The Case for Paid Content
Earlier this week, the New York Times ended its paid TimesSelect service - the one that had previously offered columnist content and other features at a premium. I was a subscriber - and didn't have a problem paying $7.95 a month to get access to columnists and archives.
The reason given by NYTimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller had to do with the potential for targeted online advertising, according to a story in the paper today. New traffic was directed via search engines to the site, and once users arrived they didn't have access to stories. Banking on the idea that large numbers of daily visitors, even if they're not loyal site readers, would increase ad impressions, it appears to be more lucrative for the Times to focus on site advertising than on building a paid subscriber base.
And so we're back to square one. Content supported mainly through advertisers.
This is a losing proposition. Yes, I know that publishing anything, even a blog, costs money - and that money has to come from somewhere.
From my vantage point, newspapers made a mistake years ago, sanitizing and stripping away all sense of personality from storytelling. In the name of objectivity, we created now-ubiquitous templates for long-form, boring news. We awarded our colleagues who managed to craft a pithy analogy in their nut graphs and gave out special kudos to the reporter who could write a single sentence answering who, what, where, when, why and how...authorities said. If those first few paragraphs of a story were interesting and told us everything we needed to know, what did it matter if the remaining 20 inches were dry as hell?
And on the other side, broadcasters, facing stiff competition from 24-hour cable channels, distilled an entire day's events into minute-long nuggets of factoid. Three people are dead in an apparent homicide. There was a car crash on I-95. The Ravens lost. It'll be sunny and 76 tomorrow. Repeat.
Is it any wonder that news consumers have fled to the web, where the storytelling in any form (gossip, interactive visuals, news, sports, politics) is paramount?
Why was I happy to pay for TimesSelect? Because I can find out the latest facts on who blew up who in the Middle East from multiple sources. With so much available information, I don't necessarily value the simple reporting as much as I did before 1996, when all this Internet stuff started. But if Thomas Friedman shares his thoughts on the most recent suicide bombing there, even if I disagree with him, that information is something I'm compelled to think about, synthesize, and potentially share.
Point is, I think that publishers are missing an opportunity. I've mentioned many times before at conferences and in classes that I think the future role of a journalist will be as a highly-trained filter/ aggregator. There's just too much information available and too many "citizen reporters" willing to do the legwork once reserved only for newspapermen. And besides, with constant staff cuts and drastically shrinking newsrooms, what editor has the luxury of sending out her reporters to cover a local rally or politician's speech?
I want someone that I can trust to navigate me through what I need to know and what I don't. On top of that, I want storytelling. Wire copy doesn't satisfy me anymore - especially not when average bloggers are pulling AP stories into their own columns verbatim and then commenting on the news.
Tomorrow night, I'll be at Temple teaching my Internet Publishing Class - and we're going to spend some time looking through my students' initial proposals on how to fund a website with less than 30% advertising revenue. I'll share what we come up with...and of course, I'd love to continue the discussion here...
