Who Is Willing to Pay?

Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps took a closer look at the demographic profile of those users who said that they would be willing to pay. Gender and marital status had no influence on a consumer's willingness to pay. Those who are willing to pay for magazine content are slightly younger that those who won't (43 years vs. 47). For newspaper content, however, there was no difference. Income, too, only makes a small difference. Those with a higher income are slightly more likely to pay for newspaper content than for magazines.

The report concludes that there is no consensus among consumers about how they want content delivered to them. The fact that 10% still prefer PDFs clearly shows that we are still in a transitional period. What is clear, though, is that consumers aren't very willing to pay for content online.

According to Forrester, publishers have two options: continue to offer a free, ad-supported product or offer consumers "a choice of multichannel subscriptions, single-channel subscriptions, and micropayments for premium product access."

As Rotman Epps also notes, there is a third solution: have a third party subsidize the cost of the content. This could be a device manufacturer who wants to offer exclusive content, for example.

A Slightly More Optimistic View

According to a report in the New York Times, about 48% of all Internet users in the US said that they would pay to read news online. This study by the Boston Consulting Group also looked at online news in general and found that a larger number of users was willing to pay. On average, though, these users were only willing to pay about $3.

The overall idea behind Fast Flip is interesting. Over time, the service learns what you like to read and will personalize its news suggestions for you. The execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Instead of a Google Reader-like text-based interface, Fast Flip displays a series of screenshots.

Usability?

On the desktop, you get a large picture of a page with the first part of an article without the ability to scroll down, and cut off sides where ads or links to other articles tend to be. Often, because a lot of magazines tend to feature very large images at the top of a page, all you get is a headline and an image. To actually read the article, you have to click on the screenshot.

On an iPhone or Android phone, the experience is even more annoying. Besides the problem that Fast Flip isn't extremely fast on a mobile device (images take longer to load than text, after all), the size of the screen guarantees that you can't actually read much in those screenshots besides the headline. To get a better view, you have to tap the screen and a menu will pop up that allows you to zoom into the picture or read the full article on the actual newspaper site or blog. As Rob Diana points out on the Regular Geek blog, that's a lot of clicking just to get from an unreadable thumbnail view to the actual content.

The other problem here is that Google is only working with a select number of content providers. At least for the time being, this is a closed off ecosystem.

Disappointing

Overall, Fast Flip just seems like a disappointing product. The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money. Google Reader or personalized applications like my6sense on the iPhone or feedly on the desktop just seem far more interesting and usable than browsing through a series of screenshots.

This is historically important stuff. "The transition from one-way to two-way media is not something that newspapers are used to doing," Ingram told us. "It's a big change."

"The earliest version of community we had was comments on news stories," Ingram told us. "For anyone who runs a blog, you take that for granted; but for us, that was a big step. We were the first newspaper to do that in 2005. It crept up for us; there weren't that many people commenting. Now we're getting five, six, seven thousand comments a day. On good or bad days we can get up to ten thousand comments. [We're sure he gets help dealing with all of those!]

"I like to call that community 1.0 or 1.5, because they all just sit in a big heap at the bottom of the story. It's like a petri dish of a community; it's little micro-organisms that could become community. You see people who reply to each other, good and bad commenters who return, people who assist each other. One thing I want to encourage more is writers responding to comments and using comments as a resource. That's commenting 2.0, I think.

"Community is great because it makes people feel good, democratizes the process, but also delivers value. One of our writers wrote a story, and the comments pointed out that she only talked to one guy about one aspect of the story. She said 'I read the comments and thought F*!@ you. I wrote a story. Go write your own.' But then she admitted it was true, phoned someone else, and updated the story. For me, that's a gigantic win for us and for readers as well. That's where the feedback should be. "

"I've also seen a noticeable change in tone in comments and other interactive forums, like Coveritlive.com. As soon as someone from the paper steps in and makes a comment, the whole tone changes. If you just give people a blank wall and a spray paint can, you get a predictable outcome. But as soon as anyone says we should stick to the topic or knock off the personal attacks, it has a noticeable effect.

"Comments are the base level of interaction. I've been thinking of other ways to enhance that. We've got live blog, a wiki project, and hopefully we've got groups and forums around a particular issue.

"One of the biggest things we need to do is identify and encourage members of the community who are thoughtful, intelligent, and produce comments of value -- encouraging them to contribute more, elevating what they do and suppressing some of the noise. I'm hoping our new Web publishing system that lets people vote on comments will help with that. I'm trying to think of more ways to use the volunteer fire department principle. Identify key members, ask them to contribute more, and incentivize them. Making their comments look different, giving them a title, giving them different tools. There's no way we can moderate all these comments every day, and the only way to do it is take advantage of our community. I think a task or a goal helps a community gel."

Does the Globe use TwItter? It sure does. "I have been using it as a way to connect with people and push out features," Ingram told us. "You can pull Twitter feeds into Coveritlive.com. We did an Oscar one, an Obama visit, covered a shooting in the subway. I was looking for people commenting on Twitter on those topics, pulling in what people say. I've retweeted, approved users, or approved with hashtags. There is a surprising number of everyday people on Twitter; the Mayor of Toronto is on it. But something like that for raw information delivery is always going to be valuable. You may be touching only 1% or .1% of the population, but they are reaching ten times that many people."

Ingram's closing thoughts on the changing media landscape: "Sometimes you do things, like the policy wiki we set up to get people's input on serious issues, the first issue we got a lot of input on and the second one we got a lot less input on. It's the ghost-town phenomenon. Or they are talking about what you want them to talk about but someplace else. You can build a cool night club and tell people about it, but if people don't want to come, if they want to go to an empty warehouse, then that's what they are going to do. As a big media entity, we used to have the audience; now you have to win over an audience to pay attention to you. I don't know how to solve that one either."

Mathew Ingram is an active participant in conversations on Twitter about international media and technology; you can connect with him at @mathewi. Learn more about The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management via this link.

Little is known about Preston's personal use of social media, she's either using aliases or is remarkably quiet around the web, and details are still forthcoming about the new position she'll fill. The Times has done a remarkable job of engaging with social media so far, though, and we have high hopes for this new post.

She doesn't seem particularly active in the social media world so far. She has a private Twitter account that she's just begun to open up this morning - but apparently she hasn't published any tweets there yet, ever. She is following almost 160 people so far, though, far more than are following her to date. So she could be using it for listening.

She's also got a private FriendFeed account, a private Yahoo account and an unused Tumblr account. The BackType comment search engine can't find any comments she's left on blogs around the web.

Gawker suspects she's been brought into the position to silence the prolific tweeting of other people at the Times, but that's hard to imagine. It would be a terrible tragedy if the Times became as tight lipped in social media as many of their competitors have lately. Bloomberg staff has been explicitly prohibited from Twittering about competitors or sharing links to their sites! No one at the Times has responded yet to our requests for comment on the new position.

The New York Times has done an incredible job leveraging Twitter informally, it's a virtual case study of how journalists can effectively use the medium. The company's other social media moves include a long list of powerful APIs, great infographics (some leveraging user generated content), lots of video and a real-time stream of updates from the organization. The business side of the Times is in as much trouble as the rest of the newspaper industry, but many in the organization seem prepared to stake its future on innovation. It's a lot of fun to watch. (The Times also syndicates ReadWriteWeb, something we appreciate a lot.)

For now we'll have to wait for more details on the new position. Word came out via a Tweet from Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor at The New York Times.

We would love to see Preston fill a role similar to what Mathew Ingram does at the Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada's largest daily paper. Ingram's position is "Communities Editor" but he interfaces with social media activities both on and off of the paper's site. In a recent interview we did with Ingram he explained that "The transition from one-way to two-way media is not something that newspapers are used to doing. It's a big change."

Social media at newspapers doesn't have to be about promotion or damage control, it's also a real resource. "One thing I want to encourage more is writers responding to comments and using comments as a resource," Ingram says. "That's commenting 2.0, I think...One of the biggest things we need to do is identify and encourage members of the community who are thoughtful, intelligent, and produce comments of value -- encouraging them to contribute more, elevating what they do and suppressing some of the noise."

(For more Ingram goodness, see his article last week at the Nieman Journalism Lab titled The Golden Age of Computer Assisted Reporting is at Hand.)

That kind of hands-on approach, plus the NYT's brilliant tech innovation, sounds like a powerful recipe for Jennifer Preston to do some exciting new things at the intersection of old and new media.

Since ProPublica announced this policy, articles from ProPublica journalists have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and online publications, including USA Today, Politico, Salon, The Denver Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and the Albany Times Union.

To some degree, ProPublica models an approach that could eventually help newspapers to stay afloat by pooling resources and making stories available across a wider network of papers.

ProPublica and Citizen Journalism

Just this week, ProPublica also launched a new citizen journalism project, the ProPublica Reporting Network, that invites citizens to "commit acts of journalism." As its first mission, the ProPublica is asking people to "adopt" a stimulus project and monitor it. Essentially, this project crowdsources investigative journalism, and given the scope of the stimulus bill, this might just turn out to be the only effective way of monitoring the efficiency of a project of this size.

Will More Projects Follow this Path?

It would be nice if other non-profit news organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting would adopt similarly liberal licenses, though for now, we think this is a great start. If you are aware of similar projects, please let us know in the comments.

An Amsterdam based holding company called PPF and the Paris based World Association of Newspapers are funding a fascinating project that will launch 30 different websites covering hyperlocal news throughout the Czech Republic. Google will provide technical training and the sites will run AdSense in exchange. In order to maximize contact with the local community, the project has hired 90 mostly young reporters who will work out of offices with public coffee and internet shops built into the facilities.

The idea brings to mind the Lawrence Journal World, a well known model of effective local online reporting. If Google and other online specialists could help more newspapers rock like LJWorld.com does, then things could really look up for local news.

To be fair, some people attribute LJWorld's success to its local near monopoly across different media types - but the company has been wildly innovative in terms of types of content, interactivity, mobile and the creation of a content management system (Django) that is now used by newspapers around the world. The company even offers an RSS feed of their most-clicked classified ads and displays those in a widget throughout the site. That's cool. Anyone interested in local news online should make sure to spend some time looking around the website of the Lawrence Journal World.

Do You Think the Web Industry Has An Interest or Obligation in Helping Old Models of Reporting Transition Online? RSS readers can click here to view and participate in our poll on that question.

Why not have web specialists offer training to more old fashioned news organizations in order to create a more compelling product? This morning I was watching a trailer for an immersive multiplayer game about to launch and thought: lots of people are willing to pay $20 to $50 once or as a subscription for these really compelling game experiences - couldn't the news organizations of the future better leverage the internet to create an experience that people would pay for? Either pay for or view advertisements through? From games to iPhone apps to really useful software otherwise, I know I'm willing to pay for things. The local news rag just doesn't do anything moving enough for me to pay for it, other than a weekend print edition that I have delivered to my house. Their website certainly isn't interesting enough to visit.

Be it through subscriptions, micropayments or advertising, this whole historic dilemma of the death of newspapers, local news and investigative reporting sure seems like it would be a different scenario if the news producers just made a more compelling product. Our expectations are higher these days because we have the internet. So make something awesome that takes advantage of all this technology. (Granted, this doesn't take into account the reticence of local advertisers to buy online. That's not the only problem newspapers are facing, though.)

Programs that put technical specialists into the newsroom to teach technical skills sound like a great avenue to explore. It would be good to see Google's program in the Czech Republic expand outside of that country and for other vendors to be offering similar services. Let's see a Vimeo Professional Services. Reddit is used by papers but not nearly as well as it is on Reddit.com. How many microblogging services could do themselves and the local paper a lot of good with some symbiosis through training services? I think this is a very interesting idea.

For more on this general topic, I'm going to listen to this collection of podcasts by Dave Winer and NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, titled Rebooting the News.

At the same time, Murdoch also dismissed Amazon's Kindle, because he doesn't want News Corp to cede its content rights "to the fine people who created the Kindle." During a Senate hearing about the future of the newspaper industry yesterday, the CEO of the Dallas Morning News announced that Amazon will take a 70% cut of the newspaper subscription revenues from the Kindle. Those numbers do, indeed, seem rather outrageous, though some might argue that the 30% the newspapers will get from Amazon is still more than the zero dollars they are getting from people who read the paper without the Kindle.

Interestingly, though, while Murdoch heralded the return of paid online newspaper subscription, News Corp also proudly announced that the Wall Street Journal's free iPhone application has been downloaded over 360,000 times. And that app, on a device fully controlled by Apple, gives users all of the WSJ content for free without the need for a subscription.

Senate Hearing

Yesterday's Senate hearing on the "Future of Journalism" made it clear that there are quite a few newspaper companies who would like to go back to charging for their content (while lobbying for tax breaks at the same time). Google's Marissa Mayer and Arianna Huffington managed to put some of the newspapers' hyperbole into some much needed context (Huffington's testimony starts at around 58min here). They argued that while the age of the printed newspaper may be coming to an end, journalism itself will blossom in the future, and that online publishers can indeed make money from their online content by smartly monetizing their traffic (and those who don't want their traffic to come from Google can just add a line to their robots.txt file anyway).

It's Not About the Future of Newspapers - It's about Journalism

We also think that it is important to move away from the question of how we can save the newspapers (easy answer: we can't). Instead, the more interesting question is how we can save good, in-depth, investigative journalism. There are clearly no easy answers for how to save the newspapers and still be able to finance good journalism, and we have doubts that charging for online access is a viable model. Users have clearly voted against this, and even if a paper wanted to charge, users could just head to another paper that decided to go with an advertising-based revenue model.

In some respects, though, the new Kindle (which will, after all, see its debut at a college) is probably geared more towards the textbook market than the newspaper business. For textbook publishers, electronic (and DRMed) editions aren't so much about convenience for students, but about cutting out the used-book market where a lot of students get their books and where the publisher gets absolutely nothing. In 2005, the market for used textbooks in the U.S. was valued at about $1.6 billion which was about a third of the total market for educational and professional books.

As Larry Dignan points out in detail, if Amazon could sell electronic versions of these textbooks for cheaper than a college bookstore, it could cut the incentive for students to buy used books, even as it cuts out the option to sell new copies back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

Newspaper

As for saving newspapers, hopefully, the papers that are said to be launch partners for the new Kindle, including the New York Times, will realize that they can't just recreate an electronic copy of their morning papers and hope that it will be successful. After all, the main reason why newspapers have lost their must-read status is that most of what's printed in the morning is already old news.

For a newspaper on Kindle to be successful, the Kindle version of the paper would have to be updated continuously throughout the day, just like the paper's web site. However, the fact that papers are clamoring for a larger version of Kindle so that it would be easier to replicate the feel and layout of their dead-tree editions makes it likely that the large-screen Kindle, if it turns out to be real, will see the same subscription model for newspapers where a new copy of the paper will be downloaded automatically once a day.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Amanda Munoz.

Even though we mostly consume our news on the web, a lot of us here at RWW still love the printed paper, but given these numbers, it is hard not to think that the printed paper as we know it today will soon be a thing of the past.

Image used courtesy of Flickr user Matt Callow.

Indeed, the state of the newspaper industry has become so dire that U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced a bill on Tuesday that would grant non-profit status (and the tax breaks that come with it) to ailing newspapers to give them a chance to restructure their business.

Image credit: Trulia blog

Shutting Down the Presses

In the last couple of weeks, a growing number of newspapers have moved their businesses completely online. Just last week, the Seattle P-I announced that it was going to become an online-only publication with a reduced staff (and the latest data shows that the traffic on the site has actually gone down since then).

Laying Off Journalists

The New York Times, sold its venerable headquarters in a lease-back deal earlier this month and will now cut about 100 non-union, non-newsroom jobs. Last year, the Times already cut 100 of its 1332 newsroom jobs. This week, the company also announced that it also plans to cut salaries by 5%. The Houston Chronicle just laid off 12% of its staff - and the list of papers that have ceased publication on the Newspaper Death Watch blog continues to grow.

Note: we mistakenly reported that the times had laid off 100 newsroom workers this week, however, the Times only cut non-newsroom staff this week - most of the cuts in the news division happened last year and the Times actually promises that it will not lay off anymore newsroom staff this year (which, given the current situation, might be overly optimistic in our opinion).

The Breaking Point: Are We There Yet?

One thing is clear: a lot of newspaper are about to hit their breaking point. While there was already a trend towards online publications, the current economic climate is only accelerating this process. Gimmicky experiments like a custom newspaper that readers can print at home will do little to reverse this trend. Indeed, while some forms of printed newspapers (think free, fully advertising-financed newspapers distributed at train stations in Europe, for example) will most likely continue to be around for a while, the future of the industry is clearly online.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user purdman1.

As Andre Behrens points out in the announcement, the Times is trying to recreate the skimming experience of the physical newspaper, where you often discover random articles that you would probably never notice in the online version.

The layout of the new online application is somewhat similar to that of the Times Reader desktop application, but the team is also trying out some new features. Older articles, for example, gradually fade out as they get older. The newest articles just have a white background.

Overall, the app feels very fluid and lightweight, and the article skimmer provides a great interface for browsing the site's content. It is just a shame that you can't actually read the articles in the same interface.

The New York Times has done a lot of interesting things on the web lately, including opening up an API that allows developers to search the newspaper's articles.

The newspaper business is clearly struggling to reinvent itself on the web, and this experiment is only a small step in this direction - but it is experiments like this that make it clear that there is still a lot of life left in the online newspaper business.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb has an existing syndication arrangement with The New York Times

While the Knight Foundation's endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.

Another good example for an organization that was awarded a grant by the the Knight Foundation is the Coral Gables Community Foundation in Coral Gables, Florida. This group, together with the University of Miami, will use its grant to train seniors to report, write, and blog about local affairs.

A complete list of sponsored projects can be found here. A second round of grants will be awarded later this year.

These appear to be buttons you can click on, but they are only there for displaying the information. In order to access the commenting and feedback features, you have to actually click the headline to read the article. That's a very minor complaint, though, as it's the commenting feature that really makes the News Mixer site shine.

Facebook Connect Makes the News Personal

Because of the site's integration with Facebook Connect, News Mixer is able to highlight the comments left by your Facebook friends. This brings their thoughts to your attention which in turn delivers a more personalized news experience. (Unfortunately, I couldn't test that aspect of the commenting feature since I don't know anyone in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)

If you choose to participate, you can select from a drop-down box of responses which will preface your comment. By default, the site suggested "Sarah Thinks." (Obviously, your name would display in place of "Sarah.") Other options include "feels," "wonders," "agrees," "disagrees," "hates," and "loves." These choices are very similar to the options presented to you at the microblogging site Plurk, a Twitter-like site for sharing status updates with friends. On Plurk, you are also given various color-coded prompts to choose from when posting a note, the same as News Mixer.

Another plus to News Mixer's commenting feature is its transparent nature. Instead of allowing for the creation of fake names or internet handles for use on the site, Facebook authentication means that people's real identities are being displayed. No more comments left by internet trolls hiding behind their mask of anonymity!

Today's commenting systems are largely broken, as social media pundit Robert Scoble noted today on his blog. The main reason for his post was to share ideas about the state of commenting and interaction systems on the web. He wanted there to be a way that he, as the writer, could call attention to some comments as being more important than others. He had also said that he wished there was a way to see the social networks of the people commenting. As it turns out, News Mixer has introduced a great example of how that second request of his could work.

Newspapers: Steal These Ideas!

Although at the moment the News Mixer site appears somewhat plain and clunky, you can see the potential is in its framework, if not its design. In fact, the press release even notes that the New York Times interactive news technologies editor Aron Pilhofer encouraged media industry members to look at News Mixer, adding that there were "bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now."

We would encourage others in the industry to borrow some of News Mixer's ideas as well. It's not too late to save the daily paper - it just takes some fresh ideas. Like Rupert Murdoch recently said, the time for doom and gloom is over - the internet is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. We agree. Now is the time for innovation because...well, it's either innovate or die. Hopefully most will choose the former.

That finding is just one of a number of interesting statistics in this report that details a dramatic transformation underway right now in media.

• 75% of newspapers now accept comments on articles, up from 33% in 2007.


• 100% adoption of RSS. All but three of the papers offered feeds in 2007 already, but this is a remarkable change in news delivery none the less.


• 92% of the newspapers now include buttons to bookmark articles in social bookmarking systems like Delicious or Digg, up from 7% in 2006.


• The brief experiment with required online registration is over. The number of websites requiring registration to view most content (free or paid) has decreased to 11%, compared to 29% in 2007 and 23% in 2006.


• 20% offer chatting options and 40% now offer SMS alerts.

What It Means

Mainstream news will never be the same again. You can now talk back to it, take part in it and interact with it along with countless other sources of information. Just as no software company can produce content or code as well as a world of users and developers collaborating can, so too can newspapers no longer keep us sufficiently informed all on their own. It's nice to see they aren't trying to anymore. These are changes for the better and show that while old media institutions are struggling to hold on to revenue in the face of the internet challenge, the fight is also doing them a lot of good at the same time.

You can read the full report here.

Photo: "Sharing a Paper" CC by Flickr user Pingu1963

The Information Valet Project

As more and more newspapers crumble, there is concern that we will lose major sources of vital news and information. The threat of online news, which is both abundant and free, has turned this industry on its head, forcing companies to come up with new models for making money. But which of those models will end up working is anyone's guess at this point. Some models are attempting to use crowdsourcing to pay reporters' salaries, while other companies are finding their niche as hyper-local sources of information. The new Information Valet project aims to do both and more.

With the Information Valet Project, paying customers wouldn't just get a simple web page dedicated to news. Instead, the project would deliver "a 24/7 platform-agnostic nerve center that finds, organizes, shares, and makes sense of information from a vast array of paid, volunteer, independent, and partisan sources - and then serves it how you want, when you want it."

What makes this project different than any ol' customizable web portal like iGoogle or My Yahoo, will be the way you pay for its services with your attention. In addition to the small monthly fee, the service would manage your attention to deliver premium content. So for example, when you look at an ad, that would create a payment that would be credited to an account where it will go to offset your purchase of premium content later on. This model effectively makes attention the currency with which you make your purchases./

In addition, the Information Valet will offer a one-stop shop of sorts for all your web registrations across the web and a safe and secure place where your privacy is protected.

So, It Does What Exactly?

If you're confused as to how this project is anything new or different than the news offerings out there today, you're not alone. There are so many different pieces to the project, it's kind of hard to get a grip on what exactly it is. The best explanation we found so far comes from Martin Langeveld, who described the various aspects of the Info Valet project as follows:

Content consumers/web users:

• Would register their personal data via InfoValet and would, in a secure system, retain complete control over who could access that information.
• By doing this, they would also gain the convenience and security of not having to enter a raft of data over and over each time they register at another site to access information or make purchases. Their personal information would reside in only one place on the web.
• In return for allowing selective access to their personal data, they would gain two important benefits: (1) access to information more tailored to their demographics, needs and interests, and (2) a system of rewards in the form of cash or points based on their web usage and exposure to advertising content. These rewards would be greater if they are willing to share, selectively, a larger amount of personal information with advertisers for targeting purposes.

Content providers including newspaper web sites:

• Would act as portals through which content consumers initially sign up for InfoValet. As such they could gain a share of future transactions, including ad-viewing rewards, associated with individuals they have signed up--even when those users are elsewhere on the web.
• Would be able to sell and host advertising targeted more precisely at site visitors by means of InfoValet registrations

Commercial content providers/advertisers:

• Would benefit from more efficient, better targeted ways of advertising to InfoValet registered consumers, published through "trusted nodes"--local brands through which consumers have signed up for infoValet
• Could send new, more welcome forms of commercial content to InfoValet consumers

Could This Work?

For something like this to succeed it will take a good bit of effort. Internet users are used to information being free, and will balk at the idea of having to pay for it. The additional services that make this project compelling and valuable will also have to be easy for the average internet user to understand, and - let's face it - we're not there yet. However, as news giant Rupert Murdoch recently stated, the future of newspapers goes beyond dead trees. In other words, now may not be the time to summarily dismiss new ideas such as this without first giving them some serious thought. The current business model for newspapers may not be working, but we've yet to develop what the next model may be. Could this be it? We'll have to wait and see, but at the moment it looks like an uphill battle.

You can learn more about the Information Valet project here, read the summary PDF, or view the PowerPoint.