Andrew Sullivan’s bold paid-content plan, and Al Jazeera’s play for the U.S. P

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
A bellwether for blog paywalls?: Legendary blogger Andrew Sullivan joined the parade of journalists requiring readers to pay for their content online last week, though his move was particularly significant because, after all, he’s not a news organization but a single blogger (with a few staff members). Sullivan, who had been at The Daily Beast, will use a metered model charging readers $19.99 a year for full access, and he won’t host any ads.
At least initially, Sullivan’s plan was a massive success, bringing in more than $300,000 from 12,000 subscribers in the first day alone. Sullivan told The New York Times he’ll need $900,000 a year, and said it’s time journalism “started earning a living like everybody else.” He also told BuzzFeed the lack of advertising will free him to cover more out-of-the-way topics, rather than trying to chase pageviews. Complex editor Foster Kamer was more skeptical, calling the independent paywall a sales pitch to other publications on the loyalty of Sullivan’s audience.
The immediate question that came to pretty much everyone’s mind, it seems, was whether Sullivan’s paid-content model could work for other bloggers, particularly ones without Sullivan’s reach. Sullivan told TechCrunch to hold off on the prognostication, but still saw no reason it couldn’t scale to smaller blogs with less overhead. Others were equally optimistic: GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram described Sullivan’s paywall as a finger in the eye of the industrial journalism model, and The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor explained why he was subscribing, while also suggesting that blogs might eventually be able to band together to charge for content to multiple sites.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argued that the key to Sullivan’s success in charging for content lies in his audience’s loyalty, which is built on his own distinct obsessions. Whether you can charge for content “depends on how strong the relationship is between you and the regular users of your site. Sullivan and crew have ample reason to bet on that relationship,” he said.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/this-week-in-review-andrew-sullivans-bold-paid-content-plan-and-al-jazeeras-play-for-the-u-s/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=c074304896-DAILY_EMAIL

Can Local Newspapers Collaborate with Blogs? J-Lab Finds Answers

mediashift reporting;
J-Lab recently released the results of its Networked Journalism pilot project, a three-year initiative that "called for eight newspapers and one public radio station to network with local blogs," resulting in "nine different models of collaboration," J-Lab reports.
In a detailed report called Networked Journalism: What Works, J-Lab's executive director, Jan Schaffer, outlines the problem the project was designed to explore:

With U.S. newspapers losing more than 42,000 journalists since 2007, local news coverage has suffered. At the same time, hundreds of local blogs and news sites have launched in their markets ... What role can traditional news organizations play not only to expose their audiences to more news than they themselves can deliver, but also to connect new sources of information rising throughout their communities?

She concludes that for a partnership between a legacy newsroom and its community partners to succeed, two things are needed: First, "it is the responsibility of the hub news organization to provide their news networks with enough visibility and outbound links to drive traffic to their partners' sites." And second, "it is the responsibility of the community news partners to post frequently enough to be robust participants and to nab the visibility -- either on the network page or the home page -- that would bring them traffic."
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/12/can-local-newspapers-collaborate-with-blogs-j-lab-finds-answers341.html

Judge Clarifies That Bloggers Can Be Journalists (Just Not One in Particular)

NYT reporting:
Back in December, United States District Court Judge Marco A. Hernandez created a stir by seeming to suggest that bloggers are not journalists as defined by Oregon’s shield law. The ruling came in a case involving a self-described “investigative blogger,” Crystal L. Cox. She had been sued by Kevin Padrick of the Obsidian Finance Group for defamation because she had written that he and his company had engaged in a wholesale fraud in a bankruptcy case.
Initially, the blogosphere sounded the alarm at what seemed to be an attack by powerful moneyed interests on a crusading blogger. But a cursory investigation revealed that Ms. Cox employed a number of unorthodox tactics for a journalist, including registering dozens of domain names of people she perceived as her enemies in order to initiate serial and often profane salvos against them. In the instance of Mr. Padrick, she sent his lawyer an e-mail offering reputation management services after savaging his client in several blogs...
In his ruling denying the motion for a new trial, the judge said that he never intended to suggest that bloggers can’t be journalists, only that Ms. Cox did not fit the definition:
“In my discussion, I did not state that a person who ‘blogs’ could never be considered ‘media.’ I also did not state that to be considered ‘media,’ one had to possess all or most of the characteristics I recited.”...
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/judge-clarifies-that-bloggers-can-be-journalists-just-not-one-in-particular/?nl=business&emc=edit_at_20120402

How Blogs Influence Purchases and Recommendations

emarketer reporting:
Bloggers, from hobbyists to professionals, influence readers and other bloggers when it comes to purchases and recommendations. Many of these bloggers are discussing their experiences with brands through product reviews and descriptions of their experiences in stores, and promote their work on social networks, creating even more buzz.