I was hoping you could explain that to me….

Economist/Journal: For newspapers or magazines with lots of their own or especially valuable content, to have a partially-freely-available online page. The online page is completely available, as a 1st-class citizen, to subscribers. Interestingly, the Economist has different rates for print and online subscribers. I subscribe to the Ecnomist.

Commercial-gateway: Salon.com has been doing this successfully for awhile, and now NYT is, too, I think (at least, they’re trying). Each day, you have to watch an ad to read the site. You have to subscribe to read the site. They’ve always been online-only, and have various associate blog/comment systems.

Newspaper-style online daily: So far, my favorite example is the Washington Post. They make you register (and, unlike other papers, haven’t timed out or otherwise lost my identity). They have advertising above and to the side of columns. All articles have comment pages, they have several blogs, and regular chats with interesting people. I’ve always felt they were ahead online, especially compared to the hapless NYT. I think they have alot of deals of various kinds going, which may help their bottom line.

Horror-story: Bad examples are also good, as I see it. Mine is of the NYT, the gold standard of the pre-online era. They had a web page later than many papers, and it was terrible. For many years, it was hard to read, all the news fit to read on the web was a handful of technical stories. Later, they added a leetle more stuff, mostly about New York unions, yippee. Now they’ve added ads and seem to ‘most all their content online. But they’re still having problems. The salon-style gateway commercial has never actually worked on my computer – I have to use the click-through link (at least they provide that). And, they’ve made their opinion section the heart of the revenue access section, which is dumb becuase that’s what blogs are best at, meaning they’re trying to get money for something available better for free elsewhere.

Journalism has been considered a loss-leader (with the product being eyeballs for advertisers) for so long that it may take a while to establish new economic models, but they *will* be established, and the people who create them will make a ton of money. It might help to start with the premise that “journalism” IS the product, and then go from there.

The problem with journalism on the web is that there’s presently no equivalent of single-copy-purchase available– nothing like the corner newsstand. The subscription model isn’t working because it requires readers to pay in advance for a bundle of stuff, some of which they may not want, and some of which commodity news, which someone, somewhere, will *always* be giving away for free.

I for one would be glad to pay something reasonable for the articles I read on line, but there’s no easy way for me to do it. People have been talking about micropayments for years, so why the heck haven’t the publishers (who have the most to lose) figured out how to do them?

Of course, for micropayments to succeed you have to let everybody in. And that might mean that some readers might want to send some of those payments to folks outside the existing news club. Perhaps fear of losing control of those dollars is contributing to the foot-dragging?

And an effective micropayment system solves the problem of supporting the writing of less-than-popular articles, because you’re no longer talking about a percentage of a subscription-based publication’s readers, instead it’s the percentage of readers on the entire web (c.f., “long tail” and all that). With micripayments the Iraq interrogation article doesn’t make as much as the Paris Hilton article, but it probably makes *enough*. And I would posit that there are writers out there for whom “enough” IS “enough,” provided they are allowed to follow their interests (rather than be tasked with covering Paris Hilton).

(Plus, who says that the “race to the bottom” hasn’t already happened… read your local Gannett lately? Personally, I’d rather see the balance of coverage being driven by the “votes” of paying readers rather than by the charitable impulses– or “sense of duty”– of a for-profit corporation that views journalism as an expense only loosely related to its true business of selling eyeballs to advertisers.)

And the advertising-supported model also gets in the way of serving readers because it leads to the attitude that “anything that might be considered (by some purist) to be advertising has to be paid for.” McLennan highlights the problem:

“…there isn’t a single newspaper that has figured out a really usable way online to find out what’s going on tonight without lots of clicks and searching.”

IMO, the reason for this is that newspapers still think the “what’s going on tonight” directory (and items like it) is a box to be filled with paid advertisements, rather than as a collection of information that they assemble for their readers. Again, who’s the customer here? As a reader, I don’t care if the listings in the directory are sponsored or not. I *do* care whether they’re complete. Well, newsprint is expensive, but bytes are cheap. So how about giving every one of the venues a basic free listing (as part of the newsgathering I’m paying for), and let ‘em pay if they want enhancements?

But that means re-thinking what they’re doing, and I see very little of that.

I won’t touch on the “public funding” argument, except to say that it’s not going to happen. The *best* you might get is not-for-profit status, and I wouldn’t base my future plans on getting even that.

The only real long-term solution IMO is through the use of public funding (e.g. BBC, NPR).

A friend of mine looked at the figures evolution during the 6 months period. It appears that the websites of the newspapers grew normally:

the post about this is here: http://www.balencourt.com/blog/2007/04/19/presse-belge-retour-sur-6-mois-sans-google (it’s in french but with plenty of figures)

What do you see as a potential good business model for healthy journalism in the US?

Look around – big box general stores, little stuff stores, restaurants, artists, tv stations, radio stations websites and blogs.

IMO spread to thin. And I see to many captains and not enough grunts sucking the pie dry. Who pays for this survey and that analysis and that study?

Paper pushing society we are for busy work. Any pyramid ideas for a pitcher of beer, bread and a tent?

Sounds like the beginning of a really pathetic news distribution system. See the movie Idiocracy.