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.
Colorado GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams, in a Westword article, recognizes the problem his party has:
“We want fiscal conservatives to be our standard bearers, because we need to restore our credibility on that issue. We lost that credibility nationally, and we lost it here in Colorado, too, when our legislative majorities appeared to be more concerned with social issues than with confronting the beginnings of our fiscal problems five or six years ago.”
He wants you to give them ONE more last chance. Just ONE. They really mean it THIS time.
Westword was kind enough to publish my letter on Denver’s Initiative 300 this week (third letter down). Here it is:
In your excellent piece on Denver’s I-300, you list several groups opposed to the measure. You conclude the list by mentioning that “even the Libertarian Party of Colorado” opposes it. The use of “even” connotes surprise that the LP would oppose the measure. There should be no surprise. I-300 would require that police automatically confiscate private property of individuals for failure to show government issued identification upon request. This is exactly the kind of statism the Libertarian Party opposes. Remember, it is never about “left versus right” with the Libertarian Party. It is always about the power of the government versus the rights of the individual.
I-300 expands the power of the state and decreases property rights of the individual. Of course we oppose such a measure. Let freedom ring.
David K. Williams, Jr.
State Chair, Libertarian Party of Colorado
Censor and Sensibility
Wake up and smell the coffee:Censorship gets a bad rap. If the government is not involved, censorship is great. In fact, life would be nigh on impossible without it. Censorship is the examination of something “in order to suppress or delete any contents considered objectionable.” If you did not censor, you would have to read everything, watch everything, and listen to everything. That would be hard.
Have you ever turned the channel because you were offended? Have you turned off a movie because your mother entered the room? Do you refuse to buy girlie magazines? Have you been given a piece of art you did not hang on your wall? Do you turn the radio to another channel when a song you dislike comes on?
You, my friend, are a censor. You have personally suppressed something you find objectionable. And that’s good. The only bad censorship is government censorship. Unfortunately, people confuse the two. Personal censorship is not government censorship. We cannot do without the former. We must never succumb to the latter.
This unfortunate confusion manifested itself when the owners of a Diedrich coffeehouse recently removed artwork depictingSaddam Hussein and a separate painting of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (Off Limits, June 16). The artist, Miguel Flores, said the removal of his paintings was censorship. Yep. So what? A private company made a decision about what goes on its walls. Stop the presses.
I have some drawings I would like to display, too. I wonder if Flores would let me put them in his house. If not, he is censoring me and my work.
If the government had ordered the removal of the paintings, I would be right there protesting with Flores. That is not the case. The state does not run this Diedrich coffeehouse. “Mr. Diedrich” does.
David K. Williams Jr.
Denver
From the InDenverTimes, “Post’s owner to charge for some content at Salt Lake City and others.”
Charging for content only insures ain’t nobody gonna read it.
Brilliant.
“We can’t continue to give everything away for free,” says (Dean) Singleton (CEO of MediaNews Group). “When you give it away for free, it has no value. When you begin charging for it, it has some value.”
Patty Calhoun over at Westword might disagree with you. Broadcast networks might disagree with you.
It’s called “advertising.” Sell some.
