Netflix had announced in April that it wasn’t going to renew its broad licensing deal with Viacom. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said at the time that his company was in talks with Viacom to possibly strike separate deals for specific shows. A Netflix spokesperson told us Thursday that the company doesn’t have any news to share on that front.

Netflix’s previous deal with Viacom included titles from Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, VH1, Logo and Spike. In a position paper on the future of his company, Hastings said in April that Netflix was using a whole lot of data to evaluate these kinds of deals before deciding to renew them:

“We might pay, for example, $200,000 for a 4 year exclusive subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) license for a given title. At the time of renewal, we evaluate how much the title has been viewed as well as member rating feedback to determine how much we are willing to pay. How many similar titles we have is also a consideration.”

Netflix doesn’t share any of its ratings with the outside world, but the company has made it clear in the past that kids are a very important audience, which even deserved a dedicated UI to further encourage their viewing. With that in mind, it’s possible that there may be hope for Dora or any of the other more popular kids shows to return to the service sooner or later. Fans of Teen Mom on the other hand may have to look elsewhere.

The purpose of the hearing was to set schedules, review witness lists and go over last-minute evidence objections ahead of the trial. Cote proposed that each side should be given 22 hours over a four day period plus a final day for closing arguments; the federal government said it would need at least 30 hours to make its case, and Apple requested the same, meaning the total trial would last 12 days. Cote said she will decide in the near future.

The parties also reviewed the witness list, who include prominent publishing CEOs like Macmillan’s John Sargent and Apple executive Eddy Cue. Today’s hearing also raised the possibility that News Corp CEO James Murdoch, who exchanged a series of emails with Apple’s Steve Jobs, could take the stand for cross-examination; the federal government will decide in coming days, on the basis of an evidence issue, whether this will be necessary.

Much of the trial, however, is unlikely to feature dramatic CEO testimony. Instead, the core of the trial is likely to slog through recondite economic arguments and civil evidence issues; part of today’s hearing focused on expert witness opinion about the competitive effects of agency pricing and whether it coincided with Apple’s economic self-interest.

Today’s hearing also focused on an ongoing dispute in which Apple is attempting to force its competitors, especially Amazon, to unseal evidence they have submitted as part of the proceedings.

At the outset of the hearing, in a courtroom that rises 15 stories above lower Manhattan with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, Cote stressed that the case represented an enormous amount or work, and told the parties to call her “day or night” if they decided to settle.

This trend isn’t specifically a result of the growth of social media or even the rise of the web in general, Stray says. In fact, the research he describes — a study published earlier this year (PDF link) by two researchers at Columbia University — shows that it has been going on more or less continuously since the beginning of what we call the mass-media era in the 1950s (an era that itself may just have been an accident of history, as I discussed in a recent post). “Contextual” journalism of various kinds has been climbing steadily and conventional fact-based reporting has been declining.

As Stray puts it: “Journalists are increasingly in the business of supplying meaning and narrative. It no longer makes sense to say that the press only publishes facts.” He notes that no one really needs a news organization whose sole job is to tell us what the White House is saying when all of their press briefings are posted online — an extension of the principle that now “sources can go direct,” an idea proposed by media theorists like blogging pioneer Dave Winer. As a result, Stray says, journalism has to figure out how to “move up the information food chain” and provide more than just facts.

If context is all, what happens to objectivity?

Interestingly enough, both Stray and the authors of the study note that this kind of journalism doesn’t even have an agreed-upon name. Some call it in-depth reporting, some call it longform journalism, some refer to it as analytical or explanatory, but it has no established terminology. As the study’s authors note:

“Although this category is, in quantitative terms, easily the most important change in reporting in the past half century, it is a form of journalism with no settled name and no hallowed, or even standardized, place in journalism’s understanding of its own recent past.”

Stray, who runs a data-visualization project for Associated Press and also teaches computational journalism at Columbia University, says that he believes one reason for the lack of discussion about this change in the media is that it conflicts with the view that journalists have to be scrupulously objective — in other words, that they provide “just the facts, ma’am.” If everything requires context and interpretation, then that means an end to the rigid version of objectivity that many journalists were trained to accept and the rise of other values such as transparency and engagement.

“This seems to be a tricky place for truth in journalism. Much easier to say that there are objective facts, knowably correct facts, and that that is all journalism reports. The messy complexity of providing real narratives in a real world is much less authoritative ground.”

It may be messy and complex, but I think Stray is right when he says that the shift must be made — and that the desire for context helps explain the rise of unbalanced outlets like Fox News, but also of commentary-based journalism of the kind practiced by publishers like Gawker Media and even individuals like Andrew Sullivan. Where the trend ultimately takes us remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

Twitter is framing the partnerships as a way for marketers to reinforce brand messages by reaching consumers on television and small screens at the same time. For consumers, this is likely to mean seeing more video content within their Twitter feeds and more hashtags on the shows they watch. In its news release, Twitter framed it this way:

We think these types of two-screen sponsorships are a win-win-win. Users receive spectacular, timely content that rounds out their TV experience or reminds them to tune in. Powered by Promoted Tweets, broadcasters reach new audiences and open up new business lines. Brand advertisers get, for the first time, an integrated cross-platform tool for reaching the social conversation wherever it happens.

The company is branding the deals as “Twitter Amplify” or, as one executive said on stage, simply “Twitter Amp.” Other partners, which join earlier participants like ESPN and the NFL, include A&E, Time Inc and Warner Music.

The announcement is part of Twitter’s effort to strut its stuff before Madison Avenue and to show that it is now part of “the New York City community.” The company is engaged in a major push to raise revenue as it prepares for an IPO widely expected to take place later this year.

The claims are set out, in part, in a letter last week from Apple’s law firm that urges US District Judge Denise Cote to reveal information about its pricing as well as “internal discussions about the inferiority” of its Kindle e-reader compared to the iPad. Apple also says the redacted information will help expose the “fiction” that Amazon was “forced” to adopt a new pricing system as a result of a 2010 arrangement between Apple and five big publishers.

This arrangement — known as “agency pricing” — resulted in publishers requiring retailers to sell ebooks on a commission basis, in which publishers could set the price. This led the Department of Justice, state governments and class action lawyers to sue Apple and the publishers; the latter settled the cases and agreed to pay out millions but Apple is holding its ground.

Apple argues that the Department of Justice is wrong to portray Amazon as a victim, along with consumers, of a conspiracy to raise prices. Instead, the company claims that Amazon was contemplating agency pricing too and was pleasantly surprised when the publishers took it up on their own. Apple is also using colorful emails obtained from Amazon executives to make its point:

 ”I guess what we never figured in was the idea that five publishers would band together and insist on receiving worse terms,” the email said. “And then Amzn would be ‘cornered’ into accepting them.”

“Hysterical, isn’t it?” the Amazon executive replied. “Jedi Mind Tricks here in Seattle.”

The email exchange was reported by Reuters legal reporter, Alison Frankel, whose recent analysis portrayed Amazon as the “elephant in the (court)room.” Her report adds that Judge Cote stated that she doesn’t want the trial “distorted by a larger battle between two commercial giants.”

What do others think? Apple’s view is likely to find support in at least some quarters. The publishing community continues to fume about Amazon’s enormous clout in the book business. Meanwhile, some copyright lawyers have joked to me in the past that Amazon should send US Attorney General Eric Holder a holiday card for suing Apple and the publishers.

Amazon will get to offers it own views directly; its executives, along with publishing executives, will be among the witnesses testifying on behalf of the Department of Justice.

For now, Judge Cote has decided that the evidence Apple is seeking will remain redacted. But the issue will not doubt arise again if the trial, scheduled to begin on June 3, goes ahead as planned. There is a pre-trial conference planned for later this Thursday — we’ll let you know if any new twists emerge.

Here’s the letter from Apple’s law firm:

Amazon to Disclose (Request)

Nearly four years and 3,000 titles later (with an additional 1,000 titles under contract), the company is still focused around acquiring and marketing backlist titles. Open Road has raised $15 million so far, from Kohlberg Ventures, Golden Seeds and Azure. (The company would not disclose revenues or whether it is profitable.) It still does not pay advances and still splits revenues 50-50 (after recouping some digitization costs) with authors, but it has also expanded its focus. It is publishing print books, expanding to new verticals like romance and the Vietnam War, signing up a limited number of original manuscripts, and handling digital distribution and marketing for both U.S. and international publishers.

These changes reflect Open Road’s adaptability to a changing market, but are also evidence of the fact that, in 2013, it faces more competition from other publishers than it did four years ago. The backlist — which covers books that have been out for a least a year and that in some cases are decades old — is estimated to make up around 40 percent of the trade book market, and many publishers are seeking to mine those rights. HarperCollins is currently suing Open Road over the digital rights to Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves; the case hasn’t yet gone to trial. Amazon has bought up the backlists of several small publishers and plans to release those titles as ebooks for the first time.

Arthur Klebanoff is the CEO of RosettaBooks, which led the way in 2001 as a company focused on marketing the backlist in digital formats. Rosetta and Open Road are often described as competitors, and they are, but, Klebanoff noted, “I think any ebook-only publisher really has to say its primary competition is each of the print publishers of any size. Those print publishers, for the better part of 10 years, have been trying to license back the digital rights to everything in their backlist.” One reason they don’t always succeed — allowing publishers like Rosetta and Open Road to get the rights instead — is that they almost always still only offer a 25 percent royalty (rather than a cut of the sales) and they are more focused on new titles than on the backlist.

In those areas and others, Open Road hopes to stay ahead. Here are some of the things it’s doing.

Always be marketing

Open Road has always been centered around marketing. The company has over 40 in-house employees, and more than half hold marketing roles.

Open Road describes its marketing strategy — a combination of publicity, promotion, online merchandising and social media — as proprietary technology. Chief marketing officer Rachel Chou told me that it is a custom-built software platform that lets “all parts of the company look at the same material at the same time” and integrates product management, asset management and campaign management into one system — whereas at a traditional publisher, editorial departments and marketing departments might all work on different platforms for the same book.

Open Road develops a marketing plan for each book, each quarter. If a particular campaign doesn’t work, Open Road tries a different one. That separates it from traditional publishers, which have to “cut their losses” a few months after a book hits the market, cofounder and CEO Friedman said. She tells agents and authors that “the first quarter means nothing…if in that first quarter a significant milestone related to that title hasn’t happened, then it’s the second quarter where it might happen, and where everything starts to grow. We’re selling more of our authors’ works year-in and year-out.”

Forget selling direct…at least for now

Conventional wisdom says that publishers have to start selling books directly to customers. Open Road disagrees. “We’re not going to have a storefront,” Friedman said. Instead, the company relies on retailers to sell its books, and offers them campaign ideas for promotions.

“I have always been very supportive of the retailer,” Friedman said. “The retailers are doing a very good job, and I don’t think we can do better.”

One caveat is that Open Road wants to run special sales involving promotional codes — to give a reader 10 percent off a title, for instance. Friedman said that with the exception of Sony, the retailers don’t support these yet, and so Open Road might run a limited number of promotions itself in the future.

Video doesn’t mean book trailers

Video is a key component of Open Road’s marketing initiatives. Luke Parker Bowles, the executive director of production, oversees creation of video content and describes video as Open Road’s “special sauce” — but said the videos shouldn’t be confused with book trailers. “The author is the brand. The title is not the brand.” Open Road aims to sit down and film video with each of its authors, or with the estate or family members if an author has died. The company has a chief researcher, Galen Blaze, who spends every day doing research to find out new things to ask the company’s authors.

The unique content is key because Open Road doesn’t consider its own site a destination for video content. Rather, the company pushes the content out to sites like the Huffington Post, Daily Beast and Fox News. A click-to-buy button appears at the end of each video so that users can buy either a single book or a number of books from different authors on one theme, and Open Road tracks how the videos convert to sales.

Change it up

At the beginning, Open Road was focused on literary fiction, but it has since expanded into genres like mystery, romance and science fiction — the areas that are “just exploding in e,” publisher Tina Pohlman said. The company is also publishing around 12 new titles a year. This fall, for instance, it will release The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer, who was previously published by Riverhead and Spiegel & Grau.

“Our acquiring of content has become more scientific, for lack of a better word,” Friedman said, because it is now purposely harnessing areas that are seeing the greatest digital growth.

Sometimes you need print…

While most of Open Road’s titles are still only available as ebooks, the company does make a sliver of its titles available through print-on-demand (90 titles so far) or through short traditional print runs (70 titles so far).

“There are certain books that really need to be in a physical bookstore,” Chou said at the Making Information Pay conference recently. “They deserve that table up front.” Open Road starts print runs at 500 copies, and the largest print run they have done is 15,000 copies. “If we’ve done a print run and we find that it’s really taking awhile to get through the inventory,” Chou said, “we can switch it back” to POD.

…and sometimes you just need to get lucky

One title that Open Road will be making available in print is a never-published, forty-year-old manuscript by the author Pearl Buck. Buck wrote The Eternal Wonder shortly before her death in 1973, and it remained unseen until a woman in Texas came across it in a storage locker that she found at auction. The woman got in touch with Pearl Buck’s son through the Pearl Buck International foundation, and he bought it from her for a small fee. He then got in touch with Open Road, which had published Buck’s other titles as ebooks. The company will publish The Eternal Wonder as an ebook and a paperback this October.

The discovery of The Eternal Wonder is a reminder that, even in a data-driven age, a publisher needs luck. So far, one of Open Road’s greatest assets has been timing. The fact that Friedman built her company before ebooks had really taken off helped it get its footing and get ahold of digital rights that big publishers hadn’t yet focused on. Nearly four years in, it can build from that base.

“The speed of what’s happened has been staggering,” Friedman said. “I think this isn’t about the Big Six at all. We’re living in a very exciting time for publishing, for independent publishing, for new kinds of publishing. This is the golden age…It’s not about the giants. It’s about the small guys.”

Photos by Rani Molla

The tablets were already available in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan (as well as the U.S., of course). While a 4G version of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is available in the U.S., only Wi-Fi versions are available internationally.

“Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” Dave Limp, VP Kindle, said in a statement.

In the U.S., the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, which is Amazon’s answer to the iPad, got a big price cut in March. The 4G, 32 GB version, which had been $499, was cut to $399. The Wi-Fi-only version of the same tablet got a price cut of $30 — to $269 for the 16 GB version and $299 for the 32 GB version. Internationally, prices will vary based on operating costs.

What did he get for this suggestion? Not one, but several cease-and-desist letters from the New York Times‘ legal department. This falls under the heading: “How to blow some free publicity.”

Cody Brown is the founder of a New York-based startup called Scroll Kit, whose software makes it easy for publishers to produce interesting layouts without having to do a lot of programming. When he saw the Snow Fall feature, he thought it was the perfect example of what his software could help media companies do, so he created a video showing how he replicated the design elements of the story.

An order to remove any mention of the NYT

In a blog post at Medium, the Scroll Kit founder explains what happened next: he got a “cease-and-desist” letter from the New York Times‘ legal department saying his video was an infringement of the newspaper’s copyright to the Snow Fall content, and demanding that he remove it.

This request isn’t that unusual. Media companies send these kinds of letters all the time — although, as Brown notes in his post, there is at least a chance that using the newspaper’s content in the way he did would be covered by the “fair use” exemption, since it didn’t compete with the original NYT content and was arguably transformative. But since he didn’t have the resources to fight such a case, he made the video private and assumed that would end the matter.

Instead, he got a second letter saying that marking the video as private was “not acceptable to The Times” and that it had to be removed from YouTube and any other site. Not only that, but the NYT lawyer said that Brown had to “remove any reference to the New York Times from your website,” (boldface added by me for emphasis) including a line about how the newspaper had spent hundreds of hours building Snow Fall but it took him an hour to recreate.

It’s not infringement, it’s a tribute

As Brown discusses in his post, the first of these requests is debatable but arguably fair, since he used the entire New York Times feature rather than just an excerpt. But the second letter goes above and beyond any fair interpretation of copyright law and tells the Scroll Kit founder that he needs to remove any reference to the NYT from his website. This is absurd, of course, and not even remotely reasonable, despite attempts by people like Paul Carr to argue that it is.

@mathewi @robmillis I'm not glossing over it, I'm saying in context it's a perfectly reasonable request.—
Paul Carr (@paulcarr) May 22, 2013

Nilay Patel, a copyright lawyer who writes for The Verge, told the Poynter Institute that the order to remove any reference to the newspaper was “based on nothing more than a sense of moral outrage” — which just makes the whole thing even more ridiculous. And a third response from the NYT’s legal department reinforces the point, by asking Brown to “use another publication to advertise your infringement tool.”

As I (and others) tried to explain in a Twitter debate with Carr, this completely misunderstands what Scroll Kit is, or the purpose of showing how Snow Fall could be replicated using it. The software isn’t “an infringement tool” any more than a piece of HTML design software like Dreamweaver is an infringement tool. All Brown was hoping to do — as I see it — was to pay tribute to the New York Times feature, and suggest that other publishers could do something similar (the CJR has pulled together most of the conversation, if you’re interested).

Unless the New York Times is arguing that it is a crime to even attempt to duplicate the look of Snow Fall by other means (which, as David Holmes pointed out, doesn’t require Scroll Kit but can be done with readily available Javascript libraries) then all it has done is made the newspaper look churlish and unable to take a compliment — and fairly clueless about software to boot.

Note: The New York Times responded to our request for a comment by saying: “We fully support innovation, but we prefer that this developer use his tool to create original material instead of appropriating our content, copyrighted content that was conceived and created entirely by Times journalists.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Hans Gerwitz and Eva Blue

The feature, known as “two-factor” authentication, is already used by companies like Google and Apple and works by sending a pin code via text message to a user’s cell phone. Twitter has details and a tutorial video here.

The decision to add an extra security feature comes after hackers have repeatedly gained control of high profile Twitter feeds. The most prominent example occurred last month when hackers used the Associated Press’s account to say bombs had injured President Obama. The fake tweet roiled financial markets and led to calls for Twitter to improve its security features.

Attackers have also targeted CBS, the BBC and the Onion. The latter offered a candid account of how the hackers phished employees accounts and induced some of them, including a person with control over social media passwords to share log-in information.

Two factor authentication would likely have prevented those attacks because the attackers would have had to enter a password sent to the employee’s cell phone.

Sarandos pointed to Bill Burr as one example of a stand-up comedian who has seen huge success on Netflix, to the point where he can now tour in countries where Netflix is operating its streaming service. Producing stand-up comedy is “also a great way to cultivate talent for future scripted projects,” Sarandos added.

Asked about his plans for the next phase of original shows on Netflix, Sarandos said that he wants to target audiences that the company has so far overlooked, including tweens, Sci-fi fans and sitcom viewers. Altogether, Netflix could debut as many as 16 originals in 2013, according to Sarandos.

In 2013, Netflix is going to launch a total of 8 originals, including the much-anticipated return of Arrested Development, which will premier on Netflix this coming Sunday.

As the Columbia Journalism Review describes in a post on the project, Climate Desk not only found and interviewed their comment troll — a 57-year-old insurance executive named Hoyt Connell — as part of a video series called “The Secret Life of Trolls,” but also profiled a scientist who spends much of her time engaging with trolls on the topic of climate change. In the final instalment, the scientist and the troll met each other via Google Hangout.

The CJR post criticizes the Climate Desk series because “it doesn’t shine as much light under the bridge as it could have,” since it doesn’t go into detail about why Connell latched onto climate change as a topic, or what drives him to comment so aggressively (fittingly enough, Connell comments on the CJR post himself to try and clear some of this up). But what impressed me was how normal this mega-troll seemed once he was interviewed.

Comment trolls are people too

I found the same thing — and I think others did too — when Gawker Media outed a notorious Reddit troll named Violentacrez last year, after attention was drawn to several offensive sub-Reddits he created. Although clearly much of his behavior on the site crossed a line, the interview showed him to be a more-or-less normal, and in some ways even sympathetic (or possibly just pathetic) character. Not that this justified his conduct, but it helped to explain some of it.

We’ve written before about how the value of comments transcends the occasional troll, and how the best way to maintain a civil dialogue is to engage with readers directly, a point blogging pioneer Anil Dash also made in a post a couple of years ago. And writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic have shown that commenters can be much more than just a noisy distraction — in some cases, they can actually become collaborators. The Climate Desk series is a good reminder that trolls are people too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Jeremy King

Zite outlined the changes in a blog post. CEO Mark Johnson has been pretty vocal about how he doesn’t think Zite should be like Google Reader, and told me the new features Zite has added to its iOS app are those that “enhance the user experience both for Google Reader users and the reading population in general.” Articles will now “gray out” after they’ve been read, users will be able to save sources as favorites and Zite’s algorithm will pay more attention to obscure content:

“One of the biggest problems with Google Reader is that RSS feeds which publish many stories per day tend to dominate your feed, so the obscure blog you found a few years ago that publishes every three months can be drowned out in the noise. Zite’s algorithm will more aggressively highlight rare content, so feel free to ‘like’ publishers that you enjoy, no matter how popular or rare.”

An Android update is coming soon.

Zite’s also added seven new publishers to its publisher program, bringing the total number of publishers it works with to 24. The new publishers are GigaOM, Atlantic Media (with The Atlantic and Quartz), Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, Say Media (Remodelista and ReadWrite) and Serious Eats, and they join existing publishers like CNN (Zite’s parent company), the Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, and can run their own ads against their content.

“We are also starting to look at ways to monetize publisher content,” Johnson said. That’s something Zite’s competitors are already doing: The New York Times makes content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard, and the Wall Street Journal has a similar arrangement with Pulse.

Here’s a video of Johnson speaking about the future of content personalization at paidContent 2013:

Soo Meta is the latest product of the Budapest-based online video startup Dragontape, which has also developed a video curation app called Dragontape. After months of testing, the company is now ready to unveil Soo Meta as a new platform for online video storytelling.

Here’s how Soo Meta works: The platform offers content producers and curators an easy way to mix videos with still images, text, links, music, polls and even RSS feeds. The results look like video slideshows, and can range from simple annotations to complex remixes. Take a look below for an example:

There are a few things that I find especially intriguing about Soo Meta: Each story doesn’t just consist of a video, but also a Storify-like story line. Users can either click play to watch the video, or scroll down and browse through the quotes, photos and other elements that make up the story.

The other interesting aspect about Soo Meta is how easy it is to gather media for your video stories. There is a bookmarklet that lets you grab images, videos and quotes from any website. Alternatively, users can manually add Urls to the content they want to use, or even upload their own images to the service. These different elements can then be organized on a timeline, mixed together and annotated.

Playing with Soo Meta is definitely fun, but I also found it challenging to actually decide on the stories I wanted to tell. Thinking out of the box ain’t easy. Still, I could see this become a great tool for online journalists who want to use video in novel ways, or even just annotate third-party videos and put them into context. Even a Storify-like approach of curation of third-party quotes could work great. For example, why not mix highlights of Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal with quotes from journalists who covered the event?

I could also see annotated and visualized podcasts being a big use case, but the makers of Soo Meta have another idea in mind: The company is betting that a combination of online video and polls will bring in whole new audiences. Dragontape co-founder and CEO Tamás Szakál told me that the inspiration for this feature came from teachers using the service. “For them its a really cool way to give more engaging assignments to students,” Szakál said.

He added that it would also be great for bloggers to engage with their audience, and get measurable feedback through analytics. For this, Szakál argued, people will pay. Soo Meta’s freemium model offers advanced polling features and analytics for a monthly fee. Paying users will also get an option to edit stories collaboratively, and share them privately within groups or companies.

So what’s next for Soo Meta? Szakál said that his team of three wants to improve the mobile experience, and strike partnerships to integrate the platform with tools and sites for educators and others. A WordPress plugin is already available, and a full-blown mobile editor is already in the pipeline as well.

An integration into smart TVs is also a possibility. But for now, the company wants to concentrate on perfecting the tools for creators to get people to use it – and hopefully inspire new types of stories. “The goal is of course to make Soo Meta the platform for digital storytelling that makes it a lot easier and faster for teachers, bloggers and journalists to create more engaging experiences,” said Szakál.

The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks.

The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product:

According to a spokesman, the idea reduces friction in the marketing process because Twitter already has users’ email addresses and other contact information — meaning that it takes just one click for a user to connect with the brand.

The move comes as Twitter continues to expand its ad products, including its self-serve platform, ahead of a rumored IPO later this year.

The news comes just a couple of weeks before Apple is set to face the DOJ in court. In the trial, beginning June 3, the DOJ will argue that Apple conspired with book publishers to fix ebook prices. Apple counters that the system of  agency pricing it arranged with the publishers is the same as what it uses with all other retailers in iTunes, and that the launch of iBookstore created competition in the marketplace.

Under the proposed settlement, announced Wednesday morning, Penguin would pay $75 million to consumers represented by 33 states’ attorneys general and by Hagens Berman, the Seattle-based law firm that filed the class action suit against Apple and publishers in 2011. The settlement still has to be approved by the courts, in a hearing set to take place later this summer.

Penguin’s settlement with the consumers and states is the largest that any publisher has agreed to. HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster settled together for a combined $69 million, while Macmillan agreed to a $20 million payout. The settlements, in most cases, result in customers receiving a credit for online book retailers — meaning the publishers will recoup at least some of what they pay out.

The settlement also clears the way for the Penguin-Random House merger to move forward in the second half of this year. Penguin’s parent company Pearson said in a statement, “In anticipation of reaching this agreement, Pearson had made a $40m provision for settlement in its 2012 accounts. An incremental charge will be expensed in Pearson’s 2013 statutory accounts as part of the accounting for the Penguin Random House joint-venture.

That doesn’t stop readers from writing their own spinoffs anyway: The largest fan fiction site, FanFiction.net, hosts millions of free stories. And in works like these — and the passionate readers who create them — Amazon sees the potential for profit.

On Wednesday, Amazon Publishing announced Kindle Worlds, “the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.” The company is making this work by securing licenses from existing entertainment properties and by paying royalties to both the original author and the fan fiction author.

So far, Kindle Worlds has licenses for three Alloy Entertainment properties: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. Writers can publish “authorized stories” inspired by these properties and sell them in the Kindle Store; Amazon says it will add more licenses soon, in areas like “books, games, TV, movies and music.”

The fan fiction authors get a royalty of 35 percent for works of at least 10,000 words, and a royalty of 20 percent on works between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Amazon is also paying royalties to the original authors of the properties, but would not disclose that royalty rate.

Kindle Worlds is not a self-publishing platform like KDP. First of all, any works published through Kindle Worlds are published by Amazon Publishing — they’re not self-published, so the author doesn’t retain print or digital rights and doesn’t set the work’s price. The website notes that “Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.” Second, Kindle Worlds won’t publish all of the works submitted to it; it will only accept some (though the company says it aims to accept as many as possible, as long as they adhere to content guidelines). Finally, “Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories. Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99.”

Kindle Worlds will officially launch in June with “over 50 commissioned works” from authors like Barbara Freethy, John Everson and Colleen Thompson. At that time, readers can also start submitting works to Kindle Worlds.

• Time, Inc.: Director of Digital Ad Product Experiences (New York)
• Gannett Co., Inc.: President and Publisher (Des Moines, Iowa)
• M80: Director, Paid Social (Los Angeles)
• Bloomberg: Media Licensing Manager – Latin America/Caribbean (New York)
• HitBliss: Digital Account Executive (Lexington, Mass.)

We also have listings from companies like Target, the Taunton Press, the Crackle Network at Sony Pictures and more. Click here to see what else is on our job board.

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Mathew Ingram – Senior Writer, GigaOM / paidContent

Speakers:
Bob Bowman – President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media
Raju Narisetti – SVP and Deputy Head of Strategy, News Corp
Justin Smith – President, Atlantic Media
Richard Tofel – President, ProPublica

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Even before the news was confirmed on Monday, critics with long memories were reminding anyone who would listen about Yahoo’s track record with acquisitions, which has some rather notorious bumps in it, including two major ones known as GeoCities and Flickr. Those two deals alone have made many question whether Yahoo will be able to do the right thing with Tumblr — and while it may be unfair to lay the blame for these at Marissa Mayer’s feet, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the future of this latest acquisition.

How long will it take yahoo to ruin tumblr?—
Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) May 19, 2013

GeoCities + Flickr: billions in missed opportunities

In 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3.5 billion, which even at the time was an eye-popping amount. Although it was over a decade ago, which is eons in internet time, there are some broad similarities between what GeoCities was then and what Tumblr is now: both were distinctive and somewhat chaotic communities, focused on allowing individuals to create their own space. Yahoo did a number of things that arguably accelerated the demise of its high-priced acquisition, including trying to monetize it through hosting fees and cheesy banner ads.

The other stick that many anti-Yahoo types use when they want to beat the company up about its acquisition strategy is Flickr, the pioneering photo community that languished under Yahoo’s ownership until relatively recently. As many of its hard-core fans (including me) have argued in the past, Flickr was — or at least could have been — Instagram before Instagram.

There have been a number of post-mortems on what happened with Flickr, but in a nutshell Yahoo did almost everything wrong: the larger company took away or smothered much of the photo-sharing community’s most important features, prevented its employees from innovating or growing, and forced all kinds of integration between the two platforms that did nothing to benefit users — in fact, precisely the opposite. It was like the trifecta of failure, and a perfect example of why most large-scale acquisitions don’t work.

“All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.”

Successful mergers are exceedingly rare

It’s certainly reasonable to argue — as many of her fans in Silicon Valley have since the Tumblr deal was announced — that Marissa Mayer shouldn’t be held to account for these lapses, since she had nothing to do with them and the internet has changed a lot since then. Yahoo is also substantially more desperate than it used to be (if that’s possible), and that has arguably made Mayer more cautious about potential screw-ups.

But the bottom line is that just because Mayer is a new CEO doesn’t mean she or the company won’t screw Tumblr up somehow anyway — either deliberately or by accident. That’s because large companies like Yahoo have a way of destroying the value of the things they acquire even if they don’t mean to do so, especially when the thing they have acquired is a somewhat unique community with special characteristics, which Tumblr arguably is.

This is why successful large acquisitions of web communities or services are so rare — rare enough that almost everyone can only point to a single example: namely, Google buying YouTube (although Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is looking like it may be another one). The question for Yahoo and Mayer is whether Tumblr can be kept as a distinct entity and yet still monetized, as YouTube has been, or whether the process of monetization will inevitably turn Tumblr into the latest example of a MySpace-style failure.

Can Yahoo do what Google did with YouTube?

Former YouTube exec Hunter Walk took a look at what Google did right in the case of YouTube, and boiled it down to five factors, including keeping the product from getting too intertwined with the parent company and maintaining a separate physical identity. But to me the most important ones were:

Protect Tumblr from “helpful” Yahoos: This is where the accidental destruction of acquisitions often comes from — people who just want to help, but whose requests for features and other attempts at integration wound up almost “hugging us to death,” as Walk puts it. There is a powerful desire to get efficiencies out of acquisitions, but many of those attempts fail badly and ruin the thing they were trying to monetize or grow in the first place.

Stop short-term monetization that won’t scale: Walk talks about how YouTube managed to avoid the natural desire to build all sorts of easy-win monetization methods into the platform, and focused instead on longer-term approaches that were harder to sell in the early going but built more value. If Yahoo sees Tumblr as a way to bulk up its banner ad or other programs, it could wind up making the exact same mistake that YouTube was able to avoid.

In the end, much of the answer to the question about Yahoo screwing up Tumblr rests on Marissa Mayer, and her ability to stave off the desires of both the board of directors and the other senior managers who see Tumblr as either a distraction or a digital cow to be milked and then sent to the abattoir.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Stephen Brace and Getty Images / Chris Jackson and Pamuk Sekerli Tardis

The outfit got a big boost this week thanks to a $1 million donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will be used to expand its growing video library and to make it easier for video browsers to find everything from Jon Stewart to Walter Cronkite.

Right now, the Internet Archive has more than 400,000 news clips dating from 2009 that it offers as a research tool to scholars, journalists and the general public. Users can search them using closed captioning tags and other metadata the Archive has assembled.

“You can discover culture that’s languishing unseen and unheard,” Roger Macdonald, Internet Archive television news project director, told me by telephone.

He explained that the Internet Archive, which last year began using BitTorrent as a distribution system, had been recording the broadcasts for years — “we ingest, index and make available,” in Macdonald’s words.

The new money will help the nonprofit afford the petabyte’s worth of broadcast data it collects every year, and stores on servers located at its office, a converted Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district. Macdonald said the Internet Archive will also hire people to improve what is for now a fairly rudimentary user interface.

There is also the question of how the Internet Archive will be able to obtain older TV footage — think Dan Rather, Howard Cosell, I Love Lucy and so on. For now, the television networks jealously guard their copyright and make such content available in very limited ways; for instance, users can watch old shows from NBC, ABC and CBS at New York’s Paley Center for Media — but cannot do so online.

Macdonald said the Internet Archive, which lets users watch 30 second clips or rent DVDs, is in talks with the networks about gaining access to their content in the capacity of a digital librarian.

Now MySiteApp, the Israeli company that previously put out the UppSite tool for converting websites into native apps, has brought out a new service called Brow.si for making mobile websites behave like apps. Brow.si is a multifunctional toolbar that can be easily inserted in a responsive website through the addition of some Javascript. It’s now in public beta, following a two-week closed beta period in which it was already used by a million people.

Pushing for the web

Much of this functionality is the sort of thing a publisher can put into a mobile website itself – content sharing through social networks, read-later options such as Pocket, font resizing and so on – but Brow.si aims to make its addition easier.

It also introduces something that’s previously only been available on apps: push notifications. Without the user having to install anything, they can subscribe to notifications from all the websites they visit that are using Brow.si, and consume that content through the platform’s own reader. Again, users don’t have to create an account for this – they just need to log into a social network (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) for sharing purposes, after which Brow.si will know which user is which.

What’s more, MySiteApp has become a WordPress VIP (see disclosure) feature partner, meaning sites using that publishing platform can easily install the Brow.si plugin. But again, that’s not all: as alluded to above, Brow.si is a platform in its own right, and it aims to help publishers monetize their content.

Cashing in

As MySiteApp CEO Gal Brill explained to me, publishers can add so-called “mini applications” that will only show up when the user activates the Brow.si toolbar. When the toolbar is swiped across the screen, it introduces new real estate below it, so the publisher could for example add a mini-app for the content recommendation engine Taboola, or they could even use this new space for traditional ads.

Mini-apps will be made available through Brow.si’s marketplace, and the company has an open API so third-party developers can help populate that marketplace with their own efforts.

It’s all very clever, and the simplicity of installation should give Brow.si a flying start. It remains to be seen, though, whether this sort of functionality will help publishers monetize their content on the mobile web. There are many variables at play here, from users’ desire for content-related push notifications (granularity seems to be lacking) to publishers’ desire for differentiated presentation.

That said, the addition of a new and relatively unobtrusive patch of mobile screen real estate for advertising purposes could turn out to be a welcome development.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

The winning startup will be announced at Book Expo America on May 31 and will receive $10,000 and the chance to pitch its product to William Morris Endeavor co-CEO Ari Emanuel.

Here are the finalists:

• BookCity: A way to find books set in your travel destination [photo illustrating this post]
• Captiv: Makes book recommendations based on your Twitter activity
• Coverlist: A solution that focuses on browsing book jackets
• Evoke:  A way to discover young adult literature through characters and browse books by emotion: “Readers may determine if they wish to be inspired, challenged, amused, or informed during their next read based on content generated by an audience-in-common” [photo on right]
• KooBrowser: Makes book recommendations based on your web browsing habits [photo on left]
• LibraryAtlas: A book discovery solution based on geolocation

I attended the demos on Sunday. A few thoughts:

• It’s hard to come up with a book discovery idea that is not similar to Goodreads in some way, though the finalists above did a good job. Many of the teams built ideas on Goodreads data or pulled other information from it.
• Book-recommendation algorithms were big (and, you’ll notice, didn’t make the cut above). A lot of teams described their idea as “Pandora for books” or “Netflix for books,” but they just meant that the software serves content recommendations, not that it actually streams content.
• Of the above, I thought that KooBrowser seemed most useful and like something I’d actually use. The idea is that, if you’re reading an article online, you could pull up a list of book recommendations based on the content of that article. The success of KooBrowser depends on how good the recommendations are, of course. But this idea seems to fit well into users’ actual everyday activity without being annoying. (I’m still not sold on the idea of receiving book recommendations pushed to my phone when I’m out and about.)

Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital.

“Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.”

Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries.

In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners.

While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

At a time when many publishers are trying to improve comments or else refuse to permit reader participation in the first place, Above the Law — which is a must-read for many lawyers and even judges — continues to let readers be as abrasive as they like. For example, here’s a screenshot of responses to a story by editor Elie Mystal about a scholarship for white people at Columbia:

I spoke this month with Mystal and John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media (the company that owns Above the Law), to learn more about the site’s comment philosophy and its effect on business strategy.

“If you write on the internet, people will say horrible things about you. We allow them to say it to our faces — if we didn’t, they’d say it on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr,” said Mystal. “Anyone who wants to write professionally better be prepared for ad hominem, unfair personal criticism. That’s not just part of media in 2013.”

Above the Law’s writers, most of whom are Ivy League law school graduates, are frequent targets of personal vitriol by readers, but Mystal says he still appreciates them.

“Commenters got me my job. Online people voted me in. I remember that when they’re screaming about how I look like a walrus.”

The commenters also serve as a vital part of the site’s overall content and business strategy. Lerner explained that the story comments appear as separate web pages, which allows Above the Law to sell additional ads, and that the site also works with comment platform Disqus to sell sponsored comments on its app. And, contrary to popular wisdom, advertisers aren’t skittish about their brands appearing next to off-color stories (like this one about a lawyer who invoked the First Amendment to excuse “slut-shaming” someone who turned him down) – a quick look shows that most of ATL’s sponsors are big and boring professional firms.

“It’s not like five years ago when a lot of advertisers didn’t know how the internet works,” said Mystal. “They realize there’s horrible comments on the Washington Post too.”

Above the Law readers can flag comments as offensive but that doesn’t mean the editors will respond. The only thing likely to be pulled down is something that offends absolutely everybody — “no one one cares if you’re offended”, says Mystal, adding that moderating each comment would be a full time job.

Ultimately, the no-holds-barred policy is not just simpler for the editors to oversee, but may also offer a more authentic view of humanity than the curated comments of other forums:

“I used to work in a big firm in downtown Manhattan, and there were some racists there. We’re the legal community, and there’s people who hold racist, homophobic views — you’re going to meet people like that. Those people may be your boss.”

(Image by ArTono via Shutterstock)

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

On an investor call on Monday morning, Mayer had noted that there are “obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr,” but that it’s too early to say what those opportunities will be.

The choice of location for the press conference — a hotel in Times Square — became clear as Mayer announced that Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street — the old New York Times building — and will be moving all 500 of its New York-based employees there. Tumblr’s employees, however, will stay downtown at their Union Square office.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage to say the move reflects “what a big player New York has become in the tech industry,” with Yahoo becoming “one of the largest tech presences in the city.” He noted that Tumblr is a “New York-grown company” and that NYC was the first city government to have its own Tumblr.

“Twenty years ago, if you looked out the window, there were plenty of yahoos in Times Square,” he said. “Now the Yahoos here will make an honest living … and help us grow and make our economy stronger.”