Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Oh, I don't know -- it could be the best thing ever for independent journalism. Which is one reason it will probably never happen.
Caveat Utilitor
The man IS watching you...through the news he feeds you(it contains tiny microchips with GPS functionality). Consider a diet high in fiber.
Bored at work? Play Game!
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]
Well somebody has to pay the reporter's salary and expenses. While you're not likely to see them on the TV or hear them on the radio anymore, real journalists do exist and it is an actual skill people make a career out of.
Internet advertising is practically worthless. We learned this from the dotcom bust.
So unless you're okay with "manufactured celebrity/political controversy" or "trite blogging on the latest who-gives-a-shit gadget" being the only news available, they need a viable business model that generates money.
The alternative is to nationalize the media like they did with the BBC. I'm not entirely sure if that's good or bad, since the BBC is pretty good overall but the thought of government controlled media scares the shit out of me.
=Smidge=
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.
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.
We didn't learn that there is no value in internet advertising from the dotcom bust. We learned that that not every imaginable service in the service industry needs an online presence.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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 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.
Another model is that of NPR. Basically non profit user supported.
I do however think that the major newspapers will figure out how to monetize their popularity eventually. It is not as if the newspapers are not being read, it is just that the old revenue model is failing.
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.
The BBC isn`t government controlled. It is publicly funded and the amount of that funding is set ultimately by government.
The proof for BBC independence is that whatever government is in power, their supporters always claim the BBC is a puppet of the opposition. This is exactly how an unbiased news outlet should be perceived in my view.
You could argue that as the government sets the tax level (after lobbying from the BBC) that it can control the content but any government that tried to do that would be swiftly out on its ear.
The BBC has never been "nationalized" either. It has always been independent, though financed through a special "license" you buy in order to receive its television broadcasts. BBC radio has not required this license for many years.
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.
The BBC is interesting because it's arguably less government-controlled than the US media, in spite of being tax funded.
s/in spite of/because of/
The BBC has to worry less about pleasing its corporate masters and more about serving the public, since it's the public that's footing the bill. It's essentially the same principle that keeps Consumer Reports and public radio a cut above the rest.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
I agree with you.
AP and Reuters are two of the few actual content providers. They SHOULD charge. After all, they charge newspapers for their content. They have live trained reporters around the world, many of them risking their lives. This has substantial value. They deserve to be paid.
Yes, citizen journalism has its place, but there is no substitute for trained professional reporters.
So, I think the "free media" movement will bottom out. Things may be permanently more competitive in professional journalism, but it won't go away.
NPR is only funded about 2% by the government. (And I believe most of that is bidded on, not just handed to them.) So yes, it is more "listener-supported" than "taxpayer-funded". And I don't think you understand what "non-profit" means, either. Where it gets the money is irrelevant, it's what it does with it that matters.
Have you seen the circulation figures lately? Readership is dropping like a rock in many places.
Best Slashdot Co
Internet advertising is practically worthless. We learned this from the dotcom bust.
There's some people who run a certain website who would like to disagree with you. It's called Google, maybe you've heard of it?
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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
"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.
"Why people should want to pay?" Is that person a moron? Nobody WANTS to pay. People want things for free. Hell people want to get paid for giving you the priviledge of giving it to them for free. A better question to ask "why should they charge".
Well let's examine why a COMPANY may want to charge money for it's SERVICES.
Well other then the fact it is a for PROFIT COMPANY, and it is offering a SERVICE which costs it money I don't have much of a good reason. They need to make their money somewhere, and if ad's aren't cutting it then they need to get it someplace else.
As I have said it before, and I will keep saying it - This service is not a life or death service. You do not NEED it to live or be happy. Given that - you can pay for it or not pay for it. If it's time for the business to fail then it will eventually fail. In the meantime - managers, reporters, support staff, printers, web devs, isp providers, internet connections, and other infrastructure cost money.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
I thought the dotcom bust taught us that after you spend your venture capital on aeron chairs, razor scooters, and indoor beaches, you need to actually do something that makes money.
Actually, I didn't get my number from Wikpedia, but I can't recall where I heard it. (Maybe ultimately it goes back to Wikipedia? Dunno.) Still, a fair point. 16% it is (include CPB), although it doesn't change the point any. The amount paid directly by listeners is well in excess of this.
31% listener pledges, memberships, etc. As the GP points out, tax-deducatable donations are just a special kind of government funding.
Surely you can see that this is nonsense? Money I spend on a charitable donation does not reduce my taxes (therefore government income) by the same dollar amount. If it did, I'd pay my taxes to my favorite non-profits and screw the government. Heck, I'd bet most people don't even BOTHER to itemize their deductions to make the individual donations count. It's not worth the effort for the average taxpayer.
(Wikipedia claims universities, some of which are subsidized by government)
This is just plain stretching to the point of silliness. I can't speak to all universities, but I know the state university in Colorado is funded less than 10% by the state government.
Independent journalism is a myth. If you want to cover a car wreck, maybe. If you want to get information from the government? Don't bet on it.
To write a real piece of investigative journalism, you need time, you need clout, and you need money.
As an independent, your FOIA requests will be largely ignored: what are you going to do, sue them? With what money? Big corporate newspapers hardly sue anymore because their margins are shrinking. Let me repeat: companies that make millions of dollars don't make enough money to pursue lawsuits that they can't help but win. What hope does an independent have?
To keep from suing all the time, you need power and prestige. You need the government to know that you mean something, that you represent a large group with deep pockets, and that you will grind them under your boot if they fuck with you. To put this in terms you understand: if a newspaper sells less than 75,000 copies a day...That's 75,000 paid page views...even your state government won't give you the time of day. Translate that into web traffic, and imagine how big the site would have to be. This site gets tons of page views: when was the last time you saw them do something besides link to an article someone else wrote?
Now money. You know what you get from the government if you FOIA request some data and they don't make you sue for it? The motherfuckers make you pay 25 cents a page plus shipping and they'll bulk up the document with everything they can find. You request some piece of information, better be ready to shell out a few hundred dollars in "copying costs." That's perfectly legal, they do that all the time.
Without being able to demand information from the government, what do you have? What kind of journalism can you do? Seriously. And who'd pay for it? Since everything is free right? When the indie journalists go out and break the next Watergate, paying for their own lawyers the whole way, how are they going to get compensated? You gonna buy a t-shirt?
What a fucking joke. Traditional media has it's warts, but no new media has stepped up to the plate...All they do is leech of the old media. And the only winners are the government, who make out like bandits with less oversight.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I say we just let the news industry go back to it's more honest past...
When was that? It must've been before 1770, because it only takes a moment to tell which side any of the period illustrations of the Boston Massacre were on. The engraving by Paul Revere is the only one you ever see anymore, but there were others published in loyalist papers that showed a handful of frightened, panicked british soldiers firing in helpless self defense as they are set upon by a huge mob of angry, rioting colonists. The media has never been honest. At best, it may have had a brief period where it pretended to be honest in a fairly convincing way.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
Oh wow, guess I should have kept reading. The previous articles are from: LA times, Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, the fucking Voice of America. This is in order, motherfucker! Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek! Not one fucking article that wasn't written by an old school media outlet!
Independent journalism my ass.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
But hey, (almost) all of that money was printed by the government at some point!
So NPR is 100% funded by the government and counterfeiters!