Here's a brief proposition I'd be curious to see contradicted:
The common factor among all profitable journalism startups in the last seven years is not Web distribution, user interaction, worse content, better content, more content, less content, paid content or free content. The common factor is a narrow audience.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Disprove this
Friday, May 01, 2009
In which hog fuel demonstrates that paid content has potential
"We tried that. It didn't work."
But there's a powerful rebuttal to that case, one that grizzled online-news veterans (like my man Steve Yelvington, linked above) miss: The economics have changed since last time.
No, consumer desires haven't changed since 1996. Sorry, Al, they wouldn't pay for traditional newspaper content online then, and they won't now. But local media incentives have changed since 1996.
The real question: whether those incentives have changed enough to force newspapers to make the crucial shift that could keep them alive -- a shift to niche products.
If you want to understand how newspaper incentives have changed, you need to understand the following short story from the great Northwest.
It's a story about hog fuel.
Hog fuel is a byproduct of papermaking. It's basically a bunch of tree scraps that get left on the mill floor because they aren't even good for turning into pulp. Paper plants, like this one in my old hometown, produce hog fuel by the metric ton; they can't avoid it.
What do you do with a nearly worthless byproduct? Maybe you could find some odd use for it. But that'd take a lot of work: gathering it, measuring it, marketing it, lining up buyers and shipping it to them. And for what? Obviously your workers' precious time would be better spent on the operation that makes the real money: paper.
No, it's much easier to find some use for hog fuel that costs nothing. And that's exactly what paper mills do: they burn it. Hog-fuel furnaces offset a huge share of many paper plants' substantial electricity bills. It's a cheap and effective way to dispose of something you've got too much of.
But what if paper suddenly ceased to be so profitable?
What would happen to your hog fuel then?
You'd still have a mill that's very good at chopping up trees. But suddenly, you'd start looking closer at your hog fuel. You might start looking for those obscure hog-fuel markets. You might start chopping your logs a bit differently to maximize the value of that hog fuel. You might even start researching how to turn hog fuel into something really valuable, like ethanol -- research that would have never been worthwhile before.
You've got incentives you never had before to make hog fuel valuable.
Hog fuel is Web content. Paper is -- well, paper.
In 1996, when the print product was gushing cash, the rational thing to do with newspaper content online was to throw it up for free. Unlike with paid online content, which requires a helpdesk, a sales effort, and maybe even some changes to the production process, the marginal costs of free content were minimal.
The newsroom was already churning out a metric ton of content, after all. So what if it wasn't optimized for online readership? Hire a kid to hit CTRL-C/CTRL-V for an hour or two each morning, and you'll get some cheap exposure, a hunk of cheap online ad sales and a cheap feeling of progress.
But now, the paper market has dried up.
It's time to figure out what to do with all this crap we've been leaving on the floor, kids. We can squeeze money out of it. We just have to change the process a bit.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
It's a manifesto
Do less, better.
And for journalists, it's the way of the future. It's exactly what consumers are demanding.
How cool is that?
Friday, April 17, 2009
Online news should be replayable
Follow-up thought on yesterday's iTunes for news defense: When analysts say things like:
Newspaper content is ephemeral by nature ... It isn't the same as downloading a song and keeping it and replaying it. It loses its value almost instantaneously.
...the speaker is not describing a problem with iTunes. She's describing a problem with the way news is traditionally presented.
It's a problem that can be solved.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Dept. of mythbusting: Money can indeed be exchanged for goods and services
They're wrong.
A year ago -- three months ago! -- I would have been the last person to make a case for paid content. But I've been coming around, and not for the reasons you think.
It's not because I think newspapers can ever turn back the clock or put the news genie back in the bottle. They can't. From now on, most content will always cost $0.00.
But not all content will be free, because money is not the only cost consumers must pay to read content. Gathering information -- even free information -- requires time, effort and knowledge: time to find it, effort to determine whether content is reliable, and knowledge of what content does or doesn't exist.
If a product can save its readers enough time, effort or knowledge, they'll pay money for it.
This isn't to say that newspaper Web sites in their current form can save people enough time, effort or knowledge to be worth money.
My point is: the problem here isn't the price.
It's the product.
(photo courtesy Flickr user Roby72)
Monday, April 13, 2009
King Content needs a diet
Most readers don't want more. They want less. Though they want more of it to be relevant.
Quicker is better.
Simple as that.
And as Eric Schmidt noted the other day: when speed is the goal, print still works faster than pixels.
Newspapers aren't very fast.
But print is, or can be.
That's why print is still king among newspaper readers.
It's something to consider.
(photo courtesy Flickr user mharrsch)
Thursday, April 02, 2009
The career ladder loses its top rungs
One of the many reasons that small markets are not safe from the current roil: small papers and broadcast stations, with their low pay and heavy workload, have always been subsidized by the promise of advancing to a larger market, which (unlike the small papers) offered an upper-middle-class family wage and the time to produce high-quality work.
Now that larger markets tend to be basket cases, this subsidy will cease; fewer talented, hardworking people will be drawn to smaller markets; and the quality of small outlets will suffer observably.
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