Tag: media

Ten Things Your Public Librarians Won’t Tell You

~ K ~ 8 Comments
Image from acuratedlifestyle.blogspot.com

1. We are not stupid. We know when you are gaming the system. We know when you are trying to be deceitful. And we will monitor you if you raise suspicion or seem consistently dishonest.

2. When you come to the checkout counter (aka circulation desk) with more than 5 CDs at time, we pretty much know you’re burning these CDs on your machine but it’s not our job to police you.

3. We would really, really appreciate it if you stopped using that big floppy disk that has virtually nil storage capacity compared to a tiny flash drive that has tons of storage. In this case, bigger is not better.

4. It’s almost always not a stupid question.

5. We know that you swear on your dog’s life that you returned that book and returned it on time, but if we can’t find it on our shelves, we’re pretty certain it’s still in your possession in some form, most likely under a seat in your car. Please check and double-check under the seats in your car before adamantly insisting that you’ve returned an item.

6. You are responsible for a borrowed library item in your possession. As a result, we will hold you responsible if it is returned damaged or missing in any way (eg, water damage, cracked CDs, missing DVDs from a set, an unidentifiable sticky substance we do not want to touch without using a biohazard suit).

7. We love talking to our patrons and spending time with them at the circulation desk, but be conscientious of others. Sometimes lines quickly and quietly form behind right behind you and it’s not pleasant for another person to be kept waiting because you want to keep talking. If you really want to keep talking, at least move to the side so we can speedily assist the next person but really everyone would prefer it if you saved the conversation for a less busy time.

8. Please do not shelve things yourself. You’ll most likely put it back in the wrong place and cause undue distress to others because it can’t be found. If you pull any library item off a shelf and choose not to check it out, please ask the staff where you should place it. In some libraries, there are carts for depositing items you do not want. If this is not the case, leave the items on an empty table or (even better!) bring it to the circulation desk and tell the staff you don’t want the items.

9. We are not tax advisors. Do not get huffy when we cannot offer tax advice beyond the location of your tax forms. (Actually, some librarians might be cheeky enough to tell you this.) Some libraries have third-party tax assistance that comes in and helps patrons with tax inquiries; ask your local library whether this is a service it offers. In addition, do not get huffy with us if we have run out of tax forms. We do not poop out these documents on site and we are not intentionally withholding them from you; they are provided to us by the government who would prefer that you file electronically by walking into H&R Block or using Turbo Tax. Blame them, not us.

10. Using the library is a privilege. If you rack up fines, pay them. If they’re extremely excessive, you may be able to negotiate them down some by speaking to the person who oversees circulation. If the fines are constantly excessive, we lose patience and sympathy. Take care of the items that are loaned to you (remember rule #6!), return them within the allotted time frame (or pay promptly if returned late), and be courteous to staff.

If the library is your primary source for books and other media, then you need library staff to be your “friends.” Being a nice, courteous patron goes a long way and staff will go out of their way to make your visits pleasant and satisfactory. Be a consistently rude or difficult patron… well, don’t be surprised if all your library experiences suddenly become harrowing.

Newsday.com begins to charge for content… and why it will become free again

~ K ~ 4 Comments

So the owners of Newsday have decided that beginning Wednesday, October 28, the majority of content on its website, Newsday.com, will only be available to subscribers of OptimumOnline (Cablevision‘s Internet Service Provider), Newsday, or those who are willing to pay $5 per week.

Although I have a mother and other relatives who live on Long Island, I’m not so desperate for online content about Long Island that I’ll be forking over $5 a week. How about you?

However, nonpaying customers will have access to some of newsday.com’s information, including the home page, school closings, weather, obituaries, classified and entertainment listings. There also will be some limited access to Newsday stories.

Newsday described the move as one that would create a “pioneering Web model,” combining the newspaper’s newsgathering services with Cablevision’s electronic distribution capabilities. About 75 percent of Long Island households are Newsday home delivery or Cablevision online customers or both, according to Newsday. Optimum Online customers total 2.5 million in the New York area, the paper said.

I’m not very business-minded so perhaps I’m missing something here. It seems that Newsday is essentially closing off most of their content to anyone who isn’t already funneling money into its parent company, Cablevision. A grandmother who lives in Des Moines, Iowa and simply *has* to know how her granddaughter’s lacrosse team in Patchogue is doing might be willing to pay for weekly access. Most people will see the prompt for payment as nothing more than a minor disturbance that can easily be rectified by clicking the X in the top right-hand corner of the screen or typing a new URL in the address bar.

We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Remember the now-defunct TimesSelect?

TimesSelectIf you don’t, let me refresh your memory. For 2 years, The New York Times wanted to take their revenue streams for a test drive and see if they could charge for some of their popular content such as op-ed columnists and any articles older than 30 days. Subscribers paid either $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year. Or one could pay to access a full, archived article. According to a 2007 Reuters article, TimesSelect generated $10 million in revenue each year. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at. Especially when ad revenue is tanking. (And currently, circulation revenue is up above ad revenue for the Times.) So what happened that the Times was willing to forfeit $10 million in annual TimesSelect subscriber revenue?

During the TimesSelect years, site traffic plunged to new lows. Unique visitors plummeted. The people who needed access to TimesSelect (ie, students and media professionals) already had access to it. But the average consumer wasn’t willing to pay for it. Especially when aggregate sites such as Drudge Report and Yahoo! News would link to sites that offered similar content for free. The earlier-reference Reuters article summed it up beautifully:

The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising.

Since the disappearance of TimesSelect, the number of unique visitors and regular traffic has skyrocketed. But that hasn’t kept The New York Times Co. from losing millions upon millions of dollars every day. The ad revenue generated from increased traffic and readership unfortunately just hasn’t been enough to cover it.

But let’s take a step away from the Times‘s dilemma now and back to Newsday whose content is much more focused and much more local. Newsday‘s target is to people who are either on Long Island or are interested in Long Island happenings. Since at least 75 percent of people on Long Island will already likely have subscriber access to Newsday.com through OptimumOnline or their Newsday subscription, I suppose Newsday is hoping the other 25 percent will be willing to fork over the money to access their content or sign up for one of the two subscriptions. (I feel pretty safe saying OptimumOnline practically holds a monopoly for IS providers on the Island and only recently has Verizon FIOS begun slightly breaking into their market. But not by much. The triple-play deal [cable, phone, Internet] has given Islanders an incentive to stick with Cablevision.)

Media industry analysts will be eyeing Newsday.com’s subscriber model with a careful eye. Newsday.com hopes to be a model of the future but I’m afraid it’s simply a repeat of TimesSelect’s past. Newsday.com will make money during this period; that I don’t doubt. But they’ll find that their number of unique visitors will drop so low that the subscriber model will begin to render itself worthless and Newsday.com will be forced to make its content free (with ad-supported revenue, of course) for all once again.

Until media companies figure out a way to generate decent revenue from web advertising and consumers decide what’s valuable enough to pay for, I have a funny feeling we’ll all be stuck in this ad-supported free content limbo for a while.

(Image from Huffington Post)