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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."
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
"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.
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.
How about.... No. Since you're so free with everybody's money how about you give up your entire paycheck to them, ya know for just a limited time of a couple of decades... naw that won't work since you'll already be use to giving everything up, you'll mind as well just continue to pay til the day you die. Since after all til death is still a limited amount of time, right?
Besides we don't need yet another credit system since we already have enough and absolutely have zero cause to have another.
This space is not for rent.
"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."
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.
If it is worth paying for someone will pay for it.
Someone isn't enough...and if you can get it all for free, most people will not pay for it at all even if the content is good enough. If anything, having excellent content just means people get it from you even more.
Screw 'em. I'd trust a pamphleteer over any of the sacred cow rags that are mentioned in the TFA.
'Pamphleteers,' by whom I presume you mean bloggers, are not journalists. Bloggers just cherry pick other peoples' hard work and add a few opinionated comments of their own to it. Journalists are professional people who do research and go through an editorial process before they get published. They are held accountable. Society needs this. It costs money. The money has to come from somewhere. The free news business model has been tried, and kudos to the newspapers for giving it their best shot, but it simply does not work. Screw em? No. Let's not 'screw em.' We need someone to uncover the next Watergate. We need someone to keep an eye on the war profiteers who charge $20 per washing machine load of laundry. We need someone to keep tabs on the polluters and bring it to the public's attention. If it means an exemption to anti-trust laws (that were written before newspapers ended up in this situation) then so be it. A professional news media is too important to be left to die.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
> if newspapers don't find a way to make money online soon, they'll start seriously blending advertising inside news content.
Teen wearing Nike Shocks and Abercrombie & Fitch jacket steals 2010 Toyota Corolla and rams it into Wal Mart.
Granny calls 911 from her new Nokia Xpress Music phone with an affordable AT&T plan, reports missing LG 52" Plasma TV bought at Best Buy.
It would go about as well as the money Congress gave telcos in the 90's to give everyone fast, cheap broadband service.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Newspapers dying is not the same thing as professional news media dying. Not all internet journalism must be blogging. Not all internet journalism need be ad-supported. There are many flaws with your response.
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.
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
Ever see the footage from those ten cameras after ten different network editors have had a go at it?
One source, one series of questions... you'd think it would be one story, right? Wrong. Each network will edit the footage to say what they'd prefer it to say.
Anyone with an S-Band satellite dish who's spent time watching "wild feeds" - network uplinks of raw footage - who's then watched the finished product rolled out on the news a few hours later can confirm this. It's one of the reasons Bob Dole got trashed in the '96 election - media coverage just flat-out favored Clinton.
Drop the number of reporters and cameras down to one and you still have the one source, the one series of questions... but instead of being told the story ten different ways, you're now being fed one single pre-approved opinion.
There's no way that's a good thing.
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.
Do you think they will still allow Googlebot to crawl their web pages?
The sad thing is that they will probably only allow Googlebot to crawl them, thereby disadvantaging any upstart search engines that might want to compete with Google. As much as I like Google, the fact that they are so big creates a "we only need to worry about Googlebot" mentality among website operators that is similar to "we only need to worry about working with Internet Explorer."
Journalists are professional people who do research and go through an editorial process before they get published. They are held accountable.
Provided you define "do research" to mean "Maybe check google for a couple seconds", "editorial process" to mean "Check whether this will boost ratings/readership", and "held accountable" to mean "Issue a 1 line or 2 second correction a week after the fact when we make an error so we can't get sued over it no matter how badly we fucked up".
Journalism from the major corporations ended a long time ago in favour of increased profits.
I think the point of having the lawyers there (or mentioning it) is to say that what they're planning may be very borderline. They've got the lawyers there to advise against getting nailed for antitrust- but it clearly means they're bouncing ideas that could be on the other side of that line...
In other words, it means their intentions are definitely not pure.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I wouldn't even pay $1 for what crap most press sites have up. The majority of the stuff I see is either cooing about the new iWhatzit (Macrumors and other dedicated Apple sites do a FAR better job than the blurbs that a lot of papers use as filler), more celeb news, anti-US propaganda, alarmist reads, garbage citing "anonymous sources" so the reporter can pretty much skirt on the edge of libel, and just plain yellow journalism.
Local newspapers who don't pay for journalists to do the legwork to for scoops on events are facing irrelevancy. Papers who don't get this concept end up in a death spiral of buying more and more wire articles, and their customers end up not bothering with the paper because those articles can be found on the Net. If a big paper in a town goes under, its just Darwin in action. There will always be some startup that can provide the journalism that people demand that can take its place.
So, let the news sites paywall themselves into bankruptcy. Someone will more than happily replace them and be able to have a company thrive by existing ad revenue. In fact, if a news site is decent, they get higher paying advertisers so its a win/win for both sides.
Paywalling might have made sense in a better economy, but when people are more worried about putting a roof over their head and keeping food on the table, charging cash for articles is a very dumb move.
For one, your "pamphleteers" probably get their sources from your "cow rags." See very few bloggers and other small news and commentary outlets have the funds and ability to get reporters where reporters need to be, and while there is a lot of fluff there are also a lot of places where reporters really do need to be.
For two, no, people are not going to pay for something just because that something could be worth paying for. Online so far they can get it for free and from other outlets where oftentimes the original source of the story is masked by the source or by the simple derth of caring by the consumer. These outlets often seem "better" to the consumer giving articles that are more opinionated, seem more trustworthy, and by giving fuller arguments over the story. The problem is that while sometimes a fuller argument can be made often news simply has to be reported as it is.
Someone should mod this 'funny'. If these journalists are so professional and accountable and so on, where are they on covering the ACORN government-sponsored partisan politics? Hello, that's brazenly illegal. Where are they on the rest of the crap going on in Washington? Who did the research on the 60 Minutes fake letters? Who's doing the research on the bailouts, the billions of money being unaccountedly funnelled to political cronies of the administration?
No, bloggers arose because the Mainstream Media, including the newspapers, didn't do the job they claimed they were doing. They want their big money and perks, but they don't want to have to work for it. Arrogant incompetence, once again.
Bloggers are doing the research today. It's the Journalists who are cherry-picking other people's hard work. The big newspapers deserve to die.
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.
Yes the man in a small war torn African nation dodges bullets, manages to scrape together a bowl of polluted water and rice and then runs down to his local internet coffee shop to hop online and post to his blog.
Seriously, no, important news does NOT occur obligingly where everyone has an open internet connection and the ability to use it.
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.
I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous
Paywalls break the web. Even if they are valid and necessary to fund the kind of high-quality journalistic content we all love and want to see more of... they will still annoy people. Someone will send you a link, but when you click on it you'll get a "Please Pay" unless it happens to be one of the sites you pay for. When you sit down at a friend's computer, your favorite sites are not accessible anymore (and/or you end up fumbling with passwords). When you search for content on search engines, you can't find it. The web is based on links, and paywalls break those links. This is one of the main reasons why pay-sites have suffered: when looking for a link to support a point or discuss a story, most people will prefer a free link to a pay-based link, even if the pay-based link has a slightly better article. The reason is that you know everyone will be able to read it.
The newspapers know this, which is why their only hope is to collude so that all sites become paywall at the same time. So that no site can grab all the marketshare by offering the same content for free (read: ad supported). But will this really work? How will they prevent small-time papers from offering free content? How will they prevent bloggers with subscriptions from blogging about articles to audiences who don't bother paying for the subscriptions? Ubiquitous paywalls will just mean that a dedicated group of people will pay for access (basically the people who already pay for a few subscriptions), whereas the mass of people who don't worry about journalism day-to-day (but who on occasion do read this article or that) will just be content with second-hand accounts. This doesn't sound like a sustainable ecosystem.
Even the blanket subscriptions that you describe won't help much. The problem isn't just that people are not willing to pay some money for good journalism. The problem is that (most) people don't care enough to go through the hassle of paying; they don't care enough to keep paying when money is tight; they don't care enough to remember silly passwords... they want the web to be fast and easy and ubiquitous. (I also worry that blanket subscriptions, like other forms of collusion, will kill what little competition we have now; if there is one monopoly-like de-facto news subscription, what reason is there for a member newspaper to work hard to provide good content?)
I don't have an alternative, mind you. But I'm just pretty sure that subscriptions are going to fail in a big way. People don't like hassle and don't like spending money... and there are just not enough high-minded people who will actively recognize the need to fund journalism. One could imagine alternatives like mandatory charges on Internet access, or tax-funded journalism bursaries... but all these proposals have major drawbacks, too.
4. Offer other publishers access to your platform for much larger sums.
The same publishers who can't make a profit now have to pay to use the system? Users need to pay for more content or there won't be enough money to go around.
If recent history demonstrates one clear, concrete fact, it's that the overwhelming majority of what is passed off as journalistic value is worth less than the paper it is printed one. No one should be paying for it.
The recent Iraq War only brought sharply into focus and issue which has been building for many years. Newspapers, TV, Radio, indeed all mainstream sources of news are heavily biased, grossly inaccurate and sloppily researched and presented. The news industry has been slowly bleeding itself to death by producing naught but tripe and nonsense over the last two decades or more.
Are you seriously suggesting that millions are turning away from newspapers because there are lower quality sources which happen to be free? I put it to you that it would in fact be quite a challenge to produce a lower quality product that the mainstream media without making something unreadable and/or unpalatable. No. The reality is there are far more push factors than price which are turning people off mainstream sources.
May the Maths Be with you!
It is going on right now, everyone sees it, nobody cares. All over the place.
Tell me, is it not a watergate scandal that GM is going to be run by the US government, rather than let fail because of poor management and unions run amok? (I blaming both the board and UAW).
Why should I, as a tax payer, who has never owned a GM product, be required to prop up GM? Give me ONE reason?
And how much $$ to keep it running is enough? WHEN is Enough going to be enough?????
Sometimes the hardest thing do to is take the shotgun to Old Yeller, is also the best thing to do.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You are confusing two separate issues. You don't need ten microphones to have ten "takes" on the facts. One mic is enough--sell the raw feed to everyone to spin as they please.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
The newspapers are traditionally the ones that drove reporting and investigation. It's not that easy to throw away such a centuries-old industry and replace it with some sort of new-fangled business model - certainly cable television isn't the example to follow, nor are radio or many of the online-only publications.
According to our journalist overlords, it's only a scandal when Republicans do it.
I
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.
The problem is they stopped working as independent watchdogs years ago. They have been promoting their own agenda for years while claiming to be neutral. The original newspapers were biased and proud of it. They came out and told you what they stood for and didn't pretend to give the other side a fair shake.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Sorry but I strongly disagree. You might call mainstream journalism crap, and some of the writing along with the various media biases are certainly worthy of that term, but the mainstream media is still the place where we get the boots on the ground to actually find out what's happening in the world. Take that away and I don't know how much 'reporting' the blogosphere can actually support.
Everyday the local metropolitan newspaper (in my case the Boston Globe) provides coverage of dozens and dozens of events that you'd be hard pressed to learn about through an RSS reader watching some random collection of local blogs. And where do the local bloggers find out about these events themselves? I suspect a large percentage write about things they themselves learned from the mainstream media, and only a tiny fraction are writing about things they experienced in person.
Anyway, your last question is framing the issue incorrectly. People are turning away from newspapers in favor of -identical quality- sources which happen to be free, because those sources have been able to appropriate and parrot the same content with ease.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Of course, we can't forget that US tax dollars are going to GM, not to keep workers employed here in the US, but to better Chinese auto plants.
Every new model GM has like the Chevy Spark is coming out of Shanghai, or rebranded.
GM should have been set out to rot long ago. Now the US taxpayers are paying 100 billion dollars not to better domestic interests, but Chinese jobs.
As others have responded, there is a general sense that journalists are not actually delivering news in a way that is honest and thoughtful enough. People turn to bloggers more and more because one can find a blogger who will provide a deep and critical analysis, unhindered by a parent company's aversion to certain topics. There are of course many terrible and biased bloggers, but the point is that there are enough bloggers that those that rise to the top are worthy of listening to.
But I agree that they can't, by and large, do the difficult and expensive research necessary to "break" stories.
But then the solution would seem to be to find a way to fund investigators, without those investigators necessarily being the ones who analyze the data or write the news. We don't need the whole infrastructure of modern newspapers if the only key ingredient is the research.
What I would love to see is funding made available to quality investigators, who gather together a bunch of information and publicize it, letting the public make of it what they will. With all kinds of source material (interview tapes and footage, detailed notes, photos, documents, etc.), the bloggers of the world would have the original material they need. (And no doubt many of them would find a way to make a living at it...) The question is obviously "who will pay for these investigators?" I don't have an answer, but I submit that this is the question we should be tackling. Not "How do we make newspapers sustainable?" but rather "How do we fund the important piece of news--investigation..."
I don't know if the right answer is public funds, or donations, or some mechanism by which interested parties (journalists, bloggers, citizens, etc.) pay into a fund to support the investigators, or what... But again I think we need to focus on the piece of newspapers that is actually valuable, and let the rest go.
Sorry, I'm going to nit here. Price fixing is often used to force a cheaper solutions out of the market. It has frequently been used in the oil industry to prevent cheap oil refinery operation and even the construction of new refineries - despite the government's refusal to prosecute. In this case, we can say "free" is cheaper than non-free. As such, having a free alternative in no way, shape, or form, effects the qualification of price fixing. Besides, you said it your self, if the "free" stuff has no news (is crap), then free doesn't matter in the least and won't even enter the equation.
I work for a newspaper company... There is no money in journalism... What other ideas are out there to keep news journalism profitable?
I'm curious - one of the things I have heard said about newspapers is that they gave up journalism in the 80's when they started ripping each other's content and getting their feeds from AP, cutting their stable of beat journalists.
Do you see that as a valid criticism, or does your newspaper still invest the same amount of resources in critical, objective, investigative journalism as it used to?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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.
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
What other ideas are out there to keep news journalism profitable?
Look back to the roots of news journalism.
Reporters had to hustle and compete for stories. The paper with the big scoop won the day. Now its all shared crap regurgitated form a hundred different mouths via the AP.
You want to survive? You want people to buy your stories? Go out and get something unique. Be the first on the scene... get a story that isn't already on every newspaper in the country. Find something and report it.
Compete for my interest instead of colluding to divide it up "fairly".
Being controversial means advertisers don't want to be associated with your paper.
Yeah, that's why the Fox News Channel is so vanilla-PC and non-controversial, otherwise they'd get zero ad revenue.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Why should I, as a tax payer, who has never owned a GM product, be required to prop up GM? Give me ONE reason?
For the same reason we subsidize grain - there is a tremendous national security advantage to being self-sufficient. We can't lose our industrial capacity any more than we can lose our ability to feed ourselves, or we risk becoming dependent on nations we might war against.
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%.
6. Watch the money float away as users jailbreak the electronic devices to use as free ebook readers and Kindle sues for...you know, whatever it is people try to sue other people for.
The problem with this idea is:
Which isn't to say nobody would get one, but I don't think enough would for a sustainable market. The hand-held online text-viewer market is pretty much saturated at the moment, and companies that're sliding into oblivion (through no fault of their own, of course -.-) aren't exactly in a position to try and break into that.
That said, maybe if they made an iPhone app, they could actually get somewhere. Of course they won't, because technology is bad and nothing good ever came of the internet.
The problem is that there are only a handful of media outfits left that are willing to to pay to put boots on the ground. How many U.S. reporters are there in Iraq right now. Two, maybe three? The Boston Globe is buying its Iraq coverage from the same reporter that the the NYTimes uses. And he is the same guy who is interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS. So if this guy makes a mistake, it is propagated and repeated by the hundreds of papers that buy their international (and often national) coverage from the Times.
FreeSpeech.org
Exec 1: Let's make the subscription fee $19.95 a month.
Lawyer 1: You can't say that, sir.
Exec 2: Sounds like a good idea.
Lawyer 2: You can't respond to that, sir.
And then later...
Investigator: Did any agreement of a subscription price occur during those discussions?
Lawyer 1: We specifically forbade them from collusion, so that could not have happened.
Lawyer 2: That is correct.
Investigator: So can you explain how both newspapers came up with the same monthly subscription price at the same time?
Lawyer 1: Coincidence.
Lawyer 2: Great minds think alike.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Journalists are professional people who do research and go through an editorial process before they get published
Journalists are professional people who rewrite press releases and go through an editorial process to check they are on message with their employers positions before they get published.
HAHAHAH. We are NOT self sufficient. WE depend on so many imports right now to survive it isn't even funny.
Try this, for one month. Buy only products made 100% in the US with 100% US made components. If it doesn't say "Made in USA" you can't buy it.
You're in for a huge surprise.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Totall agree, we do need this. What we don't need is the rest of the baggage that newspapers want to keep selling to us. We don't need hundreds of newpaper titles, all carrying the same national news -- there is no added value any more in reprinting someone else's reporting.
Unfortunately, we don't currently have the newpapers that we need. The financial crash and the investigation of Madoff, where was that? The same person who gave details to the SEC about why Madoff must be running a Ponzi scheme took his information to a couple of major newspapers -- what did they do with it? Nothing. I did hear an interview of a reporter who had been investigating events that led up to the crash 2-3 years ago -- good reporting, yes? She wrote for UK newspaper.
The problem for the newspaper industry is the same as the buggy whip manufacturers when cars came along -- the demand for their product has dropped dramatically and many of the manufacturers will have to go out of business. Think of it this way, with hundreds of papers, the same function (collating and printing news) is repeated hundres of times each day, with no real added value over and above what the next guy is doing. There is no economic value in this. They had their shot, they made money (lots of money), but their time is now past. Technology and society have moved on.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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,...
If I wasn't commenting in this thread I'd mod you up. Especially in terms of local interest/events, newspapers drive a lot of reporting. What's the alternative? Local TV news departments don't have the same depth today as the papers do. In my own experience local cable news outlets are marginally better (Just because a channel like NECN is on all day doesn't mean it isn't just repeating largely the same news hour after hour). I can't confirm this right now, but I believe even national news outlets like CNN.COM pick up stories from the AP wire. Newspapers and the reporting infrastructure they've created are a valuable resource even if dead-tree news delivery is a relic of the last century.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Obviously you've never worked in a newsroom.
Journalistic integrity is still a huge issue among major newspaper journalists. Even in the past 5 years we have seen journalists have their careers ended due to integrity issues.
I think maybe you're confusing television news with news journalism, they are VERY different beasts.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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!
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.
You aren't willing to give up your newspapers so your intention is that others should pay for it. Right...
If that were true then Fox News would have folded years ago...
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
Buy only products made 100% in the US with 100% US made components. If it doesn't say "Made in USA" you can't buy it.
You're in for a huge surprise.
You should be able to eat and clothe yourself though probably at a higher cost than you'd usually expend.
It may come as a shock but a car is not essential to being self-sufficient.