Slashdot Mirror
Micropayments For News — Holy Grail Or Delusion?
newscloud writes "Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab sounds off on micropayments for news content, on the side of the argument that says they are a dangerous delusion: 'What does it mean for journalism? It could mean charging for different platforms, for early alerts, for special members-only access to certain premium or value-added content. But I'm pretty sure of one thing: It doesn't mean charging people fractions of a cent to read a news story, no matter how sophisticated the process.' The article provides good context on the debate over micropayments from a 2003 piece by Clay Shirky, to recent analysis and opinion by Masnick, Outing, Graham, and Reifman. Google's micropayment plans were recently discussed here."
If the content is premium content, something that I know is more valuable or interesting than elsewhere, then I have no problem paying for it. This is the reason people for pay for Wall Street Journal and the likes too - they get more out of it and the writers are specialized in the area.
For everyday news, no. I want opinions and better writing than just simply telling the news.
I'll just get my news fix at free sites.
Easiest way to find a free alternative. Most people already pay for TV of some sort on top of internet, so if every single news outlet (including local news outlets and blogs and places like slashdot) started charging for you to view news, people would simply watch the news they already technically pay for. I have no problem paying for new news. The problem with our news is that every outlet runs the same story with their commentary slapped on top.
Advertising on the internet simply does not work, and micropayments are never going to fly. Newspapers need to adopt the NPR beg-a-thon method. They need to learn to live with lower overheads and lower revenues. Their sales forces need to convert into grant-writers and they need to focus on asking their readers and big corporate donors for money.
I wont pay for news content period. There's very little out there that I have to have right now, and somewhere, someone else will have it for free. I might pay for a value added website, but not for news, which really is just raw material.
It's the Holy Grail of media outlets, because it would get people to pay for something that has been given away for a long time. But it's a delusion as well, since efforts at doing just that have not met with anything remotely like success.
For instance, the New York Times tried to do a "Times Select" paid service with a lot of formerly free content available for the low low price of $10.99 per year or so. It must not have worked, because a few months later all the content that used to be hidden behind the paywall was placed back on the free site.
I am officially gone from
The SI definition of micro is one millionth. Its gonna take a lot of payments to add up to even 1 cent. I doubt that it would be economical.
Well hopefully it means the resurrection of journalism and the death of sensationalism. Ultimately it's up to generation Y to decide what we want.
I demand payment for this comment, slashdot.
The problem with news is that it is an experiential good meaning you can't determine it's value in advance. You only know whether it was worth something AFTER you read it. So why would someone pay for news that might or might not be valuable? Usually because the source has a track record of providing good information (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc) or you have some other reason to suspect that the information might be valuable (information about a stock that is not widely known for instance). But the seller of information by definition cannot know what the information is worth to the buyer in advance. Generally the seller finds out it was worth something to the buyer if the buyer buys information from them again.
There is money to be made in paying for content that can be had for free elsewhere. Apple's iTunes is proof enough of that. BUT it has to provide something you can't easily get from the free (even if illegal) alternatives. That could be convenience, it could be support, it could be complementary technology (iPod/Kindle), it could be reliability, it could be unusually insightful analysis, and it could be other things. Just copying the latest AP news has some value but not enough many people will pay for it directly.
OK news is another content type on the net that would benefit from micro-payments.
Problem. Is there a micro-payment system out there that people would trust? NOPE.
Every micro scheme I've seen to date want to effectively tax the user with huge fees. Or saddle it with some craptastic marketing angle.
Until the governments put some trust behind the system like have for cash then micro payments are a no show.
Last I checked, the Holy Grail was a delusion.
With a very few exceptions, news is worth what you can get advertisers to pay for access to the consumers. This has been true since the advent of television journalism half a century ago.
It's the newspaper's own fault that craigs list took over classified advertising. They had the better part of a decade to get their acts together and get the ads online before craigs list existed. And it's their own fault that they still haven't learned the Google advertising lesson so that they're still serving worthless banner ads that many if not most of the browsers block.
If they continue to refuse to embrace their new reality, they will continue to fail. Such is fate.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If the content is premium content, something that I know is more valuable or interesting than elsewhere, then I have no problem paying for it.
The problem with that argument when applied to newspapers is that news is an experiential good and by definition you cannot possibly know if it "is more valuable or interesting than elsewhere" until after you have the information. So you have to pay for it and hope that it turns out to be valuable. You can rely on the reputation or reliability of the source, but that still doesn't tell you in advance that the information is good. Even if others tell you it is valuable, you might not find it to be so - think of a movie that all your friends like but you don't.
I sense a problem that can be solved with S****ISM (deleted as a proactive measure to stop the political-right from having a heart-attack). The BBC news is light-years ahead of anything in the USA. It's also politically independent, unlike state-run newspapers in Iran, China and Russia.
Can you not see a simple solution when it's staring you in the face? Has Rupert Murdoch out-foxed you all? Create an independently funded public institution, with a mandate to "educate", "inform" and "entertain", and maybe the citizens of the USA wont score so poorly on survey questions such as "were WMDs found in Iraq".
And your news content wont be beholden to advertising interests.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
One problem is, of course, that often times you can only estimate the worth of an article after reading it.
I wouldn't mind a system that tells me at the end of the month about the top 10 news sites I've read and allows me to say "yeah, they were good, give them some money". I know I have a few regular sites that I'd give some right now if it were as easy as a PayPal link.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It is only when everyone is completely free to spread and comment on information that everyone will be free. Until then the people without will be subject to the filters of the people with.
Suggestion for news aggregators: Quit trying to emulate television by attempting to force ads on your viewers.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I don't want have to decide *before* I read an article whether I want to pay for it, I want to decide *after*. To that end, I propose the following micropayment system. If I want to get content from a consortium of providers (say, anything owned by The New York Times Company, or Time-Warner, or Seed Media Group, or a group of publishers that set up their own consortium), I set up an account, pay my $50/year, and get access. If I like a piece of content (article, podcast, interactive graphic, whatever), I click the "Tip the Author(s)" button, and a chunk of my $50, maybe 10 cents, gets redirected to the actual people creating the content I actually like (not just start to read). If I don't use up my $50 for the year, it just gets split internally by the consortium. This way, readers have control over where the money goes and get to associate "paying money" with "feeling good about what they read", providers get cash, and the best providers get the most cash.
I worked for a newspaper in college, I know they are typically trying to be sensational. The top searches every day often involve celebrity news. If news organizations are making all their money off of gossip are they going to stop investing in quality local and investigative articles? Will micropayments be the downfall of quality news?
Forcing people to pay for news will only increase the tendency for people to only read news they agree with. What will "save" the news industry is a shift away from creating the content to vetting content created by interested parties. While most newspapers (US) have had deteriorating quality since the Spanish-American war most in depth reporting has been done by interested parties. Groklaw is a good example of a single subject reporting. What good news aggregators should do is make it easy for people interested in SCO to find Groklaw, press releases by involved parties, and alternative views on the subject. Real "news" reform would force government, corporations and even non-profits to be more transparent in their dealings, making it easier for interested parties to research and create quality news. Tort reform to keep legal action from crushing individuals prior to judicial review (ie loser pays) would have significant impact too.
Maybe the newspapers could start charging Linden Dollars for stories? :)
Anyone like me who has published a paper newspaper knows that it is all about circulation. Every additional cent that you charge for a copy of your publication does not increase your profits. Instead, it decreases your circulation.
Point in fact: when I lived in Omaha, Nebraska I bought a copy of the New York Times every day and read it on the treadmill.
Now, I live in New York City where the New York Times costs $2.00 a copy. I have bought it about three times at that price.
In short, micropayments is a sure way to send people somewhere else for the news.
I think that the main problem here is that they are attempting to charge directly for something that has ALWAYS been free -- news in all its current iterations is solely an ad-supported medium. People pay for newspapers, that is true, but the costs of subscription barely (if at all) covers the cost of cutting down trees, milling them into paper, putting ink on them, and then putting them on trucks to deliver to front doors across the world. The costs associated with the actual journalism part has ALWAYS been ad-supported, that is why you do not need to pay anything to watch news on TV or listening to it on the radio. Subscription costs have historically been assessed to cover the cost of distribution. With the relatively minimal cost (I know bandwidth is not free, but it is significantly cheaper than the printing press) of distribution online, there is no need to charge subscription. When the newspaper business comes and tries to tell you that the Internet is changing the game by getting you your news for free, tell them to blow it out their ass. They are the ones trying to change the game here, they are trying to charge for something which has been free as long as it has been in existence.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Well most people regard news as just another form of entertainment - we know this, as the most popular news programmes on TV are not the authoritative ones that tell us important information about events that will affect us. The one's that get the biggest audiances are the "populist" news programmes that deal more with celebrity gossip, scandals and rumours (oh yes, and sport). The conclusion is that people want entertainment more than they want information. Occasionally, when there's a Sept-11 type event people pile in to news channels, but since these almost never happen there's no way to build a profitable news channel or website based on regularly occurring disasters.
So if people are given two options: free entertainment websites on the one hand and paid-for sites on the other, they will almost always choose the free stuff. The small number of individuals who want and need in-depth analysis and coverage are already buying papers like the FT and WSJ and using their onlibe outlets, too. There's no room for much more in that field.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
But I'm pretty sure of one thing: It doesn't mean charging people fractions of a cent to read a news story, no matter how sophisticated the process.'
Well I'm pretty sure that this is exactly what micropayments are for.
1. Report accurately on poignant world events, or specialist news which is well researched and factually accurate. ...
2. Increase readership.
3. Charge more for advertising space.
4.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I could se myself pay for high quality articles where the reporters go out on a limb, do research and investigation resulting in unbiased and correct reporting.
Problem is most media today are highly biased, write stuff any blogger can do better and wouldnt dare touch a sensitive topic if its anything but 100% PK with upper management. The product arent worth the money and why should i pay for what is essentially propaganda aimed at me?
Im the one who should get money for all the ads, both in normal papers and in write-for-rent rags where a big ad gets you a nice article about your company.
HTTP/1.1 400
If these guys want to charge for their content they should combine their offerings into a subscription service. We are used to watching television programming through the cable or satellite companies. We pay for access to a collection of channels and content. It would seem very odd to pay for each show. It would also make flipping the channels difficult and in the end people would probably just watch less TV. The same situation would be true for Newspaper articles. I would pay for a subscription to a newspaper co-op that allowed me to read articles from a collection of reputable papers.
Is there a reason why advertising doesn't pay for the content? What am I missing here?
Reply to That ||
Being able to pick tv channels is a Micropayments system that I want to see.
I should I be forced to pay for the disney channel carp just to get ESPN?
I can't I get some channels that are only on comcarp at this time on sat tv? I want to pay for CLTV and have it on my direct tv system.
Why does comcarp cable put fox movie channel in the sport pack?
The general public doesnâ€(TM)t put any value on the source of their 'news'. In other words, a twitter post is just as good as something from the AP. This is partially due, IMO, to shitty poor journalism, so little time and effort is spent investigating and digging for original content nowadays. Rather, today 'journalists' slap together a handful of talking points and use other news organization's reports as sources. Journalism today has by and large become a cycle of shit, thanks in large part to the freak show circus of cable 'news'.
So, I don't see myself paying Google for the same quality of 'news' I can get for free from any random jerk's blog.
FAQs are evil.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Instead of forcing consumers to pay, they need a viral network that will distribute their news to people in as many ways as they can possibly connect, while adding in the advertisements in just like they do on radio or TV. I imagine it could work something like the Cybus Earbuds you see in the BBC Science Fiction show "Doctor Who" :D
Now that might scare a few people, but it is not meant to be, however, with Cell Phone use nearly ubiquitous in some parts of the world, maybe that's where news needs to be targetting instead of trying to play catch up, they might actually be able to 'innovate' and find a way to deliver news to readers in a way that gets their advertisers much better coverage.
What do you guys think?
The news corporations have reduced their news products to he/she said gossip.
The journalism that people used to buy in newspapers every day (sometimes twice a day) was the report of a person finding the actual facts and telling the actual story. The modern version, especially (but not at all exclusively) on TV, is the report of a person collecting different sides of an argument, telling what each arguer said (and editing them to look just as reasonable on each side). Radio news isn't even that: it's pure commentary propaganda, paid for by corporate sponsors (not at all necessarily the advertisers).
Who would pay for that crap? Especially in the most propaganda news (the majority of it), the news org should pay its audience to consume it, as the product is designed to serve the news org's needs, usually contrary to its audience's needs.
The news industry should be thriving in the Info Age, with free distribution and a nearly universal audience. Instead it kept its worst artifacts of the previous eras, especially its corruption, while its main moneymakers (embedded ads and classifieds) were done better by new, focused competitors after news orgs failed for over a decade to do it right.
Payments for news that isn't either urgent (eg. its value in making more money or protecting lives/property vanishes after 15 minutes) or valuable to an audience too small to compete with an organized distribution org (eg. technical bulletins for specialists) is just as much delusion as is the Holy Grail. The quest for it is the industry. Actually having it is a fantasy.
--
make install -not war
Newspapers have a fundamental problem, which is that they do little original journalism, buying from sources like AAP and Reuters instead.
They are not really in the business of selling papers to people, rather they provide eyeballs to parade advertisements in front of. The news is mere bait to entice the eyeballs to bite.
Perhaps it made good business sense to outsource content and to focus on the core business, which is carrying advertisements to the eyeballs. As a strategy it seems to have worked well so far, and for radio and tv, too, but it fails in the era of the internet, and for the same reason why it used to work: Production cost. The cost of publishing a paper, also radio and tv, is enormous because a lot of very expensive equipment is needed. Sadly for the publishers, it costs approximately nothing to publish on the internet, just the cost of the content, really.
The papers observe falling revenues at the same time that their consumption grows online, and may feel, incorrectly, that the paper they print and deliver is somehow competing with, and losing income from, their own online edition. But even though they get no revenue from online readers, neither does it cost much to provide the service; and while they continue to be read, they continue to have a product to sell: eyeballs, remember?
The easy money in news comes from creating content, which you make available under licence. There aren't all that many people in that game, so competition is small and rewards are correspondingly higher. The papers will all line-up to pay for the right to republish, because that's what they do.
David Newall
While a free site will get a lot of visitors (most of whom are merely casual browser types) as soon as they start charging even the slightest amount you can expect their readership to fall off dramatically. Why is that?
I see you've been reading Chris Anderson :)
It's an absolutely valid point. But the other side of the coin is that when you charge even the slightest amount, and your readership drops, the readers who remain are demonstrably committed to your subject matter. Advertisers love that kind of audience. If you sell handlebars, would you rather pay $1000 to reach 100,000 web users who skim past bikemag.com for free, or $1000 to reach 10,000 web users who are so into bikes that they pay $1/month for premium access to the site?
(Yes - this means you have to define a premium service where "no ads" isn't the selling point)
For one simple reason, micropayments as they are debated here will never work.
When the product is too cheap, then the time and effort buying the product is the true cost to the buyer.
In other words, after a certain point, it just has to be free, or it simply isn't worth it.
What's more, if the seller doesn't value their product enough to charge a non-micro amount for it, then what they are doing is failing to make a value proposition, which is the essence of a business transaction.
No one will pay pennies for something worth pennies.
Newspapers are already cheap, but they are not free. But they aren't micro-priced either. Whether it is buying a paper at the stand or subscribing months at a time, there is a valid value proposition there.
On-line media has yet to find that value proposition. Without that proposition, debating the technical details concerning how payments will be made is getting waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of yourself.
For those interested in more detail about the economics and psychology behind Clay's theory that micropayments will never work, I recommend this earlier piece from 2000. Nine years later, we still haven't seen a viable micropayment system (where "micro" = 25 cents or less) and I don't think that will change.
...micropayments would still seem to have an advantage over larger payments, since the cost of the transaction is so low. Who could haggle over a penny's worth of content? After all, people routinely leave extra pennies in a jar by the cashier. Surely amounts this small makes valuing a micropayment transaction effortless?
Here again micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?
Beneath a certain price, goods or services become harder to value, not easier, because the X for Y comparison becomes more confusing, not less. Users have no trouble deciding whether a $1 newspaper is worthwhile - did it interest you, did it keep you from getting bored, did reading it let you sound up to date - but how could you decide whether each part of the newspaper is worth a penny?
Was each of 100 individual stories in the newspaper worth a penny, even though you didn't read all of them? Was each of the 25 stories you read worth 4 cents apiece? If you read a story halfway through, was it worth half what a full story was worth? And so on.
When you disaggregate a newspaper, it becomes harder to value, not easier. By accepting that different people will find different things interesting, and by rolling all of those things together, a newspaper achieves what micropayments cannot: clarity in pricing.
The very micro-ness of micropayments makes them confusing. At the very least, users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."...
Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As usual, what will end up happening will be something between the two extremes.
Not every news site will be able to, or even want to go with a paid subscription model. Some sites that are charging for content at present, such as the WSJ, will continue to do so. Quite a few more will make the shift to paid access, only some of these will be successful in doing so, some will fold and the rest will go back to the present model of advertising.
What people will see real value in, and will be accepting of paying for is opinion, insight and thought. Current events are raw data - they happen and they're reported as-is. Where the value lies is turning that raw data into information and this is what people will pay for. As an example, anyone can walk into the Australian Bureau of Statistics and get raw import/export data for commodities. There is no value in someone else simply republishing these statistics. What there is value in is looking at the series over time, analysing the data with your knowledge of the industry, saying why things happened in the past and what they're likely to do in the future. People will pay a lot of money for this kind of information.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
If I like a piece of content (article, podcast, interactive graphic, whatever), I click the "Tip the Author(s)" button, and a chunk of my $50, maybe 10 cents, gets redirected
Genius! Someone mod this up.
And the lazy or unconcerned will get default disbursement. The people who care most will have a reasonable capability to decide.
Another solution.
Provide an on-line pass with the primary subscription to your local paper. Once you sign on to your local paper's internet site, you receive a cookie that permits you to access any other on-line content of the consortium for the day.
The papers get a win by increasing local readership and circulation. You don't have to worry about micro-payments. If you don't subscribe to the local paper, you're left with micro-payments to access major papers content.
With costs distributed to both advertisers AND readers, the paper has to satisfy both. When only advertisers pay, the paper no longer serves YOU, it serves a corporation only. Looking at papers where this already occurs reveals they suck.
It's worth noting that newspapers don't do radio news and they don't do television news. Each medium ultimately finds its own business model.
Paper, radio, TV news content is paid for by advertising.
The shape of internet news is already evident. The only thing missing is blog sites that start bringing in enough revenue to put journalists and researchers on staff. Suppose HubPages or Blogger decided to set up a section for hard, fact-checked news and well-respected columnists. The ad rate in this section would climb fast. Positive feedback and competition does the rest.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If only the corporate media and big ISPs could find a way to lock down the internet and control access to and dissemination of information and content... Yeah, that's the ticket!
Am I the only one who sees this as yet another argument by corporate media and big ISPs as to why they need to become the gatekeepers of the internet?
I may be wrong, but I see this as just another salvo in the war against net neutrality.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
Agreed. And I think you should factor in non-monetary costs also. For example, what it costs you to navigate a site full of pop-ups and banner ads. The cost of clicking ten times the "next page" button for an article that would easily fit in one page. THe cost of flash or javascript taking over 99% of your CPU.
Remember the old Altavista? It used to have tons of ads in its search page. Then Google came in with its clean visual and took over the search engine market.
Conclusion: it pays not to be greedy.
A few things I've found by having several news sites in my rotation.
With that in mind I would possibly pay for a handful of 'full stories' every week but for the bulk of them they're just not that interesting. I like knowing Event A happened but I don't need the in-depth analysis. But I wouldn't sign up on multiple sites and hand over payment information willy-nilly nor would I want to have to jump through multiple hoops to get access to the story. By the time that happens I will have already lost interest. Don't even start with putting down a balance on each site to have access to their content.
A little offtopic, but I was looking into running a service based on transactions under $1 but I simlpy couldn't make the numbers work. All the services I looked at that would accept credit cards took at least $.20 of any transaction which would just trash any margins we would have. Any ideas?
No smoking sigs indoors.
Nonsense. You get to "experience" a periodical in every issue.
You didn't bother to follow the link and learn what an experience good is did you? I'm not talking about some sort of gestalt or an amusement park "experience". An experience good is a term economists use for items you can't evaluate until after you have them in your possession. You don't know if information is valuable until AFTER you already have the information. When you pay for the Wall Street Journal, you aren't paying for specific information, you are paying for the reputation of that magazine for reliably providing interesting/useful content. If you already knew the content in advance of reading it there would be nothing worth paying for.
Even if the content
is only available in hard copy you can still easily browse it and all of
it's immediate competitors (library, bookstore).
You really didn't understand. No publication can sell you information you already have. The act of consumption (reading the paper) is one way act. Once you have read the information not even the might Wall Street Journal can make you un-read it. The good (information in this case) has already been consumed. Only after you have read it can you make a determination of value.
This is somewhat different than music where there is some entertainment value in listening to the same music repeatedly. News is much more of a wasting asset. Once news is consumed it is unusual that anyone reads it again and it loses most of its monetary value.
The character of The Journal doesn't change from one day to the next.
The content does change every day and not every article is valuable to every person. Not even the mighty Wall Street Journal has any way to know in advance whether I will regard a particular bit of information as valuable or what I will think it is worth. The best they can do is publish the best articles they can on a variety of topics and bundle them together in the hopes the consumer will find a sufficient number valuable.
So now you will pay for them to manufacture your consent for another war (AfPakRaqRan), tax money to the banks, no health insurance but payments to insurance companies and the rest of the corporate agenda. I do not think so.
Putting a paywall up on the website won't fix their fundamental issues. The problem they have is that fewer people subscribe or buy a daily paper than in the past. All a paywall on the website will do is make their web hits decline in a similar manner. If they want to solve their problem, they need to figure out why readership is declining in general, not treat the web as a special case.
I can't speak for all potential readers, but I can state some of my own reasons, particularly those where I know at least some others share them.
Part of it is that we no longer feel informed when we read the paper. The political news rarely gets beyond partisan bickering. Big deal some Republicrat called a Demican a doodie head again. Just like yesterday and the day before. That's not entirely the newspaper's fault, the only why there is because they are members of opposing parties. Just like yesterday and the day before. I might be interested in reading an insightful look into the opposing philosophies and reasoned arguments for and against, but they can't give me that because there are no reasoned arguments anymore, just a bunch of adults acting like kindergartners.
There probably ARE some people in Washington willing to give a reasoned andwer to insightful questions, they need to find them and find within their own ranks someone who still knows how to ask an insightful question. If the opposition spouts nonsense, they'll just have to say so at the end. and accept that a story can only be balanced if both parties are willing to express themselves and their thinking rationally.
I realize that the kind of interviewing necessary to get such a story is the sort that gets you dis-invited to press conferences. That's unfortunate, but I suppose at least one paper could bill itself is the most hated in Washington and then focus on genuine investigative reporting. That brings up the next problem:
News in general has become all about the sponsors. They don't want to report anything that might offend the sponsors. The real customer is the corporate interests that buy ad space. Regular people aren't buying newspapers because they are at some level aware that it's not for them. The problem with that is the sponsors don't buy newspapers and if nobody else does, there's no benefit to being a sponsor. If they want to live behind a paywall, perhaps they can manage by setting a policy to piss off as many potential sponsors as possible every day. No more printing press releases as if they were real news. Investigative journalism is much more than just asking a few people what they would like for the paper to say about them.
The press is supposed to play a vital role in democracy by telling the stories government would rather they DIDN'T tell. They're not going to be able to do that while trying to be everyone's buddy so they get invited to press conferences and first dibs on the meaningless sound bite.
"The Daily Show" is becoming a popular news source simply because however silly it gets and however little attention it pays to journalistic integrity, they're the only "news" that actually seems to question what they're told anymore.
What you pay for a paper helps offset some of the cost of delivering it to you. The newsprint and ink and printing press and reportage and editing are paid out of advertising. That's why they're hurting. Nobody wants to run a newspaper ad when they get better results from Craigslist for free. So now they want us to pay for content, which we've never done before, but no doubt they'll want us to pay for content + advertising. No way. If I'm going to have to suffer the ads anyway, I'll get the free version that's paid by ads. If I'm paying, it had better be ad free.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
not a new idea, but if this is going to work, there will have to be a central news payback authority that issues accounts to netizens, who then drop credit in those accounts, and they debit when a news organization's premium corner is accessed.
and it won't work well based on the slow, cranky response and stall-outs that have been increasing and dominating newspaper sites over the past year. it's going to be like a communications provider... invest in the site to make it work, then charge for it.
fail, die.
blowhards, liars, and phonies with no charge for shovelling the krep onto your desktop will otherwise get the hits, and society will continue to slide down the dumbness scale.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If each news story requires a micropayment, doesn't that mean that sites like Slashdot, should they post little quotes and information from News sites, are guilty of a crime?
Holy Grail OR Delusion? A Holy Grail *is* a delusion!
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Big media owners value things differently than consumers do. For TV, the owners refer to ads as the "content," while the shows are "fill." With most corporate newspapers it's much the same, ads are the profitable part, articles are an expense which bring in the eyeballs for ads. (This wouldn't be quite so bad except corporate owners and their advertiser colleagues now have a huge influence on which articles are written and how.) Your monthly newspaper bill barely covers paper costs and the delivery kid; micropayments are similar, they can make a difference but they're a barely noticeable income compared to advertisers.
Look for more corporate "compelling content" like celebrity news and missing pretty women. Useful corporate news will be expensive, behind pay firewalls or distributed as expensive newsletters. For useful news for the rest of us, look to alternative news collectives and the occasional exceptional blog.
> I sense a problem that can be solved with S****ISM (deleted as a proactive measure to stop the political-right from having a heart-attack).
How would sexism help?
If you can't determine the value of news until after you read it, isn't any system based on pay-by-value voluntary?
Here's one voluntary solution and one compulsory solution. These only work for material that assists people in some direct or indirect way with product purchases. Such material can of course cross-subsidise hard news, as has always been the case.
Voluntary: Make it possible for purchasers to make donations to creators of material that has helped them choose the product they have bought, and allow these donations to be paid out of a manufacturer's cash rebate. Donations are more likely in this case because the donor is being prompted during a cashback claim to give a portion of something that's not yet in their pocket. No credit card required.
Compulsory: Allow publishers to charge a firm fee for an item, but allow this fee to be recovered from subsequent cash rebates the reader receives. The reader pays nothing up-front.
Newspapers are already cheap, but they are not free. But they aren't micro-priced either. Whether it is buying a paper at the stand or subscribing months at a time, there is a valid value proposition there.
Yes, big media will be loath to replace their bundling with item-based micropayments, because that would devalue their masthead and put them on an equal footing with smaller competitors. So they'll first try to make their bundles bigger (perhaps through a cartel).
I am honestly torn on this issue. On one hand, I feel the news agencies need to adapt their business model. On the other hand, if news agencies decide that news is unprofitable and just stop doing it, most of our news will come from a source that has no need to profit: the government. That isn't to say that for-profit news organizations don't use the news as a means to propagandize, but I know what governments like do when they are the only voice. Can anyone lend me some peace of mind here?
It's true that it'd be infeasible to have to authorise payment for each article, but you could have a system where you bless certain publications to charge you a particular amount for each item, valid for a particular period. Then you've just got to manage this white-list.
I'm scared of micropayments. It conjures up a picture of tiny holes in my wallet that continuously leak small ammounts of money, only, a lot of tiny holes leaking small ammounts of money ammounts to a lot of money leaking away.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Whatever happened to Flooz credit?
No, we'll just take it from Techdirt.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
After Guinan left 10 Forward they couldn't get another Trek endorsement and it collapsed.
This might not be entirely the same thing, but South Korea's online magazine http://www.ohmynews.com/ lets readers pay any small amount to the author if they liked the article. Though it doesn't seem to be mentioned on the English Wiki page.
Stop making that big face!