I wanted to read about the news that former online publisher Steven Brill, former Wall Street Journal online exc Gordon Crovitz, and former cable exec Leo Hindery had teamed up to to create a company to enable news companies to huddle behind a wall and charge for their content.
I went to the Wall Street Journal site to read about it. But the damned site keeps forgetting who I am. So I got just a few lines and yet another pitch to subscribe, nevermind that I already had. Even though I have paid for the Journal – the only site I pay for (for now) – it wasn’t worth the effort even to remember my username and so I went to the New York Times and then to Reuters and then to Paid Content to read the story (PaidContent, a blog, did the best job). I knew they call covered the news thanks to GoogleNews.
The irony is painfully obvious: A pay wall stopped me from reading about putting up pay walls and I had no problem detouring around it to read free (and better) accounts.
Therein lies the challenge to this effort to put together content cartels. It takes just one guy to ruin the party. Best of luck to them but I predict it won’t work. Once again, this will not only reduce traffic and thus advertising opportunities and revenue but it will reduce Googlejuice (even if Google can search the paid content, it will get fewer links and clicks and thus less juice) and it will bolster competitors. I blogged recently that a wag at a meeting I attended wished newspapers would do just this because it would put them out of business sooner and open up opportunities to replace them.
I don’t intend to pay – nor do I intend to charge. And, by the way, I have decided not to renew the Journal. I get more and better media coverage elsewhere. Today is just a case in point.
: The press release just went up. It sounds eerily reminiscent of the doomed New Century Network.
It also sounds eerily threatening. After saying that the company will “will be to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites” it adds that its hired guns include attorneys David Boies and Theodore B. Olson.
I’d also turn that sentence around: It’s the online news istes that base much of their business models on referrals of readers from search engines and other web sites.
(Disclosure: I remind you that I work in the link economy with Daylife and Publish2. In the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, we will also flesh out pay models. My stand on that is obvious but let’s get real numbers – assumptions and ranges and experience – and have the debate in specifics.)
Please clarify, if possible – were the NYT, Reuters and PaidContent stories original reporting or did any of them pick up the WSJ content? You know somebody’s gonna make that point, if they can.
I can safely say I did my own reporting, including an interview with Gordon Crovitz, and posted before reading the WSJ article (or the press release). Now back to work as I finish writing up an interview with Steve Brill.
By all means yes, let’s have a debate on specifics. But, without having any specifics in hand, you “predict this won’t work,” you say your own position is “obvious,” you say you “don’t intend to pay” and that you are now abandoning the sole paid site you have ever used.
Is there any particular reason anybody who doesn’t already agree with you should be waiting with bated breath for the results of your New Business Models for News Project — at least with regard to pay models? Or should we just anticipate an enthusiastic endorsement of Googlejuice?
What — if anything — could change your mind about the utility of paid subscriptions in some forms of future journalism?
By the by, I’m not sure PaidContent is purely a blog. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I believe the company also offers premium reports that are, well, paid content. In other words, they are a hybrid of paid and unpaid content — as is the Journal.
We will have business analysts working on a number of models, some I subscribe to, some I don’t. What’s a model but assumptions and ranges? On paid content, it should be easier than with most to come up with those assumptions and ranges (the harder part is coming up with actual experience to inform those models). There will be optimistic assumptions (Brill, Isaacson, et al) and probably a more pessimistic set (me) and in the end, it will be up to those who execute models to decide which is right. There is no right or wrong without execution; it’s only with experience that one can truly learn. Brill et al will learn and that will inform the conversation. I’m happy to be proven wrong. But we all have opinions and I’ve long stated mine.
Fair enough. And certainly if there emerges a purely ad-supported model that can support diverse, robust journalism — in whatever form — I’ll be the first to celebrate.
“It’s only with experience that one can truly learn.” I certainly agree. Which is why I get frustrated when you savage ideas you don’t like before they even get started. Surely we all benefit from the successes and failures of experimentation, whether we like the ideas or not.
As you say, you’re entitled to your opinion. But you have a loud voice in this discussion. If you elected to be skeptically supportive instead of savagely dismissive, I can’t help but think it would encourage innovation.
[...] [as told by Jeff Jarvis]: “…[F]ormer online publisher Steven Brill, former Wall Street Journal online exc Gordon Crovitz, and former cable exec Leo Hindery had teamed up to to create a company to enable news companies to huddle behind a wall and charge for their content.” [...]
i’ve been debating whether to post about this jeff. i feel the same way you do, but i think this is so laughable that i think i’ll just ignore it.
As a journalist, my heart goes out to the newspaper owners who will be tempted to sign up for this program. Brill is mining desperation here, just as he mined vanity (American Lawyer) and misery (CourtTV, Clear) in earlier ventures, in my opinion of course. The way forward for newspapers is to re-examine their product, not their marketing.
I too suscribe to WSJ (print and online) but rarely read their content as much as I should.
Jeff – if you haven’t seen it check out this video with Vivian Schiller from NPR, she talks about her decisions on removing NYT’s select content and search, etc.
http://www.beet.tv/2009/04/npr-ceo-vivan-schiller-newspapers-must-keep-content-free.html
“Is there any particular reason anybody who doesn’t already agree with you should be waiting with bated breath for the results of your New Business Models for News Project”
How about the fact that you can already get all the news you want for free everywhere on the internet. That includes from current news providers, whether them being newspapers or local/cable TV news etc. If its already free, why would anyone in there right mind go from that to paying for it??
That’s why this new venture will fail, no one wants to pay for something that is already free. There will be no incentive to pay for this content. The content itself is not scarce, it can be found at many places and from many sources. If they want people to pay for it, they have to give them a reason to pay, you know, something that people actually want to pay for and get. Not just you pay now because we said so.
Well, just because you can doesn’t mean you should — get it all for free, that is. The music industry (not that I think its full of geniuses or anything) fought back with help from Apple. You might think that if the news industry is going to successfully fight back, they may need to have the help of someone Jobs-like. I don’t know that this plan will work. I have my doubts even though I have sympathy for the newspaper publishers’ position. In fact, the more I think about all this, the more What Google Does just smells wrong. (OK, I’m ducking for cover now.) Not that it’s illegal. Not that it’s possible to stop it. But the biggest reason I see that saying “you can already get all the news you want for free” isn’t really an argument that this venture will fail is the simple fact that right now what going on with online news just doesn’t seem sustainable. That is, “free news” on the Internet is — yes, I’m gonna do it, I’m use the “s” word — is being subsidized by large newspapers and cable news networks, not all of which are in the best financial shape. How long can this go on? Now, I’m hearing that new sources of news will spring up to fill the gap if the biggies go down or start charging: citizen journalists, bloggers, net-based news organizations that will be savvy enough to survive on advertising. Maybe. I really don’t know. But for now — and Jeff probably knows the figures to confirm or deny this — most people probably are getting the majority of their news from the big traditional outlets: the NYT, MSNBC, CNN, etc., etc. But saying people won’t pay for news because they don’t have to now, is not a logical argument. It is free now, but this cannot last in its current form.
> Well, just because you can doesn’t mean you should — get it all for free, that is.
How well does telling your customers what they should do work?
> What Google Does just smells wrong.
Google tells readers where to find information.
Google means that every source for the same information is in competition. Is that wrong?
Do you want to argue that one can’t make money on-line with good, unique, and valuable or that it’s impossible to do good, unique, and valuable?
I ask because none of the “old guard” is addressing good, unique, and valuable. Instead, they’re complaining that they can’t make enough money from commodity news.
“We put the content up online and Google, the thieving bastards, tell people where they can find us!”
For some reason I’m not convinced.
>What Google Does just smells wrong.
I am not sure how it smells, but I know it’s pretty cheap. Anyone with a spare $5K can index 4000 news websites. Again: just 4000 sites. OK, make it $100K to match Google’s quality: speed, updates etc. Now when someone chooses 1) go after a portion of Google wealth instead of 2) create Their Own News and get 100% of wealth embedded in the “quality journalism” – what does it say re where this persons actually think the wealth is.
I just finished reading a interview series with various journalists and academics about the future of journalism (including Christian Science editor. I believe in free culture, but these individuals made some good points (obviously many are losing their jobs, and newspapers are closing left and right). of why newspapers should charge….but i do realize it is an up hill battle.
http://www.ourblook.com/The-Media/The-Future-of-Journalism.html
@ working reporter from a fellow working reporter
You’re right — paidContent is the flagship of ContentNext Media and one of its four news sites. ContentNext produces reports (Lauren Rich Fine is our research director) and holds events, including conferences. We’ve been ad/sponsor supported since soon after Rafat started paidContent as a blog. We are a hybrid but to my thinking it’s all paid content — usually the difference is whether the advertiser or the reader pays. Our particular mix is the same as it was before we were acquired by Guardian News & Media last summer.
[...] No wonder Clay Shirky said that Brill was creating a news version of the RIAA (Jeff Jarvis says it reminds him of the New Century Network, a notorious newspaper industry train wreck from the early [...]
[...] [as told by Jeff Jarvis]: “…[F]ormer online publisher Steven Brill, former Wall Street Journal online exc Gordon Crovitz, and former cable exec Leo Hindery had teamed up to to create a company to enable news companies to huddle behind a wall and charge for their content.” [...]
Web users have been spoiled by the willingness of many, myself included, to give away content. But I write a humourous / satirical blog and can afford to do it for fun, I’m not a news reporter trying to earn a living. Competent news reporters have to be paid for their work and as the web becomes increasingly ad – blind people who want online content of reliable quality will have to be prepared to pay for it.
Alternatively we can settle for reading the bigoted Obama – worshipping dross on Huff Post or the bigoted Obama hating dross on World Net Daily.
I guess what I’m saying is objectivity costs.
If a “customer” has come to expect to have his bottom powdered and shoulders honeyed while having soothing words whispered into his lordship’s ear and the world’s bounty lovingly deposited into his piggish maw, then fuck the customer.
@ Andy Freeman
OK, maybe the Google remark was off the cuff. Sure, Google’s search is a wonderful thing. I use it all the time. I guess what I was talking about was more the “aggregators”: Google News, HuffPost, etc. And the comment was based on my personal feeling that I could never feel good about myself making money that way. I know, I know, I’m just helping people find the information they want, collecting some money along the way from advertisers. What’s the harm? It’s just all based on the fact that other organizations are paying for that information to be gathered and presented. It doesn’t feel entirely fair. Yeah, I’m being a sap. This is why I’m not an entrepreneur, why I’ll never make a bundle of money. People who fuss too much over whether something is completely fair aren’t the kind of people who start the next big thing. So you called me on that, Andy. Fine. I won’t argue it too far right now. The point I really wanted to make here was that “free news” is not free. It’s subsidized. Everybody knows this. People are used to not paying, but the true cost of that information is hidden from them. And maybe you can extend that to say that any money Google makes on Google News is subsidized as well. How long do you think this can be sustained? Something has to give. I don’t know what will give. I don’t know how the customers will react when it does.
> I guess what I was talking about was more the “aggregators”: Google News, HuffPost, etc.
None of those folks aggregate good, unique, valuable. They aggregate commodity news.
Here’s a simple test for whether your producing something unique and valuable – if you stop, someone comes to you with a checkbook and asks “how much”.
Huffpost won’t, because they have plenty of suppliers; they don’t do unique.
Stop worrying about how someone else pays their bills. If they’re willing to give away content for free, you can’t charge for equivalent content. It doesn’t matter how they manage to stay in biz, or even if they can. As long as they’re charging less than you want to get, you’re not going to get what you want.
Unique and valuable means that you don’t have to worry about what someone else will charge because there is no one else. You only have to worry about how much your readers are willing to pay, ie valuable. (And yes, some aggregators may be willing to pay for unique and valuable even though they won’t pay for commodity.)
If they want us to pay, then at least provide something worth paying for, articles with links to in-dept coverage, full multimedia content. For instance take ‘The Power of Nightmares’, a documentary. I can hunt it up on Youtube. Read the Wikipedia article. It talks about how Neo-Conservatism was sold to the American public through the same methods the advertising industry used etc etc. Now, everyone don’t have the time or inclination to hunt this stuff up. How about a single one-stop-shop that I could click on and pay for.
[...] Sleep Publish April 16, 2009 Jeff Jarvis on paywalls (again) The irony is painfully obvious: A pay wall stopped me from reading about putting up pay walls and I [...]
Ian, I think you’re missing a third option: what happens when we’re getting our news from people who aren’t reporters?
For example, back when MSOOXML was going through ISO, my primary sources for information about what was happening weren’t the sites that report on such things. I was following blogs of attendees who were discussing what they’d been involved in, and going to the official sites to read the published documents. I didn’t need reporters just to provide me with a summary, and I sure wouldn’t pay a reporter to give me what I can get directly from the source. And that source isn’t in the business of publishing news. Their blogs aren’t sources of income, nor businesses, they’re a personal discussion of what these people are doing every day. They’re essentially a hobby. I think the rules have changed, and the problem reporters and news sites are facing is that they’re trying to play by a set of rules that no longer apply.
An acquaintance of mine (google for “stompbox” for one of his numerous projects) commented on something similar. He titled his post “But they can’t own tool! Ogg is only one to own tool!” and he was discussing businesses that were based around providing access to equipment (CNC milling machines, high-resolution large-format color-calibrated printers, laser cutting/etching rigs) that was too expensive given the amount of use they’d get out of it for individuals or even an individual business to own outright. These businesses are having a real hard time surviving as prices come down to where the businesses who need access to the equipment, and even hobbyists, can afford to get good-quality units themselves. The hobbyists especially are a threat, since the hobbyist can offer the exact same access and since they aren’t running it as a for-profit business can offer that access for costs instead of maximizing their profit.
This dilemma is a rich vein for satirists, thankfully:
Guardian wants free money from Google
UK consumers willing to block ads for free content
There is a place for pay walls. That place is for information which is created, not simply reported.
If I write the next Great American Novel, create the best Word Processor Deluxe ever, or am providing a developer’s toolkit to an as-yet-unreleased software platform, it makes sense that I would want to control access. In these cases, a pay- or $0-subscription-required wall makes some sense.
In cases where you are just presenting the information, it makes less sense. This is particularly true if you are presenting the information in a matter-of-fact manner, without additional editorial content.
Information doesn’t materialize suddenly. It doesn’t track itself down. It doesn’t research itself. It doesn’t corroborate itself. It doesn’t explain itself in layman’s terms. It doesn’t gather itself into a logical order for presentation and consumption. Someone has to do that for it. And that requires time and work, for which said someone should be compensated somehow.
> And that requires time and work, for which said someone should be compensated somehow.
There’s that “should” word again.
Let’s try a different tack. Suppose that someone else is willing to do the relevant work for $X.
Why “should” I pay you $Y, where Y > X? Does the answer to that question depend on the value of X?
If you’re trying to sell something that someone else is willing to give away for free….
You can sell unique for what it is worth. If there are other suppliers, you won’t get more than they do.
Watch the beet.tv interview I linked to in an earlier comment…Vivian gives the economics behind the decision to kill NYT select…..talks about “google juice” and diminishing returns of a subscriber model.
Two things I believe are true: 1) Many people do value good journalism, whatever the source; and 2) in our economy, anything that has value will be produced. So in my more optimistic moments, yeah, I just figure this will all shake out and everything will be fine. It may take a few years, and in the meantime some newspapers will go out of business, people I know may lose their jobs, there may be a lot of pain. But nothing important will be lost in the long term. This new thing Brill et all are trying will be part of the shake-out process. Andy tells me to stop worrying. Maybe that’s right. I’m not much of a worrier anyway. But what bothers me in the short term is seeing newsrooms decimated. I don’t mean to say I BLAME Google for all this. Newspapers are mostly to blame because of a series of bad decisions and missed opportunities.
In an earlier comment I asked what’s going to give — and then later in the day I was reminded of the answer to that question — at least at the moment: the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports that nearly 6,000 newsroom jobs were lost in 2008, a record. Some of these people are trying new things — in Seattle and Denver, for instance. Let’s hope some of these ventures work.
It seems to be to be the perfect platform for launching and nurturing hyperlocal reporting. I realize that is not what they envision their primary mission, but making it easy for me to pay someone to cover news in my neighborhood seems useful.
[...] ask anyone who thinks about this stuff for most of his or her day (e.g. Jarvis, Blodget, Shafer) and he or she will tell you that JO will never work. I literally couldn’t [...]
[...] On object lesson in walls « BuzzMachineThere will be optimistic assumptions (Brill, Isaacson, et al) and probably a more pessimistic set (me) and in the end, it will be up to those who execute models to decide which is right. There is no right or wrong without execution; [...]