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AP Considers Making Content Require Payment
TechDirt is reporting that the Associated Press is poised to be the next in a long line of news organizations to completely bungle their online distribution methods by making their content require payment. While this wouldn't happen for a while due to deals with others, like Google, to distribute AP content for free, even considering this is a massive step in the wrong direction. "Also, I know we point this out every time some clueless news exec claims that users need to pay, but it's worth mentioning again: nowhere do they discuss why people should want to pay. Nowhere do they explain what extra value they're adding that will make people pay. Instead, they think that if they put up a paywall, people will magically pay -- even though the paywall itself is what takes away much of the value by making it harder for people to do what they want with the news: to spread it, to comment on it, to participate in the story. Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse."
Let them force users to pay for their content. If it kills off the service, then so much the better. Something else will step in to fill the void left behind, and will likely be less dinosaurian about the entire process. Good riddance.
And if it works? Well, I'll accept an "I told you so."
I forget the title of the book she wrote, but she was making the point that the problem with the newspapers is that they have cut all the local investigative journalism (because it's expensive), just reprint wire stories that everyone read the day before, and then wonder why no one is buying the newspapers. So in order to combat this, they decide to cut more staff from their newsrooms, buy more wire stories, and continue to shrink into irrelevance.
My father subscribed to the local major city news paper for 35 years. He remarked how the newspaper had continued to shrink year after year in the past 10 years. Finally they cut out the listing of stocks to just a few blue chips and the bigger local employers and the sports section, which he could read free online. So about a year ago he canceled his subscription and now reads the local sports section online.
Frankly, there is more local news in the local throw away rag that we get twice a week, free. They seem to be doing okay. Are they raking in millions? No, but they are profitable, keep on top of local issues that you won't find elsewhere and people at least skim the headlines.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Free as in..? The free as in beer brought by advertising happens at the cost of free as in freedom. Personally, I prefer a news network that is accountable to its readers rather than to advertisers, and I will gladly pay for it, but hey, maybe that's just me.
Besides, isn't AP already selling its content to non-owners, i.e. the non-US media?
Don't be crazy anymore!
I think the main post's idea is that there are many independent news sources that provide such services free of charge. So the main question I think is "Why pay for this site, when all others are free?".
Ok, maybe you get a nicer page layout with colourfull flash animations, or some cool widget. Personally, I'd welcome the day when main-stream media outlets die and the only news you get comes from people like you and me, who have are not constrained by our bosses and do not have to be biased in favour of any one entity.
This may seem tin-foil-hatty, but personally - I do not believe anything I hear anymore, I know it's been filtered and truncated through multiple PR staff, management, and "think-of-the-children" outlets before it makes its way to me. The sooner this dies, the sooner we can get back to receicing public opinion, and not state-sponsored opinion.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
When all newspapers become pay sites, you'll see where they're adding value - by bringing you the news in the first place.
Ads are no longer a viable revenue source for most of the providers.
Perhaps you'll trust the news being broadcast from around the world by free broadcasters. Others won't and will expect CNN or AP to send professional reports to the events and provide professional analysis. We'll see where the value add ends up.
You can see it today - who do you go to for your political coverage? Your sports coverage? How about your technical coverage? All of those have "amateur" coverage, yet here *you* are, on a site managed by professionals. Something has to pay the bills.
I would want to know the length and depth of the article, and a summary of exactly what the article will cover.
So, a free 1 paragraph summary, with word count, and a depth rating (1 for glossover, 5 for deep technical dive, perhaps). No crummy misleading headlines, and it would also have to have a "reused/rehashed" rating, to determine how much is just a recap of old news. These ratings would need to be done by a 3rd party, or would need to be a summary of the article reader feedback, with no way for the news producer to manipulate them.
I also want permanent access to it, to be part of my "pool" of information that I have purchased, so I can refer to it whenever I like. Oh, and no blocking of print, or cut&paste. No funky formats or DRM, to prevent media/device shifting. A workable micropayments system also would be necessary, not some junk like paypal.
So once you have that ready, let me know.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
While the story is interesting your editorializing is much less so. There are a number of very news organizations that have been very successful with a payment/subscription model. Two great examples: The Wall Street Journal and ESPN. In fact there was an op-ed in today's WSJ about this very subject. When companies have a news product that is unique in the marketplace, then the payment model is quite successful.
Examples given-
WSJ
Bloomberg
Lexus-Nexus
ESPN
While it is true that some news providers might not actually offer anything sufficiently distinct or special to make a charge model successful, some definitely do. This assertion "Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse." is borne out by neither reality nor common sense. If your content/service is unique and in demand, you can charge. The AP's content may very well be too generic to get people on board the pay to view model, then again their aggregation services may be sufficiently unique that content providers that rely on the AP may be willing to pay.
Your knee-jerk reaction is as interesting and insightful as those on the other side that insisted a free model could never work.
I worked at a newspaper several years ago (including during the 2000 election debacle) and at the time our paper had to pay for an AP subscription to see the new stories. The only way to see articles through the AP website at the time was to log in as a (paid) subscriber. Apparently at some point in the more recent past they felt they could do OK by charging newspapers for the rights to print the stories that they were giving away for free on the internet.
Exactly why they thought this wouldn't hurt newspapers is beyond me. Now it is apparently hurting them as well, too bad the damage has for the most part already been done.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
Tell that to all of the bloggers that went out and reported on what was happening during the Tsunami, or Katrina, or the Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When you've got literally millions of reporters all out there reporting, and almost that many with decently high-end cameras taking decent photos...it sortof becomes unnecessary to throw Dan Rather on a jet.
Tell that to the reporters that spend months investigating a given issue and then writing 7-8 articles on it. Bloggers are fine for breaking news, not so much for things that require in depth coverage and investigation.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
From where I stand the opposite is true.
There's 3 papers (I'm aware of anyway) in Houston Texas.: The Chronicle, The Houston Press, and Free Press Houston (listed from most corporate to most independent). The Chronicle endorsed GW for re-election in 2004, for example, despite Houston going for Kerry. The Press is much more liberal/independent and are less afraid to run stories about police brutality for example. FPH is very much your High School Yearbook team.
What's funny is that the subscription newspaper (Chronicle) is the least independent of the 3. FPH and the Press are both ad-supported and free. And it's not limited to Houston.
Seattle (the Stranger), Portland, Austin, and Denver all seem to follow the same model where the more independent paper tends to finance itself via advertising to local businesses and it's actually nice. The advertisements are generally extremely informative and let you know everything from what non-pizza hut places there are to get a decent pie, to when [favorite indie band] is coming to town.
[Disclaimer: I don't work for any of the papers. I do go to their parties and am acquaintances with some of their writers.]
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Ok, I'm going to make a strained metaphor here. It's not about cars but please, bear with me.
Back before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, the Catholics had the lock-on monopoly on access to God and the afterlife throughout most of Europe. There wasn't any way around that. The bibles were in Latin, you needed priests to speak the Latin to God since he didn't know any other language, and you couldn't say squat about them because they'd excommunicate your ass faster than you can say "Pontius Pilate!" And it cost some serious coin to keep an operation like this going, to support the massive ecclesiarchy and keep the pope in funny hats. They basically had the patent rights to salvation.
So here comes this funny little German anti-semite who says "Hey, what if we don't need the middlemen to get to heaven?" So when you get bibles written in the vulgate, printing presses churning them out by the gross, and this impertinent idea that you didn't need to tithe to Rome to get to heaven, you can understand why the pope saw red.
What I've noticed is that the older an organization gets, the more traditional and conservative it becomes. And throughout this ossification of thought and process also comes the bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that burns through money like nobody's business. It takes a fantastic revenue stream to keep the perfumed masters in kibble. If you strip that bloat away and have an organization that's all about delivery, couldn't you really cut the cashflow and still remain profitable?
I admit our current hybrid model isn't going to survive the immediate future. We went from mainstream media who were both content creator and distribution channel to our current system where they still produce content but distribution has been coopted by the net. The creators lose a large portion of ad revenue to people who essentially serve as aggregators of their content. When the creators stop creating, the aggregators will need to step up to the plate and start producing.
Defenders of the MSM will say that it takes some money to put together a credible news organization. This is true. It's also true that it costs money to have good editors and quality control. The thing is, we're not getting that with the MSM right now. Because their way of doing things costs so much money, the people who own them expect them to serve as profit centers. They also expect the news team to support their own agenda. To put this back in terms of religion, it's like the king expecting his clergymen to speak of God's will in his latest war.
The net helps to lower the cost of doing business. I think what we could end up seeing is journalists setting up their own non-profit news service to circumvent the dying mainstream model. Locals can report on what's of interest in their region and the wire can ship it out to anyone who cares. The editors would be part of the service and it's their job to make sure bogus stories aren't planted. (looking at you, New York Times and lead-up to the Iraq War.)
I'm thinking the news organizations of the future will bear more in common with the various open source outfits than with today's MSM approach. We're talking about lean, low-budget operations that can succeed because of the low capital requirements of operating in an internet-enabled world.
I could be wrong on this but I don't think it would be because what I say is completely unlikely.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne