With all the renewed talk of charging for content, damn it, there is too little reference to the experience the news industry has: TimesSelect. We know how many subscribers they had and how much revenue came in but it would be a tremendous mitzvah to the news business and journalism if The Times would open up its TimesSelect books and let us know exactly the business details of the shuttered experiment in paid content. This would allow the discussion about the relative net value of paid subscribers vs. free readers occur with more information. Among the things I’d like to see:
* Number of subscribers by type — fully paid, free-with-subscription, free-education — and how much each paid.
* Renewal rates (though experience with that will be limited).
* Subscriber acquisition costs, with conversion rates in marketing.
* Retention marketing costs.
* Customer-service costs.
* CPMs for advertising to paid users.
* Traffic patterns after TimesSelect was stopped: how many incremental users and pageviews.
* CPMs for advertising to free users.
* Google rank of Times and Times features before and after TimesSelect – and traffic to The Times through Google in both periods.
What else?
The Times wouldn’t really be releasing treasured secrets; it’s not charging now. But by releasing this data for others to analyze, it would be doing the industry a huge service.
Indeed, I believe that other companies that have experimented with different models should release similar stats. In most cases, they don’t have competitors. And the more we learn as an industry, the better. As part of the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, I’m happy to play host for this data. We need to get real about specifics in the discussion of business models. I am among those who have been talking in theories and possibilities and I want to see spreadsheets.
My partners at Daylife are kind enough to throw an event for What Would Google Do? tonight and, as one friend there said, it created a “glorious mess” as about 400 people signed up. So Daylife and I are putting on another event next Thursday; please RSVP on Facebook here.
There was a magical moment at Burda’s DLD conference in Munich – there usually is – and I managed to capture it on my Flip camera and just got the time to upload: Violinist Hilary Hahn in a duet/duel with beatboxer Beardyman. I’m told that they met and briefly conspired only the afternoon before the performance. Don’t miss this:
Because of travel, I’m late in linking to Alan Mutter’s two-parter responding to my speculation about the post-press LA Times. Mutter is by far the best, smartest, and most-informed analyst of the financial state of papers and so I disagree with him at my mortal peril. Indeed, I’m delighted that he’s bringing out real numbers and considerations and hope we get down to such brass tacks in the New Business Models for News project upcoming. My response to Alan: I think that online up-sells in classified will disappear with classifieds and so that benefit of having print is quickly becoming moot. Some papers simply cannot afford the cost of print now and so they’d better figure out life post-print or there won’t be any. New competitors can come in without the cost of print and newspaper legacy and act far more nimbly in the market. And I argue that even if shutting off the press is off in the future, it is – in some form – inevitable and so papers damned, frigging well better plan on it (most I know want to perish the thought) and so this exercise and discussion is vital.
One form of revenue – and, truth be told, government subsidy – for newspapers that hasn’t gone away – yet – is legal ads. Laws require notices to be given to the population as a whole and newspapers were judged to be the best vehicle for them. No more. A court in Maine just ruled that notice in a paper is no longer sufficient because papers are now, well, too puny.
In a unanimous decision published Tuesday on the court’s Web site, Associate Justice William Clifford wrote that the practice of putting lawsuit notification in a newspaper began “when newspapers were the only means of print mass communication, and when newspapers were more widely and intensely read than is now the case … Because service by publication has become less likely to achieve actual notice of a lawsuit, it is also less likely to meet the requirements of due process.”
See, too, John Bury in the Star-Ledger’s NJ Voices saying that politicians will kill legal ads – and with them, some papers – when they wise up.
I’ve been wishing for sometime that movie ads would blurb bloggers over the same old hacks, with links so I could see what real people say about movies (and so I could judge their taste, unlike that of that Jeff Craig Sixty Second Preview thang).
I plan to talk the publisher to include blurbs of the people when and if a paperback of What Would Google Do? is published. If I’m successful, here’s the blurb I would be honored to include from blogger Gregg Morris:
…Jarvis not only “gets it” he “explains it”. As very few have been able to do. And he does that not just for those “in the know” he does it for the average Joe as well. If you are having trouble coming to grips with the new world order, Google and the niche economy, and what it means to you as an individual, a business or an organization I would encourage you to get to Amazon’s site or down to your closest Barnes and Noble and get a copy as quickly as you can. And if you are one of the gazillion people out of work right now you might want to get there quicker.
What he says. I couldn’t resist snipping those kind words. Thanks, Gregg.
One of the more head-scratching solutions papers are clawing at to save themselves is eliminating a day or two of print, as these Ohio papers are doing on Tuesdays. It’s ridiculous to say that’s a no-news day. But what this really does is make a lie of the supposed necessity of printing the news. Printing is merely a commercial convenience, it says. Tuesday is merely the first domino.
Former San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein talked with former Washington Post editor Len Downie and this resulted:
He royally dissed the New York Times, his main competitor during his years as Post editor, and said they needed to cut their newsroom, which might horrify purists. “A lot of excess costs built in” to the operation, was how he put it. “They’re going to have to get serious about things they’ve been high-minded about in the past.” Wait. Len? Len Downie?
As journalism is rebuilt and rethought – out of necessity and opportunity – it’s important to abstract it and understand what functions it performs and what functions we need performed.
I tried to rethink the article as the basic unit of reporting here.
Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti (auf Deutsch) broke down the basic functions of journalism into five here (please correct my translation, German friends):
(1) Research (reporting) and monitoring,
(2) The simple presentation of complex issues,
(3) Identification of trends, visualizing them, and giving them context,
(4) Dialogue and moderation,
(5) Generating attention. [See the discussion about that from Davos here.]
Then Heinz Wittenbrink takes her list farther and breaks down the form, tools, and skills needed to perform each task in a Google Docs spreadsheet (it’s also in German but you’ll get the idea: Research and reporting take the form of wikis and link aggregation [I'd add process blogging]; they require personal skills of exploration and evaluation; and the tools include search, databases, RSS, bibliographic tools, and collaborative tools).
What we need next, I think, is an audit of the output of journalism to, again, see what needs to be replaced in a new vision of journalism: just how much output and resource are devoted to:
* investigative journalism,
* beat reporting,
* breaking news,
* commodity (repetitive) stories,
* flackery (rewriting of PR),
* lifestyle and entertainment,
* production,
* interaction.
Out of that comes a calculation of what we’re trying to save (and what we can augment in new ways). The goal is not to support or replace the newsroom as it stands but to rethink the value it produces and how it can do that in the future, using new tools, skills, and relationships. We need this new accounting to build new business models and to answer the question of how we can sustain journalism. First, we need to redefine it.
For today’s snippet from What Would Google Do?, we bring you the question of whether toilet paper – like other consumer products (Coke or clothes) – could be Googley. Note that this mentions the magical Davos toilet. Here’s the video I made last year of that toilet:
On my latest trip, I noticed this cautionary note about the limits of the technology posted above the magic machine:
In the excerpt below, I also speculate about publishing on toilet paper. In the same restroom, I found the next best thing: ad-supported paper towels:
Now the snippet:
* * *
OK, consumable goods, gadgets, and fashion could be Googlified. But what about Google TP? Surely it is not possible to bring Googlethink to toilet paper. There won’t be communities around toilet paper. I shudder to imagine TP 2.0 after seeing a commercial for toilet paper whose USP (unique selling proposition) is that it doesn’t leave little paper bits on your butt. Boy, that must have been a tough sales conference. I can’t think of a better reason for advertising not to exist.
As with newspapers, perhaps it’s time for the TP industry to get out of the paper business and ask what business it is really in. Cleanliness, right? When I was in Davos, what amazed me almost as much as hanging out with heads of state and industry was seeing an automated, self-cleaning toilet seat in the conference center. After flushing, a motorized arm comes out and grabs the seat, cleaning it as it rotates. It’s mesmerizing. I took video of it to share on YouTube. (Google “Davos toilet” for my video. Or for a more entertaining if politically incorrect demonstration, search on YouTube for “Swedish toilet seat Gizmodo”). The company that makes that product is not in the paper business. It’s in the clean-seat business.
Toto, a Japanese plumbing manufacturer, has decided that the business is neither paper nor clean seats but clean bums and happiness. Toto invented the Washlet automated, computerized toilet seat, a marvel of technology that heats the seat to a cozy 110 degrees and spritzes you with warm, clean water after you’ve done your business. Then it dries you with gentle, warm air even as it magically eliminates odors. (On YouTube, search for “Toto Washlet FlushTV” to see a demonstration by W. Hodding Carter IV, son of the former Carter administration official and author of Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization.) Before you laugh, know that Toto has sold 17 million Washlets (they advertised on my Buzzmachine with smiley faces superimposed on naked, happy, clean butts). The Toto is hot on YouTube with videos that have tens, even hundreds of thousands of views. Hollywood actor Will Smith has bragged on TV that he has the deluxe, $5,000 model and doesn’t spend a dollar on TP. Here we have the perfect convergence of problem and solution, hardware and software, technology and life with bottom-up marketing. This is the post-TP Googley toilet.
Even in atom-based enterprises, the connections the internet makes possible can bring business benefits. No end of consumer products would be helped from a more open conversation: tool makers listening to craftsmen, cooking-utensil companies opening up to cooks, athletic equipment companies watching out for what athletes and trainers want. One should find opportunities to make more targeted products and to partner with customers to design, support, and sell products. Google and the internet change everything, even factories.
I found myself irritated by today’s story in the New York Times that asks whether putting money from the bailout toward broadband would be a waste. The question was its own answer. So was the placement of the story atop page one. The reporter creates generic groups of experts to say what the he wants to say (I know the trick; I used to be a reporter): “But experts warn…. Other critics say…. Other supporters said…”
I wish that every time he did that, the words “experts,” “critics,” and “supporters” were hyperlinked to a page that listed three of each.
It’s an obvious case of a story with an agenda: ‘I’m going to set out to poke a hole in this.’ But the agenda is unstated because reporters don’t state opinions, of course, they find others (or create generic spokesmen) for their opinions.
Compare and contrast that with Andrew Ross Sorkin’s good column suggesting that watchdogs should get bonuses. It, too, has an agenda, but because it’s a column, it’s more forthright about it – and that forthrightness give it more credibility. Yes, it’s labeled as a column. But the essential goal of both pieces of type is to make a suggestion. One is just more honest about it.
My other problem with the broadband story is that it thinks as short-term as Wall Street and politicians. It assumes that every dollar in the stimulus should work immediately. I think, on the other hand, that there is no magic bullet and that building real value and real jobs in new industries long-term is the only real answer. Enough with short-term thinking already.
Instead of a faux-definitive story on page one of the New York Times, how much better this topic could be handled as a debate. Just as the article is insufficient for complex stories, so is it inadequate for complex debates.
