AP Considers Making Content Require Payment 425
TechDirt is reporting that the Associated Press is poised to be the next in a long line of news organizations to completely bungle their online distribution methods by making their content require payment. While this wouldn't happen for a while due to deals with others, like Google, to distribute AP content for free, even considering this is a massive step in the wrong direction. "Also, I know we point this out every time some clueless news exec claims that users need to pay, but it's worth mentioning again: nowhere do they discuss why people should want to pay. Nowhere do they explain what extra value they're adding that will make people pay. Instead, they think that if they put up a paywall, people will magically pay -- even though the paywall itself is what takes away much of the value by making it harder for people to do what they want with the news: to spread it, to comment on it, to participate in the story. Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse."
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a difficult position to be in. Offering and maintaining content costs real money in time and resources.
And I'd like a pony. (Score:5, Insightful)
And where do these stories come from? Who pays the reporters? Who keeps the servers running to deliver these stories?
Forget the "extra value," what about the existing value? And if people won't pay for news on the web, then the services should keep providing news for free? I don't think it's a case of they expect people to magically pay if they put up a paywall, it's that they know people won't pay if they don't, no magic required.
Seriously, is this guy running for d-bag of the year? The world does not owe you free content. If the people who, you know, actually work for a living, want to get paid, then so be it. If you refuse to pay, you weren't doing them any good reading their content for free, so they won't miss you when you when you're gone.
Re:News (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know -- it could be the best thing ever for independent journalism. Which is one reason it will probably never happen.
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
Well somebody has to pay the reporter's salary and expenses. While you're not likely to see them on the TV or hear them on the radio anymore, real journalists do exist and it is an actual skill people make a career out of.
Internet advertising is practically worthless. We learned this from the dotcom bust.
So unless you're okay with "manufactured celebrity/political controversy" or "trite blogging on the latest who-gives-a-shit gadget" being the only news available, they need a viable business model that generates money.
The alternative is to nationalize the media like they did with the BBC. I'm not entirely sure if that's good or bad, since the BBC is pretty good overall but the thought of government controlled media scares the shit out of me.
=Smidge=
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:5, Insightful)
THAT is the internet. It isn't a series of tubes, it is an amazingly cheap distribution method for media.
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
And in related news... (Score:3, Insightful)
CBS plans to pull the plug on its free broadcast of the Evening News with Katie Couric and make its nightly newscast available only on pay-per-view. The news organizations of Fox, ABC, and NBC applaud the decision and are anxiously awaiting an increase in their ratings.
Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
If AP and Reuters go this way news is literally dead.
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
We didn't learn that there is no value in internet advertising from the dotcom bust. We learned that that not every imaginable service in the service industry needs an online presence.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:3, Insightful)
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
Tell that to all of the bloggers that went out and reported on what was happening during the Tsunami, or Katrina, or the Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When you've got literally millions of reporters all out there reporting, and almost that many with decently high-end cameras taking decent photos...it sortof becomes unnecessary to throw Dan Rather on a jet.
Re:And I'd like a pony. (Score:5, Insightful)
"And where do these stories come from? Who pays the reporters? Who keeps the servers running to deliver these stories?"
Who pays for the news broadcasts on NBC, ABC, and CBS?! Who pays the anchors, the journalists, and the cameramen? Who pays for your local news broadcasts?
Let me repeat from an earlier comment I made... Do you seriously think that CBS would make more money on its Evening News with Katie Couric if its stopped broadcasting it for free and made it solely pay-per-view? Think about it.
Get what I pay for? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want real news, you will need to pay.
That's fine. I understand that news costs money to create, and free (beer) distribution means whoever does the work doesn't have a reason to. So, we move to a paid model.
Will I get what I pay for? As it is, news is largely vapid, telling people what they want to hear (celebrity X, outrage Y, cuteness Z). If we move to a paid model, will I finally get what I'm paying for - real actual news about what's going on in the world?
Remember CNN.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scary (Score:3, Insightful)
More and more I have been suspecting we'll see exactly this.
The sad thing is this is what we as a society as a whole have decided on. No one wants to hear clear, unbiased reporting of the facts anymore. What everyone wants is some loudmouthed blowhard spouting off talking points that others will agree with. People want to hear the opinions of people that will say things to reinforce their own opinion.
In other words, people want to hear 'Dog bites man', not 'Man bites dog', and will not buy from people who publish the latter, even if it is the truth.
Re:And I'd like a pony. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'd welcome the day when main-stream media outlets die and the only news you get comes from people like you and me, who have are not constrained by our bosses and do not have to be biased in favour of any one entity.
Oh lord no! Have you read the comments around here lately? No offense to people like you and me, but I'd prefer to get my news from people who know what they are talking about.
The rest of this comment has me very confused. You think an organization 100% dependant on advertising for income will be less constrained than one getting income directly from readers?
When you pay for news, you are the customer. When your news is advertiser supported, you are the product being served to the customers, the advertisers. How does that get you back to receiving your public opinion?
Re:Scary (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. Let's say that AP starts charging for their feed. They're a news organization, not an ad organization. Now let's say that you think that there's a market for an ad-supported newspaper website. Rather than hire a bunch of reporters, you license the AP wire. If your business model is correct, then your ads will pay for the newsfeed (as well as all of your other costs). If not, they won't. Simple.
This is no different than the fact that bandwidth and servers are not free for newspaper sites.
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
Another model is that of NPR. Basically non profit user supported.
I do however think that the major newspapers will figure out how to monetize their popularity eventually. It is not as if the newspapers are not being read, it is just that the old revenue model is failing.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:5, Insightful)
It does however, become necessary to put Dan Rather in front of the camera somewhere, so he can filter the signal to noise ratio down to something useable and 'believable'.
Bloggers, for all their newfound 'power' are still subject to the "a million voices crying out" problem. Look at the 'blog' coverage of any of those events and you realize that had we "only" had bloggers telling us what happened back then, we'd still be trying to piece it together.
There still needs to be something at the end of the funnel, filtering the "teh aliens what was the ones who did it" and the "I heard from my neighbor's sister-in-law who heard it from a guy standing on the street waiting for a bus.." out of the stream. And while that could be anyone, including yourself, most of us don't want to spend the time or the effort trying to decide who to trust and whose a wingnut. It's easier to choose one person, network, group, who've convinced us (rightly or not) that they are able to do that for us and present the package in an easily digestible manner.
That being said, I do think the news industry is in for some major changes in the near future. They are going to need to move from being the 'authors' to being the 'research librarian': someone who can find what's already out there rather than spending time writing it themselves.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:5, Insightful)
Signal-To-Noise
If [slashdot.org] only [fark.com] there [digg.com] were [metafilter.com]a [reddit.com] few [ycombinator.com] million [iciou.us] people [engadget.com] out [boingboing.com] there [stumbleupon.com]willing [mix.com] to filter through this stuff and decide what was good and what wasn't. [com.com]
Yeah, you're right, blogging will never take off.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
The BBC is interesting because it's arguably less government-controlled than the US media, in spite of being tax funded.
s/in spite of/because of/
The BBC has to worry less about pleasing its corporate masters and more about serving the public, since it's the public that's footing the bill. It's essentially the same principle that keeps Consumer Reports and public radio a cut above the rest.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the kind of news that needs real reporting. Any yahoo with a camera can take pretty pictures to put on TV, or, sometimes, take insightful pictures to put on TV.
Bloggers aren't out digging into court archives to find patterns of abuse, like the Philadelphia Inquirer did while looking at the judges that accepted kickbacks in exchange for sending a higher-than-normal rate of kids in their courts to private boot camps.
Bloggers comment on those types of stories. They don't research those types of stories, at least not very often.
And that's the real problem. We don't have a New Media today. Not yet. What we have is a temporary middle-state:
1. Old media (old print media, to a large extent) does investigative journalism, but isn't paid for it.
2. "New" media takes the original story, shares it, comments on it, and runs with it.
So our "new" media of today is temporary at best. What happens when their sources go away?
1. ??????
2. "New" New Media comments on Things That Can Be Caught On a Phone Cam and nothing else gets done.
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you.
AP and Reuters are two of the few actual content providers. They SHOULD charge. After all, they charge newspapers for their content. They have live trained reporters around the world, many of them risking their lives. This has substantial value. They deserve to be paid.
Yes, citizen journalism has its place, but there is no substitute for trained professional reporters.
Re:News (Score:4, Insightful)
So, I think the "free media" movement will bottom out. Things may be permanently more competitive in professional journalism, but it won't go away.
Re:And I'd like a pony. (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget the "extra value," what about the existing value?
The value becomes less and less as time goes by. All the major newspapers use AP and UPI for most of their news, THESE are the AP's customers, not you and me. I'm not going to pay for a newspaper unless I think I'm going to be sitting in a doctor's office waiting room, and then I'll leave it on the table for the next guy. McDonald's has newspapers for anyone to read while in there. So does my barber. People go to the library to look at newspapers. Free newspaper content has been around longer than the internet.
I pay for content by putting up with their ads. The fifty or seventy five cents pays for the paper and ink.
The world doesn't owe you anything, but it provides for much of value for free, despite the old saying about free lunches. My garden is free, and I water it for free. I give away tomatos and other stuff from it for free.
But then, I'm not a money-worshiping greedhead, either.
Democracy can't live without the 4th estate.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And this is what will finish them off. (Score:2, Insightful)
(perhaps even creating their own)
They already did create their own news syndication operation. It's the AP. "The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers." from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
It is not as if the newspapers are not being read (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you seen the circulation figures lately? Readership is dropping like a rock in many places.
Re:News (Score:4, Insightful)
Internet advertising is practically worthless. We learned this from the dotcom bust.
There's some people who run a certain website who would like to disagree with you. It's called Google, maybe you've heard of it?
Re:News (Score:4, Insightful)
"Also, I know we point this out every time some clueless news exec claims that users need to pay, but it's worth mentioning again: nowhere do they discuss why people should want to pay.
"Why people should want to pay?" Is that person a moron? Nobody WANTS to pay. People want things for free. Hell people want to get paid for giving you the priviledge of giving it to them for free. A better question to ask "why should they charge".
Well let's examine why a COMPANY may want to charge money for it's SERVICES.
Well other then the fact it is a for PROFIT COMPANY, and it is offering a SERVICE which costs it money I don't have much of a good reason. They need to make their money somewhere, and if ad's aren't cutting it then they need to get it someplace else.
As I have said it before, and I will keep saying it - This service is not a life or death service. You do not NEED it to live or be happy. Given that - you can pay for it or not pay for it. If it's time for the business to fail then it will eventually fail. In the meantime - managers, reporters, support staff, printers, web devs, isp providers, internet connections, and other infrastructure cost money.
Re:Let them. (Score:3, Insightful)
Something else will step in to fill the void left behind, and will likely be less dinosaurian about the entire process. Good riddance.
Let's see: You HOPE something of the same quality or better will fill in the void. You HOPE what steps in will be less "dinosaurian". That's a lot of assumptions there. You may also get nothing to fill in the void, or whatever fills in the void to be of less quality and cost more to you (be it advertisements every other word or you gotta pay). Their model may not work anymore but that does not mean they are incorrect for charging. Put it this way - would you go to work for free? If not then stfu.
In a word: bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who pays for AP? Newspapers. Who prints most of the AP? Newspapers. Who provides most of the content for AP? Newspapers.
That you think that you not viewing the AP for free online is going to hurt them one tiny little bit, shows how little you know about them. Web service they provide at a loss to drive their brand.
Lets just toss the AP for a second. You think that the newspapers not putting their content on line would hurt them? Bullshit. It's not a significant revenue stream for them, even now. Too much of the revenue they do make online is eaten up by the bullshit sites they use to aggregate their ad traffic.
But newspapers not putting their content online would destroy a lot of online sites. Fark, Google News, Yahoo News. Even Slashdot would feel the effects.
So deal. If they pull it all offline it'll be a big deal, and a lot of properties are thinking the same. Free distribution can't pay for in-depth coverage. //Yes, I work in news. Yes, I know more about this than I'd ever want to.
Re:News (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I didn't get my number from Wikpedia, but I can't recall where I heard it. (Maybe ultimately it goes back to Wikipedia? Dunno.) Still, a fair point. 16% it is (include CPB), although it doesn't change the point any. The amount paid directly by listeners is well in excess of this.
31% listener pledges, memberships, etc. As the GP points out, tax-deducatable donations are just a special kind of government funding.
Surely you can see that this is nonsense? Money I spend on a charitable donation does not reduce my taxes (therefore government income) by the same dollar amount. If it did, I'd pay my taxes to my favorite non-profits and screw the government. Heck, I'd bet most people don't even BOTHER to itemize their deductions to make the individual donations count. It's not worth the effort for the average taxpayer.
(Wikipedia claims universities, some of which are subsidized by government)
This is just plain stretching to the point of silliness. I can't speak to all universities, but I know the state university in Colorado is funded less than 10% by the state government.
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
Independent journalism is a myth. If you want to cover a car wreck, maybe. If you want to get information from the government? Don't bet on it.
To write a real piece of investigative journalism, you need time, you need clout, and you need money.
As an independent, your FOIA requests will be largely ignored: what are you going to do, sue them? With what money? Big corporate newspapers hardly sue anymore because their margins are shrinking. Let me repeat: companies that make millions of dollars don't make enough money to pursue lawsuits that they can't help but win. What hope does an independent have?
To keep from suing all the time, you need power and prestige. You need the government to know that you mean something, that you represent a large group with deep pockets, and that you will grind them under your boot if they fuck with you. To put this in terms you understand: if a newspaper sells less than 75,000 copies a day...That's 75,000 paid page views...even your state government won't give you the time of day. Translate that into web traffic, and imagine how big the site would have to be. This site gets tons of page views: when was the last time you saw them do something besides link to an article someone else wrote?
Now money. You know what you get from the government if you FOIA request some data and they don't make you sue for it? The motherfuckers make you pay 25 cents a page plus shipping and they'll bulk up the document with everything they can find. You request some piece of information, better be ready to shell out a few hundred dollars in "copying costs." That's perfectly legal, they do that all the time.
Without being able to demand information from the government, what do you have? What kind of journalism can you do? Seriously. And who'd pay for it? Since everything is free right? When the indie journalists go out and break the next Watergate, paying for their own lawyers the whole way, how are they going to get compensated? You gonna buy a t-shirt?
What a fucking joke. Traditional media has it's warts, but no new media has stepped up to the plate...All they do is leech of the old media. And the only winners are the government, who make out like bandits with less oversight.
Re:Just go back to the old way... (Score:4, Insightful)
I say we just let the news industry go back to it's more honest past...
When was that? It must've been before 1770, because it only takes a moment to tell which side any of the period illustrations of the Boston Massacre were on. The engraving by Paul Revere [wm.edu] is the only one you ever see anymore, but there were others published in loyalist papers that showed a handful of frightened, panicked british soldiers firing in helpless self defense as they are set upon by a huge mob of angry, rioting colonists. The media has never been honest. At best, it may have had a brief period where it pretended to be honest in a fairly convincing way.
Re:About time (Score:1, Insightful)
The NYT is primarily an AP feed site for news
And with this, you kissed any credibility good bye. I guess having more Pulitzers [wikipedia.org] than anyone else, along with Nobel Prize winning economists on staff counts for nothing. Not to mention all the local news which the AP doesn't cover.
Silly me. I guess if you knew anything at all about journalism, or even lived remotely new New York, you'd know any of this. Back in your cave, neo-con troll.
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
The DOW was up 4000 pts from swearing in to when it was evident that Obama was going to win.
Not sure how you come up with those figures. A quick check of the Dow on January 19, 2001 shows that it closed at 10,587. The Dow's never been 4000 points higher than that -- the high point was October 2007. I'd venture you didn't think it was evident that Obama was going to win back then.
Howling hypocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
You pathetic little hypocrite. That blog has, on its front page, an unsourced link to an article from the New York Times [nytimes.com] and you have the shit-eating audacity to point to that as a proof that independent journalism is alive and well.
That's the most pathetic thing I've ever seen.
Re:Let them. (Score:3, Insightful)
The market doesn't appear to want to pay for subscriber supported high quality journalism any more either. So we're going to have low bit rate mp3 news as well.
GP is correct that their attempting to force users to pay for it won't work, anymore than forcing users to pay for music when its available "for free" is working.
What most people don't understand is the threat to their liberty of a "low bit rate mp3 news" feed (good analogy, by the way.) The only people who will present news are going to be those pushing a slant hard.
Imagine if every news channel was filled with the biased loudmouths on Faux News, only without today's pretense at facts. And with only homegrown "competition" (picture Billy Bob's Northern Florida Crop Report and Congressional Oversight Journal telling us all that Congressman Johnson was picked up by aliens and probed last night) we're going to get overrun by politicians who are NEVER held to account for their crimes. We'll be an Idiocracy before you can say "Michael Moore ate my burrito".
Gathering news is expensive, and you have to pay the journalists every day, otherwise there'll be nobody standing guard over Washington when we desperately need them. And I've noticed that we need them every single day that corrupt crooks hold office, which is pretty much every single day.
Re:Independent journalism?? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like "mainstream media" bothers to fact check. [slashdot.org]
It's pretty hard to take your point of view seriously when people can "manufacture truth" by simply telling unsubstantiated peripheral lies enough.
Re:News (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wow, guess I should have kept reading. The previous articles are from: LA times, Reuters [reuters.com], Christian Science Monitor [csmonitor.com], the fucking Voice of America [voanews.com]. This is in order, motherfucker! Wall Street Journal [wsj.com], and Newsweek [newsweek.com]! Not one fucking article that wasn't written by an old school media outlet!
Independent journalism my ass.
Re:Independent journalism?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Same like the one where that the media went on and on claiming that Michael Reiss (the Royal Society's ex-Director of Education ) said that Creationism should be taught in science classes, and thus eventually Professor Reiss had to resign from his post.
When in fact he didn't say such a thing at all. What he said was very reasonable:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism [guardian.co.uk]
(Ignore the title and blurb which was probably supplied by Guardian - who were part of the problem)
You will see he said:
Creationism can profitably be seen not as a simple misconception that careful science teaching can correct. Rather, a student who believes in creationism has a non-scientific way of seeing the world, and one very rarely changes one's world view as a result of a 50-minute lesson, however well taught.
As it is, his voice of reason was silenced.
If you google the rest of the media headlines about the "incident" you'll also see the fanatical atheists baying for his blood. It's ironic how so many atheists claim that without religion, you wouldn't have all the bad stuff like wars and persecution - when they are working hard on disproving it.
It might be a good thing if newspapers and journalists like that go bust. At the rate they're going they won't be a net positive to the world, so it'll be fair if they are not net positive in their bank accounts.