behind-the-wall method will cease to be viable anyway.

Much blog content is news-orientated, so it's doubtful that most of it will be useful, or popular enough to generate substantial ad revenue, decades from now. How many posts are being written every day about the new iPad, and how many of them are still going to be read regularly 10 years from now?

Tracking Down the Descendants
Throughout history, keeping track of descendants generation after generation has been difficult. Additionally, as time goes on, a common ancestor can have a multitude of descendants: imagine if you have two children, who each have two children, who each have two children, etc. Both of these reasons are also good economic justifications for our current system. Most people would agree that there shouldn't be several thousand people getting royalty checks because they are distant descendants of Socrates, and even if they were entitled to it, the administrative costs of keeping up with so many heirs would probably eat up most of the purse anyway.

The Internet solves the former problem but not the later. It's easy to imagine a Web site where authors could designate heirs, who in turn could designate future heirs, and so forth. But we have not solved the second problem: should the revenue from a centuries-old blog be split among hundreds of people so extremely far removed from the original author? If not, what else should we do with the money?

Of course, it's possible that technology and our world will change so dramatically in the coming decades that none of these issues will be applicable, in ways we wouldn't be able to understand from our current vantage point.