Agreed – But I’ll take it further. The whole industry, from soup to nuts, needs a transparent / open source approach to figuring out to make news a financially viable enterprise in the future.

We’ll never get there as long as each organization is toiling on their own, behind closed doors. That’s fine when an industry has some stability. But when the industry as a whole is going down, the organizations need to join forces and work collaboratively to share insights & learnings — that’s how you accelerate learning and, hopefully, discover viable new enterprises before the old ones sink altogether. Otherwise, as Ben Franklin said, “If we don’t hang together, we shall hang separately.”

And so, if we were to move toward this transparent / open source model of innovating the future, we’d need to regard the TimesSelect experience, as Evan Rudowski says above, as just *one* experiment of many. And it would be in studying and learning from *all* the experiments that we would (collectively and collaboratively) find the new viable business model / models.

That’s my main point. But if you’re interested in more:
– On why the New York Times should go totally open source on finding a new business model:
http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-new-york-times-can-save-itself.html

– On why newspapers should create a massive, joint experimentation program:
http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/2008/05/if-i-were-newspaper-publisher-today.html

Anyone who has ever sold content online knows that it all starts with the “offer.” The most crucial aspect is what people see and read right before they decide to enter their credit card number. TimesSelect didn’t understand this. Their offer was weak and unimaginative. High perceived value (low actual cost) premiums play a key role in motivating people to pay. WSJ knows this. There’s so much the Times could have offered.

For one example, genealogy research is hugely successful online and there are many successful businesses serving the field. TimesSelect offered access to its archives back to the 1800s. (Now free, I believe.) Anyway, with a little work, TimesSelect could have appealed to the whole genealogy field. Anyone whose ancestors might have appeared in the Times archives…Lots of educational connections, too.

When you signed up for TimesSelect, they could have sent you an email inviting you to research your ancestors in the TimesSelect database. A link could have taken them to a site where they could see what others have done, how easy it was to find stuff, examples of what people did with the stories once they found them, etc.

This is just one example. The marketing of TimesSelect could have segmented the marketing of the service based on people’s profession. Give them a free trial but capture some basic data on them–and the customize the conversion process based on that info…Lots of b2b businesses can do that and it could be applied successfully to the Times and, I think, even top metro dailies around the country.

People can play around with the assumptions in my excel file… please take a look:
http://mediacafe.blogspot.com/2009/02/newspaper-charging-or-not-for-online.html

You could show us something about how that works.

Just a thought.

Lead by example.

The Travel Channel hosts free online content while simultaneously charging for ‘Travel Channel University’ courses that teach people the fine art of pro video capturing and editing.

Bonus: TC then aggregates all the video submissions from their videopgraphers to feature on their cable channel. In effect they’ve charged people to provide content to them.

Just think what the Times could do charging for some things that people are willing to assign definite value to.

Yes, this would be very helpful in moving the debate away from opinion to fact. However, we need to acknowledge that TimesSelect was one experiment in paid content, not necessarily the definitive execution. Therefore we must be careful not to draw too broad a conclusion by assuming that the specific results of TimesSelect are a proxy for future paid content efforts at the Times or elsewhere. Nevertheless, we can admire the Times’ attempt to experiment, and learn from it.

I don’t know if we’ll get the data but I am glad to see you asking for it. Open-mindedness becomes you.

Kind regards,
Evan