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News Content As a Resource, Not a Final Product
Paul Graham has posted an essay questioning whether we ever really paid for "content," as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age. "If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?" Techdirt's Mike Masnick takes it a step further, suggesting that the content itself should be treated as a resource — one component of many that go into a final product. Masnick also discussed the issue recently with NY Times' columnist David Carr, saying that micropayments won't be the silver bullet the publishers are hoping for because consumers are inundated with free alternatives. "It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll." Reader newscloud points out that the fall 2009 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports contains a variety of related essays by journalists, technologists, and researchers.
Because despite it being slower, having longer queues, only being open at specific times and any money raised from that booth goes to "the man" - it's the legal route. So while it would certainly be easier, better, more convenient and arguably more morally just to go to any of the 49 other lanes - legally, you'd be in the wrong if you did. So unless "the man" says it's OK to use the free routes, wear a balaclava as you speed past the losers who obey the law.
http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/1061
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Q: " "Why didn't better content cost more?"
A: This is the media, if their content was better, they wouldn't need to force charge people for the vast sums of shitty content they spew in much higher proportions than the actual good content.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Great... then print news can be more like TV - where "news" (and all other shows) aren't the content, they're just the bait.
This space available.
But look at me this morning. I am reading the Boston Globe site, for which I pay (essentially) nothing. I am accessing this site via a Comcast connection, for which I pay waytoofarkingmuch per month. Yet I get a huge benefit from the Globe, information that is directly relevant to my daily life. From Comcast I get nothing but the passing along of the signal. There is something wrong with this picture.
If I were the Globe, I would think outside the newsbox. I would do something like set up a wireless network in and around Boston and sell internet access way under Comcast's price. The home page for this service would be boston.com or its descendant. The monthy access fee would cover the network costs and cover running the news organization.
There are probably technical problems to this fantasy, but IAANACSM (Also Computer Science Major)
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
newspapers had advertisements, in them, whether in paper or digital format.
If they're so money hungry, one scheme might be to ask for donations? Like... "Help us keep our site free by donating." or something.
The constant attempt at various corporations to conflate morality with legality in the minds of individual citizens is very ironic in light of the fact they have no such confusion themselves. What is moral is irrelevant to them, and even the issue of legality is only addressed as far is it doesn't hurt profitability too much. They have the option of being able to easily change the legal goalposts when they find the legal issues too much of a hassle.
Morality and legality can overlap, but they are not at all the same thing, and any attempt to claim they are is only convincing to children.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
If news is always a resource, and we expect to get it for free now that the distribution method is relatively free, how will we, as a community, pay for investigative journalism? Surely we can agree that news is significantly more valuable when there is someone who makes the effort to dig it up rather than waiting for it to land on their desks. I am willing to allow all the news about Brad and Angelina to be left to bloggers who just do it for kicks, but what about covered up scandals and government conspiracies (ie- NSA Wiretapping Program, Secret CIA Prisons, Torture)? I would really rather have some competing news outlets paying people to investigate things like that.
Paul Graham's essay:
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
Nonsense. Some paperback editions of out-of-copyright works sell for £1. A new novel by a big literary figure fill sell for £9 in paperback, £18 in hardback (with the paperback released later; the hardback price is really a 'get it first' price). A trashy mass markey novel will cost £5 in paperback. A magazine rack book of romantic short stories costs £2.50. A technical book will cost upwards of £20.
These all cost approximately the same to print and distribute - and it's a tiny proportion of the price.
...giving the customers what they want?
Today there is no shortage of options and sources for those who want celebrity gossip & opinions, political gossip & opinions, technological gossip & opinions, sports gossip & opinions, world events and international affairs gossip & opinions, conflict gossip & opinions, judicial gossip & opinions, market gossip & opinions and so on.
But a lot of people would like to have NEWS delivered and nobody seems to sell that without obfuscation beneath layers of gossip & opinions.
And perhaps beneath it all the biggest news is that the societies and cultures of the western world have been and are dying at their own hands by internal squabbling and betrayal to appease and support the numerous enemies of freedom and life, enemies both internal and external.
To build on what Paul Graham is saying, I think there's a more fundamental problem with selling "content":
Each piece of content (article, story, etc.) tends to be a one-time use product (this is less true for movies, and not true at all for songs). But if you want to sell a one-time use unique product, then the consumer can't tell if it was worth the money until *after* they've consumed it. This creates risk and people are risk-averse when it comes to spending money (even one penny). So you can try to become known for producing consistently good content (very hard), and then sell that, but that means all the stuff you do first has to be given away for free. As soon as you start charging, you significantly reduce your audience growth rate.
So there are other business models for content. You can become recognized as an expert on X, and then people interested in X will read about you. However, if you try to start selling advertisements or referrals for X, you start to lose credibility.
Therefore, I think the next logical step is to become recognized as an expert on X (as a critic), then announce you're fed up with the existing offerings of X (because of reasons Y and Z), and tell your audience you've decided to go and make your own X that's much better than everyone else's X, and then you've got an audience of people who are going to be drooling to buy your X.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The way I see it this is about paid services trying to offer the same bullshit as free services do. Can anybody honestly say that they trust news sources any more than they trust gossip? The problem is that journalism used to be a respected profession, but then some publisher along the way figured "Hey we don't need to report the truth, we only need to report what's 'amazing'", and people bought it. When the internet came the cost for deliverance of these "news" was cut to almost nothing. Now these bullshit publishers, who were already living off advertisement and the cost for the paper itself was more or less the production cost minus human labour, got to reduce that last cost which was the cost for the paper, thus solely existing due to ad exposure. Some tried the hybrid model, which seems to have failed, while still offering the same bullshit content. How can anybody expect to get paid for that?
I'm not against paid services, infact I very much hope someone brings forth a news service that reports truth, and if someone does I have no reason not to pay for it. But pay for lies? Hell I can just ring my neighbours doorbell for that.
I am the lawn!
Big Media does not want to sell you a product. Remember, we needed First Sale Law to make it explicitly clear that the purchaser of a product does not accept any obligations that they have not agreed upon prior to the sale to even be free to resell books and sheet music. (Hence, EULAs are nonsense, and only the law applies. It's not the EULA that forbids you from selling copies.) Hollywood would like to sell you the right to listen to some music, and ideally (for them) you would be prohibited from even reselling it, at least without them receiving "their" cut. So far, the market has responded overwhelmingly in favor of First Sale, which is why nerds were able to lead a successful backlash against DivX — not the video CODEC, but the company whose business model revolved around selling you a DVD player which could call home and report on you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can call it 'Fred and Barny' if you like, the owners are going to call it what they intend for it to be. As for the rationalizing rhapsody of contrast and comparison, forget it. No analogies suffice. There is nothing "like" the net.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The concept of micropayments in the context of content has been a pipe dream for over a decade now. To businesspeople, it's one of those ideas that's so appealing they just can't let it go because they can't grasp just how complex a system it is, and how many people will simply say, "no thanks," because they don't want to feel like they're being nickeled-and-dimed to death for something they're used to getting for free. Micropayments have enjoyed some success in online gaming, but will never work in the news biz because for every site that will charge for articles, you'll find four more giving roughly the same thing away for free and living off the advertising alone.
I don't know what the future of journalism will look like, but I can tell you that it won't involve charging the end user per-article payments or subscriptions. Anyone who thinks either of those will work for the industry as a whole in the long term is either blinded by greed or on crack.
Better (or at least more popular) content moves more copies. Its superiority doesn't need to be reflected in a significant variation of the unit cost.
[......] as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age.
Publishers of music aren't struggling to stay afloat - they're raking it in as fast as ever. They're just whining cos they want even more.
There are a few pretty big gaps in this article's reasoning.
The price of books or music or movies doesn't depend on the format. If it did, all MP3s and DVDs would cost the same, and books would be priced based on their print quality, number of pages and binding. And last time I checked, not all MP3s, books or DVDs cost the same. Books that cost the same to print often have wildly different retail prices. And MP3s -- well, there, the medium cost is nothing. The production costs certainly vary, but it's rarely the production cost that contributes to the price.
I happen to make part of my living writing books. And I have two books, for example, that are almost identical in format (printing, length, etc.), but with over 50% difference in price because of the content of the books.
Second, the article talks about better content, but "better" is highly subjective. Here's an example right from the beginning of the article:
Personally, I happen to prefer the Economist to Time. But there are a lot of people who prefer Time. Who's right? Who knows?
I think pricing is an odd, and probably not all that useful, way to look at this. While one reaction might be to let the market determine what's "better," I think markets are very good at determining a price for, say, an album, but notoriously bad at determining what's "better." To butcher an Oscar Wilde quote, markets know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Personally, I would throw you average Celine Dion album in a bargain bin, but there are clearly many people (and not just French Canadians!) who would disagree. And price is not necessarily indicative of anything at all. Is Radiohead's In Rainbows "worse" because they gave it away for whatever price you happened to feel like paying?
One last thing strikes me about the article:
That's a great example of a point I thought the article only tangentially made. People go to a movie theater to meet up with friends, take out the family, go on a date, etc. The $7 tub of popcorn isn't worth $7 because of the corn in it is somehow "better." It's worth $7 to the people who get it because it's part of the experience. The "content" there is the movie, but it's the real purpose of going to a theater is only partially to experience the movie. (I'm not quite sure exactly how that impacts the point of the article, but it definitely paints a murkier picture than the article suggests.)
Building Better Software
The "one-time use content vs risk" idea is very insightful, from an economic perspective.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
I think it is going to be like Darwinism for Content, mutate to what your clients want and make sure it's profitable for yourself .
If you don't you will just fade away. Every other business has to do this, what makes the media industry any different?
i don't think the demand for news will fade away, I just think that a handful of companies who for a long time have controlled the aggregation are now confronted with more competition.
They are complaining about it, boohoo. I think it's time for them to re-learn how to compete and do business smarter.
Writers REPORT the scandals. That is, the distill the information, write it up in somewhat easy to read form, their editors and proofreaders do the final touch up, etc but they DON'T for the most part "uncover" many scandals without the leaks. There are a few exceptions, such as lately those undercover Acorn whorehouse facilitating vids, but again, someone had to first leak that Acorn was doing such things. And that particular scandal did NOT come from main stream news expensive reporters, it came from private, very low ball cost, independent video bloggers, who just took a cheap cam, threw on laughable "pimp and ho" Halloween costumes, and waltzed in..
The scandals themselves come from NON journalist insiders who are concerned over the crimes they see at work or wherever. Basically, all "investigative journalists" do is pretty up the story, and it became the fashion for these large old print media and broadcast media to claim they "uncovered" it. A lot of times they didn't, they just got tipped off, that's all. Most of the scandals probably. The classic Woodward and Bernstein and "deep throat". There was NO STORY without "deep throat" leaking it. Nowadays they wouldn't be needed, TOR and wikileaks (and etc other ways) would have sufficed to get the story out.
How much is "news" worth, when we can still get the basic story today in a fashion that is just a little worse grammatically possibly, with some typos, or maybe the video is not top of the line professional quality, but "plenty good enough"?? I contend it is NOT worth billions of dollars annually anymore.
And for regular local news, ordinary enthusiast bloggers can cover that, we are already seeing it, such as on Examiner and Topix and millions of other smaller efforts. Heck, look at "black box voting". The dang big guys didn't do jack shit with a pretty damn important story, neither uncovered it nor did much coverage of it, it was independent concerned people risking a lot that did it, put stuff up on the web about it, and are still the main source of information about this issue.
There are enthusiasts for this or that, local kids baseball to the county board payoff scandals to huge geopolitical events, this area or that, big cities and foreign nations to little podunk towns and way the hell out in booganoogaland, and enjoy writing about it, and pay is a secondary issue, if it even matters to them at all, as most are completely content to do it for free, for their own reasons.
And you don't need to "fly in" some expensive newsie anyplace any more, cellphones and the net are everywhere, even in remote developing nations, and the locals there are ALREADY THERE and have a BIG INTEREST in getting any sort of important "news" concerning their area out..and they are *doing so* now, and it is becoming more extensive daily. And it's just not all that hard to write well enough for other people to understand it, either, even having to jump through language translations hoops.
The old news "business" paradigm is broken, because of modern tech. It's on the way out, just like the old business paradigm of charging ludicrous amounts for copies of music is on the way out, because "copies" are now extremely close to "free" in cost to make and distribute widely.
World wide cheap easy internet has just utterly SMASHED any number of old dinosaur businesses now, they are just thrashing around in pools of their own bleeding irrelevancy. They are no longer "worth" what they think they are, not even a fraction of it, just because they WERE pre internet and cellphones.
That was then, this is now, the sooner those people realize that, the sooner they can go find something else to do to "make tons of money". Or in the case of tools like Murdoch and his ilk, why can't they just close shop, call it a night cowboy, and go retire on the billions they already made?
Just how freekin "rich" d
The answer may lie in the quantity of content, as far as selling is concerned.
Fact: the Internet allows a lot of free content in small page-sized elements.
Hypothesis: want to sell content? Make it a lot bigger than a page.
If you are a typical person, an article will often make you scratch your head. People won't buy such small scraps of information because they don't see long-term value. It's cheap for the writer to whip the stuff out, but it's selling strength is very low. The economics of buying news is simply that people usually find news reporting to be entertainment and not much use in helping them gain financially. The news is very hit and miss in terms of helping people make a good bargain, improve their life, or make a better decision. As a result, the media is marketing to the point that they give away their content, and after all, putting news on the Internet is in a large part marketing.
What if writers put in the effort to make book-sized stories and filled in the background as well as the many things that are omitted for lack of space in the one-page article? It would take a lot more time to get the info and write about it, but in the computer age it may be viable. Many objections besides the cost and risk come to mind such as readers would go nuts distinguishing between facts and opinions, as opinions inevitably creep into such large hunks of verbiage, or wading through different versions from different publishers, or even the sheer cost of spending more than X dollars a day to get the lowdown on big news.
But if the information is proven to serve readers in a way that helps them earn more, then they will be more likely to actually pay for it. If a person could pick up on some news in such completeness that s/he could go to an employer or a client and say "I learned such and such to the degree that I can actually turn it into business value," then some extra dollars might flow in the way of the news consumer. This kind of cause-effect would loosen many a purse string when it comes to spending for daily news.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The internet has given every user a best research tool. You want to know where investigative reporting will come from in the future? It will come from you ... you will be responisble.
yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay?
There are some good reasons:
Personally I think just as big an obstacle for paid content on the web is a good payment system. You'd be talking very small amounts per use, and it would have to be secure, easy, reliable and available everywhere. PayPay isn't it (has some restrictions on use, eg. use for porn sites isn't allowed), credit cards are no good (not everybody has one, filling out credit card details for each use is too much hassle, subject to fraud) and other systems are supported on just a few sites. It's just too clumsy to use a different procedure on every paysite.
With an easy, universal micro-payment system in place, paid content on the web would be much more feasible.
Two examples that I've found useful in various online discussions:
1) If you go into any "tech" bookstore, up front you'll see some displays of the current best-sellers. If you open them and scan the first few pages, you'll typically find a URL where you can download them in PDF form, for free. So you can get them for free over the Net, but the books are selling well, typically at rather high prices. WTF is going on here? Simple: A printed book has a lot of advantages over a PDF on your disk. (And yes, the PDF has a lot of advantages over the hard copy form.) Try getting both and using them both as a reference; you'll quickly see what I mean. Every software lab I've worked in, including those devoted to network software, have had a small library of useful reference books. Sometime there are several copies of some of the books.
2) A year or two back, a musician whose name is well-known in the styles that he plays announced on several online forums that he had put together yet another collection of his new tunes. It wasn't actually in production yet, so he had put the whole collection online in several formats. He told us the URL and asked for comments and criticism. Over the next few days, there were a good number of questions posted asking "When can I buy the book?" He replied with comments like "Hey, I'm giving them out for free online; why are you all trying to pay me for them?" But of course, this was just joking, because he knew as well as the rest of us why. Yeah, we could download all the tunes, print them out, punch holes in the pages, and put them into a binder. Some of us did that. That takes time (and paper and ink and a binder, which aren't free). If we could send him $20 or so for the printed and bound version, we could spent the time saved playing music.
This example is interesting because it has shown one effect of online "publishing" which may be permanent. A common problem with music books is that the binding doesn't allow them to lie open on a music stand. It used to be that you had to copy the pages you want to play. Now, what you can do is send a message to the publisher (and announce on relevant music forums) that you aren't buying the book because of the bad binding; you have downloaded the music and printed it yourself. Music publishers are slowly learning that they have to use the right sort of binding, or they won't make many sales. When they all learn this, life will be a bit easier for a lot of musicians.
Anyway, both of these illustrate the fact that the physical medium and format may not be everything, but it can be an important part of why people buy hard copy rather than download, even when the hard copy is more expensive.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
As some have already pointed out here, blogs do still rely on the professional journalism that comes out of newspapers and television networks. Amateurs can't hope to have the access or clout that professional organizations do, and locally we can't sit around and hope that someone in the community will make it to every city council meeting and write it up. If you've got a local journalism buff who likes to blog and has the time, great. If you don't, you need to get someone to do it, and that means paying them.
If advertising doesn't work then journalism needs new revenue streams. Non-profits are one idea if they can get enough grants and donations and whatnot. A government service like the BBC and CBC is also an idea, but probably won't go over very well in America. I'm reminded of an idea from the novel Earth by David Brin: in that society (set in roughly 2030 if I remember right) people were required to subscribe to a particular number of news feeds in order to keep the right to vote, the idea being that a voter must keep informed about current events. Suppose that, rather than funding news agencies directly, the government gave every citizen an allowance which they were required to donate to one or more news agencies (paid for by taxes, and therefore equivalent to requiring every citizen to pay for news, but with a subsidy for low-income citizens). This would allow the people to decide which news organizations should be funded, rather than letting the government decide. Of course, there are difficulties--- what constitutes a news agency? Fox News? DailyKos? What if I started my own newspaper, circulation 1, just so I could keep the money--- and they may be insurmountable. But I think journalism is very important to this country, as important as health care and sanitation and all the rest, and something will have to be done.
Back when I was consulting for newspapers, a rough calculation showed that the price of the newspaper times the number of copies printed daily did not even cover the cost of the raw paper. If I went to the news department, old worn office furniture, crowed working conditions, people sharing desks. In the Ad department, leather chairs all around, many private offices, up to date office furniture and nice wooden desks.
IMHO what killed newspapers is not that people are getting news online, but the fact that more and more people are shopping online.
but what about covered up scandals and government conspiracies (ie- NSA Wiretapping Program, Secret CIA Prisons, Torture)
Have the investigations funded by somebody who has a financial interest in finding out about them. I'm sure the Democratic party got plenty of value out of any dirt uncovered by looking for this. Similarly, the Republican party has a lot of interest in getting bad news about ACORN out.
It might require investigative journalists to gather really good evidence, but requiring that is a good idea anyway.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
"Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts."
When are we going to see this new form of the industry emerge?
See, because right now, song writers, sound engineers, and session drummers are not seeing a dime from concerts and t-shirt sales.
I always hear from these "Internet visionaries" that bands are just going to HAVE start operating this way. Well, unfortunately, the music industry doesn't solely consist of jobless 22 year olds playing guitar for other jobless 22 year olds.
Does everyone involved in the music making profession need to be a touring musician now?
Who is going to step up and reorganize the industry based around merchandise sales? Can't you see some issues with that? What if the t-shirt design sucks? Should the guy who wrote the song or played marimbas on the recording suffer the consequences? How exactly does this business function?
Now, it may be that micropayments work at a level between the retailer and the wholesaler. For example, google could pay micropayments to useful sources, or I could subscribe to a news source or listen to a radio station. The author/band/whoever gets paid via aggregated micropayments, but I don't actually make a micropayment. That is, historically, a sound business model, but making people decide on an article-by-article basis whether they want to read the whole thing for a penny is nuts.
I realized that wasn't the right article -- here is the one I was looking for. He probably even debunked them earlier, but this was just the first time I saw it.
Remember the Maine!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
If the choice is to charge us appropriately for the medium, believe me, they will!
No one will ever benefit from "micropayments" so long as idiot publishers hear the term and think four dollars fits the bill!
What's a micro-payment? Twelve cents? Twelve dollars? My first question: How do you track micro-payments, in your checkbook? Let's say, one day, I read 100 articles on 17 (or 7 for that matter) different sites. One site charges 8 cents, another charges 75 cents, another a buck twelve, per article. How do I track how much money I spent? There would need to be a RSS-like "over"-service that tracks all of that. Second, what if I'm poor. Dirt poor? Where do I get this credit card to make this 'micro-payment'? I think, if you're below a certain economic margin you can't even get a debit card. I know you couldn't 10 years ago. More importantly, if I'm poor, where do I get this money to read the news? It staggers me that the internet is for and about information...but we continually discuss putting barriers in between people and information. Like this one. While at the same time railing at the gods that our users are too dumb and uneducated and 'just don't want to learn (information)'. There are already trends that indicate a technological caste system. People who can write applications to publish/sort/sift information, and people who use those applications. Someone who actually bothers to learn HTML and someone who takes a 6 week class at the local JC on how to use Dreamweaver. There's a higher tier, the people who write {favorite html editor}. News organizations are known as "The Fifth Estate", in a democracy they have a special place, without being melodramatic, something of a sacred place, even. You don't get educated end users by making information complicated, hard to understand, or...too expensive for the largest socio-economic class to access. K.
no such thing
I think this raises a very good point about what's wrong with the free online news services today. A lot of the content is just wire service stories and corporate/government press releases passed along virtually unchanged by the news source you are reading. (This happens to be particularly noticeable in Canada, where the high U.S. content of the stories republished by Canadian news media tends stands to stand out more, e.g., misleadingly quoting statistics that apply to the U.S. economy rather than the Canadian economy, or mentioning a product or service that isn't available in Canada). My reaction after reading these stories is that the newspaper or reporter whose name appears on the article has done no homework or analysis at all. Even with my limited knowledge I can tell that some of the content is misleading or wrong, or that only part of the story has been told, or that it is presenting a slanted viewpoint without comment or counterpoint. What I want my news source to do is to give me the rest of the story - what wasn't said in the press release, what's the history behind it, what's the counterpoint? I would pay for that. I do pay for in-depth weekly news sources like the Economist or New Scientist because they do a whole lot better job even when the cover the same news (e.g., when New Scientist reports on the latest scientific "breakthrough", they usually add reaction comments from a couple of experts in the field, who may give cautious endorsement or mention limitations or doubts about the results which weren't in the press release reported by other media.)
Reuters and AP are the only news organizations. All the Print (Newspapers), TV, and Web "news" are just reposts of Reuters and AP stories.
If the "News" media companies want to survive they have to start doing their own reporting instead.
What I predict will happen eventually is Reuters and the AP will start charging the public directly instead of reselling the stories to FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc...
If it's not free then it's too expensive.