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