Several of the biggest names in the daily news business joined the AP in its fight against online news clipping service Meltwater News this week. The publishers coming to support AP by filing an amicus brief in its ongoing lawsuit include the New York Times Company, Advance Publications, Gannett, The McClatchy Company and the Newspaper Association of America (which represents 2,000 organizations).

Last year, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against Meltwater claiming the service — a paid electronic clipping service that monitors and delivers news stories on keyword-specific topics to its paying customers — violated AP copyright and competed directly against AP by illegally selling its content. Since then, the back and forth battle over fair use and what’s fair on the Internet has intensified, with supporters on both sides.

This week, the newspapers weighed in and filed an amicus brief supporting the AP (download the full PDF of the brief, which is worth reading). Here’s their take on the issue and what’s at stake:

It takes no friend-of-the-court brief for the Court to know that the rise of the Internet has been highly disruptive to the nation’s news organizations, as their readers and advertisers have migrated to the Web. In response, the nation’s news organizations, including the amici on this brief, have at considerable expense developed their own Websites and digital businesses to carry their news reports. These digital businesses are supported by electronic advertising revenue, electronic subscription revenue, and licensing income from other publishers and users and aggregators. None of these revenue streams can be sustained if news organizations are unable to protect their news reports from the wholesale copying and redistribution by free-riders like Meltwater.
Read more

On this holiday week, I’m out of town but still couldn’t escape the blizzard conditions blanketing the Midwest and much of the rest of the country. So I’m settling in with a story and amazing piece of multimedia from the New York Times that I bookmarked last week. It’s an absolutely beautiful and breathtaking tale of an avalanche in Washington state, both the events leading up to and the people involved in the event in the moments before, during and following the event. The reporting, the writing, the photography, the videography, the audio, the use of animations and maps, and the overall story design… everything comes together into one of the single best pieces of multimedia content I’ve ever seen. This story is what multimedia packages ought to aspire to be.

So if you’re like me, home from the office and snowed in for the day, take a half hour (or more) to browse through the beautiful and thrilling story, “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” It’s a great read and a great example of how old-school reporting and storytelling play perfectly with new media tools to take a story from good to great and tell it in a way online the Internet could allow.

I’m a word person, but I’ve never been any good at crosswords. I’ve always thought my vocabulary was a hindrance, not so much that I don’t know the right word but that I know too many possible words that my brain can fill in the blank with two or three options and, even in pencil, that makes me afraid to commit to a potentially wrong answer. I’m more of a Sudoku gal, personally.

Nonetheless, I thought it was interesting to see that the New York Times — the de facto crossword king — has redesigned its digital crosswords games this week. It’s an interesting development because, while I’m all about the journalism, I like to see news agencies realize their mission isn’t just to inform but also to entertain. That’s why newspapers print things like movie reviews, comic strips and yes, crossword puzzles. I know several people who only (or in large part) pick up the newspaper for the puzzles or who save outdated editions for the day off someday when they’ll have time to work through them. (I hope they get some of the news while they’re there, though.) So it’s nice to see the Times devoting some of their IT power to improving the digital presentation and play of one of their most popular non-news features. Note: They do charge a few bucks a month for premium access to the daily puzzles, but do offer older puzzles from the archives for free.

Not only have they rolled out an HTML5 version of the crossword, but they’ve also coupled the new style with a very in-depth tutorial and explainer on the changes. They even have puzzle maestro Will Shortz on video explaining how he works and giving tips for Crossword beginners.

Among the changes the Times says they’ve made:

• Clean and simplified layout
• One entry point with various options on how to solve
• Redesigned personalized scorecard
• New bonus puzzles
• Larger squares
• Redesigned leaderboard statistics with top 10 puzzlers
• Cleaner color scheme of blue, gray and white

The new game play is intuitive, and because it’s running on HTML5 it’s played right in browser without me needing any extra plug-ins or anything. Even on my older Mac, it worked seamlessly and swiftly. I might even be able to get into crosswords with a platform like this. Maybe.

Tonight marks the first official presidential campaign debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. It’s taking place in Denver (at 9 p.m. Eastern, or 6 p.m. Pacific), but since you likely haven’t snagged a seat, your options for viewing are plentiful this election year. You may not have determined who you’re voting for let alone figured out how you’re watching the debates. Here are five options for where to watch tonight’s Q&A and interact with others watching.
Read more

Comic Sans is the proverbial red-headed step child of typefaces. But beyond being derided for its cutesy looks and people’s penchant for using it in inappropriate communications, a recent “experiment” conducted by filmmaker Errol Morris in a piece he wrote for NYT.com shows that perception of the font can cause readers to do more than snicker. It may cause them to question your facts and affect whether they believe what you’ve written at all, he concludes in a follow-up.

We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic? Or malefaction?
Don’t get me wrong. The underlying truth of the sentence “Gold has an atomic number of 79” is not dependent on the typeface in which it is written. The sentence is true regardless of whether it is displayed in Helvetica, Georgia or even the much-maligned Comic Sans. But are we more inclined to believe that gold has an atomic number of 79 if we read it in Georgia, the typeface of The New York Times online, rather than in Helvetica?

To test this, he wrote a post in which a script changed the typeface of an identical passage and then asked readers (apparently more than 45,000 of them) to take a quiz asking whether they believed it to be true. The fonts tested were Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet.
Read more