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Newspaper Execs Hold Secret Meeting To Discuss Paywalls
Techdirt got wind of a secret meeting by newspaper execs, complete with antitrust lawyers, to discuss how to proceed on the issue of implementing paywalls going forward. Of course, if newspapers decide to all lock away their content that just means the rest of us will have a bunch of great journalism talent to pick from soon thereafter. "You may have noticed a bunch of stories recently about how newspapers should get an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude -- working together to all put in place a paywall at the same time. That hasn't gone anywhere, so apparently the newspapers decided to just go ahead and try to get together quietly themselves without letting anyone know. But, of course, you don't get a bunch of newspaper execs together without someone either noticing or leaking the news... so it got out. And then the newspapers admitted it with a carefully worded statement about how they got together 'to discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of news gathering that will serve the American public.' And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved."
We all know paywalls won't work. However, the alternative is worse: if newspapers don't find a way to make money online soon, they'll start seriously blending advertising inside news content. I don't want that to happen!
One idea, based on what I have seen work abroad, is to mandate, for a limited time, a fee of $1 on all Internet connections. You could then use that monthly credit to subscribe to whatever content you chose. That would inject millions in the content economy. If what you want is free music, use your credit for that. If you want to read the New York Times, fine.
After a few years, phase out the fee (hum...). By then, people should have gotten used to it and you get a smooth transition to people using micro-payments for content. Any better ideas?
--
FairSoftware.net -- fair jobs for iPhone developers and graphic designers
*ring ring* ...
NY Times Editor: Marcus? Hi, it's Bill Keller from the New York Times and since we're all in agreement that today we put our paywalls, I just wanted to call you up and thank you again.
Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, Bill, we gotta do this--I mean, we just can't sustain without this revenue *snicker*.
NY Times Editor: Alright well, I'm calling because it's 10am now EST and we had all agreed that at midnight EST our papers would switch over to paywalls.
Washington Post Editor: Yep. That's right. *snort*
NY Times Editor: Yeah, well, your paper is still accessible without a paywall.
Washington Post Editor: What? Oh, man, hah, must be a bug. I'll get right on that!
*click*
Two hours later.
*ring ring*
NY Times Editor: Yeah, Marcus? It's Bill from the New York Times again, it's noon, still seeing a paywall on your site, what's up?
Washington Post Editor: Oh yeah, it's a bad bug, we can't figure it out--might take weeks. *laughing in background*
NY Times Editor: Really? Well, we haven't had a single person sign up for our paywall and I'm looking at an ad online right now that says, "Washington Post: Because Information Wants to be Free." And, uh, I also am reading some comments on blogs about only idiots will ever use the New York Times from this point on. Am I on speaker phone?
Washington Post Editor: Bill, it's time I came clean. In the newspaper business, there are sheep and there are sharks
My work here is dung.
I'd be happy to pay for a newspaper, an online one even. The alternative is nobody doing investigative reporting (you really think bloggers are going to pick up that slack? I doubt it).
Would have been nice to see the papers actually cover the run up to the Iraq war, or all the insane voter suppression tactics from 2004, but I guess we can't have a functioning democracy AND access to information at the same time.
... to try to save a dying business model.
The reporters can always get day jobs and keep their writing game up at wikinews.
"You may have noticed a bunch of stories recently about how newspapers should get an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude."
I seem to remember something called LexisNexis. No? Ok.
see subj.
So how much easier would a more mature micropayment system make almost every information transaction? Hell, at this point Second Life Lindens are starting to look like a good currency for this type of thing.
-- The unsig...
still seeing a paywall on your site, what's up
Should be:
still not seeing a paywall on your site, what's up
if they stop, i start. people in all the war places can make their own news, and report to us. those papers are stuck in old world thinking, people aren't going to take it.
"How can we make ourselves even more irrelevant than we are now?"
---don't make me break out my red pen.
Sounds like a non-story to me. Or does the article submitter imply that whenever companies get together, they should invite the press and make it a fully open meeting?
Yeah, so they want to get paid for their work. Might as well spin this as: "Capitalism 2.0: Your time ain't free".
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Charging for stuff" is not "a" business model, it's business. What's not a business model is giving free rides. Something's gotta give.
to be fair, I'm not convinced that 'day jobs' will let reporters REALLY do research.
problem is, almost no local paper does research anymore and its only the 'biggies' that can afford it. the biggies are also the ones we cannot trust as they are too much in bed with the subject they are trying to do research on! its a big mess.
smaller independants are more trustable but their budgets are down to near zero now. so where do we get IN DEPTH stories from?
answer: we don't. the gov will soon control the data flow and news flow (in our lifetimes, we'll see this).
we are witnessing a change in info flow but its not all good, folks.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Do you think they will still allow Googlebot to crawl their web pages? If so I see nothing wrong with changing my user agent. Then again for the most part I listen to NPR and read the articles on their website. Support public broadcasting!
I call it "The Kindle does Cable:"
1. Stop printing news on paper.
2. Give out electronic devices that update automatically and wirelessly
3. Bill the users of those electronic devices a small but non-trivial monthly rate (say, $14.99 with a 2-year subscription)
4. Offer other publishers access to your platform for much larger sums. So a subscription to your paper also includes a subscription to the local sports magazine, dining guide, etc.
5. Work out a deal with Craigslist to deliver local classified ads for free.
Not for trying to collude in secret with one another, because that's been the status quo of business since some better-than-thou jackass decide that "manager" should be synonymous with "boss" rather than with "secretary." No, this fail because they just illustrated just how irrelevant they've become. I can't get a lick of investigative journalism out of these crusty old outlets other than that spoon-fed to them by their chosen benefactors in government or industry, but I heard about this little gathering of goofballs just fine using these silly Intarwebs.
Why should I pay a bunch of jokers to hunt down sources when those sources are having a grand old time posting everything they see direct to the world, often with full color photos or even video from the convenient little cameras that so many people carry in their pockets these days. Sorry Jimmy Olsen, I know you dream of roaming the streets capturing your Pulitzer, but most of us have found a nifty way to pass information to one another without needing you to play middleman.
Just goes to show you that they are in the business of maintenance through limited liability. They only print that which is in their interest or was explicitly granted to them without recourse to any suit that may incur.
Take away the paycheck, take away the maintenance. 1st Amendment is not maintained by the people, it is only acknowledged for the purposes of the debt charters known as the united States of America. Next thing you know, they'll be trying to convince us that the united States of America exists as a single entity titled "The United States" that creates "U.S. States" rather than confederated states of America.
This message brought to you by North Carolina American Republic.
They want their failed business model back.
Blame it on the greed and entitlement attitude of the average person. They want it all but don't want to pay for it. As a result, control falls to the organizations with a big enough hand to survive via other means.
As for the GP, you're an idiot. A journalist that can't focus on the subject at hand is worthless.
It's become trendy to say that bloggers do much of the work of the media and that is simply delusion. First of all, nearly all blog entries (including a large fraction of those on this site) are built around a link of a publication which employs its writers. Bloggers do a great job adding bits, contextualize and bringing together info, but they are most often not the generators of solid base information they work with. So if we really do lose newspapers we are not going to have the People's Republic of Blogistan stand up and replace them with real reporting, we're just going to have gasbaggery in its place.
Now the newspaper industry as a whole needs plenty of creative destruction on top of that. Now that news can freely travel across the country and the world, there's no need for every paper to have Washington bureau and foreign correspondents, and consolidation is much needed there. Likewise the stupid forays of the 90s into "new media" and the debt-fueled expansions also call for some of these business to go under. But that's about restructuring companies and an industry, not replacing paid professionals with everyone's favorite opinion.
My hope is that the newspapers will force the issue on micropayments. I would gladly pay $1, maybe $2 a day for a combination of stories from the Washington Post, NYT, LA Times, my local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on occasion some random others that I learned about from some blogger. I absolutely will not pay $20/mo to each of those. So if they can figure out a joint payment scheme that makes sense, I'm all for that. Double bonus points if they can use it to make their archives affordable and not priced for company and institutiional use.
I don't see how antitrust is necessary in this case. In the dense suburban area I grew up in, there was only one newspaper my family ever considered - the large, liberal, city newspaper. Our neighbors also only considered one newspaper - the local, conservative newspaper. There were only two newspapers that served out region, and everyone knew which they wanted. There was no true competition.
As I understand it, most of the US is like this. I don't know the history of the industry, and I'm sure there was competition at some point, but I can't think of any cities that are served by multiple large newspapers (and no, I don't count the New York Post!). Perhaps the industry already colluded at a regional level, and now they need to do something similar at a national or international level.
Frankly, I think it's a bit dangerous. I come from a city that has a terrible large newspaper (San Diego Tribune), and it sucks that we don't have more choice. If this happened at a national level, the entire print industry would die in one fell swoop. This "paywall" also sounds dangerous. I already get most of my news for free, and I know the demand for paid news has fallen. Perhaps this last ditch effort indicates the industry is already dead.
"...and they had anti-trust lawyers "
So what?
Since when does holding an illegal meeting make it justified simply because lawyers are under advice?
Lots of criminal activity is sanctioned by lawyers even because congress has made it legal to do criminal activity.
Such as allowing the banks to steal every single American citizens tax dollars for the next 5 generations under the guise of "Tarp".
So what this isn't news, its business as usual. I am wondering why they even bothered to do it in secret, nobody cares!
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Ever see dozens of reporters trying to ask the same questions? All reporting on the same story with the same facts? 10 microphones redundantly recording what someone says for different news agencies?
There's no need for that duplication of effort. It's surprising the industry has lasted that way for so long.
As for local papers: your classifieds are all going online. Your reprinting of AP stories, sports scores, and stock prices adds no value. Your only real product is the local stories--all 2 pages of them. How much is that worth? Not much.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
This is exactly the kind of bully policies the RIAA, MPAA and other dinosaurs of 20th century industries fail with. They can't adapt so they think locking up the market will solve their woes. This is utterly misguided because then you'll have the smaller journalism organizations who've been kept out of the Big Boys Club coming in to fill the niche and unlike the cruise ships, they've got little overhead to contend with and can thrive off meager internet advertising.
I work for a newspaper company and we are going through this exact thing right now. The newspaper industry has gotten used to seemingly endless financing and now sites like Craigslist and Google are doing a better job at what makes newspapers money.
There is no money in journalism. The money comes from classifieds and sponsorship. Now that people can easily get their news from just about anywhere companies are not as willing to shell out major payments for newspaper ads.
Don't get me wrong, a paywall is a TERRIBLE idea but the news industry isn't cheap and people take it for granted. What other ideas are out there to keep news journalism profitable?
that just means the rest of us will have a bunch of great journalism talent to pick from soon thereafter.
"Hi, I'm with dailyblog.com. I hear you used to work for the Global Blabber. I'd love for you to work for us."
"That sounds great. I was one of their best local investigative journalists. How much would you pay?"
"Ummmm, pay? We are a blog. You'd work for fun right?"
*click*
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
One approach appears to be relatively obvious: Use journalistic content to persuade people to come to your Craigslist-style site, rather than the Craigslist-style site that has no journalism.
Value-Added Craigslistism!
Whatever happened to the claim that the ads paid for the hardcopy papers and the cover price was just a token fee to assure the advertisers that the papers weren't likely to just be taken and thrown out unread? If that is true, why would they need to charge anything in order to deliver the paper electronically? Don't the ads more than cover the delivery costs?
"People of the same trade rarely meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."
-Adam Smith
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
Yes, because great journalism talent will put their work on the web for free. /sarcasm
Remember, journalists have bills to pay and need to eat just like you. You wouldn't work for free, and neither will they. If they can't make money as journalists, they will get jobs doing something else. Seeing as great journalism is a full time job, there will be a major reduction in the quantity of quality journalism. But, crappy journalism with continue unabated.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I'm not sure why we need a term like paywall, but if anyone was wondering it's a subscription-based content delivery business model. I didn't see anyone in the summary or article bother to define it.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
As an longtime consumer of printed media, I really have no problem paying for a subscription to a daily newspaper and a few magazines on subjects I care about. Back in the day, the primary benefit of a subscription was home delivery ("Never miss an issue!") and a discount off of what it would cost to buy the publication on the street.
So what are the possible benefits now? I can think of a few things that would make subscribing worthwhile:
- Access to articles -- this is the porn/academic journal approach where you can only see the good stuff if you pay. This only works if what you offer is REALLY good and not available elsewhere.
- Freedom from advertising -- I would pay $10/mo to NYTime Company today if they would stop putting animated ads and buttons on their pages.
- Convenient access -- this is the Kindle approach, where your subscription grants you access to well-formatted content from mobile or dedicated devices. This only works if the content is truly well-formatted, which it is often not on the Kindle. This is more or less the iTunes model, too, because you pay a small premium for the tight integration of content and device.
- Affiliation -- this is the public radio approach: you support the station, they send you t-shirts and other crap that allow you to identify in public as a supporter. Commercial media are kind of blind to this, but it has worked really well for some organizations for a long time.
Can a room full of newspaper execs come up with actual reasons why we should subscribe like this? I dunno. I doubt it. I suspect they will put up paywalls, but then continue to show annoying ads, ignore mobile devices, and botch the affiliation angle like they always have. Bankruptcy comes to all dinosaurs sooner or later. If they could learn from Slashdot (which has an *excellent* subscription scheme) they already would have.
Rupert Murdoch, speaking out on the news business, stated today that "the Internet free access model is clearly malfunctioning, as I don't make enough money from it. We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us."
Media commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. "How can we hold governments' feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?" Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls.
Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its "fair share" for so parasitically leading people to newspapers' websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. "We feel this is completely unfair," said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, "as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss." Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I actually think the idea of newspapers having a single national registration and payment system that would allow news subscribers to pay once, which would go to their local newspaper, to access news all over the country, would be good for consumers since it allows for them to continue to access news from all over the country from anywhere, without having to make seperate payments to each newspaper, and allows newspapers to continue to survive in this economy. For those who oppose this, how do you expect for newspapers to survive when advertising revenue does not make ends meet? Furthermore, blogs and part time journalists dont really have the resources to do some of the things that larger news organisations do, such as going into foreign countries which can require a lot of resources and security, and other investigations that require resources. This would bode poorly for american society which already is woefully ignorant about the world and international news. The smaller newspapers are often the ones most endangered and failing to act to prevent dissappearance of them would mean fewer independant voices and more media consolidation.
Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research, investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.
I happen to work at a small(ish) rural newspaper that has an online edition. You can get the edition free if you pay by the year or have a 3 month auto-pay account. Otherwise you have to pay to either also get the online edition, or just get the online edition. It has been fine that way for seven years.
Frankly, I think it's a bit dangerous. I come from a city that has a terrible large newspaper
So does everyone, that's why they are all going out of business. Anyway, people don't see the need for newspapers because there are so many other sources of news. There's radio, tv, the internet. The other thing too is that newspapers are probably far too general in content. If you want news specific to your industry, then there are places you go to get it and those places most certainly charge.
The only reason newspapers have even survived is because they have been a traditional thing more than a useful one for the last 50 years, and they alienated their predominantly conservative customers. It's one thing to have a Philly Inquirer delivered because your grandfather got it, but once they start ripping conservatives all the time, its like why read this crap?
This is my sig.
Posting as AC as this isn't commonly known where I live, but the shipping industry here actually has an agreement on file with the Federal Maritime Commission which allows them to sit down with their competitor to discuss rate hikes and decreases. They can't specify exactly what they would like to charge the consumer, but they can discuss percentages. The hikes must be approved by the FMC, but so long as they present a convincing enough argument, the new rates will be approved. Rate decreases do not require FMC approval. (Ie: Competition is dead. Same service virtually no difference in costs charging the same prices.)
Everyone likes the New York Times, but if it's behind a paywall, everyone will go read Yahoo News instead. Right?
Everyone likes World of Warcraft, but since it's behind a paywall ($15/month!), everyone plays MapleStory instead. Right?
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times, and many more than that read it for free. 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
There's nothing wrong with paywalls, so long as you can make your product attractive enough to pay for.
OK, then I'll start my own online "newspaper" (with a paywall if necessary) and send my monthly credit to myself. The content of my "newspaper" will simply inform my readers how they can setup their own "newspaper" and do the same. The more you try to forcibly take my money, the harder I will fight to make sure you get absolutely nothing from me (even if it ends up costing me more money).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I'm sure the buggy makers fought to keep their market share once the automobile industry started to dominate the market and we all know how well that worked out. CNN makes a metric buttload of money from ads online as probably do a lot of other news and pseudo news organizations. Newspapers can wall up their content instead of going to an online ad based revenue stream and kill themselves off altogether. The bottom line is news happens and there will be free sources to view it such as CNN. I'm not ever going to pay for online content.
the news industry was always simply a distribution channel for information. Some papers may have done a better job then other papers but the reality all news papers must face today is the distribution channel is now the internet which is global, nearly instantaneous and more or less free. If every employed journalist disappeared today, journalism would continue. Sharing information would continue and I have no doubt that even quality journalism would continue. News papers are to the internet the same thing peer reviewed journals might be to the internet, theoretically a source of available information which has been professionally reviewed. But quality varies.
Quack, quack.
Why do we need two newspapers in every city ?
The cost of acquiring, processes and distributing news has gone down dramatically. Thus we are seeing major pressure on revenues (even without the recession we would have seen this, but not to such extent). Even after the recession, there will not be enough ad dollars left to support all of these newspapers. Let 5 or so national newspapers survive trough attrition and consolidation, problem solved.
Local news (if people want it) can still be provided by a smaller local office in each of those 5 national papers
I may get modded down for this opinion. And I am to an extent playing Devil's advocate here.
Maybe monetizing this content isn't such a bad idea. One of the biggest problems with "big media" is that they answer to their advertisers and sponsors. These are the folks that pay the bills. With content being distributed free (beer), there is absolutely NO incentive for these organizations to put out a product that is anything more than a vehicle for advertising revenue.
So, fine. Monetize it. I'm willing to pay for a truly independent press. If the newspapers continue to spew crap, then people won't buy it. But maybe, just maybe, if these so-called professionals actually put their mind to it, they could publish material worth paying for. I pay for content all the time. The Economist, WSJ, New Yorker, Harpers. I do so because it is worth it to me. And these are writers that put out good work and they deserve to get paid. Maybe the newspapers could put out content worth paying for.
If there is anything I'm worried about its not monetization of newspaper content. It is whether these organizations have the vision to actually execute a transition to an Internet world. The whole buzz about Kindles and the NYT indicates they may be --starting-- to get it. But one beauty of free markets is that if they don't do it, someone else will.
Fuck the American public.
Actually in the newspaper business the 25 cents is to control waste: to stop you from taking fifty copies to insulate your cottage. The operating costs and profits come from advertising dollars. Like the networks, that are now trying to get cable to pay them for the feed while they keep the advertising rights.
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times, and many more than that read it for free. 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
Demographically speaking, those groups don't often overlap.
like gasoline or rice
something like WoW is a luxury, like jewelry or yachts
the economics of why people buy luxuries versus commodities and whats motivates them to buy these things is completely different
comparing purchasing the news to purchasing WoW is completely bogus
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, some sort of NewsPass might work, if you could really allow free reading of news by it. There are three local papers my town is in the footprint of. I scan a few articles from two of them each morning. Then I go to news.google, which is adjusted to my prefs, and read another half-dozen stories which could be hosted anywhere. Then to nytimes.com for the editorials and a few more stories, if the day's tasks aren't too pressing. Later in the day, on break I'll read the blogs, and a few more stories at essentially random newspaper sites linked from there.
I'd be perfectly happy if I were paying $15 a month (the price of a subscription to a good newspaper back when there were more good, fat newspapers around), and that were distributed proportionally over the hosts of the stories I read. But I would not be happy if for $15 a month I could only get, say, one local paper and nytimes.com, and then had to pay more for each other story I read elsewhere. Ten years ago one of the local papers would have been enough - they had more of their own reporters, and carried a lot more NY Times copy along with more national AP coverage than presently. But now that both print and web versions of the Times, USA Today and whatever are around, the local papers are decidedly local. The equivalent product to what the good newspapers used to be needs to allow me to read anything, anywhere, without stopping to register or log in. And it should be for not more that 50 cents a day. If they can put in on newsprint for 75 cents, including the costs of delivery, they can certainly make a profit on 50 cents, where all they need is a web server to distribute it.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly somewhat raised the bar for allowing privately-brought anti-trust suits to proceed, but its standard seems to be met here if they do actually implement pay walls, so a suit could at least go to trial. In Twombly, a suit against the Bells was thrown out because it only alleged parallel behavior (not itself illegal) and a claim of conspiracy to carry it out not backed up by any allegations specifying why the plaintiff had any reason to believe it actually was coordinated. Here you can state a sufficient pleading easily: if they simultaneously introduce pay walls, you have parallel behavior, and you additionally allege that they had a meeting at which they discussed carrying out said parallel behavior in concert. Not sure that alone would allow a plaintiff to actually prevail at trial, but it should at least allow a suit to go forward investigating it if this happens (assuming the newspapers don't get a Congressional exemption).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It depends on what you're selling. The trick is to not try to sell something (relatively) infinite without adding value to it. You can't sell oxygen. You can sell it if you add value by compressing it and put it in cylinders, or if you perfume it and convince people it's the popular thing to do. You use the infinite thing (information transfer) to sell the scarce good (your time, expertise, advertising eyeballs, whatever).
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
but some newspapers will die. The world is changing, and what made lots of money in the past, makes less money today. Some news outlets will still find a way to be profitable, but it's a shrinking pie.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
OK, so *ALL AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS* paywall their websites. Now, what do you do about foreign newspapers???
And it's not just newspapers either. What about...
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.cbc.ca/
What about websites of radio and TV networks, and their individual stations, around the world?
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The change in info flow is that the people who were previously sources for the info have their own access to information dispersal tools, rather than having to connect with a reporter to get the story out. Everyone is a journalist in an age where everyone can communicate to everyone else. We no longer need newspapers as the intermediaries filtering what news we get and broadcasting it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I don't think the US has newspapers anymore. That would require Jounalism and a Free Press. 'Free' as in not bought!
there's your investigative journalism replacement
http://consumerist.com/
if you are a journalist, start your own blog if you have enough star power, or join a collective of investigative reporters and if the site is useful enough that it generates huge traffic, enjoy your adsense income
the traditional newspaper is fractionating into its various columns, sections, and star power reporters, each developing their own pioneering site on the web. the internet IS the newspaper
money will still be made, power will still exist, influence will still be felt, trust will still be earned. but the traditional forms of the mass media news- not just newspapers but also television, will be blended into a puree and new mutant forms will grow into being
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved
If any other industry was doing this, the newspapers would be killing tens of thousands of trees, and spending a ton of ink talking about another evil capitalist industry's greed.
Imagine, for a second, if your local birdcage liner found out about local gas stations getting together to coordinate prices.....
No, they shouldn't get an exemption. But considering the sweet deal that other ancient organizations are getting (hello, UAW!), they probably will.
"Charging for stuff" is not "a" business model, it's business. What's not a business model is giving free rides. Something's gotta give.
I'm not sure Slashdot is the best place to have this discussion, given the average age of the participants here - I'm not sure most folks here actually understand what it takes to pay the bills/rent/mortgage. Even most college-age folks are pretty heavily subsidized, whether mom/dad are paying their way or they're having to pay their own tuition and board. Frankly, if you're used to being subsidized you're not going to really understand how the real world works.
Well, there goes MY karma...
#DeleteChrome
This story is nonsense from start to finish. Yes, some newspaper execs got together and discussed paywalls. Big deal.
There is nothing illegal about that. I realize everyone on Slashdot thinks of himself as an antitrust expert, but industry people do this all the time. Credit card companies have trade associations, and so do banks, car dealers, fast food franchisees, and book publishers.
"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O'Hare International Airport. It's perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.
Omigosh! An industry conference! But if we call it a "quickie conclave" it sounds sinister...
In which they discussed ways their members might adapt to the market! Stop the presses! Wait - they apparently had some legal counsel to make sure they weren't breaking the law! Wow!
This story is sensationalist nonsense. There is truly nothing to see here. The best part is the guy from the Atlantic whining about the decline of journalism, while simultaneously providing an example.
Advice: on VPS providers
It's a simple capitalistic endeavor -- determine who is willing to pay for what (and how much).
Craigslist isn't free -- they charge for real estate ads in some markets. Then there's the requirement for government entities to publish announcements and bids for contracts. I'm guessing there's other legal requirements for people to post some types of information (death notices?).
The newspapers just need to figure out which parts of the paper can be used to subsidize other parts ... as general ads are down, they can either try lowering the price (in an attempt to get more total money), or find other ways to capitalize on what they have. (I used to work at an ISP that was co-located at a small newspaper (they got free bandwidth, we got free space) -- they printed some specialty newspapers when the state government was in session and some other stuff that wasn't just their normal business ... they also saved money by switching to VoIP back in 1998 to link themselves to the other papers the company owned)
Our local newspaper (different area now) would take advertisements for events based on column inches / color / etc ... but they haven't yet put up a calendar system so I could pay to have them list my event for a given number of weeks and have people easily find it on their website. Newspapers could easily re-invent themselves as local portal sites and possibly charge for combined membership / subscription or access to some 'premium' sections.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
>> But, crappy journalism with continue unabated.
Sad, but true. *sigh*
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
1 million Americans pay for the New York Times...... 2.5 million Americans *pay* for WoW.
That's the most depressing statistic I've heard.
Qxe4
AP Content is all over the place. Most people weren't aware of how much of their daily news was filled by AP until the internet made it apparent. The WSJ has been successful as a pay model because 1) they create a significant amount of their own content, and 2) People want to read it. When you look online, the local newspapers aren't just competing with each other - they are competing with the TV news as well. With 4 sources coming up with the same stories, the reader will turn to the source they are most familiar with. When that source turns out to be too noisy (either with bad content, too many ads, poor layout), people will leave. There are other places to go. The papers aren't losing money because they can't make money online - they are losing money because they don't understand the marketplace they are attacking. They want "more revenue, more visitors" so they put up more ads, shock articles, and spam (pardon me, astroturf) other sites. Instead they should be thinking about things like visitor retention and how to attract long term customers.
The internet in the beginning was about how to make information more accessible. Too big a focus on commerce is bad.
If, say, the LA Times - with their vast library of news from the last 100 years made their archives publicly accessible from day 1, they would be one of the most popular sites on the web. They would be consistently cited, consistently searched, consistently visited. Instead they decided to charge a few bucks an article for their archives - and while they made a few dollars - the focus on monetizing rather than informing resulted in a lost opportunity to increase their company value by 20,000%.
"Charging for shitty stuff" is not "a" business model, it's charity. What is not a business model is whining about it.
to be fair, I'm not convinced that 'day jobs' will let reporters REALLY do research.
problem is, almost no local paper does research anymore and its only the 'biggies' that can afford it. the biggies are also the ones we cannot trust as they are too much in bed with the subject they are trying to do research on! its a big mess.
smaller independants are more trustable but their budgets are down to near zero now. so where do we get IN DEPTH stories from?
answer: we don't. the gov will soon control the data flow and news flow (in our lifetimes, we'll see this).
we are witnessing a change in info flow but its not all good, folks.
It's called the Ministry of Truth. Everyone else merely feeds off of the "real" IN DEPTH and BREAKING NEWS that's RESEARCHED PROPERLY
It's been suggested before but the only way the 'traditional' news media can compete is if they use technology to their advantage. By the time the newspaper is printed most of the information is stale. The perils of a connected society.
Now a subscription to a Kindle-like device that provides current information and also has investigative stories would be a winner. Timely information, serious reporting, targeted advertising, the whole deal. Publication costs would be minimal and they could expand on what they already do.
The old model is broken and will continue to be broken as long as there's instant access to information. Notice I didn't say news because newspapers aren't about news any more. They're about information. Angelina Jolie's latest shoe purchase isn't news. It's information but there's no way it should be on the front cover of anything that calls itself a newspaper.
If the price was right I'd get a subscription to my local paper using a Kindle. There's lots of things in there that I'd like to know and it would be darn handy to have a classified ad with me when I had time to call or a list of the yard sales I want to visit.
But they can't get their heads out of the business model that worked 100 years ago nor do they see the opportunities for this kind of change.
and I'll show you the money. Frankly, American media stopped reporting a long time ago. Because it was too costly and burdensome to think about what you're publishing. Thus all American papers and broadcasts became carbon copies of each other and the great, vapid echo chamber was born.
There are, however, other online news operations that DO provide value, and those I pay for. Stratfor is the prime example. There are really smart analysts there doing deep thinking and cogent writing on geopolitical topics that do matter, and I benefit from reading what they have to say. Crain's New York Business is another such example, and they're still a print publication. They provide useful local reporting, the kind all the other papers long since stopped doing, and I pay for what they produce.
So I firmly maintain that the medium that the media uses is not the challenge, but the quality of their output. If they don't fix that, and remember that they really are supposed to provide a public good, then no amount of paywalls or micropayments or other schemes in the universe will save them.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
My family gets the Sunday paper for the grocery ads and the coupons. We're not quite old enough to read the obituaries to see if we're there. It's damn rare for there to be a wire story that hasn't been covered here, on The Register, or on NPR. It's damn rare for there to be a local story that the local TV stations haven't covered and 5 co-workers have forwarded me links to the story. Comics... you remember how Berke Breathed and Frank Cho used to exaggerate about how much papers were shrinking the comics. Well, this year it became reality and the online copies of the comics have higher detail.
About twice a year the paper calls us wanting to give us a free trial of the daily paper. My response "We'd like the advertising flyers from the week day the second batch of grocery ads come out. Just don't give us the rest of the paper. For this we'll gladly pay you half the rate for a full week of daily papers." The local paper still hasn't taken us up on the offer. I've even tried suggesting "How about a special edition that is just the advertisements, classifieds, and flyers?" Still no go.
I do know that next year instead of mulching the garden with newspaper, I'll have to call the installers for the local home improvement stores for their empty cardboard boxes...
Either we all pay them or we need to write and select the news ourselves (Wikis, Blogs, RSS feeds, and recommendation systems). If I want to read ten selected news items every day and the local community has 100,000 people, everyone would have to write at least one article every thirty years. I guess it's pretty obvious what is going to happen.
Well, I really would like to come up with an idea to update their business model, but I don't have time since I want to write some more free software today.
Conspiracy to commit price fixing is a felony offence. They should be prosecuted!
Online subscription(s) to newspapers available at about 20% of the cost of having the dead tree edition delivered. The online version will have ALL of the content, but NONE of the advertising except for the classified section. NO effort must be made to include ANY DRM. Subscribers must be able to print out any part of the online edition, just as they could keep any part of the dead tree edition, for their own personal use of course.
The biggest thing that needs to happen is that the full and complete story must be told every time. No spin, no omissions. Of course we know that will never happen! Large conglomerate corporations that own many local newspapers need to be broken up/disbanded. Same with the mega-corporations that own almost all of the radio and TV stations.
Just a few of my thoughts... .
The solution to losing money isn't to find a new way to charge people but to make the product worth paying for.
There is so little in a newspaper that you can't get elsewhere for free and without waiting that there's little reason to buy one. There is more sports coverage than I would ever want on television. There is live news as it happens on television. There are comic strips that are still written by their creators online. There are a million websites with editorials, opinion columns, and reviews. What does that leave? Investigative journalism and sadly it isn't like my local small town newspaper has ever done a much of that.
Until they realize that their product isn't worth paying for they will keep struggling.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I bet the average age is closer to 30 than it is to 20 at this point. And a bunch of those people have jobs that provide pretty decent compensation.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The New York Times ditched its paywall a couple of years ago. Apparently people would rather read Yahoo News.
Many sectors of the news world are simply conduits for dissiminating propanda. I don't understand why people would want to pay. There are plenty of information sources on the internet that are free. At this point in my life, I have already found sources for the majority of the information that I want to consume. By the time the major news organizations pick up on the story and publish it, they are just rehashing information that I had days ago. The only difference seems to be that they tend to have eyewitness accounts, and it shows that they have interviewed people as opposed to just repeating the facts. Two examples are Stratfor and The Long War Journal. Between those two sources I am up to date on what is happening in Afghanistan, and what the major (political / economic / military) stories are. Earlier in the week, there was a bit of griping going on from journalists about the way the Obama administration handled releasing details about the President's Supreme Court nomination. The journalists were upset that the administration officials releasing the information wanted to remain anonymous, and they were only giving the details to a select group of journalists, instead of the entire press pool. The thought that went through my mind was, "What would the White House do if all of the journalists suddenly said, 'We really don't care who you are nominating for the Supreme Court. Find some other way to let the American people know what you're up to.'" We are really getting to the point where the major news sources are less and less relevent. Who wants to pay to consume propaganda?
"Of course, if newspapers decide to all lock away their content that just means the rest of us will have a bunch of great journalism talent to pick from soon thereafter."
Perhaps you haven't read a newspaper for the last several years. Nearly everyone with talent is already long gone.
Exactly. The problem that mass media is facing right now is how many stories about Octo-Mom do we actually ***want*** to pay for?!?! Who wants to pay to read the latest ***breaking news*** about some missing white chick from B.F.E.? How much are people willing to pay to be constantly scared about Swine Flu? Maybe if MSM actually produced some worthwhile stories that we'd actually want to read, they wouldn't be in this problem in the first place. But lately, 90% of the garbage they produce isn't exactly worth reading in the first place. So it seems like we're seeing Darwin's Natural Selection process at work in the journalism industry right now,...
because the one thing I noticed about most papers is their decidedly opposite in their politics from what the area they serve. Some papers like the AJC are so extreme to one side it is obvious why few subscribe anymore. We need papers to keep government in check, but when they become just mouth pieces for one side or another they serve no one but the government. Worse are those whose editors are infatuated with certain leaders. The AJC was so bad their infatuated editor created a position in Washington just to be closer to her idol.
and they wonder why...
it was really hilarious when they were soliciting for a conservative editorial columnist and kept rejecting the ideas submitted because it didn't fit their mindset.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Lots of people here are taking a capitalist "let the best media win and the worst media fail" point of view, which I can totally get behind, in terms of national news. Between nytimes.com, fox news, cnn, washington post, la times, and direct feeds from AP and Reuters, there's no shortage of sources for national and international news. If a few of those sources can't figure out how to make a profit off the Web and go bust, hey, who cares?
But my worry is about local news. Many of the papers in question are the *only* source of serious investigative news in their region. If the New York Times and the Boston Globe go bust, who's going to investigate City Hall and State Capitol political shenanigans, state police brutality, or local corporate fraud? The Post and the Herald? Not likely. Random bloggers? They're too diffuse to have the power to be taken seriously by the government. TV channels? The only investigative journalism they have time or money for is "Are Pokemon Killing Our Kids?!"
I'm seriously worried that if these papers go under, nobody will be watching the local authorities. As I see it, scandal and corruption are already a much much bigger problem at the local level than nationally, because at the local level, not many people are paying attention. Get rid of the local paper, and it'll be party central at the city hall.
What about treating news like a public service? Have it publicly funded and held accountable with a model similar to how the BBC news operates in the UK?
The problem I see is that most newspapers are just glorified repackaging of newswire services with the odd local story and some opinion pieces that serve the owner's political agenda. That was all fine and well in the past, but the culture and technology has moved on and old business model is as dead as a downtown blacksmith ranting about how cars are damaging his horseshoe repair business.
I heard the publisher for Belo (Dallas News, et al) on NPR a few weeks. He had some interesting things to say. First was the atrocious terms that Amazon wanted to include his content on the Kindle. I forget the percentage but I believe Amazon wanted either 70% or 80% of the deal. That's just plain greed but that wasn't what Belo took issue with. What bothered them was the other clause that granted Amazon rights to reuse the content in other places as they saw fit. Can you imagine a television production company not only giving ABC most of the profit and THEN allowing them to reuse the content in other places?
He also mentioned the paywall. As he correctly stated, such a system would not work if only one publisher instituted such a system. However, getting all publishers together to agree on such a system is dangerously close to price fixing under U.S. law.
The publishers are in a hard place. I hope they find resolution.
Just like firefighters, police, (and healthcare!) etc.. news is an invaluable asset to a functioning society. Especially a democracy.
It should be funded by the public (NPR-like + tax money). Local newspapers by local towns (or several towns team up), nationwide news funded by the federal government.
There should be strict rules about government influence, and the reporting and story choice processes and methods need to be as transparent as possible. Ideally there should be more than one national news service, perhaps 3 or 4. Each should be governed by a body comprised of publically elected board members. If you feel that the news is not reporting the truth, vote them out. It might make sense to have the 3-4 board elections happen regionally (Northwest news, SW news, etc..)
> One approach appears to be relatively obvious: Use journalistic content to
> persuade people to come to your Craigslist-style site, rather than the
> Craigslist-style site that has no journalism.
Big fail. When you go to Craigslist, you go because you want to buy or sell something... period... end of story. This is not a monopoly situation like cable TV where, when you want channel A, you're forced to buy it as part of a bundle that includes channels B, C, D, E, F, and G, and pay a higher price in the process.
In the "good old days" newspapers were a monopoly for clssified ads, and they could force this through. The monopoly is gone, and people don't want to pay extra for "the bundle".
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I would never pay to read this article. Slashdot owners, if you ever think about monetizing this site, fire all your copy editors (if they even exist). They produce third-rate, biased blog postings that are riddled with spelling, grammatical and factual errors, and language meant to mislead and insinuate things that are more sensational than the truth really is. In other word, shoddy.
Good journalism is prosaically boring and full of facts. Definition complete.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Agreed. Why should I care if the media as it exists now fails? Something will evolve to replace it that works. I'm sure that the 'messengers & criers guild' had similar meetings once the first printing presses started cranking out daily papers, why would this be any different? Of course the people with vested interests are having secret meetings. Their monopolies that they have worked to carve out are threatened.
Human technological advancement is a history of the 'new' dragging the 'old' out in the street and beating its brains out with a dull rock. It's always messy, and anyone tied to the 'old' never makes it easy.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Everyday the local metropolitan newspaper (in my case the Boston Globe) provides coverage of dozens and dozens of events...
Do they? Or do they just buy a AP or Reuters story, chop it down to 2 paragraphs and print it? Because pretty much every story I see in newspapers is just rehashed AP news.
They might cover local news, but how much local news is truly 'news worthy'?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I canceled my subscription to the local paper in 2006. Here's the letter I wrote to them:
I have decided not to renew my N&O subscription. I have been wavering for a few weeks. After having been a subscriber for many years, my "automatic" renewal came into question because of a number of factors:
- A change in delivery person a few months ago has resulted in late deliveries, wet paper deliveries, and no delivery in one case. I do not care to wonder when, if, or in what condition my paper is to arrive each day.
- Your "innovative" use of stick-on ads on the front page is offensive.
- Your lack of editorial or other coverage of the president's willful and systematic destruction of constitutional checks and balances, with congressional complicity, leads me to believe that you are asleep, don't care, or otherwise not doing your job.
- In contrast, the ink spent on the local hockey team was huge - massively excessive in comparison to the many ways in which this nation is destroying itself.
- Your paper's increasingly tabloid look and feel is unbecoming a serious newspaper. You seem to be descending to the level of the failed Durham Herald, or USA Today ("News Lite").
- The daily changes in how things are collated makes it harder to identify and discard the many parts of your paper I don't care to peruse, mainly classified and inserted ads and sports.
- Finally, the long-standing placement of tear-off ads running the length of the comic pages most Sundays has been a source of continuing irritation.
In short, my message to you is that if you want my business, you would do well to stop annoying me. If you make substantive changes in any of the above areas, feel free to let me know. Otherwise, I hope you can make a living from your happy hockey fans.
The day the tax is implemented, the publishers realize they're no longer market driven to provide quality content. They replace their reporters with a slave gang of offshore typists. Later, instead of dropping the tax it is made immortal with an ever increasing rate of increase. In addition, once they get people to pay they all institute private paywalls anyway for "Premium content" like news made available within a month of the covered event, or written by someone with Enlish as their first language.
Because this is America, and that's what campaign contributions are for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They are colluding to start charging at unison.
They don't want a few like USA today or another to stay FREE.
Criminal. Newspapers and Cable TV channels are about $$$ for their owners and not providing just news.
They are making money from their websites but they will always always want more.
William Randolph Hearst - google it. They also own TV channels across the country. They hate the internet.
I want DA's sicked on their asses, I want congressional hearings, I want antitrust investigations, allegations about cover-ups, reporters swamping newspaper owners and CEOs asking them impossible questions. No one else could get away with this BS. For once the antitrust legislation could be put to actual productive use.
But, despite the outrage, what's really hilarious about all of this is that even with colluding on prices, the newspapers don't have a chance of making this scheme work.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
I think i get the gist of what you are saying, and I do agree with you, college students do not know what things cost. However, most people do not know what things cost either. Plenty of people buy brand new cars, over inflated houses, ring tones, jewelry and watches. Even something as simple as eye glasses are marked up hundreds if not thousands of percent.
I think what your main point is though, is that people should pay companies to subsidize and promote culture. I think this idea is false. Even something like the news, (to stay on topic), ought to be free to everyone. Why should only the rich be able to afford information? I pay alot of bills, yes sir. So many that i barely have enough at the end of the month to put away and save. What I am sick and tired of, is this attitude that people such as yourself put forth, that everything worth while must have a cost, and someone must be, not just surviving by that cost, but making a PROFIT. To me, profit means that someone is making money at my expense and exploit. Newspapers, tv, movies and the radio do this by polluting the world with advertising. They take so much more than they give. Luckily, with the internet, content creators, who are also exploited by these profiteering middlemen, are able to engage the masses directly. This is the reason that big companies are so afraid of the internet. Its not about "paying the bills", its about control.
If you care about your freedom, you should support openness and cultural freedom in whatever form it comes. I could care less if this inconveniences people who have been profiting selling something that should, in all rights be free in the first place.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Is it just me, or didn't CNN kill news? That may sound backward, because I think they started with good intentions. However, the drive to create new content 24X7X365 has pushed all news outlets to report first, investigate later. example: http://cbs5.com/local/huckaby.mistaken.identity.2.984162.html Perhaps the newspapers could get back to being the mainstream source of information if they went back to producing LESS news, but actual news worthy content. Let Fox and MSNBC move all their content to Twitter - it will be closer to their users attention span anyway.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
I somewhat agree with your point, but I recommend caution about praising mainstream media too much...
A few days ago, a hurricane (cyclone) struct eastern India and the nearby region. Over 100 killed and millions strongly impacted. Being a highly agricultural region, this event will have long lasting effects for the farmers... [crops don't like salt!]
Try to find one mention of it in Yahoo news. You can't!!! Not even in the Asia section...
Yet, Yahoo faithfully reports that 6 people were killed in a South American earthquake... Yes, this is also tragic, but how did this get picked up and the other event not?
Yahoo pulls from many major news sources... They aren't the only game in town, but are pretty big nonetheless...
6. ???
7. Profit!
If the newspapers continue to spew crap, then people won't buy it. But maybe, just maybe, if these so-called professionals actually put their mind to it, they could publish material worth paying for.
Ah, so we'll have our choice of Sugared-Up-Hyper-Happy-News or Horror-Film-Worst-Case-Scenario-Scare-My-Face-News. Call me crazy, but I don't want content that marketing departments have convinced the masses to want to shell out their gambling and McDonald's money for, I just want the plain old boring truth. It's why I don't watch television news anymore.
"Maybe the newspapers could put out content worth paying for."
They can't until they hire reporters who can produce it, and editors who can refine it. With the money they make now, they can't afford it - truly good reporters and editors can make better money doing PR or commercial freelancing.
Chicken vs. egg argument here. Magazines get away with it because their advertisers pay a premium to target a premium audience, and their reporters work weekly, even monthly - not daily, not juggling big investigative stories with daily "1 dead, 3 injured in car accident" reporting.
newspapers are supposed to provide. If we're going to be informed, we need paid boots on the ground at the routine school board and other government agency meetings and corporate board of directors meetings and press conferences.
Note that I said routine. The meetings where interesting things are expected to happen will have plenty of people tweeting out of them and plenty of blog postings afterwards. Sometimes, routine turns into 'all hell breaks loose' and then, it's a very good thing there's a reporter there if there is one. But if nothing much happens, a reporter can build relationships with involved parties who can explain the context and the players when things are no longer routine and there's a story to cover.
However,given the decreasing credibility of the mass media, (WHO told us that the War on Iraq was a good idea by parroting Bush Administration propaganda?) and the increasing awareness that the media news agenda is dictated by people whose interests and ours have nothing in common, of course you're going to find fewer and fewer people willing to pay for the product.
Paywalls will hasten the demise of every publication that doesn't provide anything worth buying. Not only due to direct effects, but google isn't going to provide a whole lot of reader eyeballs to content it can't access, and blogs aren't going to be pointing people at content their owners don't find worth buying on the average.
We need new business models that will subsidize "beat reporters". I hope they evolve, but I'm pretty sure that they won't come out of corporate-owned media. How can you get paid for local reporting without a corporate owner?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Then integrity is DAMN well hidden.
'cos we can't see sight nor sound of it.
There is very little in the way of integrity being shown, even if it is easily visible to someone inside.
... the problem with news in the age of the internet, is that people want all their news in ONE PLACE. This is why sites like digg, reddit and slashdot flourish posting links to other sites stories. People do not want to have to visit many sites for their news, they would rather have a 2-10 news sites the visit, any more then that and it gets tedious for the end user.
I wouldn't mind paying $19.95 or so a month if it included full search and retrieval from the archives. $20 is worth the convenience of kibo'ing or hypertexting back to the antebellum era. Abstracts suck. All they're good for is knowing which microfiche to request when you go to reference room at the library. That's extra work, time, and expense, but mainly, you could miss something important. $5-10 per full text retrieved is sheer larceny, though, when you can print it for 25 cents per page from a microfiche reader.. Many if not most papers that maintain comprehensive online morgues charge these kinds of outrageous fees for fair use and research. That's their privilige, but as we all know, information wants to be free. Now, one-time reprint rights for a single article might be worth $5 (Yes, or more. That's negotiable), but the information is and should be priceless. $20/mo. is reasonable fee for the service of providing easy online access, though. That's negotiable, too, of course, but I'd consider it a reasonable figure. ~$49/mo. might be reasonable for a bundle of all the major dailies in the country, or all the newspapers of record in a single state. And so on and so forth.
Remeber, Mr. Publisher, despite the name, copyright is a privilege, not a right, and there's more than one way to skin a cat. So play nice.
Newspapers can take a cue from the porn industry - give away snippets and teasers for free, but to get the whole article and photos, you pay a nominal fee for access to a collection of news services, archives and back stories.
For the pay version you would get the whole Sunday cartoon, not just the first frame, crossword puzzles and sudoku big enough to use, ability to comment on articles, etc. Another nice feature would be to set up profiles for the kind of news I like to read. Don't like the business section, but love the sports? How about adding SMS text alerts and local news filters. Even better is a classified ad bargain hunter feature - I put in what I'm looking to buy, and the news site alerts me if someone posts an ad for it. Better include a spam filter though.
I think the secret here is to allow readers to tailor their news delivery for what they want. The value to the papers is they'll find out what parts of the paper actually sell the paper, not what they think sells it. They'll still need variety though or this will open up niche news markets for the readers who get their favorite news excluded.
Three points:
Yes, newspapers and magazines have deteriorated in recent years. Everything having to do with print or media publishing has deteriorated in recent years. A large part of the blame is the electronic workspace. No one has the editorial, proofreading and fact checking staff they used to have. Those people retired or were fired years ago...because of the second point:
The internet has taken the most important revenue sources: local firms got killed by the big box stores which advertised are now being killed by e-commerce. Personal ads (formerly a surprisingly large part of newspaper revenues) have gone to ebay or craigslist. We all know what's happening to the local auto dealers. The remaining big advertisers no longer are captives of the newspapers and media -- they can now advertise directly to consumers via web ads and email...which leads to the third point:
The very best journalistic talent was always limited...and didn't necessarily come from the journalism schools. The talent will not disappear but may end up in other professions. There is no way that they will be adequately compensated by print mediaand there's no job security anymore.
No internet tax can rescue the situation. Free speech funded by or beholden to the government is government speech.
I used to read four major newspapers a day. I'm down to two. I find myself looking forward mostly to the funnies, which I can easily read online and might even pay for if they weren't DRMed to death. If the newspapers tollgate their content, I won't read it.
Some new business model will arise, count on it. Freedom of the press belongs to those that have one. Now, everyone does.
Don't cry for the news media and don't rescue them. Keep the government the hell out of the news business.
[Insert pretentious and semi-clever sig here: ______ ]
The phrase "boots on the ground" sounds military, let's see if we can be a little less subjective, eh? If we want to find out "what's happening in the world" how about we read online newspapers, and find a blog or 2 or 5, from that area. Then look for the same from nearby countries. Yeah, this is a lot of work, and only worthwhile for big or important subjects. It would sure be easier to just accept whatever the Boston Globe says.
Being from Boston, you're surely well aware of Noam Chomsky's analysis of major US media (e.g. Manufacturing Consent) and their tendency to report in a pro-business manner. Do some checking yourself though. Take some issue that's covered in the Boston Globe and interests you deeply, and write down your take on the article. Then research it yourself.
How do other countries manage the same issue? If someone has other views from yours, can you find points of agreement, do you occasionally find basis for their bias? Reverse the situation, could you convince them, with their narrow-minded subjectivity, of your worldly view? Try being hypocritical in their position. Analyze it from a neo-conservative angle, a liberal angle, a neo-liberal perspective. Do the deep research for facts, or as close as you can come to those. Separate opinions from facts. Draw your own conclusions and opinions from those facts. This will take time, and you're not pretending to be a reporter but doing this because you're interested and sometimes it's more involving than playing a video game.
Then read the same Boston Globe article and see what you think of its presentation of facts, it's lack of slant, what it ignores, and your original critique. Do you still find newspapers and other sources are all of "identical quality?"
As for local news, you're aware of blogs, but have you tried talking with people in diners, at grocery store checkout lines, old timers on park benches, attending city council meetings, doing things where you're in the news? A great way to misunderstand the world is to stay home and read the paper.
"Charging for stuff" is not "a" business model, it's business. What's not a business model is giving free rides. Something's gotta give.
I give mustache rides but times are tough. Where's my government bailout?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Network effects. Giving things away works all the time.
'The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits... a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.'
- Hunter S. Thompson
"$1 on all Internet connections" Yea and the income tax was only supposed to hit the top 1%.
"After a few years, phase out the fee (hum...)" Income tax was just to pay for WW2 right?
The Internet depends on everything (bandwidth, hardware...) always getting cheaper, taxation only ever increases, this is why taxation would kill the net. Rupert knows this.
I remember hearing that RIAA wanted to tax the internet too http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/14477.cfm
To me, this is like robbing Tesla Motors to keep GM afloat. Just let the failures fail and the successes succeed.