News Content As a Resource, Not a Final Product 156
Paul Graham has posted an essay questioning whether we ever really paid for "content," as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age. "If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?" Techdirt's Mike Masnick takes it a step further, suggesting that the content itself should be treated as a resource — one component of many that go into a final product. Masnick also discussed the issue recently with NY Times' columnist David Carr, saying that micropayments won't be the silver bullet the publishers are hoping for because consumers are inundated with free alternatives. "It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll." Reader newscloud points out that the fall 2009 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports contains a variety of related essays by journalists, technologists, and researchers.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Insightful)
"So while it would certainly be easier, better, more convenient and arguably more morally just to go to any of the 49 other lanes - legally, you'd be in the wrong if you did."
When it comes to news, the other 49 are just as legal. There is no benefit - moral or otherwise - for me to go to a pay site for news over going to, say, the BBC, NHK, NPR or SVT or any other public service website, or to the New York Times, Dagens Nyheter, Asahi Shinbun or any other of the thousands of completely legal and moral free to read commercial news websites out there.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:0, Insightful)
morality != legality (Score:5, Insightful)
The constant attempt at various corporations to conflate morality with legality in the minds of individual citizens is very ironic in light of the fact they have no such confusion themselves. What is moral is irrelevant to them, and even the issue of legality is only addressed as far is it doesn't hurt profitability too much. They have the option of being able to easily change the legal goalposts when they find the legal issues too much of a hassle.
Morality and legality can overlap, but they are not at all the same thing, and any attempt to claim they are is only convincing to children.
Investigative Journalism? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a problem with content... (Score:3, Insightful)
To build on what Paul Graham is saying, I think there's a more fundamental problem with selling "content":
Each piece of content (article, story, etc.) tends to be a one-time use product (this is less true for movies, and not true at all for songs). But if you want to sell a one-time use unique product, then the consumer can't tell if it was worth the money until *after* they've consumed it. This creates risk and people are risk-averse when it comes to spending money (even one penny). So you can try to become known for producing consistently good content (very hard), and then sell that, but that means all the stuff you do first has to be given away for free. As soon as you start charging, you significantly reduce your audience growth rate.
So there are other business models for content. You can become recognized as an expert on X, and then people interested in X will read about you. However, if you try to start selling advertisements or referrals for X, you start to lose credibility.
Therefore, I think the next logical step is to become recognized as an expert on X (as a critic), then announce you're fed up with the existing offerings of X (because of reasons Y and Z), and tell your audience you've decided to go and make your own X that's much better than everyone else's X, and then you've got an audience of people who are going to be drooling to buy your X.
Re:wonderful. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been like that in printing for years. Publishers (at least of magazines and newspapers have been talking about selling "eyeballs" for years. Ever since I did my first production job the industry has known that issue and subscription sales have only just covered the printing costs. A decade ago no one in the print industry would have been able to maintain a straight face while saying the consumer neded to carry the cost.
And if you dont believe me, go take a look at an oldschool periodical publishing house and check out what their sales department does. In case you can't find one anymore I will tell you. They sell ads. Or rather adspace. Or rather, viewers. Just like broadcast TV.
The bigest problem with the news industry right now is that the online advertising market isn't able to subsidize their massive brick and mortar operations like a 4c backcover ad would have done. That's because their old scarcity model no longer applies. Advertising space is no longer hard to come by, distribution is easy and there is basically no barrier to entry. IN other words, potential competition is infinite.
Of course, like most of the content industry, the current publishing business structures are top heavy (as far as costs compared to value) or middle heavy (as far as number of non-productive jobs). We are seeing the death of the middlemen, NOT the content producers.
Unless the middlemen and non-productive types can manage to buy the legislation they need to maintain their old business models. If they can make it impossible for me to have access to distribution again, then they might be able to go back to business as usual.
The way I see it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not against paid services, infact I very much hope someone brings forth a news service that reports truth, and if someone does I have no reason not to pay for it. But pay for lies? Hell I can just ring my neighbours doorbell for that.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
micropayments (Score:5, Insightful)
The concept of micropayments in the context of content has been a pipe dream for over a decade now. To businesspeople, it's one of those ideas that's so appealing they just can't let it go because they can't grasp just how complex a system it is, and how many people will simply say, "no thanks," because they don't want to feel like they're being nickeled-and-dimed to death for something they're used to getting for free. Micropayments have enjoyed some success in online gaming, but will never work in the news biz because for every site that will charge for articles, you'll find four more giving roughly the same thing away for free and living off the advertising alone.
I don't know what the future of journalism will look like, but I can tell you that it won't involve charging the end user per-article payments or subscriptions. Anyone who thinks either of those will work for the industry as a whole in the long term is either blinded by greed or on crack.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think reading news that someone paid for and is willing to give away for free is illegal?
After all, it's not as if this were something new, newspapers have been distributed for free before the internet existed. Even today, I get far more newsletters in my snail mailbox than I want to. Ad-based revenue did exist before the digital age.
All the propaganda you read about the "pirates" is just greed trying to appeal to your honesty.
I never paid for content, I paid for the convenience and the format. I have always been able to read the headlines for free at the newsstand, why should I pay to read the headlines at the internet? I listened to music for free on the radio, I only bought records that had some particular appeal for me, or to give as gifts. Why should I pay for mp3 music? I watched films for free on the TV but paid movie tickets to see the big screen, then why should I pay for a scrappy 700MB DVD rip?
Getting stuff from the internet is not unethical. I'm not consuming anything, I'm not using other people's paper, or ink, or vinyl, or theater seat. If the content creators are too stupid to find a lucrative means of revenue, it's their problem, I'm not taking anything away from them.
Better content DOES cost more -- and "better"? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a few pretty big gaps in this article's reasoning.
The price of books or music or movies doesn't depend on the format. If it did, all MP3s and DVDs would cost the same, and books would be priced based on their print quality, number of pages and binding. And last time I checked, not all MP3s, books or DVDs cost the same. Books that cost the same to print often have wildly different retail prices. And MP3s -- well, there, the medium cost is nothing. The production costs certainly vary, but it's rarely the production cost that contributes to the price.
I happen to make part of my living writing books. And I have two books, for example, that are almost identical in format (printing, length, etc.), but with over 50% difference in price because of the content of the books.
Second, the article talks about better content, but "better" is highly subjective. Here's an example right from the beginning of the article:
Personally, I happen to prefer the Economist to Time. But there are a lot of people who prefer Time. Who's right? Who knows?
I think pricing is an odd, and probably not all that useful, way to look at this. While one reaction might be to let the market determine what's "better," I think markets are very good at determining a price for, say, an album, but notoriously bad at determining what's "better." To butcher an Oscar Wilde quote, markets know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Personally, I would throw you average Celine Dion album in a bargain bin, but there are clearly many people (and not just French Canadians!) who would disagree. And price is not necessarily indicative of anything at all. Is Radiohead's In Rainbows [wikipedia.org] "worse" because they gave it away for whatever price you happened to feel like paying?
One last thing strikes me about the article:
That's a great example of a point I thought the article only tangentially made. People go to a movie theater to meet up with friends, take out the family, go on a date, etc. The $7 tub of popcorn isn't worth $7 because of the corn in it is somehow "better." It's worth $7 to the people who get it because it's part of the experience. The "content" there is the movie, but it's the real purpose of going to a theater is only partially to experience the movie. (I'm not quite sure exactly how that impacts the point of the article, but it definitely paints a murkier picture than the article suggests.)
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news
This is a false dichotomy. It's not a clear cut choice between "paying for content" versus "news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort". There are plenty of ways to turn news gathering into a profitable exercise, other than charging the consumer directly. The big question is, which method provides the sweet spot that suits consumers best, without the business going bust? It *might* turn out to be a model where the consumer pays directly. I suspect it'll be some other model - be it advertising/sponsorship, patronage, tip jars, merchandising, whatever.
Re:wonderful. (Score:3, Insightful)
(Assuming your from the US*) That's the problem, If paid for content was more reliable/verified/trustable then people would be inclined to pay and get real news, unfortunately it seams quite the opposite is true, I trust content that's online for free BBC, wikinews, etc more than i trust print news.
*I should probably note that the TV news we get in the UK is much more trust worthy than the print media we get here.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Insightful)
News is cheap. You don't need a whole website for 300 words of text and maybe a link to an image hosting site or youtube.
Spreading news is cheap. Gathering news is expensive.
Hypothetical example: how much might you expect to pay someone to spend 3 months undercover in North Korea, that they might write a double page spread on the subject? Remember you need to find someone with an engaging writing style, an insightful eye, the ability to go indetected, the guts to take on the danger, you need to pay their traveling expenses etc.
Re:Investigative Journalism? (Score:2, Insightful)
Another good example of investigative journalism is Michael Totten [michaeltotten.com], a blogger who actually went to Iraq (he literally drove across the border with no prior plans. That takes guts. Later he went in again with the US army). He has gone all across the middle east, talking to average people on the street, and seeing what they have to say. It is some of the best reporting of the Iraq war I've seen, and he is directly supported by his readers.
Compare that to some of the fun stuff the mainstream media does. [honestreporting.com] It seems every few years the New York Times has to fire someone because they've been caught reporting unethically.
That said, there is some news content I am willing to pay for, the clearest example is the Wall Street Journal. They do a good job, but with Rupert Murdoch in charge now, it may not last much longer and is already going downhill.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see Free [wikinews.org] vs Paid [foxnews.com], I know which one I trust more.
Re:IANAE (Economist) (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't make sense.
You're suggesting that the Boston Globe sells "ISP + news" for cheaper than Comcast's "just ISP" service? How can they achieve that? If Comcast's rates are too high, why aren't rivals already undercutting them?
Would the Globe also close off access to their site from rival ISPs? Doesn't that undermine their advertising revenue from all those readers?
Re:And here I was thinking, that... (Score:3, Insightful)
I support a commercial free, listener-supported Internet radio station [radioparadise.com] every month for the simple reason that I would be devastated by the loss if they ever went away (or * forbid, started playing commercials).
I think this model is workable, if your goal is to keep things simple and run it like a small business. I'm sure that's not what the big-money-media types want to hear, but simply asking people who value what you have to offer to voluntarily support you can do wonders. Look at how many people have an * to their user name here on Slashdot.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't call the "OMG THE FLU IS COMING GET DOWN" and stuff like that "news". News are supposed to be well written, complete and verified. More: besides news, there reporters who write investigation articles. You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
We need professionals (Score:3, Insightful)
As some have already pointed out here, blogs do still rely on the professional journalism that comes out of newspapers and television networks. Amateurs can't hope to have the access or clout that professional organizations do, and locally we can't sit around and hope that someone in the community will make it to every city council meeting and write it up. If you've got a local journalism buff who likes to blog and has the time, great. If you don't, you need to get someone to do it, and that means paying them.
If advertising doesn't work then journalism needs new revenue streams. Non-profits are one idea if they can get enough grants and donations and whatnot. A government service like the BBC and CBC is also an idea, but probably won't go over very well in America. I'm reminded of an idea from the novel Earth by David Brin: in that society (set in roughly 2030 if I remember right) people were required to subscribe to a particular number of news feeds in order to keep the right to vote, the idea being that a voter must keep informed about current events. Suppose that, rather than funding news agencies directly, the government gave every citizen an allowance which they were required to donate to one or more news agencies (paid for by taxes, and therefore equivalent to requiring every citizen to pay for news, but with a subsidy for low-income citizens). This would allow the people to decide which news organizations should be funded, rather than letting the government decide. Of course, there are difficulties--- what constitutes a news agency? Fox News? DailyKos? What if I started my own newspaper, circulation 1, just so I could keep the money--- and they may be insurmountable. But I think journalism is very important to this country, as important as health care and sanitation and all the rest, and something will have to be done.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, for-pay news sites can be monopolized just like any other business, giving Mr. Murdoch control over what you see and hear and thus your opinion. Getting to rule the world is quite valuable.
Or did you mean value to you?
Re:Give Music Away? (Score:3, Insightful)
You CAN sell air. But in order to sell air you have to put a balloon or a scuba tank around it. I don't buy information, but I do buy books. I don't buy movies, but I do buy DVDs. I don't buy music, but I do buy CDs and spend money in places that have hired a band. Sure, I could copy someone else's CD and often do, and sample my old tapes and LPs, but there's something about a factory produced CD with cover art, etc that puts the burned copy to shame. You need to add value.
Cheap high speed internet access has killed the old business model, and the businessmen who are in the industry need to adapt or die. Note the industry itself isn't going anywhere, but businesspeople who refuse to adapt will.