1. hrhmedia

   

   Wish this blog had a “I like this” feature similar to Facebook.

   Kathy could NOT have said this better. Newspapers are deluding themselves with the paid content model. Americans have never paid for the true cost of news. Advertising has always subsidized it (fully via TV/Radio, partially for print).

   That’s not going to change now. Get over it. Information was meant to be set free. And now it is. The question remains: how do folks make a living from producing that content.

   Mar 9th, 2009

2. Kenneth Rufo

   

   Gods, I feel so curmudgeonly, but I’m hesitant to agree with this. To me there is a gap between “consumers have never borne (solely) the cost of news” and “therefore paid models will not work.” I think the question is whether or not you can convert the news industry into a magazine-like industry, where the expectation exists that one pays for access/delivery in a broader sense, or at least pays for such things so that access comes prior to non-paying parties, or that some content elements are reserved for paying subscribers. I think Kathy may be too quick when thinking that payment for “delivery” simply covered the cost of the paper’s arrival in the mailbox. Delivery necessarily also involves a wide array of material infrastructures, and the expectation was that one would cover those costs. Just because those infrastructures are a bit more “virtual” for online/digital papers doesn’t mean they don’t have significant cost associated with them, and nor does it mean that we should somehow expect to receive content for free without supplementing the cost of that virtual delivery (a point Brill made recently).

   And I think we’ve long passed the idea that “information was meant to be set free,” and I say that as a huge open content supporter. There’s no essential “be free” attribute of information, though it is the case that certain content-specific areas are enhanced by having as few access impediments or slowdowns as possible. This isn’t true of every content area, nor for every purpose/function for which that content is developed. We can agree that certain issues, like national political or economic news, are sufficiently intrinsic to the American public that they deserve broad financial support, in which case we can do something like a CBC/BBC model. Or we can do pay-as-we-go for local news content. Whatever; but it’s not the case that information is inherently free, i.e. without production and transmission costs.

   Mar 9th, 2009

3. hrhmedia

   

   Don’t we already pay for “delivery” in the digital sense through our broadband and cellphone subscriptions? Is the problem then not of paying for freeloading, but more fairly distributing that revenue stream?

   Certainly, there are new infrastructures that need financing: server farms, designers, content creators. Platforms will come and go as they succeed and fail to find ways to sustain these infrastructures. But one thing remains constant: unless the Internet implodes, there will always be a way to share information, if not freely, then much cheaper than the way we have done through the industrial models we once cherished.

   That cheapens the cost of information, renders it a commodity, and makes it less the preserve of professionals/craftspeople/guild members. More of it is being produced, more being distributed, more being consumed. The fundamental question is how to adequately digest it. And that’s where I see the business model: in the digestive system.

   I know much has been made of the “information was meant to be set free” cliche (heck, I used and abused it above!). Ken Rufo would say that there’s a price for the distribution of information, even if it’s not so readily apparent in the online medium. I would argue it’s more of a fixed (smaller) cost than he would have us believe. And even if someone forms a news and information walled-garden cartel around every journalistic website on the web, someone, somewhere, somehow, will get word out. For free.

   Mar 9th, 2009

4. Harry Hayward

   

   I’ve been intrigued with some of the niche approaches beginning to appear.

   Mark Briggs did a great job of pointing them out in his Journalism 2.0 blog: http://www.journalism20.com/blog/2009/03/06/345/ For example, there’s the former Rocky Mountain news staffers with a new sports site, Cleveland Plain Dealer staffers with a health/medical site and so on.

   This may be one of the ways we get what we want, and someone can get paid for bringing it to us. And, I think there are some advertisers willing to pay for such a highly targeted audience.

   Mar 9th, 2009

5. Kenneth Rufo

   

   I don’t feel like we pay for digital delivery in any real sense. We pay for our own Internet access and for our mobile Internet, but that doesn’t cover the cost of delivering the news content any more than owning a home or publicly funding roads paid for the delivery of the print paper. We can call it a question of “distribution,” but right now there’s nothing – no user-associated revenue – being directed at news content. And I cannot think of any example of news content being produced and delivered without some corresponding cost on the part of the receiver. The closest we get are those alternative weeklies, but I’m not sure that’s the model we want to embrace. Even the old penny press, for all its improvements over the partisan press, did require readers to ante up that one copper coin. And we need to accept that, to some extent, we get what we pay for. News requires journalists, computers, company bandwidth, website designers, etc., just as much as the older model also required the cost and technology of printing and physical delivery, people who could do physical layout, etc.

   That being said, Hanson is absolutely correct – the information can be shared. All pay systems would require some level of mediating access control, which is to say some way of ensuring that payers can read X in a way that non-payers cannot. And these systems will never be perfect – content can be cut and pasted, etc. Obviously legal recourse exists in this context, but that’s rarely going to be worth the effort and cost. But the fact that these systems can be circumvented doesn’t mean they always will be; capacity is not the same as actuality, and so the problem of freeloading and the bypassing of access restrictions is a real one, but it’s not an overpowering one. Enough people will abide out of laziness or consent.

   Still, I agree with Hanson regarding walled-gardens. The approach doesn’t work. The TimesSelect experiment certainly demonstrated this. But I think TimesSelect did the model in the wrong direction; it should have charged for access the day the information came out, and freed it 24 hrs later. That way people who place a premium on fast information would have had the option to have it, while forgoing all those problems that attended broken or restricted links from folks referencing the article or op-ed. This would have been less of a walled-garden and more of a delayed-garden, which I think is doable. A version of RSS that preceded website publication, where the RSS subscription would involve a cost is probably also feasible.

   But I think micropayments seem feasible as well. It would allow for a more variegated readership – I could care less about sports, but I wouldn’t mind paying for actual news. I think the problem isn’t the newspaper content and the willingness to pay for it; the problem is the transaction cost, and here I mean the cost of time and extra clicks as well as the financial outlay. If the transaction costs were minimal in time and reasonable in money (somewhere between a tenth of a cent and a few cents), I doubt people would think too much about it. But this won’t work if newspapers have to have their own micropayment mechanism since then payment presupposes content or brand loyalty, and that’s a significant qualification. So the better proposal might be for the newspaper industry collectively to adopt a standard for really simple payments (we’ll call it RSP), perhaps something that ties paypal to OpenID and eliminates the transaction confirmations and logins for small transactions, much as is the case with debit cards these days.

   A publicly funded model is also viable, at least theoretically. I should note that broadcast television, for example, doesn’t really give its content away for free – we actually pay taxes that help them do that, and/or we pay cable or DSL subscription fees (along with the taxes that fund the ostensibly public air waves). Point being, public subsidization is a workable model, at least on a limited scale.

   Mar 9th, 2009

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