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."
Let them. (Score:4, Interesting)
And if it works? Well, I'll accept an "I told you so."
Something that Helen Thomas got right... (Score:5, Interesting)
I forget the title of the book she wrote, but she was making the point that the problem with the newspapers is that they have cut all the local investigative journalism (because it's expensive), just reprint wire stories that everyone read the day before, and then wonder why no one is buying the newspapers. So in order to combat this, they decide to cut more staff from their newsrooms, buy more wire stories, and continue to shrink into irrelevance.
My father subscribed to the local major city news paper for 35 years. He remarked how the newspaper had continued to shrink year after year in the past 10 years. Finally they cut out the listing of stocks to just a few blue chips and the bigger local employers and the sports section, which he could read free online. So about a year ago he canceled his subscription and now reads the local sports section online.
Frankly, there is more local news in the local throw away rag that we get twice a week, free. They seem to be doing okay. Are they raking in millions? No, but they are profitable, keep on top of local issues that you won't find elsewhere and people at least skim the headlines.
Re:There once was a day (Score:5, Interesting)
Free as in..? The free as in beer brought by advertising happens at the cost of free as in freedom. Personally, I prefer a news network that is accountable to its readers rather than to advertisers, and I will gladly pay for it, but hey, maybe that's just me.
Besides, isn't AP already selling its content to non-owners, i.e. the non-US media?
Re:And I'd like a pony. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, maybe you get a nicer page layout with colourfull flash animations, or some cool widget. 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.
This may seem tin-foil-hatty, but personally - I do not believe anything I hear anymore, I know it's been filtered and truncated through multiple PR staff, management, and "think-of-the-children" outlets before it makes its way to me. The sooner this dies, the sooner we can get back to receicing public opinion, and not state-sponsored opinion.
Paying could be worth it (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people want to read news so that they can be informed about what's happening in the world, not so that they can share and comment on it. These people might be willing to pay if it means continued access to news from on-the-ground, professional correspondents.
My hypothesis about making people pay for access to a news site is this: you get people who value it, and you keep out a lot of the crap.
Sorry if that's not egalitarian, but have you ever looked at your local paper's web site? On mine, each article typically has hundreds of comments to the effect of "how is babby formed," or "barrrak hussein osama gonna give teh aids." Why would anyone intelligent put in the effort to contribute to a discourse like that?
The counterpoint is not "slashdot." At least we have moderation and most of the crap gets pushed to -1.
Time will tell (Score:4, Interesting)
When all newspapers become pay sites, you'll see where they're adding value - by bringing you the news in the first place.
Ads are no longer a viable revenue source for most of the providers.
Perhaps you'll trust the news being broadcast from around the world by free broadcasters. Others won't and will expect CNN or AP to send professional reports to the events and provide professional analysis. We'll see where the value add ends up.
You can see it today - who do you go to for your political coverage? Your sports coverage? How about your technical coverage? All of those have "amateur" coverage, yet here *you* are, on a site managed by professionals. Something has to pay the bills.
Just go back to the old way... (Score:3, Interesting)
I say we just let the news industry go back to it's more honest past, and just have the news authors actually promote products in their articles...
"1,500 dead today in the official numbers of a third round of skirmishes along the Waziristan border in the mountains of Pakistan. Sectarian tensions are being further strained according to scattered reports we're getting out of the area, as government control over the region is fractured from open opposition from within.
"In unrelated news, Have you tried the new Camel Tropical Smooth(tm) brand Cigarettes? They've got just the right blend of tar and exotic fruit extract that'll have you singing for more! Tropical Smooth(tm) brand cigarettes - recommended by us, your favorite news source! Now, back to our story..
"'It's an unending bloodbath', says Ismail Mohammad, a local livestock herder, 'I've lost everything, and I've seen so many lose so much more. I don't even know what to pray for anymore." ...that way, at least it'll be more clear when media groups are compromising themselves for, and which corporate sponsor they're shilling for. Hey, who knows - perhaps this way, advertisers will actually prefer pushing for in depth news coverage, just so people will take their ads more seriously. Just a modest proposal.
Ryan Fenton
Before I *consider* paying... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would want to know the length and depth of the article, and a summary of exactly what the article will cover.
So, a free 1 paragraph summary, with word count, and a depth rating (1 for glossover, 5 for deep technical dive, perhaps). No crummy misleading headlines, and it would also have to have a "reused/rehashed" rating, to determine how much is just a recap of old news. These ratings would need to be done by a 3rd party, or would need to be a summary of the article reader feedback, with no way for the news producer to manipulate them.
I also want permanent access to it, to be part of my "pool" of information that I have purchased, so I can refer to it whenever I like. Oh, and no blocking of print, or cut&paste. No funky formats or DRM, to prevent media/device shifting. A workable micropayments system also would be necessary, not some junk like paypal.
So once you have that ready, let me know.
Re:Something that Helen Thomas got right... (Score:2, Interesting)
They really need some kind of working micropayment system. If they could just charge a penny to read an article (with a free abstract) they could make some revenue. That might not work for local news.
People who think that content will just exist without any payment at all are deluded. It seems to work for open source software, but that's about it - and that doesn't require realtime dedication of any kind to keep going (it can evolve at its own pace - unlike the news).
There has to be a happy medium somewhere between $25 CDs and The Pirate Bay...
The editorial on this article is dull and pointles (Score:5, Interesting)
While the story is interesting your editorializing is much less so. There are a number of very news organizations that have been very successful with a payment/subscription model. Two great examples: The Wall Street Journal and ESPN. In fact there was an op-ed in today's WSJ about this very subject. When companies have a news product that is unique in the marketplace, then the payment model is quite successful.
Examples given-
WSJ
Bloomberg
Lexus-Nexus
ESPN
While it is true that some news providers might not actually offer anything sufficiently distinct or special to make a charge model successful, some definitely do. This assertion "Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse." is borne out by neither reality nor common sense. If your content/service is unique and in demand, you can charge. The AP's content may very well be too generic to get people on board the pay to view model, then again their aggregation services may be sufficiently unique that content providers that rely on the AP may be willing to pay.
Your knee-jerk reaction is as interesting and insightful as those on the other side that insisted a free model could never work.
The AP hasn't always been free... (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly why they thought this wouldn't hurt newspapers is beyond me. Now it is apparently hurting them as well, too bad the damage has for the most part already been done.
Re:Scary (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Something that Helen Thomas got right... (Score:4, Interesting)
They really need some kind of working micropayment system. If they could just charge a penny to read an article (with a free abstract) they could make some revenue.
My immediate thought when I read this was that it would breed sensationalism. If things are on a 'pay per article' basis, then boring but important news will be of little value to them, while trivial but popular news (i.e. all of the damn celebrity and reality TV stories I'm getting sick and fucking tired of seeing) will be seen to have huge importance to the company publishing them. That seems to be a bad direction to take things in.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Tell that to the reporters that spend months investigating a given issue and then writing 7-8 articles on it. Bloggers are fine for breaking news, not so much for things that require in depth coverage and investigation.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:News (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's say that deal could reasonable be worth $20,000 in advertising over the lifetime of the deal. To make the deal, the salesman agrees to have the company incur all upfront costs, and the customer would only pay a fixed hosting cost based on page views. Advertising would be split down the middle. This seemed to be a pretty typical deal. Development and hosting costs would be at least half the expected amount to be realized from advertising. After commissions and the like, the company might realize 10-15% profit. The problem with this situation is that everyone on commission would be fighting over a couple thousand dollars of commission. Since many were on commision only, or a very low salary, and a deal like this might happen only once a month for each group, there was some incentive for fraud.
The fraud appeared to take the form of the inflated advertising numbers that so many pointed to as a reason why ad based service did not work. I think these services do work, if the expectations is realistic. In this case, instead of marking the deal as 20K, it would be marked as $50K. Commission would be paid up front assuming the ad revenue estimate was in good faith. The commission people would now receive something closer to the several thousand dollar rand, and they would be happy. Note that the commission now represents a significant portion of the money the the company can expect to see. As this money is paid up front, when the real advertising numbers come in, the company now realizes that it is operating at a loss. Sales blames marketing for not getting ads, or the customer for not pushing eyeballs to the site. There is growth in revenue, as there is in anything that is new, but it never quite pays for the service. Management always questions sales figures, but sales wins because the customer wants to see that it will be making all this money in ad revenue, which is what sales uses to compete against other products.
This continues until the comapny goes bankrupt.
Re:There once was a day (Score:5, Interesting)
From where I stand the opposite is true.
There's 3 papers (I'm aware of anyway) in Houston Texas.: The Chronicle, The Houston Press, and Free Press Houston (listed from most corporate to most independent). The Chronicle endorsed GW for re-election in 2004, for example, despite Houston going for Kerry. The Press is much more liberal/independent and are less afraid to run stories about police brutality for example. FPH is very much your High School Yearbook team.
What's funny is that the subscription newspaper (Chronicle) is the least independent of the 3. FPH and the Press are both ad-supported and free. And it's not limited to Houston.
Seattle (the Stranger), Portland, Austin, and Denver all seem to follow the same model where the more independent paper tends to finance itself via advertising to local businesses and it's actually nice. The advertisements are generally extremely informative and let you know everything from what non-pizza hut places there are to get a decent pie, to when [favorite indie band] is coming to town.
[Disclaimer: I don't work for any of the papers. I do go to their parties and am acquaintances with some of their writers.]
Strained metaphor time (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, I'm going to make a strained metaphor here. It's not about cars but please, bear with me.
Back before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, the Catholics had the lock-on monopoly on access to God and the afterlife throughout most of Europe. There wasn't any way around that. The bibles were in Latin, you needed priests to speak the Latin to God since he didn't know any other language, and you couldn't say squat about them because they'd excommunicate your ass faster than you can say "Pontius Pilate!" And it cost some serious coin to keep an operation like this going, to support the massive ecclesiarchy and keep the pope in funny hats. They basically had the patent rights to salvation.
So here comes this funny little German anti-semite who says "Hey, what if we don't need the middlemen to get to heaven?" So when you get bibles written in the vulgate, printing presses churning them out by the gross, and this impertinent idea that you didn't need to tithe to Rome to get to heaven, you can understand why the pope saw red.
What I've noticed is that the older an organization gets, the more traditional and conservative it becomes. And throughout this ossification of thought and process also comes the bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that burns through money like nobody's business. It takes a fantastic revenue stream to keep the perfumed masters in kibble. If you strip that bloat away and have an organization that's all about delivery, couldn't you really cut the cashflow and still remain profitable?
I admit our current hybrid model isn't going to survive the immediate future. We went from mainstream media who were both content creator and distribution channel to our current system where they still produce content but distribution has been coopted by the net. The creators lose a large portion of ad revenue to people who essentially serve as aggregators of their content. When the creators stop creating, the aggregators will need to step up to the plate and start producing.
Defenders of the MSM will say that it takes some money to put together a credible news organization. This is true. It's also true that it costs money to have good editors and quality control. The thing is, we're not getting that with the MSM right now. Because their way of doing things costs so much money, the people who own them expect them to serve as profit centers. They also expect the news team to support their own agenda. To put this back in terms of religion, it's like the king expecting his clergymen to speak of God's will in his latest war.
The net helps to lower the cost of doing business. I think what we could end up seeing is journalists setting up their own non-profit news service to circumvent the dying mainstream model. Locals can report on what's of interest in their region and the wire can ship it out to anyone who cares. The editors would be part of the service and it's their job to make sure bogus stories aren't planted. (looking at you, New York Times and lead-up to the Iraq War.)
I'm thinking the news organizations of the future will bear more in common with the various open source outfits than with today's MSM approach. We're talking about lean, low-budget operations that can succeed because of the low capital requirements of operating in an internet-enabled world.
I could be wrong on this but I don't think it would be because what I say is completely unlikely.
Independent journalism?? (Score:3, Interesting)
So many choices, so much karma to burn.
Independent journalism.... ...is that the one where some whiny twat thinks that his world view is so right that he manufactures news to support it? ...where news that goes against the journalists view is not treated as contrary evidence, but as a personal attack? ...so like Slashdot where the news content is aggregated from others and then pithy comments are added as independent journalistic seasoning? ...all the lazy, underpaid, journalists combined with the lack of any sort of professional structure and standards? ...without the pesky editorial process checking speeling and grammer mistakes for?
Re:News (Score:3, Interesting)
Not actually true, in the case of newspapers. The bulk of their money comes from subscription payments...If we're talking bread and butter, the subscriptions are the bread.
The ads are the butter on top (in a good year, they can be butter and a bit of jam as well) that allows them to expand, do in-depth coverage, etc. As the former has contracted, the latter has ceased to be entirely butter, and started being part of the bread.
That's where the whole "decline in modern journalism" comes in. When you're not flush with butter, you have to cut back.
Re:Its like watching an animal drown (Score:3, Interesting)
A few million people can't filter shit for me or anyone else with a desire to learn what occurs in the world, rather than someone's stilted take on it. Filtering by the masses just guarantees that whichever is the prominent political or social viewpoint of the people is the sort of article that is recommended. It basically becomes one colossal circle-jerk of individuals with identical ideals reinforcing their viewpoints.
At least professional media - and I'm talking network news rather than the sensationalist swill that's become of cable news - have a sense of duty, legacy, and [b]professionalism[/b]. Individuals who have devoted their entire lives and careers to uncovering news and attempt to repress their bias as much as they can (though it is impossible to be completely without some bias, conscious or otherwise).
Media by the masses is essentially the exact opposite, and often bold in their declaration of bias. Most 'reports' are indistinguishable from opinion pieces and rife with political commentary when none is necessary. What reporting is done uselessly superficial, as the individual neither has the learned capacity, experience, nor the connections to delve into a subject and uncover some semblance of the "real truth."
As it stands, blogging is comprised of two camps of individuals. The first is essentially a walking camera, and merely states what he witnessed, but has no capacity to elucidate the reasons it occurred. The blogger sees a plane crash, reports on it, but it is the network news organization that contacts the FTC, contacts the airport, talks to survivors, obtains black box transcripts etc. The camera-blogger is worse than useless as they serve only to muddle the truth by putting themselves as an emotionally charged intermediary between the actual event and you as the reader. These individuals have always been relegated - and rightfully so - by network and newspaper media to eye-witness accounts, to add a sense of humanity to the incident, but not to serve as the sole source for a story.
The second sort of blogger is the opinion-writer. With little and often no journalistic, professional, or even higher education, this blogger perceives his opinions to be worth more than the next person's. But they have no more credibility than your neighbor, your co-worker, or anyone else for that matter. If the individual does have some credentials, then they are already writing for, or at least submitting articles to legitimate news organizations rather than ranting online. The internet is a giant soapbox, allowing anyone to express whatever opinion they may have. However, having an internet soapbox gives an individual no more credibility than if they spouted their opinions off a real soapbox on the corner of the street.
If you cannot see the difference between what the reality of what blogging is, how the masses distort it, and which necessities of a free-society large media fulfills, then you're doomed to a future in which we can say good-bye to what transparency we have in our understanding of our world.
Re:News (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not informative, you really ought to know what you're talking about if you're going to carry on.
Independent journalism isn't necessarily independent from large media, it's independent from the Government and from the people that it reports on. Which can be difficult when a journalist needs to cover his own paper. But if you honestly believe that an editor can control his reporters, then you've clearly never actually met either. As much as I hate and despise Rupert Murdoch, the reality is that he doesn't interfere with his news operations, they're largely free to do what they want, with the main exception being the punditry.
Independent journalism under your definition would be all but useless. It costs a lot of money sometimes to bring a story, and there is unfortunately no substitute for actually going abroad when covering foreign news. Having foreign born journalists do it really isn't the same.