09
Jan 12

Paywalls, niche, mass and “general interest”

Here are two posts for anyone at all intrigued by what kind of income keeps journalism – and particularly journalism institutions – in business.

  • Clay Shirky on payment “threshold” schemes which are becoming more and more common in the US, particularly since the New York Times porous paywall looks as if it’s delivering on at least one aim of preserving the online audience while collecting some revenue from committed online users. Whether that’s enough revenue – Shirky thinks not – is another question.
  • Frederic Filloux on what we don’t yet know about the NYT scheme and on the striking price rises just announced by both the NYT and the Financial Times for their print editions. Filloux sees this, rightly I’m sure, as evidence of both titles trying to drive their readers online.

Continue reading →

Share

23
Dec 11

Christmas catchup of stuff I missed

This post just carries links to one or two pieces worth reading that I’ve missed or put to one side in the past few weeks.

  • I’ve been waiting for some time for a systematic, measured study of new media’s role in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. This looks like the first such one (if you know of others I’ve missed, please tell me). It’s only about Twitter and really only about the networking aspects, when the real study needs to link and compare the use and consumption of every thing from satellite TV to Facebook and Twitter. But it’s a start and a fascinating one.
  • Second up is a piece by Clay Shirky about news institutions and the “crisis”. Above all this is a plea for experiments in news and a strongly made argument that, important as newspapers are as institutions, their adaptive capabilities really aren’t keeping up with what’s happening. Shirky’s piece also contains a link to an essay by Jonathan Stray on the digital public sphere which also looks excellent.
  • Last is the New York Times picture essay on 2011: a vivid way to recall what has been a truly unusual twelve months.

Continue reading →

Share

25
Oct 11

Paywalls and tablets: there is more news and some of it good

A quick update on some new stuff which has emerged about both paywalls for news and tablet devices such as the iPad.

Most of these developments are promising. Not in the sense that the problems of a sustainable business model for news has been found, but in the sense that experiments – which are they key to it all – reveal a few successes and thus a few clues to what might work.
Continue reading →

Share

01
Jul 11

The Times: the paywall puzzle

The Times reaches 100,000 digital subscribers and I’m still baffled by their online strategy. I ought to be better-placed than many to figure out what they’re up to (declaration: I used to work there). But it’s not easy.

This blog starts from the position that anything which promises a sustainable economic base for journalism is to be encouraged. Dogmatic assertions (“content wants to be free”, “content wants to be expensive”) which aim to shout down empirical experiments are to be discouraged. So any publisher adding to the sum of knowledge about what will or won’t work in charging is contributing. From that perspective, the Times announcement tells us a few things.
Continue reading →

Share

06
Jun 11

Is the article a luxury, a byproduct, disintegrating or simply over?

There’s been a splurge of stuff in the American blogs about “the article” and whether it still has a place in journalism. At first I thought this was just another missable debate provoked by the peculiar urge of some commentators to prove that the web is so exceptional and revolutionary that it alters the world, the universe and everything. Then I thought that there were a few things to say.

This discussion began, as many do, with a post by that carrier-to-the-extreme Jeff Jarvis on buzzmachine.com. The opener gives the flavour: “A few episodes in news make me think of the article as not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a by-product of the process.”

Jeff didn’t argue that people were going to stop writing articles, just that they were going to be less central to journalism. Because so many more people now capture and distribute news, more of that news will be in little pieces. Background can be linked to, synthesis is a luxury and reporting is what counts. I hope this is a fair summary. (If it isn’t Jeff will let you know, as he did with Matthew Ingram.) There’s also been a parallel and closely related discussion about whether “news” and “analysis” are going to be divorced and separated by these changes (see here and here).

One could quibble that “the article” wasn’t ever the “goal” of journalism. One could point out (and commenters on Jeff’s post did) that value-added luxury is a contradiction in terms. But the basic issue here is the relationship between fragments and the whole. The new trend right now is for refining ways of streaming bits of news at you in more interesting and enriched ways: expert Twitter curation, liveblogs and so on. In other words, the fragments are where peoples’ attention is directed just now. That’s an exploration of the possibilities of new platforms and applications: there’ll be yet more of them next year, and the year after that. When the innovation wave has washed away – and that may be a long time yet – what will be left? Continue reading →

Share

16
May 11

Things to be optimistic about

So many discussions about journalism in the past few years have featured journalists from established media crying into their beer, I often forget how refreshing it is to have a different kind of conversation. One where people are working out for themselves how to rebuild the business model for journalism.

It is hard to convey the happiness you can feel when you hear people describing how they are taking a simple, empirical route to discovering and delivering what people need to know – and then finding ways to keep doing it.

I had one of these moments at City University a few days ago when a conference gathered to look at new ways of sustaining local journalism, arguably in much more immediate economic danger than the national and international varieties. An energetic group of our students, Wannabehacks, used Storify, as well as a liveblog, to record the day.

The point wasn’t agreement – there was very little on what works and what doesn’t – and speakers varied from Will Perrin of talkaboutlocal and the King’s Cross blog to Jeff Jarvis, of City University New York’ entrepreneurial journalism programme and the buzzmachine blog. Perrin illustrated what might be called the “pure, simple need” origin of a local blog: a local community identifies a problem and gathers to try to solve it, puts pressure on various local authorities and eventually ends up with what Will called a “community information burden”.

Continue reading →

Share

03
Apr 11

Fact heaps, searching and the rolling encyclopaedia

Conditioned by the rythmn of daily newspapers and nightly television bulletins, we think of news as a rolling thing, constantly renewed, refreshed and updated. Twenty-four-hour news channels speed up the cycle, but don’t change that idea of news as the latest version of the story. The newspaper you hold and read is only that latest slice of information; so is a broadcast news bulletin. And anything that isn’t the latest version is dead and gone, waste material.

When I worked at a newspaper with a large website I began to wonder if this idea of news would change. A website is a “rolling” platform in the sense that it can be updated with news quickly and many millions of users go to news sites for just that. But such a site is also something else: a vast store of data that isn’t news any more, a giant heap of facts and judgements. If you want to go deeper into a subject or backwards in the sequence of events, in theory you can. Newspapers and broadcast are news in two dimensions; digital adds a third with its ability to drill downwards, sideways into the information. So a major news website is truly something more like a rolling news encyclopaedia: topped up all the time, but with added depth and uses which newspapers and broadcast don’t have.

Potential depth. The leading news sites have hardly begun to exploit this asset, which grows every hour with the addition of more news. The New York Times chooses to do this by literally organising its material in reference-book form in their “topic pages”. But the material is confined to what’s been published in the Times. Various software companies offer programmes which automate the business of cutting archive material into topical strands. I guess that Daylife is one of the best known. The general consensus, floating on a tide of Google-style optimism, is that software will crack the problem. I began to wonder about this while reading two reflective pieces around this subject by Jonathan Stray and Felix Salmon.

Most of the automated versions I’ve seen just aggregate material: they tack together in one strand all the previously published material on a subject. This is fine but often unsatisfying. There is a vast amount of repetition, which becomes time-wasting and aggravating very quickly. If you’re lucky, the site you’re looking at may have done a “new readers start here” Q&A or an “explainer”; if you’re trying to catch up, that should help. But the problem with moving stories is that they move and those movements often change the attempt to explain what’s happening. Even explainers go out of date. Here’s an example of a bouncy explainer in Mother Jones on Libya (I like “why can’t anyone agree on how to spell Qadaffi’s name?”) which goes awry when it tries to add “updates” below. The reason I’m reading an explainer in the first place is that I don’t want a daisy chain of disconnected update fragments. Integrated information makes better sense.

Continue reading →

Share

21
Mar 11

The New York Times picket fence: who will pay?

The arrival of the New York Times metered paywall needs celebrating. It deserves that not because of its detailed merits or otherwise and least of all because I know it will succeed. I haven’t a clue how it will do. Neither has anyone else.

The welcome is for another go at experiment, another strand of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see if it sticks. Without live try-outs, no sustainable models for keeping journalism afloat will be found.

Given that we have to wait till the NYT announces some results or gives us clues by tweaking the price structure, there are only a few things to be said now plus, below, some links to the best stuff I’ve caught so far. In no particular order:

  • As a number of people have pointed out this isn’t really a paywall, more of a picket fence or a speed bump. Given how porous the proposed system is, it seems inevitable that the number of people consuming NYT material by some means will be many times the number subscribing. Wise observations here from Bill Grueskin (who worked at the always-paywalled Wall St Journal and who should know), particularly on a gap in the fence few people had noticed.
  • How will subscribers feel about this? Not all economic behaviour is strictly rational. Will the subscribers resentfully reflect that that they are the most loyal readers of the Times and they’re the ones who end up getting to pay? Or will they bask in the glow of feeling part of a small and select club?
  • The pricing is steep, relative to the few other experiments in the field and to prevailing wisdom about what the market will stand. If you have the appetite for guesstimation in detail, dive into this exhaustive takeout on the numbers by Ken Doctor.
  • There’s more here from the Monday’s Note’s Frederic Filloux who crushingly describes the scheme announced as like the French tax system: “expensive, utterly complicated, disconnected from the reality and designed to be bypassed.” Unlike most commentators, Filloux actually has an alternative: lower the prices and, above all, simplify. The lesson of the web age is that simplicity or “ease of do” wins out.
  • If Paul Krugman is any guide, some of NYT’s columnists are barely able to take the scheme seriously. He’s advising readers to vote with their feet and jump the fence.
  • Many writers (including Paul Bradshaw here) have welcome the fact that users coming via social networks don’t pay. I can see how the NYT wanted to walk a fine line between remaining connected and open while charging those who can stand it – and decided to give Facebookers and others a break. Isn’t that going to mean that the paying subscribers tend to be old? That doesn’t suggest that lucrative ads can be aimed at them.
  • The NYT’s fine technology writer David Pogue wrote a pained tweet a few hours after the announcement admitting that most of the comment he was seeing was negative. “Well what would YOU do?” he asked in irritation. That remains the best question.
  • If you believe that online advertising will eventually come to the financial rescue, you can afford to ignore charging experiments. But except in a few specialist cases, advertising income as a cross-subsidy for news won’t work for one simple reason: the connection between supply, demand and price. The price of print advertising in its heyday was high because the space in which it could appear was rationed: there was limit to the number of pages presses could print or readers could handle. On the web, there is no such constraint. Hence the price of ad space may one day rise, but it will never rise so high. And for that reason alone, experiments with charging are worth applauding.

Continue reading →

Share