By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free. Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to [...]

By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT Published: November 13, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO — Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve [...]

The New York Times - By CLARK HOYT Published: October 31, 2009 IN his autobiography “The Good Times,” Russell Baker described the Times newsroom he joined in 1954 as “comically overstaffed.” Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington reporter and columnist, quoted a colleague’s explanation for all the idle reporters playing bridge and working crossword puzzles: Adolph Ochs, [...]

Patrick Smith – @psmith - Sep 21, 2009 4:13 AM ET While some continue to talk about charging for online news content, others are busy doing it. The latest member of the paid content club is weekly public affairs magazine The Spectator, which on Thursday removed all current and archive magazine content from its website and launched a campaign to get [...]

On TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid on March 17, 2009 Online document sharing site Scribd has announced that it has partnered with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add [...]

Who owns the content in the social network and who controls it?

A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads By some measures, the medical publishing world has met the advent of the Internet with a shrug, sticking to its time-honored revenue model of charging high subscription fees for specialized journals that often attract few, if any, advertisements…more