Last summer, the news organizations published stories that described the billions in wealth held by the family of the Chinese premier. In response, China shut down the Times’ Mandarin news service, blocked its English website and denied visas to journalists. The government also blocked Bloomberg‘s consumer-facing websites, bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek – a block that remains in place today.

Speaking at the Google Big Tent event in Washington on Friday, Bloomberg’s Chief Content Officer, Norman Pearlstine, explained the decision to publish.”We would lose our credibility [if we didn't],” said Pearlstine. He added that, in China, “information is perceived as belonging to the state” and said he doesn’t anticipate this view changing in the near future.

Bill Keller, a former editor-in-chief and current columnist for the New York Times, echoed Pearlstine’s views that news publishers can’t rationalize censorship by saying they would lose money and influence in China. ”They can make life miserable for you,” Keller said of the Chinese government, adding that “this will cost money.”

There may, however, be a bright side to being shut out of China. According to Keller, many Chinese are aware that the Times and Bloomberg deliberately took a financial hit to preserve their brands — and in the long run, this will earn them loyalty and trust.

Keller and Pearlstine spoke on a panel with media executive Mark Whitaker and Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, at a Google “Big Tent” event about security and free speech in the digital age.

This shift in behavior helps explain Bloomberg’s decision to update its iPad app this week to include deeper research layers and the company’s messaging system which is popular at elite financial firms like Goldman Sachs. Bloomberg said it used eye scanners and heat maps to design the new app, which looks like this:

A Bloomberg spokesperson said the iPad app has been “by far the fastest growing platform” among its subscribers, who each pay around $20,000 for an annual license. In the past, most Bloomberg users licensed a hardware terminal (“the Bloomberg box” — see a 1996 version below) but now two thirds of them opt instead for “Bloomberg Anywhere,” which lets them log in to various devices though a portable finger-print reader.

John Waanders, the Head of Bloomberg Mobile, said the company has been on BlackBerry since 2001 and then expanded to early mobile devices like pagers and WAP browsers. Since then, it has added a Twitter feed and an app store that features an app called “Angry Bonds.”

In the last few years, Waanders said traders have come to seek out the “lean back” experience associated with tablets, and that 38,000 of them are using the iPad app. This represents a little over 10 percent of the company’s estimated 313,000 global subscribers.

Bloomberg would not comment on the ratio of Apple to BlackBerry users among its customers but said that 50 percent of Bloomberg mobile users accessed the service on more than one device.

The company is owned by the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, and competes with Thomson Reuters to provide financial information to the financial sector.

Clarification: an early version of this story said 80% of users subscribe to “Bloomberg Anywhere”; the number is two thirds.

The new feature, which Bloomberg announced on Tuesday, comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission updated its disclosure rules to say that public companies can now reveal important news on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

For practical purposes, Bloomberg’s decision means traders will not have to monitor a separate screen to watch for companies or executives that announce news on Twitter. While most market-moving news still arrives by way of traditional news wire agencies or official websites, social media sites are becoming an increasingly important tool for distributing such information.

The SEC’s rule to allow social media disclosures comes after an investigation into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ decision to share relevant corporate information through a Facebook post.

Under the new rule, public companies that want to use social media platforms for market-moving news must first tell investors that they are doing so.

In a short order issued on Thursday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the media groups fifteen minutes to participate in a hearing scheduled for March 26. The groups also include Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Dow Jones and the First Amendment Coalition.

At the hearing, the tech companies will ask the Federal Circuit to overrule a lower court’s order that granted the media companies’ initial request to unseal various filings in the patent dispute. The documents are significant because they are likely to disclose sales and revenue figures that Apple and Samsung would prefer to keep secret while they hash out damages figures related to a massive $1 billion jury verdict.

Although court filings are public, companies sometimes ask to file confidential information under seal. In recent years, however, Apple has asked to seal documents on a nearly routine basis, which led the Reuters news agency to mount a successful court challenge this summer.

The controversy over the sealed documents has led other news agencies to take an interest in the issue. The media outlets’ participation at the upcoming hearing is likely to draw more attention to the Apple-Samsung documents, an unwelcome development for the companies.

This week’s order is below. Here’s the full list of media outlets who signed the application to attend the hearing: the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Gannett Co., Dow Jones, the First Amendment Coalition, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the American Society of News Editors. The filing was first spotted by Reuters.

Fed Circuit Grants NYT Permission to Intervene in Apple Samsung

Alas, Angry Bonds is not about disgruntled 007 agents. Instead, it is one of more than 45 apps in the Bloomberg App Portal that perform tasks like risk analysis and client management. The company didn’t disclose specific prices for the apps, which are free to preview, but it’s a safe bet they cost more than 99 cents. The Financial Times reports that Bloomberg will, like Apple, take a 30 percent cut.

The launch is significant because Bloomberg has now opened up its vast pool of financial data to outside developers who can then craft new products to help traders and analysts. Until now, the company founded by New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has closely guarded its proprietary system, which costs around $20,000 a year for a license.

The app store comes at a time that Bloomberg is adopting its famous financial terminal for the mobile environment through tools like Bloomberg Anywhere and selling a new edition of its core product, Bloomberg Next. The company and its main competitor Thomson Reuters were hard hit by the economic meltdown in 2009 that decimated many of their financial clients.

Here are some more screenshots of the apps (don’t have too much fun…)

Yet, the company did just that after a federal judge ruled that Bloomberg is entitled to record and sell corporate earnings call without permission.

Swiss-watch maker Swatch sued last year over Bloomberg’s practice of providing subscribers with transcripts of its earning calls. These are public calls on which corporate executives tell investors and reporters about performance and strategy.

Bloomberg asked the judge to throw out the case because the recording was a form of fair use. Fair use is a legal defense that allows people to use copyrighted material for purposes like reporting or scholarship.

In December, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein agreed with Bloomberg that the calls were fair use but gave Swatch more time to persuade him that there “material facts” that deserved a trial.

Swatch came up short last week after Hellerstein found that “What we have at best is a thin copyright” that didn’t deserve copyright protection.

To determine whether something is protected by fair use, courts use a four factor test that balance the rights of the author against the value of the use. Ordinarily, someone will run into trouble under the test if they use a whole work for commercial purposes as Bloomberg did.

But Hellerstein decided that the value of Bloomberg’s news reporting outweighed Swatch’s “thin copyright” and threw out the case.

Here’s a copy of the decision:

Bloomberg Fair Use Copy
(Image by dedMazay via Shutterstock)

The New York Times recently ran an exclusive exposé about Walmart and bribery allegations in Mexico, a story that helped to shave about $16 billion from the retailing giant’s market value over the past few days. For Reuters blogger Felix Salmon, that sparked an idea: why not sell early access to that kind of story to customers who might want to pay for it — say, hedge funds who could trade on the information? After all, he argued, Reuters and Bloomberg have a huge business providing financially sensitive information to paying clients. But is that really the kind of game the New York Times wants to start playing with the news?

The proposal seems to have a lot going for it, at least for a newspaper that is seeking whatever new sources of revenue it can find in the wake of a continued decline in advertising revenue. In its latest financial report, the New York Times said that not only did print advertising fall, but digital advertising did as well. Revenues from the newspaper’s subscription plan or “paywall” are substantial and growing, but not substantial enough to make up for the shortfall — and it’s not clear when they will get to that point, if ever. Perhaps selling early access to stories is one solution?

Should hedge funds get an early look at important news?

Salmon points out that this is the same kind of thing that newswires such as Reuters provide for their enterprise customers: early access to information that matters to them, and for which they are willing to pay a lot. The Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones wire are two parts of a similar business in a lot of ways — some customers get access to the news on the wire earlier than it appears in the newspaper or online. So why shouldn’t the New York Times get in on some of that action?

[H]ow much would hedge funds pay to be able to see the NYT’s big investigative stories during the trading day prior to the appearance of the story? It’s entirely normal, and perfectly ethical, for news organizations, including Reuters, to give faster access to the best-paying customers.

I had a fairly negative initial reaction to this idea, which I posted on Twitter — and an excerpt of the debate that ensued between Salmon, me, Emily Bell of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and John Gapper of the Financial Times (among others) appears below. For me, the idea of giving hedge funds preferential access to market-moving information seems wrong somehow, especially the idea that they would get access to these stories a day ahead of regular readers (many of whom pay for the paper). Would it be different if it was a few minutes, or an hour? Perhaps.

John Gapper said that if regular readers don’t value scoops, which many believe to be the case, then there should be nothing wrong with selling access to those who do value them. Others who debated the issue with me argued that media outlets like the New York Times are damned if they do and damned if they don’t — they get criticized for putting up paywalls and doing other things to try and monetize their content, but unless they can come up with new models their business appears to be doomed.

Does the news not have public value as well?

Just to be clear, I am all in favor of media companies like the Times trying new ways to monetize their content, including packaging it in different ways — e-books, PDF downloads, proprietary research reports like those the Economist and others (including GigaOM) offer, and so on. I’ve written about what I think the new CEO of the NYT should do, and most of those things were included in my prescription. And if we’ve learned anything from the music business, it’s that preferential access to music is something that fans will pay for. So why not preferential access to the news?

One of the things that bothers me about this idea is that I think there is still some kind of public-service or public-policy value in journalism, and especially the news — I don’t think it is just another commodity that should be designed to make as much money as possible. And if the New York Times were to take stories that are arguably of social significance and provide them to hedge funds in advance, I think that would make it a very different type of entity than it is now. What if it was a story about a dangerous drug or national security?

Maybe doing that would be more lucrative, and perhaps the future of broad, general-interest news vehicles is so unhealthy that they will all have to become controlled-circulation newsletters for the wealthy, with some free content provided almost as an afterthought. That’s effectively what Rupert Murdoch’s hard paywall at the The Times has done to that newspaper. Reuters and Bloomberg are somewhat different because they were created specifically to appeal to institutions, and started providing news to the public as a by-product.

That is not what people think of when they think of the New York Times — but perhaps it will be in the future. Will that be a good thing for the NYT, or for society in general? I honestly don’t know. Here’s the Storify with the conversation between Salmon, Emily Bell, John Gapper and I:

[View the story "Should the NYT monetize its scoops?" on Storify]

Should the NYT monetize its scoops?

Storified by Mathew Ingram · Tue, Apr 24 2012 17:32:25

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zert Sonstige and jphillipg

Much of the traditional media business has been in the doldrums for some time now, a victim of declining circulation and the free-fall of print advertising that has sucked the oxygen out of many traditional business models. And yet, many of these companies still have only taken small steps (if any) towards trying to carve out a future for themselves by adapting to the digital world. Why is that? As Paul Smalera of Reuters argued in a recent post, the biggest issue is not that they can’t see the need to change, it’s that they are caught between trying to manage their existing businesses — which in most cases still produce the bulk of their revenue — and trying to create new ones. In media as in every other field, the fastest and most successful innovators will almost always be the ones that have no legacy business to worry about.

The impetus for Smalera’s post was a table produced by LinkedIn as part of a report that looked at which industries and sectors prospered (or failed to) during and after the recession. At the very bottom of the list of industries that have shrunk was the newspaper business — which won’t come as any surprise to those who have followed the industry’s twists and turns over the past decade, or anyone who has noticed events like the recent sale of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News for about 10 percent of what they fetched in a sale just six years ago. At the same time, however, Smalera notes that the “online publishing” sector was one of the fastest-growing industries:

In other words, traditional media outlets like newspapers may not be succeeding, but online publishing has never been better. It’s not clear exactly what kinds of companies or businesses were included in LinkedIn’s definition of online publishers for the purposes of the report — presumably it would cover digital-only entities like The Huffington Post and the rest of the AOL empire, as well as Yahoo’s publishing units (both of whom have been hiring writers away from traditional print outlets) and a number of other online-only publishers such as Politico. And obviously some traditional companies like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have significant online operations, although whether they were included isn’t clear either.

It’s also worth noting that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have been hiring journalists at a fairly rapid pace over the past year or so, and while they fall into a different category in LinkedIn’s ranking, that’s definitely a sign that digital media is in pretty good shape (Bloomberg has also been able to absorb Businessweek magazine’s estimated annual losses of $20 million or so). For both companies, of course, the consumer-facing parts of their media businesses are funded by proprietary information services that are designed for financial and other specialty markets — so their digital businesses subsidize their “traditional” media assets, instead of the other way around.

Many print-first outlets are trapped in the valley of death

Smalera suggests that newspapers in particular have been trapped in a classic “innovator’s dilemma” as described by Clay Christensen in his book of the same name, in which they have failed to adapt to the web as quickly as they should have because they have been busy running their existing businesses:

They have been trapped in a terrible mindset that they are in the business of selling newspapers. The leap from paper to digital may be vast, but to newspaper publishers, it seemed like vaulting to a different business entirely, one they were loathe to get into [and so]…

they get caught in the Valley of Death – the one Harvard business professor and Silicon Valley guru Clayton Christensen has written about in countless books and articles. Instead of innovating for the next business cycle, these companies die crossing the Valley, wringing every last drop of cash out of the last cycle.

I think Intel chairman Andy Grove actually popularized the term “valley of death” in that kind of context, but Smalera is still on target with his main point, which is that it is almost impossible for companies who have a dominant business of one kind — in one particular market, serving one particular kind of customer — to successfully cannibalize their own business by investing heavily in a new one. Even if they agree that change is necessary, the impetus will always be to continue spending most of the company’s time on managing the existing business, especially if it continues to produce a majority of a firm’s revenues (as print still does for most newspapers).

I had lunch recently with a senior executive at a media property that is part of a much larger media and entertainment conglomerate, and he talked about how difficult it was to get resources for the things that he and others knew they needed to do or experiment with, because the bulk of the company’s interest lay in maximizing the revenue and profitability of its existing businesses — not experimenting with new and untested ones. That’s why the creators of Huffington Post were able to build a massive new media entity worth $315 million in a little over five years, while the giants of the traditional media industry more or less stood still. Inertia is a powerful force.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zarko Drincic and Yan Arief Purwanto

The city has reportedly signed a contract with a Virginia company to sell websites ending in “.nyc” to people who find “.com” and “.org” sites a little too, well, New Jersey.

The company says it will share at least $3.6 million of the revenue it collects from selling the domain names according to city spokesman Nicholas Sbordone.

New York City is clamoring to be among the first cities in the world to offer its own domain name.

But the city does not yet have a plan in place to protect New York businesses from cyber-squatters who buy domain names and hold them for ransom.

This epidemic of cyber-squatting has resulted in major US companies launching the Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight to stop the issuance of more domain names. Companies have likened to process to blackmail or a hold-up.

To businesses, which only need one website address, new domain names are often a tax they must pay to protect their brand. It’s as if someone printed an alternate copy of the White Pages and asked companies to buy a listing before it was sold to someone else.

In this case, a New York City company like Bloomberg would have to buy Bloomberg.nyc or face having to buy it back at a higher price. Other iconic New York City brands will likely watch nervously to see what becomes names like of “gossipgirl.nyc” or “magnoliabakery.nyc”

Sbordone says the city plans to require owners of a “.nyc” website to have ties to New York City. But the legal costs of enforcing such rules against squatters is often more expensive than simply paying a ransom to reclaim a brand.

A website called NYCDomain.org is already taking orders to reserve .NYC names.

The company claims new search and menu functions will make it easier for traders and other financial professionals to navigate layers of data. Bloomberg NEXT also offers new graphic applications that aggregate and display deeper pools of information.

Bloomberg says that 110,000 of its 313,000 clients have already signed up for the new service and that over 99% of them have decided to keep it.

The company is providing Bloomberg Next and related training for free as it seeks to retain the traders and other clients who pay about $20,000 per year for the service, which Bloomberg describes as a “three-legged stool of news, data and analytics.”

Bloomberg competes with Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI) in the lucrative financial data market and reportedly overtook its rival for the first time last year.

Bloomberg NEXT is part of an effort to connect with a new generation of clients who grew up on internet browsers, and are more apt to use a mouse than the company’s customized keyboard. In the same way that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other internet companies are trying to personalize the internet, Bloomberg NEXT relies on functions like AutoComplete and user profiles to offer more individualized information streams.

For the media industry, the Bloomberg and Reuters financial terminals are important because they provide income for news gathering operations that deliver financial and political information to both traders and consumers.

Bloomberg’s consumer products include its website, a TV channel and Business Week magazine which the company is attempting to reinvigorate through a series of shocking cover images.

Bloomberg NEXT offers a more personalized version of news for financial subscribers but will not result in immediate changes to the company’s consumer website. A company representative noted, however, that the website will undergo major changes by the end of the year.

Tom Secunda, one of Bloomberg’s cofounders, admitted during today’s press conference that “our numbers are going up a bit slowly” as a result of a North American financial sector that is still limping from the financial crisis. The company says emerging markets represent its most important growth segment.

Secunda laughed off a question about whether Apple’s lawyers might bristle at the use of “NEXT” (the same name as a 1980′s Steve Jobs computer company). Secunda said that, if Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) makes trouble, Bloomberg can always put up a fuss over the former’s use of “launchpad” in its new operating system.

Bloomberg was founded in 1981 by Mike Bloomberg, the current mayor of New York. Bloomberg and its rival Reuters were featured in the 2010 sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”