Seems as though there’s still some life in the old “hot news doctrine” horse yet. The NY Times’s Media Decoder has a brief piece on a dispute between Hollywood news sites Deadline.com and The Hollywood Reporter set for a July 2013 court date. In their joint report, the plaintiff — that would be Penske, owner of Deadline — said it was considering whether to augment its legal complaint with a new claim for “hot news misappropriation,” some of which “occurred as recently as the week of the filing of this Report.” In other words, Penske says...

PaidContent has a brief report on IDG Connect statistics suggesting that iPad owners are buying less physical media. The survey shows that 72% of worldwide professionals polled are buying fewer newspapers, 70% are buying fewer books, and 49% are buying fewer DVDs since owning an iPad. The biggest areas of decline for newspapers are Asia, with 90% of polled buying fewer, and the Middle East, with 80% buying fewer. This represents a bit of a double-whammy for ad-funded media like newspapers and magazines—not only are they getting fewer sales, but they’re also losing the print ad views of the...

On News & Tech, Douglas Page posts a diatribe against “the newspaper cognoscenti who see a terminal disease in every printed newspaper.” He declaims against papers turning digital because a digital newspaper is “just another website” and less attractive to advertisers than a printed publication. He suggests a number of possible ways to keep printed papers relevant in an increasingly electronic world where free news is only a laptop, tablet, or smartphone click away. For example: Adopt a hybrid circulation model. Turn your newspaper into a TMC product and deliver it to the doorsteps...

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

On Gizmodo, Jamie Condliffe has a report on a 74-slide presentation by Andrew Rushbass, CEO of The Economist Group. The Economist is one of few newspapers that has successfully implemented a paywall, and in the presentation Rushbass talks about how and why the company was able to do it. What’s more, Rushbass explains that tablet owners are reading more news than before, but reading it in different ways. He calls this the “Lean Back 2.0” paradigm (following the first “Lean Back,” which was paper books, then “Lean Forward”, which was the World Wide Web), and suggests that e-readers...

Note: Full text search and snippets are free to all. Various payment plans to view full text. Details below. From the Announcement (Also Includes Video and Images): The British Library and online publisher brightsolid today launch a website that will transform the way that people use historical newspapers to find out about the past. The British Newspaper Archive website will offer access to up to 4 million fully searchable pages, featuring more than 200 newspaper titles from every part of the UK and Ireland. The newspapers – which mainly date from the 19th century, but which include runs dating back to the first...

Could we be getting closer to a free Kindle—but not one provided by Amazon? The rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they? Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter...

A report on PaidContent suggests that many readers of the News of the World Sunday paper, which shut down in July amidst the News Corp phone-hacking scandal, have not switched to reading any other Sunday newspapers. The National Readership Survey estimated that 7,217,000 people read the paper in the period from January through June of this year, Of that number, 4,342,000 did not read any other Sunday paper. Subsequently, total readership of national Sunday papers fell from 19,221,000 to 15,859,000—meaning that 3,362,000 people stopped reading Sunday papers altogether. The article doesn’t speculate on the causes, and at...

Oh, what fun! Oh, what marvelous schadenfreude! Oh, where’s my popcorn bucket? At least one court has finally lost all patience with copyright troll Righthaven. Ars Technica reports that, after a series of attempted appeals and delays, including missed deadlines for appellate filings and an attempted excuse that Righthaven’s lawyer has to undergo surgery, the court that issued a $34,000 judgment against Righthaven in August has finally authorized lawyer Marc Randazza to enlist the aid of the US Marshals to collect nearly $64,000 in costs and fees from the company through asset seizure. I look forward to...

The Onion is a terrific on-line satire magazine that is almost always good for a chuckle. But perhaps the best chuckle of all comes from people unfamiliar with the Onion encountering its stories out of context and taking them seriously. One of the best known examples of that is the Onion article claiming Harry Potter got kids into Satanism, but there have been others. Recently, the Onion posted an article claiming that “every style of parenting produces disturbed, miserable adults.” It attributed this finding to a (fictitious) study done by the (real) California Parenting Institute of Santa Rosa. And,...

Here’s another new media magnate warning old media that the time is nigh to ditch the old print and jump into the new electronic world. Harvey Levin, founder of entertainment news site TMZ.com, spoke at the National Press Club on Monday where he told newspaper and magazine publishers to get out of the print business and get on the web. As the Washington Post points out, it does take some chutzpah for Levin to issue prescriptions to traditional news media, given that most celebrity gossip isn’t exactly Pulitzer-quality journalism. But on the other hand, in the six years since...

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, at Journalism.org, has released a study on how many people own tablets and how they use them. According to the study, 11% of the US adult population owns a tablet, 77% of those owners use their tablets daily, and 53% of tablet owners read news on them on a daily basis. The only things that they do more than that on tablets are e-mail (54%) and surf the web (67%). (E-book reading only comes in at 17%.) There are other figures relating to how many tablet news readers read more...