The Independent: first victim of a confounding digital future
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It launched the "i" a tabloid print newspaper from scratch relatively recently, and the decline in subscribers to the flagship broadsheet was more or less equalled by the increase in subscribers to the (lower cost) tabloid. The total readership stayed around the same (unlike all other major UK print newspapers). In other words, an already low circulation newspaper effectively cannibalised its own readership. It's an open question whether launching the "i" saved some of the Independent's editorial or killed it.
There is more than fluff there. For example:
"Suspected Russian air strikes destroy MSF children's hospital - despite so-called Syria 'ceasefire"
and
"Anger as boycott of Israeli goods to become a criminal offense"
and a lot more.
It's difficult to conclude the people behind their online strategy had any love for the broadsheet newspaper or any desire to position it as editorially weighty.
Here's their click-bait trash (I have no other words for it, it's not even good advertising): https://s3.amazonaws.com/external_clips/attachments/43217/or...
And now compare to the Indy homepage... for a paper which has historically been pro civil liberties and not afraid of going against journalistic norms, this is a real pity.
People supplied small scale infrastructure for free. Supplying the sort of infrastructure necessary to run the internet at scale is very likely impossible without some sort of commercialisation. You need full time people to keep it going, so you have to pay them because they have rent and food bills. You can't run things on a voluntary basis once they get to a certain scale.
Likewise with professionally produced content - you just can't expect it to happen without paying someone to do it because it takes more time to make than you can reasonably expect people to give for free. People need to eat, which means you have to pay them.
That, of course, does not automatically mean you have to have a corporation involved. Something like Patreon[1] would work just as well.
Maybe that's the answer, then. Speaking of media and journalism, I see very little of value coming from the large centralized outlets nowadays. There's entirely too much agenda pushing, non-objectivity being paraded around as if that's a positive, "native" advertisements, banality as "breaking news", and all the other nonsense everyone already knows.
Think about it - look at how guarded you have to be when consuming news to ensure you're not consuming an advertisement or a propaganda piece. Look how often you have to ask the question "What is this person trying to get me to believe?"
This shouldn't be necessary!
I think we can do better. And I think the problem isn't with the players per se, but with the game as its rules are currently written. That means we start over, with a new architecture, new everything.
Call me an extremist, but I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that things like news shouldn't be profit makers. The desire for more money in that industry perverts just about everything it touches. What good is paying reporters to go source facts if they're going to be distorted and manipulated by the time they're presented to the public?
And the kind of news and editorials provided by the community (social media posts, forum content, blog posts, wiki articles, etc) could well be a better replacement for it. After all, they're already more accurate than the vast majority of the commercial media (since there are fewer financial/political incentives to lie), and the amount of ads and tracking is a lot less as well.
The question was whether commercial content can survive.
IMHO the problem is that it's still too hard to pay for something like an online newspaper. From a usability perspective, I want to enter in some payment information once and then be able to read seamlessly for a year (for example). Meaning that I don't want to share a bunch of personal information, or my FaceBook profile, and I don't want to create a separate userID to log into the site.
Part of this comes down to having an ID that is both reliable and portable across devices, while not being tied to other personal information, and requires zero effort from the user. That's a hard problem, but I think it's one that needs to be solved.
The ID thing is not difficult and keeping it anonymous is also pretty easy, but I don't think anonymity should be required. It should be an option.
The ID thing does not exist. I've said this before, the internet needs strong identity to resolve a lot of problems. You can always strip identity away in places that require anonymity. The problem here is that if you go to the online newspaper, there is no way for them to know who you are to verify the prior payment. I guess that line of thought narrows the problem - they don't need to know who you are, only that you've paid, but that's very close to the same thing.
Think of it like google/fb login. I can ask for the bare minimum on my site and basically just get a token. It doesn't tell me who you are, but just that you have an ID in the google/fb system.
Here's an example of member written and submitted news.
Woa !! Google search for member submitted news comes up with 246 million results !!
Disclaimer: I have no idea of the quality of any of these member submitted news pages. They could all be wack jobs. Opednews does have some good writers.
Much of what once came at a price is now available for free (to users). From sites like YouTube, Coursera, EdX, Skype, open access journals, etc. to content created and shared for free by millions of people on social media.
Why would news be different?
For example: Open access journals aren't free. They are paid for through predominantly public funding and pubic/private grants to researchers and universities. They are only free in the sense that we are getting rid of the middle-man (private publishers) that in many cases have increasingly dubious value (pretty much all of the labour is actually carried out by uncompensated researchers) and in many are actually parasitic.
But it's a role increasingly performed by technology, and the traditional media may be as obsolete now as other middle men.
Of course someone has to pay for that, but the service can be free for many users, paid for by alternative revenue models.
My department at my alam mater edits a top 3 journal in my original discipline. My alma mater has to buy a subscription for this journal (including the hardback version that nobody reads) with articles written by uncompensated academics paid for with public funds; edited, copyedited and typeset by my uncompensated university's faculty paid for with public funds; and reviewed anonymously by uncompensated academics paid for with public funds. What do all of these parties get in exchange that costs the university library so much? Prestige for the department, university, and individual CVs for being associated with a top 3 journal in their discipline that happens to be owned by a private company.
That seems like a parasitic relationship to me when the universities can just run the open access journal and retain the editorial board for very little by themselves. This is happening, but it just takes too long for a new open access journal to build reputation when careers are at stake with being associated with top journals.
Even if not "really free" most of them now have marginal profits, whereas the use to command a premium in the past.
Now that the monopoly is broken, other parties are providing services give for free. It turns out that many users are happy with those services.
Some users wanted news enough to pay for it. Those users now pay subscriptions.
However, the old news was subsidised by the users who just wanted entertainment. The new news is paid for by a smaller group. They must either pay more, or accept less news.
I pay for financial news. There is no other news I would be prepared to pay for. I am not prepared to pay for entertainment, except the cinema and overpriced popcorn.
Internet advertising comes with much better feedback mechanisms than ever before possible, destroying those irrational beliefs.
Secondarily: advertising quality has generally been correlated to price. Internet advertising reduces the price so far that we don't just get the equivalent of a local used-car dealer in between the national toilet-paper ad and the international fast-food restaurant ad, we get a Nigerian 419 scam and Ed's Fantasy Football League afterwards.
Like most things these days, finding good journalism tends to be exceedingly rare. In a world of over saturation of everything (books, movies, music, news), you really have to dig to find something that is objective, politically unbiased, and fair.
Even 5 years ago, it was much easier to find dependable news sources and solid, objective reporting. Nowadays, I find I'm searching a lot longer to find something which isn't outwardly slanted in one political direction or the other.