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Gillmor's paid news idea on Boing Boing
Dan posted this over at Boing Boing today:
Paying for News: A Mega-Merger Thought Experiment – Boing Boing.
My comment that i posted:
@dan — ummmm…. yahoo newspaper consortium?
@GMOKE — the begging bowl you’re describing is pretty much the model of public media like npr and pbs. we’ve got that, and it fills a niche of a certain size in the infoscape.
which is pretty much what this proposal would empower by creating a void in free content: a more powerful and robust public news media or, shudder, a more powerful and robust state-run news agency. because when the bombs are about to fall, or the tornado is heading for your neighborhood, the pay for breaking news idea falls apart.
general news information/content is simply not that exclusive or inherently valuable. it is the service provided by the publisher that has differentiating value. Here to fore, that service has been in production, packaging and delivery; the technology to create and distribute news products was very expensive and therefore the products were valuable to audiences and advertisers. as new technology shrinks the margin between consumer and producer, the value proposition and perception has changed.
the means of distributing news electronically has been in the control of the AP for a very long time, and a large network of b2b consumers and providers developed on that membership platform where the last mile was a print delivery or local broadcast product that had geographic franchise. the Internet’s primary shell shock to all such business models is that it destroys middleware – franchisers, retailers, etc — and connects producers more directly to consumers.
seriously, when the AP sold previously member-exclusive content to online pure players, that was the meteor that hit the news planet and started the path to extinction. look at the state of the news pew report and see that the main news sites online are all aggregators of wire and legacy content that have created bottomless advertising inventory and destroyed pricing rates. newspapers and other legacy media in their entrance online did not protect their core business – advertising- and actually outsourced it to the competition, selling remnant ad network banners and partnering with online verticals.
there is journalistic content in the marketplace that consumers pay for on a per product basis: books, documentaries, and the like. like enterprise stories or series or major packages, these products have higher information value and exclusivity.
when the low hanging fruit falls from the tree, you just can’t come up with a way to charge for it. you have to manage the value.
if you can put the genie back in the bottle, you might be able to preserve a shred of the old days. the press could tell the AP to stop selling the content and make it exclusive to their products again, since they are the MEMBERS of the association. that is the only real way i can see to do it.