Shirky to Newspapers: It’s a Revolution… Deal With It!

When a New Media blogger as influential as Craig Stoltz (whose Web2.0h…Really? was ranked one of Time’s Top 25 Blogs) confers PnR status on an article — shorthand for print and read, i.e., worthy of taking up three-dimensional space — you know you’d better sit up and pay attention.

In this case, Stoltz was referring to Clay Shirky’s March 15 post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” a piece that many are already calling a seminal piece on the rise and fall (and ultimate triumph) of the newspaper industry.

Shirky — NYU professor; contributor to Wired, the NYT, the WSJ, and Harvard Business Review; author of last year’s  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations — is no slouch in the world of New Media-crit himself. more »

Voluntary Subscriptions: A New Spin on Pitching Reader Donations

Maybe it’s just the idealistic blogosphere in which I immerse myself, but the rallying cry of “reader donations will ensure the survival of journalism!” seems to be picking up steam. Jason Preston of EatSleepPublish has a post this week about why local news sites like West Seattle Blog ought to offer their readers a “voluntary subscription” option.

As always with persuading people to adopt new ideas, it’s all in the pitch, and I think Preston is really on to something. At first glance, the term “voluntary subscriptions” may sound meaningless, cryptic, or a sucker’s game. (After all, the content’s already free.) But by creating a commodity (i.e., a value-added subscription) out of what is essentially a donation, it communicates to the readers that they would be getting something for kicking in some bucks — which, of course, they would. more »

Will the NYT Make Blogging Profitable — But Leave it With a Wounded Foot?

Our local NPR station, KBIA, has an excellent show, “Views of the News,” in which three journalism professors here at the University of Missouri (Lee Wilkins, Charles Davis, and Mike McKean) discuss the significance (or insignificance, as the case may be) of the major media events of the week.

This week’s show (definitely worth a listen) was near and dear to the topic of the Information Valet Project: it centered around the sorely needed monetization of news sources. Specifically, the panelists discussed the New York Times‘ new initiative to feature hyperlocal blogs on the NY metro areas, expressing deep cynicism that the effort would result in anything remotely involving dollar signs. more »

Charging for Trust? The Perils of Information Investment on an Unstable (Free) Platform

Is ”too free to be trustworthy” today’s web-wise version of the old adage “too good to be true”?

MediaShift’s Mark Glaser had a great cautionary post last week about the dangers of professional and/or personal overreliance on any one sharing-is-caring 2.0 platform, such as Facebook or Twitter. [I'll refer to these types of sites here as 'SN/UGC' for Social Networking/User-Generated Content.]

In today’s unpredictable climate of spend-venture-capital-cash-now, find-revenue-later SN/UGCs, Glaser advises, it’s folly to put all your information eggs in one basket.Better to spread your (virtual) self across a number of platforms, so if “your” SN/UGC tanks or becomes a capricious master, you won’t feel like your (real) self is lost at sea, too. more »

What Counts as “Value” on a News Site?

Back in December, Eat Sleep Publish’s Jason Preston predicted that fervent readers of a given news site would be willing to open up their wallets, if asked nicely. Using the Financial Times’ model, he visualizes a system of “metered content,” whereby the first thirty or so visits to a news site would be free, but users would incur a charge for looking at additional site content.

From there, Preston channels Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory and predicts that the financial contributions of the top 10 percent of users (the ”engaged audience”) will subsidize the remaining 90 percent of freeloading users.

Preston doesn’t go into much detail about how such a system would actually work—that is, whether the site would charge a flat fee for that additional content or use a pay-as-you-go system. Instead, he’s more concerned with debunking the myth that the public will revolt against anything more expensive than free. more »

Desperate Times Call for… Micropayments?

Take heart, desperate news media companies: Just because a decent micropayment system hasn’t taken off at any point in the last decade doesn’t mean a good one — if and when it came along — wouldn’t hold the panacea to your economic woes.

David Sarno’s LA Times column this week urges newspapers to quit complaining and start doing some “mad science” in the form of converting their free-riding online readers to (gasp!) paid readers. more »