If At First You Don't Succeed...
Selective memory can be a powerful and eerie thing. Particularly when it comes from an institution that has witnessed and written about history for more than a century. In September of 2005 the New York Times decided that certain parts of its journalistic and editorial content were too valuable to simply give away online, and they instituted a subscription service, or pay-wall, called TimesSelect. It lasted two years before the Times pulled the plug, putting all of its content--except for the crossword--back online for free. While some did pay for access to the premium content online, the reality was that most, particularly those living overseas, did not. The resulting loss in readers was devastating to the authors of the content behind the wall, and counter to the online advertising model that the New York Times was simultaneously attempting to implement. Rumors over the weekend indicate that the Times will again be implementing a metered charge of their content in the near future. Jeff Jarvis has a typically well laid-out synopsis of why the economics of a metered pay-wall are based on a scarcity that really doesn't exist in the world of online news content. While you could argue that the opinions of Maureen Dowd or Ross Douthat are a precious commodity (not saying you would or should, just saying you could) and therefore scarce and worth charging for, there is still the bigger problem of putting a wall between your content and your customers.
Internet browsing follows a path of least resistance. When searching for information or products we typically follow the links that we expect to have the content most relevant to our search. Google's success comes from providing the best possible link options with least amount of effort on our part. When we click on a link and the place that it takes us does not meet our expectations of it, we will often return back to our original search results either to refine them or make judgements on the other links initially provided, repeating these steps until a link gets us what we want. The problem with the pay-wall is that it is an obstruction to the content expected. If I click on a link entitled: "Rahm Emanuel Eats Senator's Liver with a Nice Chianti" and I land on a log-in page for the New York Times' paid subscription service, I'm hitting my browser's back button faster than you could say, "Only because he had no heart..." I will undoubtedly be able to find out what happened to the poor senator elsewhere in less time than it would take me to register with the New York Times and give them my credit card number. I've also just trained myself in a Pavlovian way to avoid links to the Times in the future.
The inevitable question is how an institution like the New York Times is to survive if a pay-wall is counter-productive and internet advertising will not support the costs of running a daily newspaper? The simple answer is that they can't survive as a daily newspaper, and maybe not as a traditional newspaper at all. I will probably regret publishing this, because it sounds horribly trite and cliche, but the future of news will be a relationship between two individuals founded on trust and not a relationship between the masses and a storied institution based on incumbency. The newspapers' model has worked for more than a century because for a century they were the most efficient method of attaining news analysis. Many thought that the advent of the television, and then the 24 hour cable news network would kill the newspaper based on the idea that this was a faster way of attaining the news--and it was--but this speed was not enough to overcome the disparity of depth between the television news segment and the newspaper article. The internet has not only proven to be faster and more efficient than television, but also the most efficient source of the most amount of news analysis. I say "most" and not "best" because of course there will always be a lot of terrible news analysis on the internet. But here is where the relationship between individuals will flourish. I don't need to read every bit of analysis on the internet. I only need read the thoughts and provocations of the journalists whose work and opinions I trust on the topic at hand. News will become specialized because the existing institutions are too large and generalized to compete with the small and focused when they can reach the exact same audiences through the internet. If I want to get analysis of election results or current polling, I'm going to search out an organization that makes that their primary directive, such as Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com. If my goal is instead to learn more about the economy I might go first to Paul Krugman's blog (already at the NYT) or Matt Taibbi's blog for his take. On any one issue there might be a dozen voices worth hearing, each from the perspective of their métier, and there's no newspaper in the world that could afford to aggregate and print all of them at once. There need not be an editorial board deciding what gets precious column inches and what does not. Column inches are not precious on the internet. There need not be fact checkers, even. Anyone paying attention knows that they haven't done the New York Times much good and that the fastest way to fact check something is to post in on the internet as truth. If it is not, someone will helpfully point that out for you.
At the end of the day, the internet has always been about making systems more efficient. I haven't personally priced out an industrial scale printing press recently, but I'm willing to wager that it is orders of magnitude more expensive than even the most stable and well-built web server. I don't know what the New York Times pays someone like Paul Krugman, but I have to imagine it's a lot easier to cut his paycheck when you aren't also cutting checks for dozens of fact-checkers, editors, receptionists, delivery trucks, drivers, press workers, operations managers, maintenance workers, and office leases. The newspaper industry--like many others--is not as efficient as the economy that modern technology has created could make it. It's inevitable restructure will be painful and likely ugly to behold. Jobs will be lost and sources of revenue will shrink. Until and unless the internet--specifically the way the world uses it--makes a U-turn and suddenly supports closed systems and scarcity of content, no amount of pay-walling or advertising is going to save the printed daily newspaper. One would hope the New York Times would remember the lesson they learned just three years ago.
Ryan Hindinger
A respected mind has asked me to clarify which way the future of news lay, which is not something that I pretend to know. I do have a few thoughts that I would call not-quite-prognostications. The future of news does not exist in the large institution as we know them now. I simply cannot see any way for them to survive in their current form, in much the same way the typewriter has sadly vanished, so too will the daily newspaper.
Current news organizations attempt to generate their own content on a vast array of subjects while simultaneously reaching as many demographics as possible. While this has given them the ability to sell more ads--as a result of a large readership--it is wildly expensive to maintain. The costs of maintaining knowledgeable, professional journalists who are qualified to cover Local, National, Political, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Technology, and Sports news under one "roof" so to speak, are huge. However, if one were to establish a new organization that is primarily focused on delivering original content on a particular subject and for that subject's primary demographic--while aggregating the rest from other content providers--a viable business model might begin to emerge. Such an organization would have none of the infrastructure and legacy costs of a large institution. It would be able to sell highly targeted advertising to an admittedly smaller audience. This advertising has more value because this organization's readership is a known entity. A good example of this model would be any of the half-dozen or so technology news sites and organizations that have carved out holds on their corners of the internet, such as Cnet or TWiT.
This specialization of news does not have to end investigative journalism, either. Information is only "free" once it makes it's way to the internet. Mining that information can be costly in the sense that it can take thousands of man hours in research and investigating leads. There will always be those who will be willing to pay handsomely for a big news story just as there are publishers still willing to pay millions of dollars in advance for a book. Scarcity creates value, and those who are willing to work to obtain information the internet does not yet have in its clutches will have the most scarce commodity of all. I might even be so bold as to suggest that a future without major media conglomerates poisoning the editorial board of the world's biggest news outlets might spark a resurgence in real journalism the likes of which this country has not seen in decades.
The other possible outcome of this restructuring is a hybrid model. Individual small organizations, or even individual blogger/journalists (eventually we're going to have to stop distinguishing between the two) who are gathered under a single banner to share certain common costs while maintaining their editorial autonomy. Call them Guilds, if you like. Costs like web hosting and advertising sales could be centralized to the host company--perhaps a future New York Times--while each member organization seeks out its niche and its demographic. The Atlantic seems to be a good model for this, aggregating excellent minds under its banner and selling advertising around their content and the readers to whom they appeal.
Ryan Hindinger
And just like that, here it comes.
Nahgunnahappen, New York Times, Pay-Wall | in History, Mass Media, The Internets
Reader Comments (3)
Let me start by saying, to quote Nick Daze, I'm a newspaper man! , (but you need the voice to really make it work). At any rate, I'm 100% biased as I'm an online news producer for the LATimes. That being said, here's my take, in no particular order:
Paid online content is inevitable. To the extent that, 10 years from now (maybe 15) we'll look back to when news outlets allowed unlimited free access to their sites as a quaint period before shit got real on the balance sheets of newspapers. The problem is, no one knows what kind of paid model will ultimately work, so it is going to take plenty of trial and error by some of the giants in the industry before we find one that works. That's what you're seeing with NYT's latest plan to allow metered access to their content, just a scant two years after Times Select failed. There is no way of knowing what will register with regular readers and the 'one-click-wonders' alike, while having a significant impact on revenue.
Jeff Jarvis' fear that NYT would charge him for their online content when he is already a subscriber seems premature, as nearly every mention of charging for online content (among those who do not already do so), allows print subscribers full access behind the pay wall; no one is expecting people to pay twice. But people will be expected to pay once. This could be by way of an exemption to the Sherman Act for newspapers and wire services like AP, so they can collaborate on how best to prevent aggregators like Google News from providing their content for free, while simultaneously generating their own ad revenue from those clicks. (Frankly I think such an exemption will be passed by Congress, but only after the financial straits of enough media companies becomes dire enough that they raise a very big fuss). Or a metered model like the one NYT is supposedly considering. Ideas like an iTunes model have been floated about...where users have a credit card on file (or a PayPal account) and are allotted a certain number of free stories a day/week/month before being charge a nominal fee to read an article in its entirety. But as I said, we may see every iteration imaginable of charging for content before someone discovers that impossibly appropriate fee that is fair to readers, content providers and their respective wallets.
Be careful when you talk of news analysis and news. They are not the same thing. Yes, the interwebs have provided a remarkably fluid means of aggregating and disseminating news, and has allowed multitudes of subjective outlets one may 'trust' to analyze the f out of it. But the objective entities that are actually gathering, researching, learning and then producing the news, in any form, exist in smaller numbers than at any point in 200 years. This is dangerous. Yes, I understand the rise of bloggers and citizen journalism and I enthusiastically acknowledge that they have started to break news and get scoops. However (and yes, I'm generalizing here) these scoops are accomplished via methods that are ethically dubious by individuals or outlets with an agenda that reaches beyond simple news gathering; Obama's 'clinging to guns and religion' moment comes to mind, as the clip was recorded at a closed fund-raising event by a paying guest. Again, call me biased, but I want my news from an organization whose objectivity I can trust. With all the attention subjective sites like Gawker, Huffington Post (more disclosure...I used to work there) and Drudge Report get, it's frighteningly easy to overlook the fact that 99% of all their content...all their 'analysis'...comes from objective news organizations who foot the bill to produce the actual 'news.'
Fact-checkers (they'd ask you to call them line editors) are your best friend in the world. Yep, that Cronkite obit was a disaster and a low point not just for the NYT, but for the reputations of legitimate news orgs everywhere. But it was an anomaly. I would humbly beg you to rethink the assertion that 'fact-checkers' aren't needed since errors will be caught by the masses once it's posted on the internet. Such factual anarchy would have repercussions into every corner of our society. I don't mean to make news orgs sound like Batman, but it is they who serve as the fourth estate and check in on who what where when how and why and they do it because it is their responsibility to inform and educate so people can live better, smarter lives. Somewhere out there there is an airbag that is not going to deploy in a terrible car crash and as a result, someone is going to die. But by and large, airbags are an essential safety feature on vehicles that work flawlessly every day around the world. Are you going to hear about that one that doesn't deploy and renders that occupant dead as a result? Yes. Does it mean we should abolish all airbags simply because the innumerable functioning ones are overlooked? No.
Your point about news becoming more specialized is 100% dead on. At that aforementioned moment in the future when free unlimited online access will seem quaint, so too will the idea that a newspaper (and their website) will cover the entertainment industry in the same manner (if it does at all) as it covers politics. TMZ may be loathed in the traditional media world for their tactics in covering aspects of the entertainment industry, but they have nothing to gain by being incorrect. They serve the people looking for that kinds of news better than any 'traditional' media outlet can. Look at LAT's automotive coverage. 15 years ago, the paper had one of the best autos section in the country. Now their coverage is reduced to Dan Neil's weekly car review, and frankly, the future I've mentioned doesn't include even that level of attention. (More disclosure...I've done some autos coverage for LAT's online autos section). Readers will be better served then by sites that are solely devoted to autos. This, ostensibly, frees up the resources at newspaper to spend time (read: money) doing the kind of gumshoe, pound-the-pavement journalism that betters our lives and allows these outlets to appropriately serve as that essential, but oft-overlooked entity, the fourth estate.
Finally, your point about the newspaper industry not being efficient as it could be is unfortunately apt. As the employee of a paper that is at the end (one hopes) of a painful and public contraction, I like to think we're more lean and nimble than many of our competitors because we've had to face the inevitable (financial) music earlier. But at some point in the very near future, the dwindling resources of others in the industry will precipitate similar cost-shedding measures on a scale that is undoubtedly keeping many an executive editor, and everyone under him/her, up late at night.
Thanks for the piece. It was, as you may have noticed, thought-provoking at the very least.
And as a final addendum, the views expressed here are solely that of undercoffler, so please, direct all ill will towards him, rather than his employer, whom he likes very much. Cheers.
Wow, you really gave me a lot to think about here. While my initial reaction is, "The writers have to make money!", I also agree that we're completely spoiled by the Internet. As consumers of information, we have everything at our fingertips. I am going to sit and think about this for a while and write a more detailed response within the next few days. Thanks for being honest about your feelings re: this topic and for taking the time to write about it. Enough cannot be said.
Allow me to start by saying that I'm extremely pleased to have the opinions of someone from within the belly of the beast expressed here, Undercoffler. I have some inkling of how Mr. Daze might say "I'm a newspaper man!" and I think I ought to be clear that my thoughts on this are not colored in any way by a desire to see writers, journalists, or even newspapers fail. But I do like to think of this as a place where the writing on the wall gets transcribed.
In this case, the writing on the wall, as I read it, is that the print media may be shriveling to a pittance of its former self, and that the news industry in general will need a massive overhaul if it is to compete in an internet age. You make a number of valid points, but I would comment on a few (okay, all) of them as follows:
Paid online content may well be a future business model for news. I don't personally see any clear path towards it, but if I did I wouldn't be writing about why I don't. There may very well be a sweet spot where the amount charged via subscription or metered service is low enough to get a critical mass of subscribers but high enough to still cover costs. It's my personally opinion that such a sweet spot does not exist that could support news organizations as we know them. I simply do not believe that the current news organizations can market a product that can compete against the niche and hyperlocal news being produced on the internet at minimal costs. And as much as I'd enjoy the chuckle I'd get from watching the Washington Post writers bend themselves into knots extolling the benefits of Free Market capitalism while their bosses collude to make it illegal for Google to use the internet, I don't think government intervention is going to be any kind of silver bullet. Keeping newspaper content off of Google News only lowers your daily hit count, which is why Google has said they'd be happy to do it.
On the fact that the New York Times is not so ridiculous as to attempt to charge its subscribers twice, we agree.
With regard to the rise of the journalist/blogger/opinion sites, while I share your regret that they are without a doubt opinionated and have been known to brush aside the rules to make a point, I feel the exact same way about the print media. I would wager that for every newspaper in the country there is a commonly held belief about its political leanings. The LAT and NYT are liberal rags. The Washington Post is a Republican newsletter. The Washington Times is run by a South Korean cultist. The Orange County Register has the one of the most conservative editorial pages in the country. The Chicago Sun-TImes, though it used to be a Murdoch paper, is about as progressive as they come. And everyone knows these things--whether or not they're even demonstrably true. We have come to a point in our culture--thanks mostly to the cable news wars--that it is merely assumed that if it comes from a major news outlet, it has an agenda. So while there very well may be plenty of objective journalists out there, their work is being contaminated by the mere fact that Americans have been inundated with "Fair and Balanced" news from both ends of the political spectrum. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that a truly objective journalist would be desperate to be able to reach a wide audience without the machinery of a major news organization. The internet has made that possible.
Finally, I fear I was too glib in my statement that we would do away with the fact-checkers. I am of the firm--and perhaps naive--belief that the truth will out and that it will always make better business sense to give the facts as they are than to give them as we might like them to be. What I should have said was that each organization/niche blog/independent journalist need not employ their own fact checkers. For the same reason that I've already mentioned, it does no good for the New York Times to print something as fact. The southern half of this country will assume the opposite is true (to paint with an extraordinary broad and unfair brush) and George Will's next piece in the Washington Post will say the opposite and confirm it for them. I don't know if you had the pleasure of reading Will's column on climate change from last February, but it was chock full of facts and figures that have been debunked and denounced far and wide, but the Post has never run a retraction or supported its facts.
I have no doubt that line editors are good people and worth their weight in gold to the journalists with whom they collaborate, but the nature of their work has changed--and I say this with greatest amount of respect possible. Verification of fact requires establishing a source document or witness, and once upon a time that was an incredibly time-consuming and resource consuming job. The rapid dissemination of nearly all source documents, video, and transcripts online has made that job dramatically less demanding. The reality is that for all but the most groundbreaking and blow-the-lid-off-of-something stories, fact checking is something that not every future news organization will need. Maybe they set up independent organizations who hire out to others for individual articles or projects. Maybe they swell the ranks of organizations like factcheck.org and other endowment organizations. Whatever the case, I imagine the future of news will need to be too streamlined for all but the largest of institutions to employ full time line editors. The others will merely let the facts out themselves.