In a letter addressed to ICANN and posted on the Guild’s website, President Scott Turow stated the group “strongly object to ICANN’s plans to sell the exclusive top-level domain rights for generic book-industry terms.” The Wall Street Journal reports the publishing group has similar objections. (Update: the AAP sets out the reasons for its objections in a letter here.)

The issue, which remains arcane for many outside of the domain name industry, arose as part of ICANN’s decision to open up the list of top-level domains to all comers. In practice, this means hundreds of new suffixes will join familiar ones like “.com” and “.org” as part of the internet. It also means companies that win the right to control names can choose between keeping the names for their own use or earning money when the names are bought and sold in the open market.

Both Amazon and Google have paid to obtain the right to run hundreds of new names though it’s still unclear what the companies intend to do with them. Google has indicated it will keep suffixes related to its core business, such as “.goog” or “.search,” for its private use while making others like “.store” and “.dog” open to anyone. Amazon, which also wants to run names like “.kindle” and “.movie” declined to respond to the Wall Street Journal’s request for comment.

Barnes & Noble has also objected that Amazon could abuse its control over the names to the detriment of the publishing industry. In theory, this could occur if Amazon agreed to to grant a “.book” or “.author” website to favored writers or publishers but not to rivals.

Google and Amazon are just two of hundreds of companies applying to run the new domain names. In some cases, there is only one applicant for the name while in other cases multiple firms have asked ICANN to run names like “.movie.” In the latter situation, ICANN will choose between the competing applicants. (You can see the full list of proposed names and applicants here).

The timing and the process for the arrival of the new names is unclear. In no small part, this is due to the murky operations of ICANN. The LA-based organization is nominally a nonprofit with a mission to run the internet’s naming system, but it has attracted controversy for failing to protect trademark owners who accuse it of facilitating “shakedowns,”  and for self-dealing among its members.

Last week, the CEO of GoDaddy, which is the world’s biggest registrar of domain names, predicted the first series of new names will arrive in June and that others will be rolled out in batches of 20 in the weeks that follow.

Under the Times‘ Starbucks plan, which went into effect last week but was announced today, readers will be entitled to read three articles a day from each of the News, Business, Technology and Most Emailed sections. The Times will also offer three more articles from a rotating list of other sections like Sports.

The Starbucks offer comes at a time when the Times is tightening loopholes around its so-called “metered paywall” which caps readers at 10 free articles a month.

Times spokesperson, Linda Zebian, confirmed by phone that the 15 articles available through Starbucks are in addition to the 10 free monthly ones. The catch, however, is that the Times’ chooses the free Starbucks stories. It offers them on a special landing page that looks like this:

Zebian would not provide specifics about the business arrangements between the Times and Starbucks, and only noted that the Times has long sold its newspapers through the coffee chain. Most Starbucks locations across the country provide free Wi-Fi.

The Starbucks gambit is just one way that news brands are using Wi-Fi to promote and distribute their digital content. In August, the Wall Street Journal announced a plan to provide free Wi-Fi access in more than 1300 hotspots in New York and San Francisco; the only requirement is for readers to log-in to the Journal’s website. These Wi-Fi schemes provide the news companies not only with exposure, but also allow them to glean valuable customer data such as where and when readers visit their sites.

Late on Friday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Wall Street Journal  announced on Twitter that free access will begin at midnight:

PSA: We'll be dropping our paywall beginning tonight at midnight through Sunday due to the winter storm. #blizzard #Nemo—
Sara Blask (@sarablask) February 08, 2013

The New York Times will do the same. In response to an email, spokesperson Eileen Murphy wrote, “We’re dropping the pay gate tonight at 6 and will re-evaluate tomorrow evening.”

The practice of lifting paywalls, which typically restrict the number of articles a vistior can read, is becoming commonplace during major public events or during critical needs for information. The New York papers did this during Hurricane Sandy and the election. As paywalls spread at newspapers across the country, it’s likely most papers will do the same.

(Image by Trudy Wilkerson via Shutterstock)

I started things off with a critical tweet about a Bloomberg story by Edmund Lee on how the New York Times paywall was working “better than anyone had guessed,” which I contrasted with a post of mine about the decline in traffic to the NYT site (as measured by comScore) and what appeared to be a corresponding decline in advertising revenue — including digital revenue. Edmund responded that his story said circulation revenue has made up for the shortfall in ad revenue.

Edmund is right, of course — he did mention this in his story, using numbers from an analyst (which of course are estimates). And so I acknowledged that saying he “ignored” the shortfall was too strong — but still, his piece made it sound as though all you have to do is put up a paywall and your problems are solved, which I think is a Pollyanna-ish viewpoint. At which point, Josh Sternberg of Digiday noted that ad rates haven’t gone up at the NYT, as detailed in his recent post, even though that was the assumption on the part of many paywall advocates — i.e., that a paying audience would be worth more to advertisers:

@joshsternberg @mathewi fact is CPMs are going down for everyone -- paid sites at least have stemmed those webwide declines in ad rates

—
Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) December 23, 2012

At this point, I made the same point I’ve tried to make before about paywalls — that they aren’t a solution for everyone, and that even for those where such a strategy is working, they can’t be the entire strategy:

@joshsternberg @edmundlee: the reason I harp on this is the impression that a paywall is *the* answer -- where is the rest of the strategy?

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Peter Kafka of All Things Digital also jumped in to confirm that the NYT says the paywall has had virtually zero effect on ad rates:

.@mathewi @edmundlee @joshsternberg NYT people tell me pay wall has zero effect on cpm.

—
Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 23, 2012

@pkafka @edmundlee @joshsternberg: the assumption was that paying customers would be seen as more valuable -- what happened to that idea?

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Raju Narisetti, head of the Wall Street Journal’s digital unit, responded that one rationale for paywalls is that it allows newspapers to learn more about their readers, and thus hopefully target ads better — which is part of why I am in favor of membership-style approaches rather than blanket paywalls:

@rajunarisetti @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg: exactly why I think a more membership/tiered approach is better than a plain wall

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

I noted that the latest estimates are that the online advertising market grew by 18% in the third quarter to $9.3 billion, and yet few newspapers — including the NYT — have seen anything like that kind of increase. Why?

@edmundlee @joshsternberg: relevant stat -- digital ad sales up 18 percent. how much of that growth are papers getting? adage.com/article/digita…

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Former Wall Street Journal managing editor and co-founder of paywall provider Press+ Gordon Crovitz then chimed in with a stat about how most paywalled sites see as much as a 30% premium for their ads — raising the obvious question of why the NYT hasn’t seen that:

@crovitz @rajunarisetti @pkafka @edmundlee @joshsternberg: so then what does it mean that the NYT has seen none of that?

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

Bill Grueskin — former WSJ deputy managing editor and now academic dean of Columbia’s journalism school — also jumped in to add that paywalls can harm a content business because they reduce the number of readers, and that affects the scale of the business:

@rajunarisetti @mathewi @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg But scale is so diminished by most paywalls. And advertisers demand scale

—
  (@BGrueskin) December 23, 2012

At which point, former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton said that quality is more important than scale:

@BGrueskin @rajunarisetti @mathewi @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg More advertisers are looking for quality not simply scale

—
Les Hinton (@leshinton) December 23, 2012

And Crovitz came up with what for me was the quote of the day regarding ad rates and the newspaper business:

... Of course with plummeting CPMs, flat may be the new premium for paid pages @rajunarisetti @pkafka @mathewi @edmundlee @joshsternberg

—
Gordon Crovitz (@crovitz) December 23, 2012

I suggested that it would be nice to see the industry spend as much time and resources on trying to get creative about advertising instead of just writing off the whole business as a lost cause, and Jon Steinberg — president of BuzzFeed — agreed:

.@joshsternberg @edmundlee: I'd like to see as much innovation around monetization as there is around display or design like Snow Fall

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

.@mathewi @joshsternberg it's amazing pay walls and not better ad products were the solution. Agree that creates a much smaller business.

—
Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) December 23, 2012

And Grueskin said that the biggest issue for newspapers and advertising is that they no longer have the kind of pricing power they used to when they controlled the platform:

@BGrueskin @leshinton @rajunarisetti @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg: that is the entire newspaper industry problem in a nutshell

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) December 23, 2012

@mathewi @bgrueskin @rajunarisetti @davisshaver @edmundlee @joshsternberg True. Trite, but: quality & ingenuity score - no shortage of them

—
Les Hinton (@leshinton) December 23, 2012

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni

Through the month of September, readers will be able to use, courtesy of the Journal, 1300 hotspots blanketing large swathes Manhattan, including high traffic neighborhoods like Times Square and West Village. The service is also available in parts of three other boroughs. In San Francisco, the Wi-Fi will be available in places like Nob Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf.

• See also Why free Wi-Fi marketing is smart and Google, Boingo bring their free Wi-Fi experiment to mall rats

So why is the conservative Journal giving out free internet service to all comers? According to a spokesperson, “We’re always looking for ways to give people the opportunity to sample The Wall Street Journal. This is the latest in a long history of those efforts.”

This is one of the paper’s more novel initiatives but it may prove effective. While it’s unlikely that an iPad-touting tourist in Central Park is going to whip out a credit card and subscribe, the free Wi-Fi could be a terrific way for the Journal to let new users encounter its homepage (provided the service doesn’t have the janky qualities of some other free Wi-Fi initiatives).

The paper will also garner valuable customer data since non-subscribers must register to access the WiFi. Existing subscribers can simply log-in using their accounts; this too promises to deliver a trove of marketing data about the places that Journal readers frequent.

Here’s a screenshot from the Journal page promoting the service (sorry Uptown, no Wi-Fi for you!)

(Image by phloxii via Shutterstock)

Update, 5:00 PM: Skift reports that Frommer’s is laying off the entire Frommers.com team, while “the Frommer’s book editors will be moving from Hoboken’s waterfront to the the Zagat floor at Google’s offices in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The Frommer’s Unlimited staff, which is made up of a number of UK residents both in the U.S. and in offices in London’s Brick Lane, will be phased out according to more complicated UK labor laws.”

–

Google is buying the 55-year-old Frommer’s Travel Guides from publisher John Wiley & Sons for a reported price of $23 million. The business has been up for sale since the spring.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The deal is expected to close shortly. Google hasn’t yet decided whether the Frommer’s guidebooks will continue to be published in print or whether they will eventually migrate entirely to online. It is also possible that the Frommer’s brand could be melded into the Zagat brand.

Google acquired Zagat for $151 million in September 2011 and made all of the brand’s listings free through Google+ Local in May.

Frommer’s has published over 300 guidebooks since its founding in 1957 and also includes Frommers.com, which has some travel content available for free. In addition, Frommer’s recently partnered with iOS publisher Inkling to make seven of its titles available in interactive digital editions for iPad and iPhone. Wiley — like other practical nonfiction publishers — has struggled to make its content profitable in an era when a massive amount of travel content is available free on the internet through sites like TripAdvisor.com. While Frommers.com has forums and user reviews, it is unlikely to be anybody’s go-to web destination for travel content.

Wiley announced in March that it was selling Frommer’s along with other consumer lines like Webster’s New World dictionaries and CliffsNotes. Revenue from the combined assets up for sale was around $80 million for fiscal year 2012, with Frommer’s making up an undisclosed portion of that. Wiley’s fiscal year 2012 revenues totaled $1.78 billion. In a release confirming the Frommer’s sale, Wiley reports that “proceeds from this sale, and others that may arise from the sale of other consumer assets, will be redeployed to support growth opportunities in Professional/Trade; Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly; and Global Education businesses.”

Zite was already working with CNN (its parent company), Fox Sports, the Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Bleacher Report, HLNtv, Motley Fool, The Next Web and VentureBeat.

Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, which is available for iPad, iPhone and Android. Like the rest of the content delivered through Zite, partner publishers’ content is subject to an algorithm that delivers personalized stories to users based on their likes and dislikes.

Publishers don’t pay Zite to be included in the program. “We believe there is adequate value being created for both parties in the terms of the agreement,” a company spokeswoman said.

Zite’s competitors are also entering into more partnerships with publishers, though their business models work in different ways. The New York Times is now making its content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard as part of its “NYT Everywhere” program, with Flipboard’s revenue derived from advertising. Pulse partnered with the Wall Street Journal  to offer content subscriptions through its app and is sharing the subscription revenue.

After much speculation, News Corp. has confirmed that it is considering a split that would see the media and entertainment conglomerate cleave itself in two, with the newspaper (and book publishing) assets carved out as a separate unit from its TV and movie businesses. Although the company could still decide not to do so, the idea raises an interesting question: Assuming that chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch is interested in seeing that newspaper-only unit succeed — as opposed to just selling it to someone else or slowly liquidating it — what would he have to do in order to make that happen? (Update: News Corp. officially confirmed the split on Thursday)

When it comes to the digital aspects of its newspaper business — which includes the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times of London and the Australian, among other prominent names — News Corp. is a creature of contradictions. Many have criticized Murdoch for being too quick to erect “hard” paywalls at newspapers like the Times (as opposed to soft or metered paywalls like the one at the New York Times), since that resulted in a massive loss of readers for the venerable British paper. Murdoch also maintained the paywall at the Wall Street Journal after buying it in 2007, despite initially saying that he planned to remove it.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s The Daily, a bold experiment aimed at creating a digital-only newspaper designed and produced specifically for the iPad and other tablets. Even if you see the venture as something of a failure — given that it doesn’t seem to have come close to the readership or revenue targets News Corp. envisioned when it was launched — it is still a substantial ($30 million plus) bet on the mobile and digital future of news. It may be an attempt to duplicate the old scarcity model of news, but that’s a much bigger investment than many other traditional media entities have made in the potential future.

Less like The Daily, more like the Pulse deal

Is The Daily something that News Corp. could build on or expand with its other newspaper properties? It no doubt has lessons it could teach the conglomerate’s other papers about what works and what doesn’t in terms of mobile or digital apps, but to some extent the iPad newspaper is a very different animal. For one thing, it still doesn’t even have a website where you can go and browse the content the way you would with the Journal or the Australian — so it is more or less a hermetically sealed tablet product, and it’s not clear yet whether that’s what readers (or enough readers) actually want.

Arguably more interesting as an indicator of future direction are some of the moves the Wall Street Journal has been making. As we’ve noted a number of times, the Journal has been experimenting with a variety of ways of moving what it does into a digital future, including the expansion of its video offerings — which my colleague Jeff Roberts has described in more detail — as well as more recent ventures like the partnership it signed on Tuesday with Pulse, the news-reader/aggregator app for the iPad.

What’s particularly interesting about the Pulse arrangement is how it differs from a similar deal that the New York Times struck with Flipboard, another news-reader/aggregation app. While the NYT is distributing content to existing subscribers through the tablet app and hoping to generate additional revenue from advertising within Flipboard, the Wall Street Journal is actually selling subscriptions to some of its content in a new way: readers can click and get access to just the Water Cooler, the Technology Digest and other sections rather than having to subscribe to the whole newspaper.

Is that how people want to read the news? No one really knows yet, but at least the Journal is experimenting with one possible solution — and you could argue that it is a smart way of taking advantage of the brand value that the newspaper has in the financial sector, where readers are theoretically more likely to want to pay for content. With the Pulse deal, they can subscribe to only the specific content they want (which might attract more casual readers than a blanket subscription to the whole paper) and they also take advantage of the alternative distribution method that Pulse represents. Those are both arguably smart moves.

Let the content flow and monetize it elsewhere

So what does the future hold for a standalone News Corp. newspaper company? Undoubtedly, there would have to be cutbacks and even asset sales, since the newspaper operations will no longer have the financial support provided by the parent’s entertainment assets — and $30-million bets on experiments like The Daily would probably also be a thing of the past, for the same reason. As media analyst Ken Doctor notes in a post on the future of News Corp., Murdoch might even wind up deciding to sell or dispose of everything other than the Journal.

But if News Corp. (or whoever winds up owning the newspaper assets) wants to try and make the transition to a digital future instead of just liquidating its properties, it would do well to continue the kinds of experiments that the Wall Street Journal has been implementing: in other words, let content flow through different channels like the Pulse app or Flipboard and find readers wherever they are, and then monetize that content where it is being consumed instead of pushing people to a website. And think more about how to make use of video — and other alternative content forms — rather than just the traditional news story.

At some point, the Journal and some of Murdoch’s other properties could also try to implement some of the ideas that former Washington Post managing editor and now WSJ managing editor Raju Narisetti has proposed with respect to a “reverse paywall” approach — one that focuses on membership benefits for devoted readers, rather than simply penalizing everyone with a paywall. Whether News Corp. or its successor company have the gumption to try something like that, however, remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rego Korosi

While Twitter already provides users with the option to expand a Tweet to view replies, re-Tweets or favorites, the new expanded Tweets will provide an actual preview of the content being Tweeted from select media partners. Media partners whose content will display in the expanded Tweets include The Wall Street Journal, Time, MSNBC, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Der Spiegel Online, BuzzFeed and TMZ, among many others.

The new expanded Tweets will begin appearing on Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile site on Wednesday, and will expand to Twitter for Android and iPhone apps soon.

While Twitter’s CEO has often said that the company is not a media company, GigaOM recently explored Twitter’s evolving role in content curation and production. Twitter’s partnership with NASCAR and hiring of an editor to curate NASCAR Tweets showed how the company is increasingly toeing the line between media production and media platform. And during the NBA finals, it encouraged fans to follow specific Twitter users, and used the basketball game to promote their specific Twitter users’ content.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But in the case of book publishers and Apple, people are tossing legal duties to the wind in the hopes that press leaks will shape a settlement.

For anyone who missed it, the case involves the Justice Department raking Apple and publishers over the coals for allegedly conspiring to raise the price of e-books.

Unlike in typical antitrust investigations, the public has already been treated to a steady parade of details.

The leaks began this spring when the case began spilling onto the pages of the Wall Street Journal as “sources” and “people close to the matter” passed on details about an impending lawsuit.

Then in late March, “two people close to the negotiations” told Reuters that talks were advancing and, last week, the WSJ started naming names — reporting that three of the publishers wanted to settle but that Apple and two other publishers wanted to stand their ground.

Some of the details refer to a deposition from a Barnes & Noble executive that, by law, is confidential.

It appears the sources are breaking their legal duties in the hopes of pressuring Apple and the holdouts into a settlement. But who are they?

There are only two realistic sources of the leaks.

One is the Justice Department itself where a departing chief appears determined to bag one more anti-trust scalp on her way out. In a recent interview with the WSJ, Sharis Pozen growled that she wouldn’t let competitors set prices — an unmistakable shot across the bow of Apple and the publishers. A series of leaks would only add to this leverage.

Michael Cader, the founder of respected publishing industry newsletter and website Publishers Lunch, noted last week that “many people in the industry believe Justice has been using the WSJ for a while now to press in public a case that they have yet to close in private or bring to the courts.”

The only other source of the leaks could be the publishers who have allegedly thrown in the towel already.

According to Andre Barlow, an antitrust expert and former Justice Department attorney, some companies prefer to simply settle rather than suffer the legal expenses and shareholder pressure that comes with an ongoing investigation. This can be the case whether or not they actually did something wrong.

“Some may just want to get this thing out of the way,” said Barlow, adding that the publishers don’t have the same deep pockets and stomach for a fight as their alleged co-conspirator, Apple. Barlow also says that parties are likely to turn to the press after internal persuasion has failed.

But what of those doing the leaking? Do they risk being punished?

“Are there penalties for leaking information that’s highly confidential? Yes. But in practical terms, it’s hard to uncover what happened,” said Barlow.

The investigation is still ongoing, as is a related class action suit. Any lawsuit or settlement with the Justice Department will produce a civil complaint that could strengthen the hand of the class action lawyers.

Publishers’ lawyers contacted for this story declined to comment on the record. A Justice Department spokesperson left a phone message but did not provide a statement on the Department’s policy on leaks.