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 »

Vivian Schiller on the Future of NPR: A More Cohesive, Effective Network of Local News

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/3349090]

KnightPulse, the Knight Foundation’s online discussion forum, brings us an interview this week with new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. The segment centered on the direction of NPR in the midst of the current economic downturn, and Schiller, the former head of New York Times.com, conveyed an optimistic outlook for the public radio network, citing the “loyalty and devotion” of its 25 million NPR listeners and the network’s continuing push to digitize content and create a stronger cohesion between the network and its 800 member stations.

As for all the buzz about “hyperlocal” news? “I don’t think anyone’s doing it very well,” Schiller said. “The landscape is wide open.” And though she doesn’t say so overtly, Schiller’s comments about strengthening the partnerships between NPR and its member stations seemed to hint that the company would take a bigger leadership role helping those stations innovate and distribute local news content more effectively.

-Emily Sussman

Can Kachingle “Change” the Unpaid Content Paradigm?

In today’s depressed economy, status symbols like fancy cars and logo-embellished shirts broadcast foolishness, not prestige. It makes far more sense to spend what (little) we have on things that sustain us physically, professionally and intellectually. Right?

In theory, yes. But in real life, only my landlord and my grocery store have business models in place for collecting my dwindling dollars.

I know I’m not alone in relying on blogs like TechCrunch or EatSleepPublish to keep me up-to-date professionally, or in feeding my intellectual curiosity with the free online version of the New York Times Book Review and its kin. And while I’m grateful for the knowledge-service they provide, that’s all I can do: be (passively) grateful. The sites’ producers don’t even ask me to chip in, let alone provide a sidebar widget that would enable me to compensate them.

Which is where the elephant comes stomping into the room. As in, if I’m not paying for it — and, by extension, nobody else is either — how on earth can these enterprises keep churning out content? 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 »

Evaluating Blodget’s Paid NYT Model

Reacting (as many bloggers did) to Michael Hirschorn’s apocalyptic scenario for the New York Times in the Atlantic, former stock analyst and Internet publisher Henry Blodget proposed a three-pronged plan last week to save the paper. “Current management doesn’t seem to have one,” says Blodget. “So it’s up to us.”  Here’s his strategy:

1)  Cut overall costs by 40 percent by 2010.
HOW: Reduce the number of editors. Fire reporters for not being “productive” enough, as quantified by page hits. Shut down bureaus. Shutter non-essential sections of the paper. Consolidate newsrooms.

2)  Make its print product profitable.
HOW: Charge the most loyal print supporters more and more for their subscriptions as paid circulation drops. 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 »