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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."
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=
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...
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."
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.
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.
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.