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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
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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%.
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
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!