Time Magazine on saving the newspaper
Well, it was a good theory, but the “How to Save Your Newspaper” issue of Time Magazine was on sale a week before writer Walter Isaacson was on the Daily Show to promote the piece. So, ironically enough, I read an article about how free-to-read news is dooming print media for free, because I couldn’t find the print version to buy it. Excellent planning by whomever was responsible for Isaacson appearing so late on the show.
In any case, here’s the article.
It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news.
Well, not all of them. Former Daily Press reporter Hillary Borrud now works for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon, which charges for most of its news on a daily basis. The theory, as I understand it, is that local Bend news is an exclusive commodity of the Bulletin, and that it doesn’t make sense to give it away for free.
I understand that — I think the exclusivity of local news is absolutely the most valuable commodity papers have to offer; I’d even ditch almost all national and international news, if I were an editor or publisher, on the theory that readers aren’t coming to the local publication for that, and that we should be offering 100 percent of what we’re promising readers, with no filler.
But the New York Times couldn’t make a pay-subscription model work. And if they can’t, can any one paper accomplish it? (The Wall Street Journal is trying.) And even if they all got on board, Google, Yahoo and other portals still purchase access to at the rights to publish Associated Press, Reuters and other wire services. If national and international news, including sports, is freely available, will consumers be willing to pay for local news?
One of history’s ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. “One thing you do is prevent good software from being written,” he railed. “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Here’s where I think Isaacson is sailing into dangerous waters:
I don’t think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day’s edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today’s clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it’s probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can’t work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. “With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself,” wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it’s made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply.
(As far as I know, there’s never been detailed information released on how well Kindle-formatted books are actually selling, just relative or otherwise vague numbers.)
I’m not sure that micro-payments are the answer for anything. Scott McCloud thought they were the funding mechanism for webcomics. They haven’t gotten there yet.
And while it’s not a piece of plastic one can lay their hands on, a song, music video or other download from iTunes gives users something they can come back to again and again. (And notably, iTunes has kicked the snot out of models that just give access to given content for a month. People want to keep their purchases, even if only virtually.)
I don’t know the answer — and obviously, I have a vested interest in someone coming up with one — but I don’t think this is it. I would be happy to be proven wrong, though.
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