http://www.podcastingnews.com/2008/10/08/new-media-bumps-nprs-site-traffic-up-78-in-one-year/

“November 6, 2003

NPR will benefit from a bequest of more than $200 million from the estate of philanthropist Joan B. Kroc, NPR President Kevin Klose announced Thursday.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1494600

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfJAeKX9PCA

How can everything be “free”? Step back a second, and it just seems nuts. Anybody remember “Dow 45,000″? The “new economy”? How ’bout all the Realtors running around saying, “Oh, maybe house prices can’t keep going up so fast forever, but they’ll just level off, they won’t go down! The one thing they don’t make any more of is land!”?

Good lord. Ain’t no such thing as a new economy. “We are at the dawn of a time where ideas, thoughts, and what we produce can be shared and is valued on a whole new scale.” OK, whatever that means. If you think human nature dawns into new eras, you need to go back and read those 2,500-year-old Greek plays. Or Shakespeare. The more things change …

It’s when you start thinking all of the sudden you’re brighter than everybody who came before or that you just see things more clearly or that you understand the new technology better and that you see this revolutionary change coming to the human condition … well, that could be when you’re on the path to trouble. Actually, that’s what some of those old Greek plays were about.

Anyway, some of this dreaming about all information being free — even though collecting that information comes at great cost, or at least the cost of paying someone to do it so they can eat and pay the rent — seems to me to be hatched from the same egg as ideas about “the new economy” or the nuts who kept fueling the real estate boom. “The rules have changed!” they shout.

Yeah, I understand that some people see the masses rising up to overthrow the old fogey media, those jerks who actually get paid to rewrite press releases and such. Volunteer/citizen journalism certainly has value. I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. I just don’t see it ever filling all the gaps once you get to a point in your life where you are no longer sleeping on a futon and can move from one apartment to another with one trip in a borrowed pickup truck.

It’s like anything you observe from the outside. It looks easy. “Damn, those fools keep making mistakes. Why can’t they just do it right?” You see this happening everywhere. So many self published books these days — “look, ma, I’m a novelist!” Anybody who can pick up a guitar can make a CD. Anybody with a blog can be a journalist.

I don’t mean to denigrate all this. Sometimes, there are hardworking, talented people who come to prominence via those routes. Not very often, but sometimes. The cream will rise. But, lord, I look at the comments on stories on newspaper Web sites and I have to think, “yeah, if that guy wrote a letter to the editor, it would never see print — and for good reason.” So often they are just ranting nuts (just like me!). But that’s fine. I can sort through them. Give them their soapbox if it makes ‘em feel better.

But you’re gonna put your status as an informed citizen into the hands of who knows who? Not me.

I’m sure Jarvis understands the need for paid, professional journalists. Sure there are bad ones, but there are good ones, you know.

But it just looks to me that the present situation has to be temporary. Of course it is a time of transition. Much of the “commodity” news that people supposedly aren’t willing to pay for is generated by people who are paid — probably by a company that is now losing money or just barely hanging on. How is that sustainable? If they go away, what will fill the screen at Google News?

I give Google all the credit in the world. They figured out how to make a bundle by getting people information but not really having to do the work of compiling the information. A stroke of damn genius. Wish I thought of it.

And I understand that some things change. Yes, the concept on which The AP was founded, for instance, makes no sense anymore. At the time it began its formation — in the mid-1800s during the U.S. war with Mexico, when the fastest way to move information was a diminutive man on a good horse — the “news cooperative” idea was also a stroke of brilliance. With today’s technology, it has outlived its usefulness.

But in the end, meaningful information requires human labor — to gather it, to compile it, to translate it from some bureaucratic jargon into something readable, to present it in visual or written or audio form, and to deliver it somewhere.

Human labor will never be free. At least it shouldn’t be in any civilized society. Neither will information. It has value. If it has value, somebody will figure out how to make a buck on it. Hell, there’s this thing going on that you read about now and then about how some very large corporations are trying to privatize water supplies. If you think they’re gonna let information go free, you’ve gotta be crazy.

Google certainly has made a buck on information that others have compiled. With regard to news, I won’t go so far as to say Google is killing newspapers. Newspapers deserve plenty of blame. But Google News is relying for the information that it aggregates upon institutions that are sick and withering. How is that a good business model? But then I doubt news generates a big part of Google’s revenue, anyway, so maybe Google could really care less about newspapers’ survival.

I know. It all comes back to advertising. It makes a lot for Google, but not so much for others. Right now advertising is not paying the bills for traditional news outlets.

Google has blazed a path here, though. I guess I just really think they need some competition so that maybe the advertising revenue they have been reaping will be forced to pay out in more fair ways. So I think this Microsoft-Yahoo news is good. For the first time in my life, I think, I’m now rooting for Microsoft – and I’ll be using Bing. Who knew Microsoft would be the underdog one day? And it’s certainly conceivable that one day Google, too, will be an underdog. Hubris can do that to you. Damn, it always comes back to the Greeks.

I really can’t believe the Times is even considering it. Totally mindboggling to even think in that direction.

Being a twenty-nine year old who grew up hooked into the net from the early days, I understand this just doesn’t work.

I just finished Jeff’s book “What Would Google Do?” and he actually mentioned when they charged a few years back, which I had totally forgotten about.

I used to actually be a reader of the Times back then, and never went to the site because it was a charged service. I never found the value in paying the enormous fee, when I grew up in a generation where we expect that information (The Times) to be free. We are visiting their site after all, and still have to look at the ads they’re making money off of.

In fact, CNN tried to do a tiered charge thing for their videos also, which they intelligently backed out of. I guess the figures for CNN didn’t work out as well as planned either.

Content has to be free. That draws traffic. The more content they produce, the more valuable they become… all with good search engine optimization of course.

This is a classic example of old business (charge for everything) clashing with the new. That is why newspapers all over this country are failing. Not because of economy, but because of confusion over what the current currency really is.

We are at the dawn of a time where ideas, thoughts, and what we produce can be shared and is valued on a whole new scale.

You gotta keep up if you want to play with the kids on the block: Youth.

Ad revenue wouldn’t go to zero either. Right now they make $70 million per year online. Their optimized advertising + subscription revenue will fall somewhere between 70 million and around 100 million, depending on the demand curve for subscriptions and response of advertising dollars. Worst case, 70 million, advertising only. If they were to get 50 million in subscriptions it would only make sense if they retained at least 20 million in ad revenue. Scaling up Jeff’s numbers that’s 400 or 600 staff, and 300 to 400 content producers, maybe half of what they have now (350 staff writers, and a newsroom of 800 or 900). That can work. It probably has to work. And hopefully the somewhat lower number of writers doesn’t hurt ad revenue or subscription demand too drastically, and if so the business just settles at a lower number.