Gannett to start charging to read its websites

Gannett, publisher of The Asbury Park Press and 79 other community newspapers throughout the country, announced today that they will emulate The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal by charging their readers to access their websites, according to multiple news outlets, not including The Asbury Park Press.

Readers will be able to read between five and fifteen articles each month before being charged, according to Forbes who covered the investors conference where Gannett announced the news.

The company also announced that they will shed $1.3 billion in cash, distributing it to shareholders through dividends and a $300 million stock buy back.

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.Com

You can now reach your favorite website at www.moremonmouthmusings.com

Long time readers may remember that some url speculator in Austrailia bought the .com address while I was still writing over at blogspot.  He then tried to sell it to me for $500.00.

Today I bought it through networksolutions for $34.95.

Thanks for the many domain brokers and aftersellers who emailed me over the last two months trying to sell it to me at a premium.  If not for you guys I wouldn’t have known it was becoming available.

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Snooki Show Banned From Hoboken

Snooki won’t be cavorting along the Jersey shore of the Hudson River anytime soon.

The birthplace of the Chairman of the Board and baseball doesn’t have to worry about Snooki and JWoww filling the vacancy created by Jon Corzine’s departure, thanks to Mayor Dawn Zimmer telling MTV that a spinoff to the show that made Seaside Heights an international destination will not be filmed in her city, according to a report on NJ.com.

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APP: Public contracts should be online. Why not public notices?

This morning The Asbury Park Press argues in an editorial that public labor contracts should be posted online.  They argued that municipalites that don’t have websites that can handle such postings should post them on the Department of Community Affairs’ site.

We agree.   While we’re at it, why not public notices that municipalities, school boards and private sector zoning and planning applicants now pay millions per year to advertise in newspapers where very few people see them?

During the last legislative session a bi-partisan bill that would have given jurisdictions the option of advertising legal notices  in newspapers or online was passed in committee and scheduled for a vote in both houses of the legislature on the last day of the session.  It met fierce resistance from the newspaper industry in committee and before that scheduled vote.

The corporate welfare recipients of the newspaper industry argued that politicians would use the choice to punish newspapers who didn’t give them favorable coverage, and that the savings wasn’t that much, if anything.  In their final push to kill the bill, which worked, they argued that some towns don’t have websites that could handle the ads.

The legislature’s Democratic leadership, Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver, killed the bill by not letting their chambers vote on it.

Well, thanks to the good nudniks of Neptune, The Asbury Presseditorial board, we now have a solution to the problem of a small number of towns not having websites that can handle posting legal notices.  Notice publication could be a shared service hosting by the Department of Community Affairs or by the counties.

Sweeney has already announced that the legal notice bill will not be a priority in the legislative session that just started, signaling to the reformers that support they bill that they shouldn’t bother.  Now that The Asbury Park Press has come up with a solution to the newspaper industry’s latest objection, maybe Sweeney will reconsider.

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THE STORY NEW JERSEY NEWSPAPERS DON’T WANT YOU TO READ

The newspaper industry is fighting to keep its outdated government subsidy, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year.

 By John Bendel

All across New Jersey, governments and school districts are slashing costs to meet the enormous financial challenges they face. Police officers and firefighters are being laid off, road and highway improvements delayed, and funding for snowstorms and other emergencies curtailed. Nearly everyone has been caught up in the statewide budgetary storm of reduced services and higher taxes.

Yet one industry is fighting to remain immune from the hard financial decisions being made by each and every town and school district in the state. Using their editorial pages and considerable clout, New Jersey’s newspapers have put their own financial interests ahead of the taxpayers, including their own readers, by opposing legislation that would save money and make government more open and accountable. This legislation would give governments the option to publish legal notices online rather than in newspapers, as they’ve been mandated to do by law for decades. The change being fought so aggressively by the newspapers not only would save taxpayer dollars, but give hundreds of thousands more citizens access to the information – and in a more easily accessible way.

Using the public’s “right to know” as cover, the newspaper industry in New Jersey is fighting to preserve its own monopoly – a monopoly that’s being subsidized by upwards of $30 million a year in taxpayers’ money.  The New Jersey Press Association and its member news organizations across the state are trying to hold onto the kind of no-bid contract they routinely condemn.

Last year, we saw New Jersey’s newspaper industry elbowing for space on Trenton’s Lobby Row to save their slice of the government pie. They lined the halls of the Statehouse – lobbying legislators in a bid to influence the process not for the public good, but for their own economic gain. They became just another special interest. And while they were busy arm-twisting legislators who will vote on the issue, they were using their editorial pages to intimidate those same legislators.

The bill was to be posted again for a vote last week, but Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver apparently succumbed to newspaper pressure and pulled it at the last minute.

A core principle of newspapers is never to confuse their editorial opinions and news content with their companies’ economic interests. In this case, that   line has been crossed. And the newspaper publishers and editors crossed that   divide in the interest of propping up a practice that is an anachronism in the modern world of the Internet. The law granting newspapers this particular monopoly was passed during the age of typewriters. It makes no sense whatsoever to preserve that law in the Internet era.

It’s especially disingenuous for the newspaper lobby to be stubbornly fighting the posting of legal ads online at the very time those newspapers are admonishing governments to post more information – everything from salaries to contracts to marriage licenses – on the Internet, on government websites already up and running. Recently the Bergen Record, Courier-Post and The Press of Atlantic City all ran editorials calling on governments to offer more documents and records online to benefit the public. Could it be that the newspaper industry is interested in transparency only when it doesn’t affect its own financial interests? You be the judge.

The benefits of allowing the posting of legal notices online are indisputable.

First, it greatly expands a notice’s exposure to the public, giving citizens greater, cheaper and more convenient access to legal notices. And the information would be available 24-7, in Spanish as well as English, in more easily readable form.

Second, the cost savings are clear. The state, county and local governments would post the legal ads on their existing websites, a simple process requiring no added expense; in fact, the scanning procedure is so easy it’s familiar to grammar-school students. Newspaper executives argue that the costs to taxpayers for running the legals in their publications have been overestimated since the private sector pays for some of the ads -liquor license applications, sheriff sales, and certain land-use matters for example. Why should the private sector fork over millions to newspapers when they could run the ads at no cost on government web sites?

Finally, while individual citizens must pay 75 cents to $1 to buy a newspaper – and much more on Sundays – they could access the same information online, at little or no cost. The fact is, online posting would save governments, individuals and businesses the millions of dollars they spend each year to pay whatever publishers charge for placing a legal ad in their newspapers.

Earlier this year in the Borough of Island Heights where I live, mandated legal ads cost the borough approximately $4,000. This is no small amount of money for a town struggling to make ends meet.

The newspaper lobby would have you believe that the proposed change would be harmful to those who do not use the Internet, especially seniors. Give me a break. The number of people using the Internet has exploded over the last decade – to the point where those who go online to learn the latest news, weather, sports scores and other information far outnumber those who buy newspapers. Going online has become second nature to a vast majority of Americans – including my fellow seniors.

  
By way of review, New Jersey laws mandate that individuals, businesses and government entities pay to publish legal notices in officially-designated newspapers. The New Jersey Legislature is considering amending the law to allow for publication of those legal notices on official state, county and municipal web sites in addition to, or instead of, traditional newspaper advertising. Technological advances and the growing abundance of government information online demonstrate the benefits of broad dissemination of legal notices on the Internet as an alternative to traditional newspaper publication. Amending the law to allow the option of posting legal notices on a web site enables residents throughout the state to view any kind of legal notice from any part of the state. Far more New Jersey residents have access to information available on the web than to any one newspaper designated to publish legal notices. While traditional newspapers were the only logical means of ensuring public access to information in the past, today any resident can gain Internet access either at home, through their jobs, at any public library, in most public schools, and at community centers and Internet cafes.

Newspaper publication imposes time constraints on the availability of legal notices that web site posting would not. For example, the law requiring publication of a legal notice of a proposed toll hike might only mandate that the notice appear for a certain number of days in one or more designated official newspaper. Because web sites have far greater capacities than a single print edition of a newspaper, the same legal notice could remain posted on official state, county and municipal websites for several months or more, allowing residents greater opportunity to find and view the information. Instead of being subjected to the painstaking process of going through individual back copies of a newspaper, a resident could go to a single web site to find the legal notice they are looking for.

Official web sites can be designed to allow flexibility in sorting and searching for legal notices. Those web sites could be required to provide users the ability to search for legal notices by date posted, the appropriate county or other geographic category, or the subject of the posting. A person who prefers searching for postings by scanning pages of newspapers would retain that option, while someone searching for a fairly specific posting – such as applications for liquor licenses in December, 2003 only – could search for and view only the relevant notices.

Amending the law to expand the available avenues for publishing legal notices affords governments, businesses and individuals a virtually free method of publishing notices that they have to pay for under the current system. Such a proposal will not limit access to newspapers or restrict anyone from continuing to publish legal notices in newspapers. Instead, it offers far greater flexibility in posting legal notices and increases the public’s access — at a vastly reduced cost for everyone.

John Bendel is an Island Heights, N.J. councilman, president of Bendel & Bendel Inc., and former editorial page editor of the North Jersey Herald News.

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1 in a million

The 1,000,000th page load on MMM occurred at 3:19:59 PM.

Fittingly, the 1,000,000th hit was from a regular reader, a Comcast subsciber with a Philadelphia IP address and hundreds of recorded visits.  The hit was on the Milestone post.

There was confetti, balloons and fireworks at MMM world headquarters.

The lucky reader wins a lifetime subscription to MMM and an opportunity to meet presidential candidate Buddy Roemer on Saturday afternoon at the Bayshore Tea Party Group’s office in Middletown.

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Milestone

Sometime this afternoon MMM will have registered it’s 1,000,000th page load from over 665,000 visitors since we started keeping track on December 31, 2006.  This is a combination of the old site, moremonmouthmusings.blogspot.com and this domain.  Statistics weren’t kept in 2006 because I didn’t know how and I didn’t imagine that my writing would attract a following.

34% of this traffic has arrived on this domain since September of 2010 when we moved here.  70% of MMM’s visitors are repeat users and spend more than two minutes on the site per visit.

Thank you for making MMM part of your routine.  Thank you to the many commenters and contributors who make the site as informative and entertaining as it is.

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Why Christie’s Poll Numbers Are Surging

Two credible, independent polls released this week indicate that New Jersey voters strongly approve of Governor Chris Christie.  The Monmouth University Poll gives Christie a 55%-37% rating. Quinnipiac respondents approve by 58% to 38%.  Both polls show women and Independent voters swinging strongly to approve of the Governor.

The narratives of both polls indicate that Christie’s growing popularity is the result of the national attention he has received due to his dalliance with the GOP presidential nomination race.  Neither poll ask respondents about Christie’s handling of Hurricane Irene.

While Irene might be a distant memory for pollsters and pundits, many many New Jerseyans are still dealing with the aftermath.

The Star Ledger’s Kathleen O’Brien says that women are warming to Christie because of how he handled Irene. She says Christies’s “Get the hell off of the beach” rebuke won women over because he was protecting the people rather than berating an opponent.

Women and Independents are approving of Christie because of the job he is doing.  The results of his work over the last 20 months are beginning to be felt.   His performance before, during and after Irene was immediate and tangible.  The impact of the reforms he’s fought and cajoled for are gradually paying dividends.

Christie has been traveling the state this week promoting the property tax relief that is resulting from the pension and benefits reform he negotiated in June.  That will help his numbers further.

Christie’s reforms are being appreciated in places where there are no press conferences as well.  

Wednesday evening at  the Henry Hudson Regional High School in Highlands there was a public hearing concerning the proposed tri-district shared services agreement for one Superintendent of Schools for the Atlantic Highlands Elementary, Highlands Elementary and Henry Hudson Regional school districts.  These three districts each have one school.  For decades there have been three superintendents.  Merging the administration of these schools is a no brainer.  Yet prior to the Christie administration, no brainer solutions couldn’t happen.

The vast majority of the speakers at the public hearing in Highlands spoke of how they have been wanting such a no brainer solution for years.  One women said she’s been advocating such since the 1970’s.

Similar reforms are taking place throughout New Jersey.  Common sense solutions that have been talked about for decades to no avail are now beginning to happen.  New Jersey is noticing.

That is why we approve of Chris Christie.  The national attention he has been getting is nice.  We enjoy it because we know him and he is one of us.  But we approve of the job he is doing in New Jersey, not because of the national media and the national GOP loves him.  We approve of him because he is doing what he said he would do.

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Ingle on O’Reilly

Gannet columnist and bestselling author of The Soprano State, Bob Ingle will be a guest on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News at 8 PM and repeated at 11PM.

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Murray Sabrin The Comedian

My friend Murray Sabrin is trying to give Joey Novick some competition in his role as comedian/blogger.

If you’re not familiar with Novick, he’s a liberal Democratic lawyer and stand up comedian that makes up stuff about Republicans in his column at Politickernj.  Sometimes Joey makes up stuff about Democrats too.  He wrote that Carl Lewis was going to appeal to Judge Judy to get back on the LD 8 ballot as a Senate candidate.  Joey thinks he’s funny.

Sabrin writes funny stuff too.  Only Murray doesn’t think he’s being funny. Murray wrote that The Fix Is In.  The Koch brothers have arranged for Chris Christie to be elected president in 2012 and that Steve Lonegan will be elected governor of New Jersey in 2013.

That is funnier than anything that Novick has ever written.

Joey and Murray should create a joint act, The Liberal and the Libertarian.

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