business model

09 Jul 09

So why do we find the likes of Facebook, Digg and the mighty Google – and perhaps soon Amazon- adopting the ad-funded model to support services and software.
Pay walls may work for niche information but not for mainstream news and exclusives. That’s something that even the Wall Street Journal, poster child of the paid model, accepts.

01 Jun 09

Seven reasons charging for content won’t work « Transforming the Gaz

Taking the Tinkerbell approach to the news biz.

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future of newspapers future of news newspapers business model

Paid content has been tried before. One of the biggest myths of the newspaper business today was that we foolishly gave our content away early in the age of the Internet. Many newspapers were either slow to go online because of fear of cannibalization or erected pay walls. We finally got aggressive and free online because holding back our content and charging for it weren’t working.
This meeting is an embarrassment. Our industry fights for openness and accountability in government and we are trying to find a path for success in a digital marketplace where transparency is increasingly important. Can these people not see how foolish and hypocritical it looks to think they can huddle behind closed doors and solve our problems?
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- clapping our hands to save the newspaper industry, like we saved Tinkerbell at the movies when we were children, has more chance of succeeding than the paid-content-cartel approach that newspaper executives are dreaming and talking about

29 Apr 09

End the University as We Know It - Op-Ed Mark C. Taylor - NYTimes.com

This guy is totally on target. But short of sending our universities into bankruptcy, like GM, I don't see it happening ... unless a few smart institutions start, and force the rest to follow suit or die (kind of like the web and newspapers).

www.nytimes.com/...27taylor.html - Preview

teaching education higher ed business model

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs.
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- The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently.
- If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.
- The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.
- It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems.
- Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs.
- Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty.
- Transform the traditional dissertation.
- For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
- Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.
- Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
- Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia

21 Apr 09

Op-Ed Contributor - Small-Town Big Spending - NYTimes.com

He's asking the right questions.

www.nytimes.com/...20brokaw.html - Preview

governance business model brokaw nytimes

“This is not a cycle; it’s a reset.”
If the American people are tuned into the need to change the irresponsible, inefficient practices and systems that created those problems, why not enlist them to take the next step and radically change the antiquated public structures that exist beyond the Beltway?
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- A year ago a bipartisan state commission said that New Yorkers could save more than a billion dollars a year by consolidating and sharing local government responsibilities like public security, health, roads and education.
  One commission member, a county executive, said, “Our system of local government has barely evolved over the past one hundred years and we are still governed by these same archaic institutions formed before the invention of the light bulb, telephone, automobile and computer.”
- Is there any reason beyond local pride to maintain such duplication given the economic and population pressures of our time?
- If this is a reset, it’s time to reorganize our state and local government structures for today’s realities rather than cling to the sensibilities of the 20th century.
  If we demand this from General Motors, we should ask no less of ourselves.

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire - WSJ.com

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bloggers business model future of news WSJ

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.
the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.
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- Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.
- As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around -- but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial.
- Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging.
- As bloggers have increased in numbers, the number of journalists has significantly declined.
- The implications of bloggers for hire are substantial. While many bloggers probably support unionization in general, they have no union of their own. Most have no benefits, yet they work long hours in front of computer screens which could cause a variety of health ailments. And the owners of the big sites most often pay their bloggers as freelancers, avoiding all of those taxes and benefits that newspapers have to pay for their writers.
- Not since eBay opened its doors have so many been able to sit at their computer screens and make some money, or even make a whole living.
- Maybe it will create a resurgence in the art of writing and writing courses.
- But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most , no formal training?

20 Apr 09

BarCampOrlando: “What kind of journalism would you pay to support?” | Etan Horowitz

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future of news business model barcamp journalism

For other journalists reading this, I encourage you to try and hold similar discussions.
there are very few general interest, one size fits all publications that people pay for. Instead, they tend to pay for publications that are specialized and have an in depth focus on a particular subject, often one that helps them get a leg up in their careers.
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- yes, the industry is in a time of immense change, crisis and chaos, but it’s also a time of experimentation. Finally, some of the solutions that have been talked about for years will be tried for real.
- The group rejected the notion that charging for online content was the answer and pledged to come up with some new advertising models to support quality journalism by the end of the day. They divided their efforts into four areas:
  
  Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone.
  Create a better CraigsList.
  Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.
  Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.
- “So, how are newspapers dealing with the fact that they’re dying because everyone is reading them for free online and they are losing so much advertising revenue?”

18 Apr 09

True/Slant Tests Web Journalism Model - WSJ.com

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future of news business model online WSJ AOL advertising

True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

It is launching with 65 journalists, or "knowledge experts," assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These "headline grabs" link back to the originating outside site.
True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

It is launching with 65 journalists, or "knowledge experts," assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These "headline grabs" link back to the originating outside site.

01 Apr 09

Dan Kennedy's Rocky Times in the Music Biz : NPR Music

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music rocknroll business model

09 Mar 09

Eight barriers to local paid content | yelvington.com

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future of news newspapers business model

You might want to look into the history of attempts by general news sites to get consumers to pay for access.
How can you get them to pay if you can't even get them to visit frequently when it's free?
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- There are plenty of competitors and would-be competitors just waiting for you to strangle your own website so they can step in and steal your future.
- Local sites don't have the breadth of content to simultaneously support a paid premium content model, while maintaining enough free pages to harvest the advertising benefits of the open model.
- In local markets, the ad model is stronger than in global markets.
- When you've had a virtual monopoly for decades, you grow arrogant and develop blind spots about your own weaknesses. From the viewpoint of the consumer, you're not nearly as unique and special as you think.

25 Feb 09

Duluth News Tribune awarded training grant | Duluth News Tribune | Duluth, Minnesota

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future of news newspapers J-school business model

For the first time in Minnesota — and perhaps in the nation — a journalism school has received a grant to help two daily newspapers adapt their products to an increasingly Internet-based industry.
The Minnesota Job Skills Partnership program has given the Duluth News Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication a total of $238,000 to help retrain the newspaper staffs.
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- “All over the nation, newspaper staff members, advertising and everyone else have heard about this, and are looking closely at this as a potential model [for training],”

23 Feb 09

Wanted: Online Payment Plan for Print - Advertising Age - MediaWorks

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future of news future of newspapers magazines business model AdAge

traffic to newspaper websites was up 12% in 2008.
But certain news categories, such as sports, business, national and international news, have been commoditized, and differences in quality haven't been enough to get people to choose to pay over free alternatives.
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- while Google is great at getting people to content, it does nothing to distinguish quality.
- 77% of the members of the Association of National Advertisers say they are planning to reduce their media budgets this year, meaning nuclear winter for the media won't end until 2010 at the earliest.
- The businesses are simply going to have to get a whole lot smaller.
- publishers themselves and trade associations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which pushed for standardized ad formats that commodified banners and created even more competition in the form of ad networks.
- The media grandees weighing in had plenty of solutions (micropayments! Pay walls! ISP taxes! Nonprofit status!), but they can be distilled into two distinct camps: those who believe that consumers can be made to pay -- even a penny -- for content and those who don't.
- Mort Zuckerman, who said his New York Daily News was profitable until last year, is similarly pessimistic that a pay model of any type will save newspapers. "I think it's a wonderful idea, if it would be possible. I just don't think it is. The market will simply not accept it,"
- Mort Zuckerman, who said his New York Daily News was profitable until last year, is similarly pessimistic that a pay model of any type will save newspapers. "I think it's a wonderful idea, if it would be possible. I just don't think it is. The market will simply not accept it,"
- It was as if the media woke up, saw its shadow and realized that the print world, including American capital-J journalism, is in mid-collapse. It's finally dawning that this isn't just about the economy, and it's not going to suddenly get better when the Dow finally starts chugging upward again.
  
  Nope, this is about newspapers, and to some extent magazines, having their once-enviable franchises disintermediated by the web. Every publication now must compete with every other around the globe, many of which are willing to offer their content for free. They also face competition from thousands of aggregators, who take journalists' content, monetize it for their own profit, and, in many cases, give little or nothing back to its originators.

10 Feb 09

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Mission possible? Charging for web content

Definitely a "newsosaurus." The comments are most interesting.

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future of news future of newspapers business model

If you want assured destruction of today's newspaper newsrooms, go ahead and start charging. It will be the end.
easy-to-acquire free content on the web rapidly undercut the demand, and therefore the revenues, for their flagship physical products.
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- easy-to-acquire free content on the web rapidly undercut the demand, and therefore the revenues, for their flagship physical products.
- It is not a sustainable model to charge for the print edition while giving away the online edition. It is economic suicide, as we are seeing now.
- I think it is too late to re-impose a paid model with any prospect of market dominance, control, or profit
- The case against paid content is so irrefutable as to make any mention of paid content completely laughable.
- You notice the TV side of the industry never has this paid vs. free conversation. In fact, TV news site producers salivate at the idea of newspapers charging for content. It would open the market for them to turn their sites into the #1 local news source.
- Any newspaper that switches to paid faces an immediate threat of a disruptive start up that will offer as much or more news online for free at a much lower cost basis
- it's always been my understanding that we readers weren't paying for much more than the manufacturing and distribution costs associated with the content, which, in a sense, we were indeed getting for free.
  
  Now our readers have done us the enormous favor of buying their own printing presses (their computers) and distribution system (Internet access). I understand there's a crisis, but it sounds to me like you want to charge people for something that has been free not just for the past 15 years, but forever.
  
  Neither you nor anyone else would be talking about this if the advertising model hadn't collapsed. The real question is whether we can come up with a new model that works.
- If the newspaper industry takes the advice of old-media lions like Isaacson and Brill (both have high-profile calls for micropayments to save the industry), newspapers will die a quick death. The guys calling for this are like the music execs who fought digital tooth and nail instead of grasping the new reality and figuring out how to profit from it.
- One last point: When we indeed do "save" the news industry, the old players will be smaller than before, yet still plenty strong enough to serve the public good as they always have. But they'll have shed those cost-$10-per-copy-to-deliver-on-Sunday shackles (unless the Sunday ad inserts remain strong and it makes economic sense to continue that).
  
  Steve Outing
- Howard is right. Most news is a commodity, not because we have made it so, but because very little of it is truly unique. Couple that with low demand from consumers, many of whom would rather be entertained than informed, and you don't have a very strong case to charge for content.
- The biggest difference between what the music industry did and what newspapers could do is that people wanted music. Do people want newspaper content anymore? Should content quality be at the forefront of the conversation?
- The newspaper industry is not dying because it gives away content on the web. Try these two factors...
  
  * Penetration of the print product has been in decline for decades, impacted by TV and cable.
  * Revenue has been under pressure for the last decade due to dramatically lower rates charged by competitors on the internet.
  
  Those are destructive outside forces unrelated to the industry's decisions about the internet.
  
  Giving away content was a response to these realities in the '90s -- trying to regain audience and revenues and, everyone hoped, keep things status quo.
  
  It hasn't worked out that way.
- Moving behind a pay wall isn't a real fix, either, unless the news organization provides something of unique value; while there is a lot of good stuff in a lot of papers, there are also lots of things that aren't particularly unique - weather forecasts, for example. Papers will have to restructure pretty significantly to find niches that work for them online.
- Where's the depth newspapers have developed that people might pay for? I worked for one paper that has just about everything that's been in the print product (and then some) since the mid-80s digitized and searchable for employees. Why not open that functionality up to the user? Do you think there might be a market for a t-shirt featuring the sports page from dad's state championship. Maybe a mug with grandma and grandpa's wedding announcement?
  
  Why isn't the business staff at major papers cranking out e-books detailing the market status of different sectors, ready to be downloaded at $5 a pop? Why haven't the entertainment staffs doing e-book biographies of local musicians ... or actors ... or whatever? Podcasts of interviews with local heroes and stars available for "upgraded" members?

15 Nov 08

CEO Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis - American Press Institute

Newspaper CEO summit = shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic?
Most appear to be at the P3=Faulty Action "in hopes of a quick fix" phase, soon to be followed by the full-blown crisis phase...which then slides inexorably into dissolution.

www.americanpressinstitute.org/...ceo_summit_on_saving_an_indust - Preview

future of newspapers crisis business model summit

the industry's response to date continues to be fitful, ranging from simple cost-cutting in some companies to paralysis and denial in others, to commitment to change and innovation in still others.
50 top executives gathered at the American Press Institute for a day-long summit guided by two corporate turnaround experts.
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- faulty action in hopes of a quick fix, followed by full-blown crisis and finally dissolution of the enterprise
- As an organization moves down the crisis curve, it will find executing a recovery plan more difficult, and will have less time to do it.
- Shein, who researched the basic financials of the public companies represented at the summit, concluded that as a whole the industry is at or approaching full-blown crisis stage, though individual companies are in various phases on the continuum. And he is pessimistic about their ability to halt their fall without outside help.
- "The biggest hurdles to progress the industry's senior leadership, including some of the people in this room." Shein told the group. "I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes."
- "Cutting staffs will reduce costs, but it won't happen fast enough, and will erode the product," Miller said in a luncheon speech. "You have to reinvent your business model."
- He and Shein urged executives to spend the majority of their time on strategic initiatives for re-invention, rather than on current operations.
- Figure out how to leverage core competencies into new directions and new niches.
- "We don't have a crisis of audience," said one, noting the growth of online readership. "We have a crisis of revenue" in monetizing that traffic.
- it fell to one of the oldest participants to strike the most optimistic note:
  
  "The Internet is the best thing that's ever happened to us," he said. "We have immediacy, and we have unlimited space. The problem is that we have been very slow to react to this technology. But it's an opportunity."

12 Nov 08

'News websites must embrace video or die' - Press Gazette

www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp - Preview

video future of news business model

“Any idiot can do this, making TV is not hard, it's not complicated, it's not difficult. The technology makes it incredibly simple.”
And he said print publications “must have video” on their websites or else go out of business.
“If you only have print or stills and your competitor has video your going to get eaten.”
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- He said print journalists were danger of becoming as obselete as the New England whalers of the 19th century.
- “You are not in the newspaper business...When new technology like the internet comes along you can hide from it or you can embrace it.”
  He said: “Like the oilmen of New England you are already in the business but you have to remember the business you are in.

24 Aug 08

Crowd Funding - A Different Way to Pay for the News You Want - NYTimes.com

The idea, which they are calling “community-funded journalism,” is now being tested in the San Francisco Bay area

www.nytimes.com/...24kershaw.html - Preview

nytimes crowdsourcing journalism news media business model spot.us

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What if the business model for news ain’t broke? | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog