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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.
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
"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."
When it comes to news, the other 49 are just as legal. There is no benefit - moral or otherwise - for me to go to a pay site for news over going to, say, the BBC, NHK, NPR or SVT or any other public service website, or to the New York Times, Dagens Nyheter, Asahi Shinbun or any other of the thousands of completely legal and moral free to read commercial news websites out there.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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
Well, HBO continues to exist, so I suspect you will still be able to buy print where you are mostly paying for the news, rather than the ads.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
For the moment, yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay? The entire question is whether there will continue to be 49 free lanes on the highway. Some, like Rupert Murdoch, believe those are going broke, creating a better value proposition for fee-based services. Obviously this won't be all-or-nothing; there will always be some free lanes, the only question is how many, and in what state of disrepair. IMHO we really need to create a financial incentive for good reporting without blocking access to that reporting through inconvenience and expense - not an easy problem to solve.
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
It's been like that in printing for years. Publishers (at least of magazines and newspapers have been talking about selling "eyeballs" for years. Ever since I did my first production job the industry has known that issue and subscription sales have only just covered the printing costs. A decade ago no one in the print industry would have been able to maintain a straight face while saying the consumer neded to carry the cost.
And if you dont believe me, go take a look at an oldschool periodical publishing house and check out what their sales department does. In case you can't find one anymore I will tell you. They sell ads. Or rather adspace. Or rather, viewers. Just like broadcast TV.
The bigest problem with the news industry right now is that the online advertising market isn't able to subsidize their massive brick and mortar operations like a 4c backcover ad would have done. That's because their old scarcity model no longer applies. Advertising space is no longer hard to come by, distribution is easy and there is basically no barrier to entry. IN other words, potential competition is infinite.
Of course, like most of the content industry, the current publishing business structures are top heavy (as far as costs compared to value) or middle heavy (as far as number of non-productive jobs). We are seeing the death of the middlemen, NOT the content producers.
Unless the middlemen and non-productive types can manage to buy the legislation they need to maintain their old business models. If they can make it impossible for me to have access to distribution again, then they might be able to go back to business as usual.
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!
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
John
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.
Do you think reading news that someone paid for and is willing to give away for free is illegal?
After all, it's not as if this were something new, newspapers have been distributed for free before the internet existed. Even today, I get far more newsletters in my snail mailbox than I want to. Ad-based revenue did exist before the digital age.
All the propaganda you read about the "pirates" is just greed trying to appeal to your honesty.
I never paid for content, I paid for the convenience and the format. I have always been able to read the headlines for free at the newsstand, why should I pay to read the headlines at the internet? I listened to music for free on the radio, I only bought records that had some particular appeal for me, or to give as gifts. Why should I pay for mp3 music? I watched films for free on the TV but paid movie tickets to see the big screen, then why should I pay for a scrappy 700MB DVD rip?
Getting stuff from the internet is not unethical. I'm not consuming anything, I'm not using other people's paper, or ink, or vinyl, or theater seat. If the content creators are too stupid to find a lucrative means of revenue, it's their problem, I'm not taking anything away from them.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
I'd rather have fairly obvious slant that might encourage people to think more critically about what is being presented. To me, that is far better than knowing that shit like this goes on under an appearance of legitimacy. It would be different if there were elements in the media that actively sought out and rooted out this kind of corruption, but there aren't -- those two reporters, as individuals, decided not to be intimidated, bribed, and silenced and that's the only reason why we know about this. It doesn't take much wisdom to know that most people would have caved. The questioning man wonders, for every example like that one that we do learn about, how many go on that we've never heard of, and of course under that assumed credibility that, as you point out, the established media commands? Say what you will of Internet bloggers and their political biases; they are unlikely to deliberately falsify a story in order to avoid losing Monsanto's ad revenue.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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
What am I supposed to pay for, exactly? What is the value they bring to my news-reading experience that is so good that the free sites can't keep up? And if the free ones start to disappear, a fully distributed p2p news network isn't hard to create. All you need is to combine rss with a p2p protocol and throw in some search and filter options.
News is cheap. You don't need a whole website for 300 words of text and maybe a link to an image hosting site or youtube.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news
This is a false dichotomy. It's not a clear cut choice between "paying for content" versus "news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort". There are plenty of ways to turn news gathering into a profitable exercise, other than charging the consumer directly. The big question is, which method provides the sweet spot that suits consumers best, without the business going bust? It *might* turn out to be a model where the consumer pays directly. I suspect it'll be some other model - be it advertising/sponsorship, patronage, tip jars, merchandising, whatever.
(Assuming your from the US*) That's the problem, If paid for content was more reliable/verified/trustable then people would be inclined to pay and get real news, unfortunately it seams quite the opposite is true, I trust content that's online for free BBC, wikinews, etc more than i trust print news.
*I should probably note that the TV news we get in the UK is much more trust worthy than the print media we get here.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
...except we're already getting news for free and it's already crappy and slanted.
"free news" has been around for over 50 years. It's nothing new. It's not a Frankenstein monster created by the internet.
The real problem of the internet is that it breaks down geographic
barriers both in terms of direct competition and what your customers
are exposed to. In short, you're customers are in a much better
position to realize that you are trying to sell 'shit on a shingle'.
Although media like newspapers were already in decline before "the
internet got to it". The bean counters and corporate vampires were
already feeding off of serious journalism.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
News is cheap. You don't need a whole website for 300 words of text and maybe a link to an image hosting site or youtube.
Spreading news is cheap. Gathering news is expensive.
Hypothetical example: how much might you expect to pay someone to spend 3 months undercover in North Korea, that they might write a double page spread on the subject? Remember you need to find someone with an engaging writing style, an insightful eye, the ability to go indetected, the guts to take on the danger, you need to pay their traveling expenses etc.
For the moment, yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay? The entire question is whether there will continue to be 49 free lanes on the highway.
Well I guess some free sites may hit the buffers in the future but given the BBC is the world's oldest broadcast organisation I don't see it going out of 'business' any time soon . . . I put business in quotes because it is publicly funded and only part of the BBC exists to make a profit. I think the model is sustainable, especially considering the high esteem in which the BBC is held both within Britain and throughout the world, it benefits no-one apart from the Murdoch's of this world to let public funded broadcasting go to the dogs.
Lets see Free vs Paid, I know which one I trust more.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I live in a town with a mill that produces newsprint. It's been having on-and-off troubles in the newsprint division since the late 1980s, long before the Internet became a meaningful consumer product. And it's not the Internet that is causing the current woes, but an economic collapse. I'll wager plenty of newspapers went down in 1929-1930 as well.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
In my experience quality correlates much less with price than with recommendations, and I certainly cant say pay-for news is among the areas where the players have created such expectations.
we're going to get crappy, slanted news
Two crappy slanted articles disagreeing with one another often leave you with a better understanding of reality than one high quality (less obviously slanted) article. And anyone with an agenda can publish anything they want; that doesn't mean anyone will actually read or care about what they publish.
"Today an eight car pileup"
Today, going by the average numbers, 136 people were killed in traffic in the US. Does putting those accidents in the news actually add anything of interest or is that a typical example of excessive creation and dissemination of information in a distributed world? Does anyone not personally affected care at all? About one of them, about all of them? Is it so important that we should, as a society, use artificial economic barriers to promote the production and distribution of such information?
Information is no longer a scarce product in almost any sector, in fact, the readers time is most often much more scarce. News media needs a huge, massive die-off (or people need vast amounts of more free time), or there simply won't be anywhere near the demand levels needed to motivate any kind of beyond-market incentive for news production.
I support a commercial free, listener-supported Internet radio station every month for the simple reason that I would be devastated by the loss if they ever went away (or * forbid, started playing commercials).
I think this model is workable, if your goal is to keep things simple and run it like a small business. I'm sure that's not what the big-money-media types want to hear, but simply asking people who value what you have to offer to voluntarily support you can do wonders. Look at how many people have an * to their user name here on Slashdot.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I don't call the "OMG THE FLU IS COMING GET DOWN" and stuff like that "news". News are supposed to be well written, complete and verified. More: besides news, there reporters who write investigation articles. You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
Dilbert RSS feed
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
Anyone with 5 minutes, a major historical news story and google news archive can demonstrate the fallacy in your argument. You have described _exactly_ the state of mainstream news today - crappy, slanted news delivering the message they want you to hear (i.e. profitable to special interest groups). Pick any of the most significant events in the last decade where powerful special interest groups had a firm position, and the mainstream news has rolled over to shaft their viewer/readers with exactly the wrong message to suit their corporate masters position, flooding the media echo chamber with the deceptive message in the process. Check it for yourself in the archives.
Pre-Iraq war - news message: weapons of mass destruction ("we must invade, there is no other choice"). Special Interest Group: The MIC..
Financial Crisis pre-2008 - news message: Money supply increases, what money supply increase? M3 discontinued, its not important... move along nothing is broken here as reflected in the total absence of mainstream news coverage
The majority of news sources that told it how it turned out (in retrospect), were non-mainstream news sources - and thanks to services like google news archive it can easily be demonstrated. You did not hear significant anti-war positions from the mainstream news cool-aid stand, which remained completely silent. You also could have also known well in advance that inflation was heading for the moon, and where and why to best place your hard earned savings for the coming economic storm from independent professionals not driven by increasing the bottom line, but instead in delivering accurate high quality news.
Publishers of mainstream news can't cut it on the internet, because they cannot compete with free high quality alternatives from motivated professionals.
You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
You probably would. But crucially, that tweet would contain a URL pointing to a mainstream news site.
Journalist gathers news. Newspaper distributes news. Word of mouth (or tweet of Twitter) spreads awareness of news.
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.
Well, for-pay news sites can be monopolized just like any other business, giving Mr. Murdoch control over what you see and hear and thus your opinion. Getting to rule the world is quite valuable.
Or did you mean value to you?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Wikinews' current top story: "Suicide bomber kills 30 in northwest Pakistan" is sourced from Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Both commercial news gathering organisations.
It's a great aggregation and distillation service, but it's not a replacement for traditional newspaper news gathering.
Oops -- let me try one more time to get the link right: micropayments.html Need to learn to hit "preview"
You CAN sell air. But in order to sell air you have to put a balloon or a scuba tank around it. I don't buy information, but I do buy books. I don't buy movies, but I do buy DVDs. I don't buy music, but I do buy CDs and spend money in places that have hired a band. Sure, I could copy someone else's CD and often do, and sample my old tapes and LPs, but there's something about a factory produced CD with cover art, etc that puts the burned copy to shame. You need to add value.
Cheap high speed internet access has killed the old business model, and the businessmen who are in the industry need to adapt or die. Note the industry itself isn't going anywhere, but businesspeople who refuse to adapt will.
Free Martian Whores!