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Kristen Wyatt’s story in today’s Denver Post severely mischaracterizes my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. (See “Colo. lawmakers urged to ban ’spice’“)
She wrote:
Also, a handful of people testified that the ban is unnecessary.
David K. Williams Jr., a Denver lawyer, said a state ban would be like banning table salt or fatty foods in restaurants. Asked about whether a ban wouldn’t help discourage Spice use among youths, Williams scoffed.
“It’s my responsibility to teach my daughter to make good decisions, not the government’s,” Williams said.
This was my response to the editor regarding the story:
Dear editor:
Kristen Wyatt’s characterization of my response to Senator King’s question is completely inaccurate.
I didn’t scoff at all. I agreed with Senator King that [the synthetic cabbinoids] should be banned for minors, just like cigarettes and alcohol. The implication that I was anything less than respectful before the committee is offensive and inaccurate.
My entire point was that prohibition does not work and never has. I did not compare salt and fat foods to synthetic cannabinoids, I said that banning of things for “own good,” like salt, is nannyism and is not the role of government.
It is no wonder paper copies of news are harder and harder to find.
For the record, I get along very well with the bill’s sponsor, Senator Mike Kopp. We just happen to disagree on this particular piece of legislation. The Gadsden Society and I are working in favor of the “Healthcare Opportunity & Patient Empowerment Act” he is sponsoring. This bill would allow Colorado to join an interstate compact with at least one other state and opt out of Obamacare.
The Saturday Denver Post teases a story appearing tomorrow:
Debate the costs, but two economists say bailouts probably prevented a depression.
And as long as a drunk keeps drinking, he’ll prevent a hangover.
According to an article in today’s Denver Post (See Senate candidates generate options on energy policy), Democratic Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff
“… called Thursday for the U.S. to require that 30 percent of electricity be generated by renewable sources within a decade.”
“Renewable sources” cost more than our current sources of energy. No matter how many unicorns Romanoff and the Greens conjure up in their vivid imaginations, costs matter.
Those hurt most by higher costs are not evil corporate bankers lighting cigars with $100 bills. Those hurt most are poor people that budget their expenses down to the penny.
Rich people will write a check for higher heating costs. Poor people will get cold.
According to an article in today’s Denver Post (See Lunches, schooled) several Colorado public school lunch ladies are learning how to cook healthier. The Post says
Thanks to federal stimulus dollars and Colorado Health Foundation funding, Colorado could be the first state where leaders from every school district learn to cook from scratch.
Thanks to “federal stimulus dollars?” Sure, that’s the accepted newspeak term. It would be more accurate, however, to say “thanks to money borrowed on behalf of your unborn grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” lunch ladies are learning how to cook. “Federal stimulus dollars” are treated by too many Americans as if they were magic beans that cost nothing and provide unlimited bounty.
Unfortunately, their ain’t no beanstalk and there ain’t no golden goose at the top of it.
Statists have an incredibly poor view of mankind. They believe that the government must control the people from their basest instincts. They believe that if left to their own devices, they will rob, steal, rape and murder. They believe people must be controlled.
They fear freedom.
Jill Moring, of Pueblo West, demonstrates this belief in her letter to the editor of the Denver Post today.
The Colorado State University Board of Governors is now allowing guns on campus. I would not want to be the faculty member who has to tell the student with a gun in his backpack, “No, there is no way you can pass this course, and no, you will not graduate this year.”
Wow. Ms. Moring believes that people are so base, so mean, so nasty and so brutish, that a college student would shoot her professor for bad grades.
It is no wonder statists fear freedom. They believe people are evil and must be controlled.
In the print edition of today’s Sunday Denver Post, a front page headline declares:
Plunge washes markets in fear
The thought of politicians and bureaucrats devising financial regulations brings forth an image of cavemen offering sacrifices to the weather gods so the frightening lightning will cease. They don’t understand the causes, but that doesn’t stop them from doing something.
Compare these two headlines about the same meeting:
1.
“Gloves off for GOP, Obama
A forum meant to tone down rancor instead turns up the ill will”
2.
The first is the Denver Post headline of an Associated Press story. The second is from the New York Times’ coverage of the same event.
These disparate views of a singular meeting gives one pause. Do not trust the “news” until you have had the opportunity to review as many different accounts of the event as possible.
Then doubt it some more.
(I didn’t link to the Post story because the online version has a different headline now. I have picture of the headline in the hard copy of the paper that was delivered to my house.)
The January 10 Denver Post published my letter under the title, “Why smoking ban shouldn’t apply on stage.” The letter replied to a January 4 editorial.
The Post argues that, because actors can use fake cigarettes on stage, the state smoking ban should apply. But just because The Post is capable of publishing fake news and commentary doesn’t mean it should be forbidden from publishing the real thing. The owners should decide policy, and patrons should decide which plays to see. It is a matter of property rights as well as free expression. By inviting politicians to set policy in the playhouse, The Post invites them to do the same in the newsroom.
Free association is also a critical right under assault by the smoking ban, in the theater as well as other private establishments. Actors too have a right to reach mutually agreeable terms for working. A play properly involves the mutual consent of theater owners, actors, and patrons. Politicians violate the rights of all those parties by interfering.
The Post is schizophrenic regarding the First Amendment (which is odd given that free expression is what enables newspapers to do business). Thankfully on January 22 the Post stood with free speech by declaring that individuals retain their rights when they join an association to promote ideas with their financial resources.
Westword’s Michael Roberts reports that “Dean Singleton… plans to start charging readers for lotsa online content at select MediaNews papers in California and Pennsylvania beginning in 2010.” This is relevant to us in Colorado because Singleton also publishes the Denver Post. Are fees for the online Post in our future?
God, I hope so.
Good journalism is hard work. Good investigative journalism is especially hard and time-consuming work. People tend not do do a lot of hard work without compensation. (I imagine Roberts would confirm this.) Thus, journalism needs to pay.
Journalism can pay in one of three general ways: advertising, philanthropic contributions, and reader payments. Advertising can be direct or indirect; for example, Michelle Malkin runs direct advertising, and her entire blog serves to advertise her books. (You’ll notice that I advertise my own book, Values of Harry Potter, on my web page. And it makes a fine addition to the tree or stocking!) I would be interested in learning how much of the Incredible Shrinking Westword’s revenues come from print versus online advertising. (While the weekly’s print edition has gotten noticeably smaller, its online content has expanded dramatically.)
I doubt anybody is going to make a generous gift to the Post.
That leaves reader contributions to supplement advertising revenues. These payments can be by the piece or via subscriptions.
As I suggested earlier, I think papers (and it’s funny even to still call them “papers”) should give readers a choice: watch an annoying ad, pay a monthly or annual subscription, or pay to read a single article at a time.
How is that not the best of all worlds? Cheapskates can still read content for free, except they have to pay with their time by watching a real advertisement. Regular readers can subscribe, preferably for a low annual rate (I would seriously consider paying, say, $50 per year to read the Post online). And occasional readers who value their time can pay some token amount — perhaps an amount that varies with the ambition of the piece — to read a single article. As I also mentioned before, the key to this is to figure out a very-fast way to make micropayments (else there is no time savings).
The fact is that readers who value good content and don’t want to waste time looking at ads will be prepared to pay to read that content. I absolutely hate the Post’s online ads that pop up, block text, push text down the page, and otherwise annoy the living hell out of me when all I’m trying to do is read a spot of news. I would much rather pay a little than deal with those sorts of ads.
I think it’s worth revisiting what Post editor Greg Moore said in September:
In terms of advertising being a means of supporting original [journalism]… right now advertising provides like 85 percent of our revenue. It’s still a huge, huge, huge driver. It’s a huge source of revenue. It’s going to be probably for a while. But I think our survival — and when I say survival I’m not talking about the newspaper, I’m talking about our ability to do journalism — I think we’ll have to shift to a different model. And I think that model is that the user will have to pay for the content that he or she consumes.
I don’t think that the cat is out of the bag. I think that the record industry sort of proved that, the music industry sort of proved that you can change people’s behavior. Napster, in the mid-1990s, everyone thought that would just sort of kill everything, and they put those people in jail, put them out of business, and now people pay for music. They do it differently — they don’t buy albums anymore, they buy singles, but they still pay a lot of money for music.
So I think there’s still hope for us, that we can sort of reverse this trend. As somebody said, I think the worst decision that was made by the owners of newspapers was to sort of be stampeded into giving away their content for free. But it doesn’t mean that it’s over.
Unfortunately, rather than quote somebody who knows what he’s talking about, such as Moore, Roberts quotes some clueless blog post by Rob Burgess.
Burgess quotes survey results from NewFiction:
80 percent of consumers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they would discontinue their favorite free print content if they were asked to pay for it. Less than 10 percent of respondents would agree to subscription models; only three percent would opt for micropayments.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner nicely summarize the problem with this in their new book SuperFreakonomics: “There is good reason to be skeptical of data from personal surveys. There is often a vast gulf between how people say they behave and how they actually behave” (page 7).
If you ask people if they want to pay for something they now get for free, what do you expect them to say? They’re going to give you some variant of “no.”
But if a person actually has a choice of reading a great article and paying, versus not reading that article, in at least some cases the person is going to pay up and ask for more. (Again, I think newspapers would be smart to offer a third option of spending time watching an ad, probably in the form of a short video. These sorts of ads are already common on a variety of web pages.)
So Burgess’s first argument is bunk. Let us turn to his second argument:
You ruined everything in the beginning by starting with giving everything away for free. It has now been almost 15 years since the Internet broke wide and you’re just NOW getting around to asking people to pay for your content? I don’t blame people for not wanting to pay for it anymore, why should they? Who would pay for something they can get for free?
The options are not “get free content” versus “pay for content.” The other option is “get no content,” at least as far as investigative journalism is concerned. With that as the alternative, paying doesn’t look so bad after all. People “should” pay, and they should be willing to, if that’s the only way to get hard-to-produce content they want to read. (Again, easy-to-produce content will remain free, and ads can help pay for hard-to-produce content.)
What Burgess seems to think ridiculous is Singleton’s comment, “We have to condition readers that everything is not free.” But Singleton’s comment is perfectly sensible. Moore uses the example of paying for music online. Today many people pay to receive television stations that they could otherwise get for free, because the reception is better and the broadcast stations are packaged with cable-only stations. Consumers change their behavior all the time, even (or especially) after they say they won’t.
There ain’t no such thing as free journalism. If journalists aren’t willing to work without compensation, philanthropists don’t pay, and advertising doesn’t pay enough, the only alternative is for readers to pay, if they want the benefit of the product.
Really advertising is a way of extracting a payment of time from readers. Again, I think papers should offer that alternative. I would much rather pay in dollars, as for me that would be the far less costly alternative.
At last month’s media panel, somebody (I believe Adrienne Russell) mentioned the idea of micropayments for online media content. Such payments might help save the newspaper industry as well as help fund better bloggers.
The idea is that readers would pay a small fee — say a quarter or fifty cents — to read an article online. A popular story that drew a hundred thousand readers could do quite well for a publication.
Consider how the Wall Street Journal presents its news stories. It gives you the headline and the opening sentences, then asks you to subscribe. But I don’t subscribe to that paper, because I rarely want to read one of its news stories (and its opinions are available for free). But, if I could pay a small, one-time fee to read the occasional story, I’d probably pay that paper a few dollars per year. That’s not a lot, but multiplied by a few hundred thousand extra readers it could add up. Indeed, newspapers could offer monthly subscriptions for regular readers as well as micropayments for occasional readers.
At the media panel, Greg Moore of the Denver Post said a couple of things of particular interest to this issue. First, he said that newspapers might have to print less frequently. Second, readers would have to pay for online content, eventually, for newspapers to survive and thrive. I can envision a newspaper that goes to press, say, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. The print edition would be stuffed with ads, comics, classifieds, crosswords — stuff people like to touch and feel. They would be big, perhaps nearly as many pages as seven days runs now, so subscription rates could at least stay even while production and distribution costs dropped dramatically. This would be the answer to traditionalists, who actually enjoy getting their hands dirty reading the paper. (I would as soon eat dinosaur eggs for breakfast.)
Under such a scheme, the Post would raise revenue from print and online ads, print and online subscriptions, online only subscriptions, and micropayments for individual stories. Publications that used micropayments would probably want to make some significant portion of its content available for free.
Bloggers (the kind with actual readers) and strictly online publications might also be able to employ micropayments for more ambitious stories.
The key to micropayments, of course, is to make them easy. A PayPal account might get the job done, or perhaps PayPal could adapt its existing program to make micropayments easier. Most people aren’t going to pay a small fee to read an article unless it’s as easy as clicking a button or maybe two.
One publication that has already combined ads, micropayments, and subscriptions is The Objective Standard. The publication shows the first part of an article online for no cost. To read the entire article, one must subscribe or “Purchase a PDF of this article” for, in this case, $4.95. (Micropayments for journal articles or specialty articles can be higher than for regular newspaper stories.)
The more I think about it, the more I love the idea of micropayments. Don’t saddle me with a long-term commitment. I have enough of those. Don’t litter my screen with pop ups and flashing lights trying to sell me crap. (That said, a third option to a subscription or a micropayment might be to watch, say, a thirty second video advertising some product before reading the article. I notice that Fox already does this for online video.) Just give me the option of paying a small fee to read something that interests me.
This article has been brought to you at no cost by FreeColorado.com.
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