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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."
Because newspapers and the like are faring so well. This is a great idea. It will simply kill off the industry. No wonder that Chinese blogger is investigating murders.
Bored at work? Play Game!
Advertising revenues continue to plunge for many sites these days, a trend I've felt myself for the few small sites I run that are ad-supported. I'm going to be deploying a "paid content" option myself for my main site in the near future, although I'm still planning on offering everything for free as long as people are willing to deal with the ads.
It's a difficult position to be in. Offering and maintaining content costs real money in time and resources.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
when newspapers were free. They made their profits via advertising. Of course, that was a long time ago, before they found out that they could double-dip.
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."
And where do these stories come from? Who pays the reporters? Who keeps the servers running to deliver these stories?
Forget the "extra value," what about the existing value? And if people won't pay for news on the web, then the services should keep providing news for free? I don't think it's a case of they expect people to magically pay if they put up a paywall, it's that they know people won't pay if they don't, no magic required.
Seriously, is this guy running for d-bag of the year? The world does not owe you free content. If the people who, you know, actually work for a living, want to get paid, then so be it. If you refuse to pay, you weren't doing them any good reading their content for free, so they won't miss you when you when you're gone.
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.
Nukes fly over the city of...[click here to pay via PayPal for full story]
This of how much they'll have to pay back for all those fake photos they keep publishing.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
THAT is the internet. It isn't a series of tubes, it is an amazingly cheap distribution method for media.
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
CBS plans to pull the plug on its free broadcast of the Evening News with Katie Couric and make its nightly newscast available only on pay-per-view. The news organizations of Fox, ABC, and NBC applaud the decision and are anxiously awaiting an increase in their ratings.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This leaves Reuters the only free international newspaper in English. By that I mean a real newspaper with actual foreign correspondents and journalists. How terrifying is the thought that news could be turned 100% into opinion piece blathering with no actual research. As of last june CBS had 0 people in Iraq, FOX and CNN have 2. No American television network has a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan. Reuters has 100people in Iraq (inc staff). I'm sure AP has a similar number.
If AP and Reuters go this way news is literally dead.
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.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
If you want real news, you will need to pay.
That's fine. I understand that news costs money to create, and free (beer) distribution means whoever does the work doesn't have a reason to. So, we move to a paid model.
Will I get what I pay for? As it is, news is largely vapid, telling people what they want to hear (celebrity X, outrage Y, cuteness Z). If we move to a paid model, will I finally get what I'm paying for - real actual news about what's going on in the world?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
A lot of people want to read news so that they can be informed about what's happening in the world, not so that they can share and comment on it. These people might be willing to pay if it means continued access to news from on-the-ground, professional correspondents.
My hypothesis about making people pay for access to a news site is this: you get people who value it, and you keep out a lot of the crap.
Sorry if that's not egalitarian, but have you ever looked at your local paper's web site? On mine, each article typically has hundreds of comments to the effect of "how is babby formed," or "barrrak hussein osama gonna give teh aids." Why would anyone intelligent put in the effort to contribute to a discourse like that?
The counterpoint is not "slashdot." At least we have moderation and most of the crap gets pushed to -1.
Anybody remember when CNN.com used to have videos that you'd have to pay for to view?! Then nobody actually paid and they realized the better way to drive traffic is to provide them totally free of charge? I know I visit cnn.com more often now because of it. Why aren't things like these noted and written down somewhere so nobody goes through this again?
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 say we just let the news industry go back to it's more honest past, and just have the news authors actually promote products in their articles...
"1,500 dead today in the official numbers of a third round of skirmishes along the Waziristan border in the mountains of Pakistan. Sectarian tensions are being further strained according to scattered reports we're getting out of the area, as government control over the region is fractured from open opposition from within.
"In unrelated news, Have you tried the new Camel Tropical Smooth(tm) brand Cigarettes? They've got just the right blend of tar and exotic fruit extract that'll have you singing for more! Tropical Smooth(tm) brand cigarettes - recommended by us, your favorite news source! Now, back to our story..
"'It's an unending bloodbath', says Ismail Mohammad, a local livestock herder, 'I've lost everything, and I've seen so many lose so much more. I don't even know what to pray for anymore." ...that way, at least it'll be more clear when media groups are compromising themselves for, and which corporate sponsor they're shilling for. Hey, who knows - perhaps this way, advertisers will actually prefer pushing for in depth news coverage, just so people will take their ads more seriously. Just a modest proposal.
Ryan Fenton
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.
It does however, become necessary to put Dan Rather in front of the camera somewhere, so he can filter the signal to noise ratio down to something useable and 'believable'.
Bloggers, for all their newfound 'power' are still subject to the "a million voices crying out" problem. Look at the 'blog' coverage of any of those events and you realize that had we "only" had bloggers telling us what happened back then, we'd still be trying to piece it together.
There still needs to be something at the end of the funnel, filtering the "teh aliens what was the ones who did it" and the "I heard from my neighbor's sister-in-law who heard it from a guy standing on the street waiting for a bus.." out of the stream. And while that could be anyone, including yourself, most of us don't want to spend the time or the effort trying to decide who to trust and whose a wingnut. It's easier to choose one person, network, group, who've convinced us (rightly or not) that they are able to do that for us and present the package in an easily digestible manner.
That being said, I do think the news industry is in for some major changes in the near future. They are going to need to move from being the 'authors' to being the 'research librarian': someone who can find what's already out there rather than spending time writing it themselves.
Signal-To-Noise
If only there were a few million people out there willing to filter through this stuff and decide what was good and what wasn't.
Yeah, you're right, blogging will never take off.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Snort. Very clever. Now let me know how you gauge the Signal to Noise Ratio of what comes out of Dan Rather et al.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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
That's not the kind of news that needs real reporting. Any yahoo with a camera can take pretty pictures to put on TV, or, sometimes, take insightful pictures to put on TV.
Bloggers aren't out digging into court archives to find patterns of abuse, like the Philadelphia Inquirer did while looking at the judges that accepted kickbacks in exchange for sending a higher-than-normal rate of kids in their courts to private boot camps.
Bloggers comment on those types of stories. They don't research those types of stories, at least not very often.
And that's the real problem. We don't have a New Media today. Not yet. What we have is a temporary middle-state:
1. Old media (old print media, to a large extent) does investigative journalism, but isn't paid for it.
2. "New" media takes the original story, shares it, comments on it, and runs with it.
So our "new" media of today is temporary at best. What happens when their sources go away?
1. ??????
2. "New" New Media comments on Things That Can Be Caught On a Phone Cam and nothing else gets done.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The twitter coverage of Mumbai was HORRIBLE! People either blindly speculating or just clogging up the tubes with their good wishes or just retweeting what they saw on CNN. This is NOT what I call NEWS. We keep hearing about the dumbing down of the US, yet we are supposed to believe what random twits say? Gimme a break.
I will admit that I have never had a paid online news subscription. That said, I believe that democracy cannot continue without a free and strong investigative press corps. There was a day and age when dozens if not hundreds of news organizations made news. Today, we are down to a handful of organizations that have the resources, skills, and clout to get the stories that matter the most. Blogs are not enough. They lack the credibility and the finances to pursue and investigate news. They only provide us with the information that the blogger can stumble across in their personal lives, or they parrot the news produced by the few real papers left. Now, that does not mean I think the AP should charge for its content.. but.. news organizations have to make money somehow, and monetization though advertising doesn't seem to cut it..
(perhaps even creating their own)
They already did create their own news syndication operation. It's the AP. "The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers." from Wikipedia
Have you seen the circulation figures lately? Readership is dropping like a rock in many places.
Best Slashdot Co
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
Who pays for AP? Newspapers. Who prints most of the AP? Newspapers. Who provides most of the content for AP? Newspapers.
That you think that you not viewing the AP for free online is going to hurt them one tiny little bit, shows how little you know about them. Web service they provide at a loss to drive their brand.
Lets just toss the AP for a second. You think that the newspapers not putting their content on line would hurt them? Bullshit. It's not a significant revenue stream for them, even now. Too much of the revenue they do make online is eaten up by the bullshit sites they use to aggregate their ad traffic.
But newspapers not putting their content online would destroy a lot of online sites. Fark, Google News, Yahoo News. Even Slashdot would feel the effects.
So deal. If they pull it all offline it'll be a big deal, and a lot of properties are thinking the same. Free distribution can't pay for in-depth coverage. //Yes, I work in news. Yes, I know more about this than I'd ever want to.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So many choices, so much karma to burn.
Independent journalism.... ...is that the one where some whiny twat thinks that his world view is so right that he manufactures news to support it? ...where news that goes against the journalists view is not treated as contrary evidence, but as a personal attack? ...so like Slashdot where the news content is aggregated from others and then pithy comments are added as independent journalistic seasoning? ...all the lazy, underpaid, journalists combined with the lack of any sort of professional structure and standards? ...without the pesky editorial process checking speeling and grammer mistakes for?
A few million people can't filter shit for me or anyone else with a desire to learn what occurs in the world, rather than someone's stilted take on it. Filtering by the masses just guarantees that whichever is the prominent political or social viewpoint of the people is the sort of article that is recommended. It basically becomes one colossal circle-jerk of individuals with identical ideals reinforcing their viewpoints.
At least professional media - and I'm talking network news rather than the sensationalist swill that's become of cable news - have a sense of duty, legacy, and [b]professionalism[/b]. Individuals who have devoted their entire lives and careers to uncovering news and attempt to repress their bias as much as they can (though it is impossible to be completely without some bias, conscious or otherwise).
Media by the masses is essentially the exact opposite, and often bold in their declaration of bias. Most 'reports' are indistinguishable from opinion pieces and rife with political commentary when none is necessary. What reporting is done uselessly superficial, as the individual neither has the learned capacity, experience, nor the connections to delve into a subject and uncover some semblance of the "real truth."
As it stands, blogging is comprised of two camps of individuals. The first is essentially a walking camera, and merely states what he witnessed, but has no capacity to elucidate the reasons it occurred. The blogger sees a plane crash, reports on it, but it is the network news organization that contacts the FTC, contacts the airport, talks to survivors, obtains black box transcripts etc. The camera-blogger is worse than useless as they serve only to muddle the truth by putting themselves as an emotionally charged intermediary between the actual event and you as the reader. These individuals have always been relegated - and rightfully so - by network and newspaper media to eye-witness accounts, to add a sense of humanity to the incident, but not to serve as the sole source for a story.
The second sort of blogger is the opinion-writer. With little and often no journalistic, professional, or even higher education, this blogger perceives his opinions to be worth more than the next person's. But they have no more credibility than your neighbor, your co-worker, or anyone else for that matter. If the individual does have some credentials, then they are already writing for, or at least submitting articles to legitimate news organizations rather than ranting online. The internet is a giant soapbox, allowing anyone to express whatever opinion they may have. However, having an internet soapbox gives an individual no more credibility than if they spouted their opinions off a real soapbox on the corner of the street.
If you cannot see the difference between what the reality of what blogging is, how the masses distort it, and which necessities of a free-society large media fulfills, then you're doomed to a future in which we can say good-bye to what transparency we have in our understanding of our world.
The DOW was up 4000 pts from swearing in to when it was evident that Obama was going to win.
Not sure how you come up with those figures. A quick check of the Dow on January 19, 2001 shows that it closed at 10,587. The Dow's never been 4000 points higher than that -- the high point was October 2007. I'd venture you didn't think it was evident that Obama was going to win back then.
You pathetic little hypocrite. That blog has, on its front page, an unsourced link to an article from the New York Times and you have the shit-eating audacity to point to that as a proof that independent journalism is alive and well.
That's the most pathetic thing I've ever seen.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.