Time Magazine’s former managing editor, Walter Isaacson wrote a heroic hail-mary cover story a week or two ago (here) endorsing a system of micro payments for journalism in an attempt to bridge that fast approaching cliff.
I like a couple of the ideas he brings up, namely clicking buttons to make payments instead of entering credit card information and charging micro payments to access day, week, month, year and lifetime subscriptions to media organizations.
Eventually there will be a brilliant solution hammered out (hammered as in media organizations are going to endure a serious ass whupping first). This quote says it best: “driving revenue while trying to re-invent a business model is a difficult thing to do, it’s like changing the tires on a moving truck.” Found that in the comments of a foliomag.com story.
I have several thoughts to contribute:
1. The monopoly is over. The cost of delivering advertising to to consumers along with words and pictures is now nearly zero. Advertisers paid whatever you told them to pay because the delivery method was expensive and complicated. Nobody gives a rats ass if the billionaire owners go somewhere else. Turning journalism into a break even industry is perfectly fine with editors, writers and photographers. I could go on and on about the decisions that are made by owners that put advertising and attracting easy readers first. My reasons for not reading Time Magazine anymore is certainly tied to their attempts to attract more readers (to serve to advertisers) at the expense of the quality of the product.
2. The cost to deliver the exact same product electronically should be a fraction of the printed version (I’m thinking 1/10th). If you’d like to buy me a computer (or other hand held delivery device) and pay my ISP bill each month then I’ll agree to the normal cost. Otherwise pass the savings I just gave you back to me.
3. Get off your high fucking horse. You’re no longer in control of the flow of information. Your sources have blogs, your readers have tweets and stories don’t end once you hit the publish button. Participation is mandatory.
There’s plenty of good punditry to read as well:
By Mark Fitzgerald, Editor and Publisher:
… Time itself looks more in need of saving than even newspapers that symbolize the industry’s troubles, like the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times, both of which dropped pretty hefty packages on my doorstep Sunday.
By E&P’s count Time sold all of 14 pages of ads in the slim issue. Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design puts it nicely at his blog with a trenchant piece that is far more worthy to be at the center of industry debate than Isaacson’s sort of obvious observations: “But its ‘Modest Proposal’ is delivered in a form that is remarkably modest itself — its 56 pages are barely thick enough to shim a coffee table, let alone support an entire industry.”
But papers didn’t make money from subscriptions; the price basically covered the cost of getting multi-pounds of newsprint delivered to your door at 5 a.m.
… the more I think about it, the biggest problem the press has is that the evaporation of advertising has meant that the news it publishes has to stand on its own two feet.
Sure, back in the day there was some foreign news, some local reporting, some great reporters and editors sprinkled across the country. But let’s face it, most newspapers sucked in all sorts of ways, and one of the main ways was opting toward blandness and timidity wherever possible, as as not to offend the older folks subscribing to the papers.
Mark Hamilton on Notes From A Teacher:
So this is where my belief that micropayments offer at least a partial solution to the who-will-pay-for-the-news question runs up against cold reality. If you accept my idea of the three stumbling blocks, we need to devise a system that (1) allows for single registration for everything, (2) opens up the pot to everyone creating media with potential value, and (3) puts the user in control of establishing the value.
… a piece by James Warren in The Atlantic, which you would hope would be a bit more intellectual — but instead makes the same old errors. Warren seems to imply that investigative journalism can only be done by newspaper reporters — apparently not realizing that the investigative reporting he’s talking about is a very new concept, rather than true “traditional journalism.”
Michael Turro, In Plain Sight:
newspapers cannot be saved. They are big bloated, convoluted corporate anachronisms that derive their strength and power from an economic model of news information that is in rapid and steep decline. These corporate entities were built and grew powerful in an age when new information was remote, precious, scarce, capital.
That age is over.
Today fresh information is immediate, cheap, abundant, available. News happens and is distributed in real time - worldwide - before lumbering outfits like the New York Times even have a chance to think up a catchy headline.
Finally Walter Isaacson on The Daily Show:
And finally the World Press Photo of the Year Award goes to Anthony Suau from a series of pictures he shot under contract for Time Magazine but they refused to print (story on PDN).
CREDIT: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/02/13/magazines-try-to-save-newspapers/
No comments:
Post a Comment