
You Can’t Sell News by the Slice - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html
======
antidaily
Related (micropayments):

"One of history's ironies is that hypertext - an embedded Web link that refers
you to another page or site - had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early
1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make
sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his
vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic
payments for whatever content was accessed."

Source:
[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191-1,0...](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191-1,00.html)

------
markessien
Micropayments for news will never happen. The thing with most news is that WE
DON'T NEED TO KNOW IT. Think hard about this - has it made a difference that
you know about some lady who got kidnapped? What has changed that you can read
about the details of the Iraqi election?

You want to know this stuff only because you are aware of it - and you are
aware of it only because you started reading the paper in the first place. If
you never read a paper (because for example, you needed to pay to read it),
then you'll not be interested in this news, and you won't see any need to pay
for it.

People will pay for information, but they will not pay for news. People want
to be aware of what is going on in general, and if this is available for free,
they will use those sites.

The business of journalism is shrinking, and it will have to evolve fast. News
will become more local, several cheap sources will be used to build a picture
of a situation, and people will pay for more niche and more technical
magazines (e.g Finance News).

These papers have a strong brand now, but those brands are decaying. They
should work on making sure their brands are strongly available everywhere, so
that when the reorganisation happens, they can still remain a recognizable
name.

~~~
jamesbritt
"If you never read a paper (because for example, you needed to pay to read
it), then you'll not be interested in this news, and you won't see any need to
pay for it."

Yet newspapers have been charging for quite some time, and people have been
paying to read them, up until they found cheaper, faster, more complete
sources.

You're digging yourself into a hole of ignorance if you are only following
what you've become accustomed to follow.

Newspapers offer the accidental, and I bet many people enjoy them for that
reason. You read things you didn't know would be interesting until you turned
the page and there it was.

It's not that there is a cost, it's that despite the cost newspapers are still
increasingly inferior to, say, Google News.

------
jonasvp
Clay Shirky wrote about micropayments and free content a while back:
<http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html>

Basically, he's saying that micropayments will not work because they introduce
a transaction cost into the act of reading: you not only have to decide if you
want to read (or skim) the article in question, you have to decide if it's
worth x cents as well.

And that transaction cost kills the transaction before it happens, never mind
the x cents that would have been transferred.

~~~
iron_ball
Yep... it's called the "penny gap," and it's what micropayment proselytes fail
to account for. I've noticed something similar on the New York transit system
-- when I have a prepaid MetroCard with limited rides, I think twice before
taking any individual trip, but when I buy the unlimited-use monthly card, I
feel much more free to consume the service even if the total price per month
ends up roughly the same.

Yearly subscriptions to sites seem much better. I'd pay a subscription to the
Times, though this certainly puts me in the minority. Heck, I'd pay a
subscription to Hacker News, too.

~~~
access_denied
But if that minority is big enough to sustain a business that delivers
journalism of a certain quality? Oh, they had to move offices to another
building, where the rent is less expensive...

------
run4yourlives
The decline of the newspaper business is more a classic case of living in your
own bubble long enough to lose the ability to adapt to changing realities than
anything else.

In this case the internet is the catalyst for change; just like in the music
industry and the movie industry. Shareholders should be demanding their
respective CEO's have vast experience in the domain that threatens to defeat
them, instead of continuing to twaddle along in a world that will die with the
boomers.

I'd imagine 20-30% of this board would excel at the c-suite level of a
newspaper. The rest of us would be more than adequate strategists and
advisors. Why? Because we understand the nature of the medium that matters,
not the medium that is already dead.

For example, my two cents worth:

What is it that local papers, including the Times (which is basically a local
paper from a city many people enjoy reading about) do that the internet can
not? Easy - they offer consistently _high quality_ and _in-depth_ analysis of
current events. It's their editorial board that matters, really. They can't
compete with timely news delivery. They can't compete with bloggers breaking
stories. They _can_ deliver a broader and deeper explanation of what events
mean to the lives of others. They _can_ provide opinions of well respected and
well researched individuals.

If they were to truly leverage this strength, they would do the following:

1\. Shut down their physical production lines, immediately saving millions of
dollars a year. Move to online only format.

2\. Move full time staff to consultant roles, and retain a small editorial
staff of the highest quality.

3\. Focus less on news snippets, possibly partner with companies that can
already do this better than they can - Google news anyone? Newsvine?

4\. Focus more on opinion, editorial and deeper feature stories that appeal
beyond the 10 second sound bite. Attract readers with the higher quality that
they can provide. (Again, there's a market in every local for this - the
Guardian doesn't care about what city hall is doing in Buttfuck, Iowa, but the
people living there sure do)

5\. Either sell ads or subscriptions for such content.

Does this mean they can't rake in the revenues that they once did? Certainly.
Does it also mean, however, that they'll remain relevant for the foreseeable
future? Of course. Most papers have already conquered the biggest challenge to
doing this - building a strong brand-related audience of readers. They've
already got the leg up on competitors, and they don't even realize it.

First one for each market to do this well wins.

~~~
cschneid
What you are describing is already done as a news magazine. Take away the
immediate snippets of news and focus on indepth stories? Well, now you are
running another Time, NewsWeek, Economist, etc..

How are those businesses doing?

~~~
run4yourlives
The problem is they didn't follow the first step.

And yes, that is what I'm suggesting, that newspapers evolve into daily news
magazines, albeit online. I understand that there won't be enough room for all
the existing brands in this space, especially with focuses that aren't local.
Such is the harsh reality of the free market.

------
mattmaroon
Every article expounding how you can't get people to pay for news content
online should be required by law to explain how the Wall Street Journal's
website has nearly 1 million paying members.

~~~
sethg
Journal readers have more disposable income than typical newspaper readers,
and the WSJ is a valuable brand, so its subscribers are willing to pay extra
(where "extra" means "more than zero") for the quality. There are other niche
markets where this works: e.g., LWN.net is supported mostly by subscriptions.

But the history of _mass_ media publications charging for content, as Kinsley
describes, is a history of one failure after another.

~~~
mattmaroon
You don't think NYT is a valuable brand or his great reader demographics? I
certainly wouldn't argue charging is right for every newspaper. At the risk of
getting some Michael Dell-style egg on my face later, I'd say that most of
them ought to just shut down now and give what little they can get via
liquidation back to the investors.

------
kenshi
I still think some people will pay for quality news reporting. Maybe not the
crap that seems to pass for journalism in a lot of publications these days. If
you provide people with well-researched information, give them access to
people/places/things they couldn't otherwise reach, you will be providing some
value which you can charge for.

If you are just doing lazy, surface level reporting on things that a horde of
citizen-journalists are going to throw onto the web for free anyway, you might
be screwed.

------
harpastum
A very forward-thinking exposition coming from a print source, but still
telling in it's anachronisms: "...Or some Web site might mutate into a real
Web newspaper."

A Real Web Newspaper? No. They will be much, much better than that.

~~~
brand
Care to expound a bit?

(I'm not trying to be antagonistic, just interested.)

~~~
harpastum
My point was just that it's still the mindset of those in the newspaper
business that their goal is to create an "Web newspaper," which I find similar
to wondering a few decades ago whether jet fighters could ever become "flying
tanks."

I don't think consumers will find much value in a 'real' Web newspaper,
because the web has so much more to offer. Real-time news, real-time sports
scores, live video feeds, user interaction, the list goes on and on.
Newspapers have always been an imperfect media outlet restricted by their
medium and distribution. The Internet promises to alleviate many of these
issues. This is why I believe it is quaint to hope that we will someday have
"real Web newspapers."

------
timr
Ignoring the silly, uninformed arguments (i.e. newspaper readers "have never
paid for the content"), this piece contains several classic arguments from the
Bible of New Economy Bullshit:

1) The Bricks Are the Problem: _"In theory, a reader who stops paying for the
physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher
a favor."_

Mmhm. They said this about store-based retail, too. "Stores can operate more
_efficiently_ on the web, and will take over because they don't need the
bricks and mortar!" What happened? Well, for starters, we found out that
people _like_ to shop in stores. We also found out that logistics, customer
service and returns are always significant fixed costs, and the absence of
bricks and mortar doesn't necessarily make them cheaper.

2) Race to the Bottom: _"every English-language newspaper is in direct
competition with every other. Millions of Americans get their news online from
The Guardian, which is published in London. This competition, and not some
kind of petulance or laziness or addled philosophy, is what keeps readers from
shelling out for news."_

...and last I checked, the Guardian has the same problems as everyone else in
the business. I guess the Utopian ideal here is that every newspaper on the
planet gives their content away for free, until they all simultaneously
combust in a cloud of bankruptcy lawyers and rainbows.

More seriously: the end-game here is not a world where we have the journalism
quality of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco
Chronicle, only online and free. The end-game is Gawker and TechCrunch. Sound
like a fair trade?

3) Everything Is Different Now, Man: _"And the harsh truth is that the typical
American newspaper is an anachronism. It is an artifact from a time when
chopping down trees was essential to telling the news"_

This is not "harsh truth" -- this is 95% wishful thinking, 5% fact. The 5%
fact is that there is another way to access media, that has both benefits and
drawbacks. The other 95% is that the Silicon Valley, VC-for-everyone corporate
culture has _infected_ media, and given it a business model as unsustainable
and wasteful as a midnight candy bar delivery from Kozmo.com.

People still like to consume media on paper. It doesn't require electricity,
can be done without the aid of a machine, and can be archived easily, by
anyone. Granted, the _type_ of content served by traditional media is
shifting, but that doesn't mean that newspapers and magazines don't have a
future in the Brave New World of digital media.

More importantly, the internet _hasn't_ made it free to produce good content.
We all like to dance around this critical fact, pretending that if we just
spend enough money on viral loops and news aggregators, we'll be able to
reproduce our current media offerings. But we conveniently neglect to notice
that many of the interesting articles we read on Digg or news.google are
_produced_ by reporters who are being paid by the old media. When it dies, so
does the content that powers whizzy web-2.0 social media.

~~~
biohacker42
Gawker and TechCrunch are at one extreme, The Economist and The Atlantic are
at the other.

Both of those extremes are easy to monetize... Now that I think about it, I'm
not sure how financially stable Gawker and TechCrunch are.

But my point is:

Popular rags are cheap to produce and can live off ads.

Intelligent content, on the other hand, can find paying cosumers.

I think the problem with the NY Times and others like them, is that it's hard
to find a sustainable business model for the middle ground that they are on.

-EDIT-

Yet a third way is a non profit news paper like The Irish Times, funded by a
grant I believe.

I hear the Seattle PI is going into chapter 11, if I was stinking rich, I'd
turn it into a non-profit.

~~~
electromagnetic
I don't understand why most news sources aren't non-profit to begin with. The
reason they struggle so much is that they're all trying to run a huge profit
to pay off their shareholders.

There's no restriction in non-profits that they can't make money and pay
people ridiculous wages. I mean IIRC Oxfam in the UK paid like £400,000
(probably near $800,000 at the time) for a marketing firm to do an advert.
It's just the company doesn't get taxed, so long as all the 'surplus' goes
back into improving the business, however all their workers can still earn an
income and will still pay income taxes.

I mean imagine how many people would buy a newspaper subscription if you got a
tax receipt from it!

~~~
access_denied
This is so obvious it hurts. Another thing: why is the NYT for example unable
to monetize it's huge traffic? I don't get this. There are people getting rich
with a lot less traffic to their sites.

~~~
ensignavenger
This is a really good question- I wonder the same thing about Facebook.

~~~
Retric
People don't click on the links.

When your looking at NYT or Facebook you are interested in their content when
you using Google your looking for something. Put another way, how effective
would advertising be when inserted in the middle of a phone conversation?

~~~
ensignavenger
Inserting advertising into a phone conversation would ruin the experience
(more so than an ad on a website). But it would probably be noticed!

You are probably right to an extent- but a lot of times people are browsing FB
to waste time. If they are looking at the profile of some girl they like, and
an ad shows up for the new album of one of the bands she likes- could that not
potentially be an effective ad? (This could be a friend, who has a birthday
coming up, and FB could suggest presents based on your friends preferences). I
really think that FB just needs to adapt their ads better. I hope they get it
figured out and prove everyone that thinks they aren't worth 15 billion wrong!

------
AndrewO
After seeing Walter Isaacson on the Daily Show last night, I couldn't help
yelling at the TV. The thing that I really wish someone had asked (and was
alluded to in this op-ed) is this:

What do you do about the entire generation reaching adulthood who has _never_
had to pay for news?

~~~
ja2ke
You give them increasingly shitty news reporting.

------
electromagnetic
I'm seeing a lot of people making the judgmental mistake of thinking that news
is simply read on paper because no one has established a sufficient way of
accessing it online. I'm sorry but this is just a fallacy, until I can read my
news at the kitchen table, on the sofa and on the toilet then newspaper still
has a significant use.

I mean it's a quite dismal future, if everyone gets up in the morning and sits
in front of a computer eating their cereal so they can read the news.

News, and likewise information, will become ever increasingly available. The
first publicly available newspapers were government-published tablets posted
in public places by Julius Caesar, the Chinese circulated news to court
officials in the 8th century.

Eventually news will become more accessible through digital media, but this
isn't going to happen anytime soon. Portable devices aren't ubiquitous enough
yet and so news isn't freely available enough on digital media to take over
the ultimately portable disposable newspaper. I can take a newspaper, read it
at breakfast, on the toilet, on the bus, at work and then when I'm done with
it I can discard it. Until I can do all the same, except discard it, with a
digital device then the newspapers won't be destroyed, they'll merely recede.

Newspapers are going to suffer more from attrition than an assault. There's so
many people who've read their news from a paper every morning, that's a habit
that is largely unbreakable. You can't stop a 60 year old picking up a news
paper. My father's in his 50's, has worked in IT since the beginning yet he
still sits down with a newspaper. Newspapers won't die until their readership
does. This gives the newspapers a long time to adapt to current technology and
establish a brand amongst the younger age group in a fashion that allegories
the elder age group.

The other assumption people make, is that news will become more refined and
from local sources. This assumption is quite laughable, local sources are
increasingly irrelevant. Yes it's good to get the news from your home town,
however do you really think that matters anymore? I live in Canada, so why do
I care about Obama in the US or Brown in the UK? Because they both affect me.
I've been to a dozen countries and I know people from even more and this is
becoming the norm in our current era of civilization. The whole notion of
globalization dictates that we're going to begin caring about world events
more and more as they increasingly affect us. Just look at the economic
crisis, the US fudged the brownie, but it's affected nearly every country and
person on the planet, so why wouldn't people be paying attention to news like
that?

