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.
Content value by their standards. (Score:3, Informative)
A: This is the media, if their content was better, they wouldn't need to force charge people for the vast sums of shitty content they spew in much higher proportions than the actual good content.
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Yeah, this is a perfect example of contemporary business missing the point entirely.
Higher value = higher price. Why? Because the only money that matters is money you have now, not money you'll get 20-50 years from now, not money you'll get next quarter, only money now.
The best content may not come at a premium up front, but people will still pay full price for it 10 years later. Why? Because it's good content and people still want it.
Compare:
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Well, HBO continues to exist, so I suspect you will still be able to buy print where you are mostly paying for the news, rather than the ads.
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.
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One of the issues, it seems to me, is the simple fact that blogs, forums and websites are proliferating all o
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<pedant>
IN other words, potential competition is infinite.
Six billion < infinite.
</pedant>
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(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.
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IANAE (Economist) (Score:5, Interesting)
But look at me this morning. I am reading the Boston Globe site, for which I pay (essentially) nothing. I am accessing this site via a Comcast connection, for which I pay waytoofarkingmuch per month. Yet I get a huge benefit from the Globe, information that is directly relevant to my daily life. From Comcast I get nothing but the passing along of the signal. There is something wrong with this picture.
If I were the Globe, I would think outside the newsbox. I would do something like set up a wireless network in and around Boston and sell internet access way under Comcast's price. The home page for this service would be boston.com or its descendant. The monthy access fee would cover the network costs and cover running the news organization.
There are probably technical problems to this fantasy, but IAANACSM (Also Computer Science Major)
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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?
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Would the Globe also close off access to their site from rival ISPs? Doesn't that undermine their advertising revenue from all those readers?
Indeed; if your (near-)monopoly ISP service costs "waytoofarkingmuch", the solution isn't to install a second corporation that would act as a "gateway" with a strong motive to block access to their competitors. It's to end the regulation that maintains the local monopolies like Comcast, and/or replace it with regulation that strongly punishes the sort of blocking game
Investigative Journalism? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The way investigative journalism has been paid for in the past, must indicate that in a free market, consumers are willing to pay for it somehow. That is, (for example) the Washington Post's management believe that by spending money on investigative journalism, they can retain readership / gain new readership from the New York Times.
I *hope* that this principle continues in an online world. It might not be a matter of paying money for content. For example, however much you may hate advertising, you might be
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Or you could just go to the source with lots of ads and great journalism...without the ads thanks to Adblock
Hooray!
And if enough of us did it, the advertisers would give up, the business model would fail, and the pay sites would win. (Or some other business model we've not dreamed up yet).
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Nope I don't agree there ...
Judging by the typical clickthru rates for banner ads (some fraction of 1%), most people will never click an ad and it would make no difference if the ads were blocked or not, and the minority who do already know what they are looking for and will happily tolerate the ads anyway if it helps them find a cheaper flight, or cheaper viagra, or whatever.
So saying that people who make a concious effort to block ads will kill the revenue is nonsense ... they would never have clicked on
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Judging by the typical clickthru rates for banner ads [...]
Clue: not all ads are about clickthroughs, and not all advertisers pay by the clickthrough.
For example, if you visit Eurogamer.net right now, the front page is dominated by an ad for Need for Speed: Shift. You *can* click through that, and who knows, Eurogamer might get an extra fraction of a penny if you do so. But if you don't click through, you've still seen it. You've become aware that there's a new NFS game "in stores now"; you've seen a shot of a big shiny car.
I don't know for sure, but I've a good id
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And if enough of us did it, the advertisers would give up, the business model would fail, and the pay sites would win.
So what? Why should I care about that? The world is a tough place and we the little guys get shat upon all the time by marketers, advertisers, and corporations. To quote Tyler Durden:
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that
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we the little guys get shat upon all the time by marketers, advertisers, and corporations
Have you stopped to consider that some of the sites you're creaming content off by blocking their ads might belong to a "little guy"?
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Another good example o
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The sad thing about this was that, at one time, at least as far as the Big Three networks went, it was pretty much part of the deal with the FCC that the news departments remained independent. That's how guys like Murrow could go after seemingly all-powerful people like a certain Junior Senator from Wisconsin.
There was a time that journalism was seen as a sacred trust, a key element of liberal democracy. While I'm sure most journalists still aspire to the high ideal, at the same time you have to wonder.
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In the end the journalists ceased being enamored with this whole "We're with the troops!" crap and started reporting at least something vaguely resembling reality, but it took too damned long, and effectively misled the American people as to the inadequacies of the invasion and the occupation that occurred afterwards.
The reason it took so long is because they were giving people what they wanted to hear. Most people supported the war, and they wanted to hear the good stuff. In fact, at the time, a good portion of Americans agreed with Nancy Pelosi that torture was ok. They wanted to see reports of tanks swooping in to Bagdad, and taking the place by storm. Which is essentially what happened, so it wasn't horrible reporting.
There were some bad reports, like the looting of the museums, but they didn't have the same pr
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Which is a pity, because that was a tragedy that will be felt down through the ages. But when you've got an army effectively run by a semi-retard alcoholic, little things like the roots of civilization don't mean all that much.
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The internet has given every user a best research tool.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff that's not on the internet, and there will continue to be. Getting real factual content will always involve getting off your arse, and spending time, well, investigating.
Some journalists make a full time job of it. To do it as an amateur, well, you'd have to be independently wealthy I guess. So what happens to all those people with a talent for investigation, who are not independently wealthy?
BTW I'm not just talking about uncovering scandals here. It could be something as
Funding Investigative Journalism (Score:2)
but what about covered up scandals and government conspiracies (ie- NSA Wiretapping Program, Secret CIA Prisons, Torture)
Have the investigations funded by somebody who has a financial interest in finding out about them. I'm sure the Democratic party got plenty of value out of any dirt uncovered by looking for this. Similarly, the Republican party has a lot of interest in getting bad news about ACORN out.
It might require investigative journalists to gather really good evidence, but requiring that is a good i
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Not even based on facts. (Score:2)
Paul Graham's essay:
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
Nonsense. Some paperback editions of out-of-copyright works sell for £1. A new novel by a big literary figure fill sell for £9 in paperback, £18 in hardback (with the paperback released later; the hardback price is really a 'get it first' price). A trashy mass markey novel will cost £5 in paperback. A magazine rack book of romantic short stories costs £2.50. A technical book will cost upwards of £20.
These all cost ap
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The price is in no way based on content, it is based the same way an OEM prices their products.
If I understand your point correctly, then the OEM's product *is* the content.
So a novelist charges $x for the text of a novel, the shelf price of the paperback reflects that. The publisher is supposed to recognise quality(*), and what the novelist gets to charge accordingly. This is exactly what Paul Graham seems to be saying doesn't happen.
(*) where "quality" actually means "consumer sales potential".
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Except they are basing the costs on their expenses, not on the sales potential.
Do you have a source for that?
Basic guesses about how the world works, suggest that Chuck Palahniuk and JK Rowling pay an agent to negotiate as high a price as possible for publishing rights, and that that figure has pretty much nothing to do with expenses.
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.
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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.
For a sufficiently broad X, I think there's plenty of precedents that say you needn't lose credibility (at least, in the eyes of enough readers to stay popular).
'Home Cinema World' is an authority on home cinema, and carries oodles of ads for home cinema products.
'Runner's World' carries adverts for training shoes, heart monitors, dietary supplements etc., and is still considered credible enough to maintain a readership.
Now, you could argue in both cases that these magazines pander to their advertisers -- y
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"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"
How is this different from the previous model? Maybe it isn't supposed to be?
One of the reasons I subscibe to a single magazine is its reputation - I count on desireable content, and I get it most of the time.
One of the reasons I don't subscribe to a newspaper is its reputation - I count on undesireable or substandard content, and I would get it, if I subscribed.
I do
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How is this different from the previous model? Maybe it isn't supposed to be?
I think the environment has changed. We used to purchase a newspaper or magazine and understand that we're buying a "bundle" of information and subsidizing the content we didn't like in order to get cheap access to content we do like.
Search engines have changed that. I'm used to finding exactly what I want without wading through a whole bunch of other junk. It's gotten to the point where I go to a brick-and-mortar store now and I can't stand how long it takes me to find something. I'm so used to typing
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.
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The problem is that journalism used to be a respected profession, but then some publisher along the way figured "Hey we don't need to report the truth, we only need to report what's 'amazing'", and people bought it.
You wouldn't happen to be talking about this guy [zpub.com], would ya? Or the Big Cheese himself [onlineconcepts.com]? Heh, Kinda like Nobel and his dynamite...
I would probably happen to be talking about exactly these guys. Many thanks for this!
Not what big media wants. (Score:2)
Big Media does not want to sell you a product. Remember, we needed First Sale Law to make it explicitly clear that the purchaser of a product does not accept any obligations that they have not agreed upon prior to the sale to even be free to resell books and sheet music. (Hence, EULAs are nonsense, and only the law applies. It's not the EULA that forbids you from selling copies.) Hollywood would like to sell you the right to listen to some music, and ideally (for them) you would be prohibited from even rese
Metaphors Fail (Score:2)
You can call it 'Fred and Barny' if you like, the owners are going to call it what they intend for it to be. As for the rationalizing rhapsody of contrast and comparison, forget it. No analogies suffice. There is nothing "like" the net.
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.
Better content does fetch more $$$. (Score:2)
Better (or at least more popular) content moves more copies. Its superiority doesn't need to be reflected in a significant variation of the unit cost.
Afloat? (Score:2)
[......] as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age.
Publishers of music aren't struggling to stay afloat - they're raking it in as fast as ever. They're just whining cos they want even more.
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.)
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The people who prefer the Economist. Duh. I wouldn't necessarily agree with their view on things but it's a good read nonetheless.
Bigger is Better (Score:2)
The answer may lie in the quantity of content, as far as selling is concerned.
Fact: the Internet allows a lot of free content in small page-sized elements.
Hypothesis: want to sell content? Make it a lot bigger than a page.
If you are a typical person, an article will often make you scratch your head. People won't buy such small scraps of information because they don't see long-term value. It's cheap for the writer to whip the stuff out, but it's selling strength is very low. The economics of buying news is s
Hardly a new idea (Score:2)
Two examples that I've found useful in various online discussions:
1) If you go into any "tech" bookstore, up front you'll see some displays of the current best-sellers. If you open them and scan the first few pages, you'll typically find a URL where you can download them in PDF form, for free. So you can get them for free over the Net, but the books are selling well, typically at rather high prices. WTF is going on here? Simple: A printed book has a lot of advantages over a PDF on your disk. (And yes
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.
Clay Shirky explained why micropayments won't work (Score:2)
Now, it may be that micropayments work at a level between the retailer and the wholesaler. For example, google could pay micropayments to useful sources, or I could subscribe to a news source or listen to a radio station. The author/band/whoever gets paid via aggregated micropayments, but I don't actually make a micropayment. That is, historically, a sound business model, but making people decide on an article-by-
Actually, more like nine years ago (Score:2)
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Micropayments??? (Score:2)
Pay for analysis, not news (Score:2)
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:4, Insightful)
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Interesting)
What am I supposed to pay for, exactly? What is the value they bring to my news-reading experience that is so good that the free sites can't keep up? And if the free ones start to disappear, a fully distributed p2p news network isn't hard to create. All you need is to combine rss with a p2p protocol and throw in some search and filter options.
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.
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.
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Spreading news is cheap. Gathering news is expensive.
You might want to decide which side of the business you are in, and how much profit you expect from it. News is by definition severely affected by the internet, and will change along with it.
Twitter spread the panic about swine flu much faster than any news site, maybe we can recreate the effect without panic.
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.
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You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
You probably would. But crucially, that tweet would contain a URL pointing to a mainstream news site.
Journalist gathers news. Newspaper distributes news. Word of mouth (or tweet of Twitter) spreads awareness of news.
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But when mainstream news organizations cease to exist, the tweets will have nothing to point at except unverified rumor. The core value we pay for in news it that which differentiates it from mere rumor - research and verification.
This is where the mainstream is shooting itself in the foot. In the rush to be "relevant" and "entertaining" they've all but abandoned the traditional standards of journalism - i.e., actual quality research and verification. Look at CNN's recent screw-up with the Coast Guard exerc
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are supposed to be well written, complete and verified
Well that leaves Murdoch out in the cold anyway.
You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter
Yes, I can just imagine The Sun's version ... "Tricky Dicky bares all on Page 3".
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You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
Watergate happened almost 40 years ago. If you can't point to something a little more recent, how can it be important? Also, I seem to remember something just a few years ago about a blogger embarrassing Dan Rather over some "proof" the MSM had of something that the blogger showed to be a fake.
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I think you're confusing "news":
TweetFreak69: RT @HeadlineBoy app. Mexico City is in quarantine with some kind of superbug
... with what (quality) newspapers sell. Detailed information, from eye witnesses, experts, and yes, biased yet entertaining opinion columnists.
Sometimes (often, even) newspapers screw it up, but when they succeed, it's better than what amateurs could achieve, and I for one want continued access to that sort of material.
OTOH I don't think charging the consumer for it at the point of access is a winning formula.
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Newspapers sell one thing and one thing only -- advertising. The amount of advertising in any particular issue determines how much room there is for content. The best ratio you'll find is about 50/50, but that's rare. 60/40 and 70/30 are more common, with content always getting the lesser portion. Any pre-printed ads from grocery stores or department/specialty stores that are inserted to be distributed with the paper do not count toward the calculation.
The content is seldom important to advertisers unless i
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Or a much more simplified idea, use something that has been around for a long time such as usenet.
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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?
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For a lot of local TV stations the newscasts are one of their most profitable things to air. Since they already have video, and it's a way to build familiarity with their brand, I can't see it likely a monopoly on news sites is possible. If a pay for site breaks a big story, there will always be free sites who will echo that story.
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For the moment, yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay? The entire question is whether there will continue to be 49 free lanes on the highway.
Well I guess some free sites may hit the buffers in the future but given the BBC is the world's oldest [wikipedia.org] broadcast organisation I don't see it going out of 'business' any time soon . . . I put business in quotes because it is publicly funded and only part [wikipedia.org] of the BBC exists to make a profit. I think the model is sustainable, especially considering the high esteem in which the BBC is held both within Britain and throughout the world, it benefits no-one apart from the Murdoch's of this world to let public funded
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I much like the British BBC for their high quality documentaries. The making of these involves lots of research, putting people on the ground in conflict zones, undercover operations, etc. I would not mind paying a small amount each time I watch one of these documentaries, just to support putting them together. Surely I'm not alone there.
If you live in the UK and own a television receiver, you already *do* pay a small amount (about 30 pence a day in licence fees), whether you watch it or not.
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?"
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:5, Informative)
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?"
I'd rather have fairly obvious slant that might encourage people to think more critically about what is being presented. To me, that is far better than knowing that shit like this [foxbghsuit.com] goes on under an appearance of legitimacy. It would be different if there were elements in the media that actively sought out and rooted out this kind of corruption, but there aren't -- those two reporters, as individuals, decided not to be intimidated, bribed, and silenced and that's the only reason why we know about this. It doesn't take much wisdom to know that most people would have caved. The questioning man wonders, for every example like that one that we do learn about, how many go on that we've never heard of, and of course under that assumed credibility that, as you point out, the established media commands? Say what you will of Internet bloggers and their political biases; they are unlikely to deliberately falsify a story in order to avoid losing Monsanto's ad revenue.
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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/sponsorshi
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...except we're already getting news for free and it's already crappy and slanted.
"free news" has been around for over 50 years. It's nothing new. It's not a Frankenstein monster created by the internet.
The real problem of the internet is that it breaks down geographic
barriers both in terms of direct competition and what your customers
are exposed to. In short, you're customers are in a much better
position to realize that you are trying to sell 'shit on a shingle'.
Although media like newspapers were already
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I live in a town with a mill that produces newsprint. It's been having on-and-off troubles in the newsprint division since the late 1980s, long before the Internet became a meaningful consumer product. And it's not the Internet that is causing the current woes, but an economic collapse. I'll wager plenty of newspapers went down in 1929-1930 as well.
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.
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Wikinews' current top story: "Suicide bomber kills 30 in northwest Pakistan" is sourced from Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Both commercial news gathering organisations.
It's a great aggregation and distillation service, but it's not a replacement for traditional newspaper news gathering.
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And that's the basic problem. Few actually realize where the news comes from anymore. It's just "on the Internet."
Sure, the big newspapers can probably get away with an ad supported model on the Internet but you have to view their ads. They cannot survive if they're expected to field a network of professional reporters, produce quality news stories and then give it away free to some other site (like Wikinews).
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They cannot survive if they're expected to field a network of professional reporters, produce quality news stories and then give it away free to some other site (like Wikinews).
It seams to be working ok for al jazeera who license thier live footage under CC-BY [creativecommons.org]. I believe the whole point is that the news/footage/information should be given away because:
1)It gets you a reputation and so people are more likely to use the products you make money from
2)The info/news gets out anyway
Between commercial licensed content like al jazeera, national stations (BBC), first hand journalism and press releases, the news is going to be reported. Collating the news can be done by those producing it o
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Yes, if news isn't your primary business then you might be able to keep it going as a side line. Al Jazeera is primarily a TV/radio station that has a web presence. If enough people start going to the web and not listening/watching the over-the-air channel then Al Jazeera will have a problem too.
As far as national news organizations, that's great as far as it goes. Of course, if any of the libertarians on here sees your post they'll be sure to tell you that you don't really want a government controlled o
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I would not trust any one news source in particular over any other; they are all biased in their world view. I would assume each media to only provide the news in the best light for the group it is assumed to be for. I would thus read from sources on opposing sides of any particular news I am interested in. I will typically read a financial news paper to see the side of investors, a document form left wing and right wing political factions over the same topic, local news/view versus national/international n
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I would not trust any one news source in particular over any other; they are all biased in their world view.
They may all be biased, but not all biases are equal! Personally I think there is quite a line between the out and out biases (such as fabrication) you can see and being fair but simply having a different worldview, clumping together FOX,the mail,etc with bbc,al jazeera,etc is pretty disingenuous. BTW what is the particular bias you are pinning on wikinews? (or for that matter BBC /Al Jazeera?)
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if you want unbiased news check out a financial news source such as the wall street journal. Investors just want the facts and are not going to trust a source with a political bias in their reporting. Granted, you'll see only news which impacts economics, but at least you will see some objective reporting!
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so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
In my experience quality correlates much less with price than with recommendations, and I certainly cant say pay-for news is among the areas where the players have created such expectations.
we're going to get crappy, slanted news
Two crappy slanted articles disagreeing with one another often leave you with a better understanding of reality than one high quality (less obviously slanted) article. And anyone with an agenda can publish anything
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Anyone with 5 minutes, a major historical news story and google news archive [google.com] can demonstrate the fallacy in your argument. You have described _exactly_ the state of mainstream news today - crappy, slanted news delivering the message they want you to hear (i.e. profitable to special interest groups). Pick any of the most significant events in the last decade where powerful special interest groups had a firm position, and the mainstream news has rolled over to shaft their viewer/readers with exactly the wrong message to suit their corporate masters position, flooding the media echo chamber [wikipedia.org] with the deceptive message in the process. Check it for yourself in the archives.
Pre-Iraq war - news message: weapons of mass destruction ("we must invade, there is no other choice"). Special Interest Group: The MIC. [wikipedia.org].
Financial Crisis pre-2008 - news message: Money supply increases, what money supply increase? M3 discontinued [marketoracle.co.uk], its not important... move along nothing is broken here as reflected in the total absence of mainstream news coverage [google.com]
The majority of news sources that told it how it turned out (in retrospect), were non-mainstream news sources - and thanks to services like google news archive it can easily be demonstrated. You did not hear significant anti-war positions [wifr.com] from the mainstream news cool-aid stand, which remained completely silent [google.com]. You also could have also known well in advance that inflation was heading for the moon, and where and why to best place your hard earned savings [billcara.com] for the coming economic storm from independent professionals not driven by increasing the bottom line, but instead in delivering accurate high quality news.
Publishers of mainstream news can't cut it on the internet, because they cannot compete with free high quality alternatives from motivated professionals.
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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.
Oh, I dunno; it seems to me that the news from "professional" sources has long had a reputation for biased, slanted news. It has mostly been in the form of quietly ignoring news that their employers and the advertisers don't want people to know about. Less often, it has been outright lies, though we saw a good example of this a few years back wh
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Yes, Japanese (televised) news always carries such riveting stories as "men molesting high school girls on trains", "kids do something cute", and "it's hot/cold, isn't it?".
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Including Xinhua and Pravda. Sorry Murdoch. If you manage to shut down the BBC and other Western sources of free news, I'll just read those.
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.
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.
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In the world of print magazines and newspapers, cover price is not much of an income stream. However, charging for the paper, or even better having plenty of paying subscribers, allows you to charge more for advertisers. It allows you to say "look, our readers are not just people who pick up a free rag on the bus, glance at it then throw it away. They're motivated, engaged readers who are so committed to our publication that they spend money on it.".
But, on the web, you can keep server logs to see how engag
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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 w
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You know, I decided to pay for Sky Cable TV here in the Philippines for the exact same reason ... no commercials.
Now the bastards started sneaking them in as "sponsored by", "supported by", and "in association with" links, before, during and after every damn show and intermission. And it's not just *one* sponsor like CNN does, it's at least 5 for popular primetime shows.
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Well, you're off-topic, and who knows, I might get downmodded for reponding to you.
You're making a similar objection to that made by some programmers back when free software was a new idea. "How will programmers make a living?". The answer to this is that the world does not owe programmers, or session drummers, or sound engineers a living. Any more than horseshoe manufacturers were owed a living when other forms of transports overtook the horse.
As it happens, programmers found ways to get paid for writing f
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The answer to this is that the world does not owe programmers, or session drummers, or sound engineers a living. Any more than horseshoe manufacturers were owed a living when other forms of transports overtook the horse.
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Horseshoe manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed horseshoes when cars supplanted horses and horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press cou
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The music is worth whatever the programmers, session drummers and sound engineers charge for it.
Or, it's worth whatever the programmers, session drummers and sound engineers clients/employers pay them for it. One side of the relationship wants to push the price up, the other wants to push it down, and somehow they meet in the middle.
It's up to whoever hired them how (or whether) they monetise the end result. If they want to give away the music, in order to promote touring/merchandise, that's up to them.
Note, I'm not talking about piracy. I'm talking about a business model that includes giving away con
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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 h
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The whole 'concerts and t-shirts' thing is bullshit, and only someone who has never worked in the music industry would suggest it.
It only applies to a certain kind of act, but it can and does work. Other kinds of act need to find the solution that works for them. But the point is still that a musician needs to find a way to monetise their skill -- not just demand that whatever it is they happen to do currently, gets them paid.
It is about as practical as suggesting computer games companies make their money from LAN parties and selling T-shirts.
... which probably wouldn't work. But the games industry has found ways to make money while giving away content. Look at the free MMOs, or the ad-supported casual Flash games.