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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."
*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.
After a few years, phase out the fee (hum...).
I present to you the Federal Telephone Excise Tax. Once a tax or fee is on the books it will be next to impossible to remove it - it will just be repurposed. What really grinds my gears is the Cost Recovery Fee charged each month to support the number portability act. That was is, what, 2004? Let's do the math: 5 years * 100 million cell phone subscribers * 12 months in a year * $1.25 per month = $7.5 billion in cost recovery monies. You really think it cost the cell phone industry that much money to support number portability? My professional wild assed guess is that it cost the industry 1 billion to implement and maybe 1 million a year to maintain/support. The rest of that is pure profit; pure profit I don't see going away any time soon. Now, if the government mandated they use that money to forcibly upgrade their network.
A black hole is where God divided by 0
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!
They want their failed business model back.
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.
The problem is that recent history demonstrates one thing: People will gladly accept free crap of virtually no journalistic value over cheap crap that at least has a much higher value.
In the tech field, there is plenty of good free online journalism. Their expenses are relatively small, and are easily supported by advertising. Outside of the tech field, things get more costly due to scope - and the free alternatives either lean heavily on "pro" material (one of the news industries biggest complaints) or else just feed us trash worth about as much as what you get out of any scandal rag.
On the other hand, the previous guy's idea of forcing everyone to pay for some content is extremely distasteful. I think it would be much better to enforce some basic rules on content re-appropriation. While I love getting well-written news for free online, it's also one of the main reasons the people who write that news are going out of business - they don't get paid, and no one sees the ads that would normally fund them (because they're looking at the ads that fund the site that ripped off the content).
Attribution is fine, but in this case I think the newspapers are within their right to cooperate on this matter, because it's not price fixing if there are still going to be many free alternatives.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
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
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?
Err, yes:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public..." - Adam Smith
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Hilarious.
I've been working 60-80 hour weeks for nine months because of layoffs by corporate to fund the debt holes they dug at other papers, while at the same time our 401(k) matches are cut, our health insurance is cut, our vacation time is halved and our sick time is cut by 2/3. Thanks to a reply-all fuckup by my boss, the entire newsroom just found out that our publisher wants to axe 3/4 of our copy editing staff by August.
There's no bloggers at the public meetings where school boards try to cut funding to the black schools so the white schools can keep their football programs. There's no bloggers at the city hall meetings, the port board meetings, the county board meetings. The only bloggers at the capitol are partisan hacks angling for work in the machine.
The people who want "big money and perks" left the business two years ago, and that's if they were foolish enough not to switch to PR before they got their mass comm. degree.
The passionate people who never expected to get pay or benefits in a profession where the per-capita income is lower than teaching in public schools are getting ready to switch to PR, political consulting, or flipping burgers.
The idiots who rewrite a press release for 30 minutes and play Peggle for the other 11 1/2 hours that their corporate-appointed "editor" has scheduled them to work are just happy to not be flipping burgers, and wonder why all of the people who've been working there for 20 years start to choke on their own vomit every time they see a kid like that get promoted from intern to reporter.
You want to know why your newspaper sucks? Look at who owns them. Look at what they've thought were good ideas - ignoring the Internet until 2002, paywalling content, cutting news staff, thinking event calendars and photo galleries trump local reporting.
But don't you shit on me for screaming in your ear to pay attention to the utter incompetency in your local and state government. Big newspapers can fuck off and die for all I care. The AP is a corrupt megalomaniac with a bullhorn who's still screaming from its deathbed. But journalists are looking for pay and perks? Fuck you. We came in knowing there wasn't any left for us after corporate was through. That doesn't mean we stopped giving a shit.
Since everybody's picked up your talking points and won't stop pissing them at us, though, fuck it, and fuck you. I'm tired of being bitched at for caring about your city, and your government, and your life, so you don't have to take the time out of your day to care on your own.
If you could take care of your own governance, you wouldn't need blogs, much less papers. Try keeping up with your own goddamned idiot local administration for a month and see if you want to hate me and what I've done for most of my life.