Appetite for Destruction: why an "iTunes for News" is a bad idea

You can learn a lot of the wrong lessons from Apple: You can attribute the success of the iPod to the fact that people like white plastic, and so you can dip your crappy doodad in a can of paint. You can say that the success of the iPhone is because people really like touch screens, and so you can make another terrible cell phone -- now with touch-screeny goodness. And, as journalists and journalism theorists by the dozen are saying recently, you can look at the success of the iTunes Store and say that it proves that "people will pay for content."

That was exactly what was said a good half-dozen times at Chicago's Journalism Town Hall, which saw 350 people cram into a conference room to discuss journalism's future, this weekend: Look to iTunes and follow its lead into a magical land of news articles paid by their devoted readers. It worked for Apple, right? Why not us?

Well, first off I'm hard pressed to believe that people love articles the way they love music. Don't get me wrong -- I believe in the power and importance of journalism (hell, I teach it). But how often do you go back and listen to a song you love? Compare that to how many times you re-read an article. You're not going to put a bunch of articles on shuffle any more than you might take a bunch of clippings, toss them into the air, and read them in the order they came down in. The analogy simply doesn't hold up. It's a false comparison.

But there's a bigger issue here than simply an incorrect analogy.

You know who hates iTunes? The major record labels. From the iTunes store's inception, they have chafed against the rules and requests that Apple has placed upon them. Some have threatened to leave (Universal famously did for a time in 2007). Others offered Digital Rights Management-free tracks to Amazon long before Apple got them, in the hopes of propping up Amazon's fledging service. They invested in streaming services, they created their own download services (their most ambitious, TotalMusic, closed this year). None of it, not even the good ideas (and I'm probably being charitable here), have worked. And, as a result, the labels find themselves in a very different place than they were before Apple came along. It's not a place they want to be.

iTunes threatened the established order: it proved that the labels were not as powerful as they claimed. Even more threatening, it demonstrated a road forward where major record labels will become even less important.

It seems a little silly then that big newspapers would look to iTunes: it's embracing your own destruction.

The big record labels' entire business was built around moving little plastic discs around the world, similar to how a newspaper's business was built around moving paper through a printing plant and on to you. That's about 60-70% of the cost of producing a newspaper: getting the ink on it and moving the damn thing around. Moving things from place to place--be it plastic discs or bundles of paper--is very difficult and expensive. It's the kind of business that rewards economies of scale and, as a result, allows for huge concentrations of power and money. It's the kind of business that creates five major record labels and a dozen or so major news companies (that's a generous number, actually, once you get past the first five or six you're down to small town paper chains). It's the kind of business that comes crashing down the quickest once its central complication--moving things from here to there--disappears. With the efficiencies of digital distribution, the established order is not simply threatened, it is broken.

And so it's understandable that those within the established order would grasp at ideas that would allow that central complication to continue: control the digital content, sell it to people that want it. Hence the many, many arguments put forth at the Chicago Journalism Town Hall in favor of the "razor blade model" (give someone a Kindle-like device for free, sell them the content to put on it), or the "cable TV model" (bundle a bunch of services together for a single price), and the good old "iTunes for news" model (selling articles a la carte--but hanging onto the sales side too).

None of those arguments are about saving journalism, they're about saving the established order. It's no surprise then who is advocating them, and also no surprise that those most critical of them at the Journalism Town Hall were those outside the journalism establishment, people like Chi-Town Daily News editor Geoff Doughrety whose local news upstart gets closer and closer to besting the Tribune's metro section.

Nobody doubts that there's a trouble in journalism right now. But the real threat isn't to journalism, it's to the business models that have long grown fat on the spoils of controlling the movement of things from place to place.

So we can talk about saving journalism, or we can talk about saving the established order, but we can't talk about both.

Comments

[wetshoes]

There's an editorial component to newspapers that I miss on the web. My newspaper editors have selected feature stories, layout, pictures, and placement. Frankly I like that pre-digestion. On the web it's still too hard to sort the good from the bad.

Actually I think huff post is the best example of a web-based newspaper there is. It has sections, it has headlines, it has features, and it has great writers, and the ads aren't intrusive. But I dunno how anyone gets paid for their work, and I worry about that. I want to read good writers. I can give up the newspaper's expensive print and distribution, but I don't want to give up the writers.

[GeoffDougherty]

@ valkyrie607: The Chi-Town Daily News is, in fact, following the NPR model. You're welcome to help us, too (Though please don't stop supporting public radio. We love them as much as you do). Chitowndailynews.org/about/donate

@dan: Thanks for the kind words. One additional thing about the iTunes/newspaper disconnect: Downloading music on the internet was a pain in the butt before iTunes. You're essentially paying a convenience fee. For $9.99, Apple will save you the trouble of finding an album on bitTorrent, trying to download it from a couple of dead links, finding a good one, waiting an hour for the resulting file to finish, and finding out that it's actually someone's pirated porno movie, not the Yanni album you'd dreamed of owning.

But reading news online involves no such problems. Point, click, news.

iTunes solves a problem for the consumer. Creating a similar interface for news will make things worse, not better, for consumers. So nobody will pay for it.

[puciret]

The trouble with today's brand of reporting is the bias. People have become polarized because of ethnicity, political views and prejudiced by their senses of moral and ethical responsibilities. Good journalism means reporting facts not as we'd like them to be but as they really are. Government intervention in the media is akin to enslavement. Social bias dictated by the government's " NEED " to hide sensitive material from our " enemies " has all but abrogated freedom of speech and nullified our Constitutional right. When the government no longer decides to censor what the journalist perceives to be important enough to inform the public then journalism will return to its proper intent.

[valkyrie607]

I donate $25 to my local NPR station every year. That seems to be working alright for them. Why is nobody talking about that model?

And what about paying journalists? I'm more concerned about that than with ensuring the continuation of print newspapers.

[mcfried]

You are partially correct. The issue with journalism is content not distribution. I regularly download podcasts of Bill Moyers and other news programs on I tunes. They're free but if I was asked to pay a subscription of a couple of dollars a month I would. Why ? Because what I download is informative, thoughtful and devoid, for the most part of gotcha journalism. If you asked me to pay for 90% of the cable news shows or nightly network "newscasts" I'd laugh my a$$ off. Saving journalism actually requires there to be true journalists to save.

[TRYKER]

That you for this excellent article Mr. Sinker.
Very enlightening comments on this as well, thanks folks.
Giant Corporations owning the media turned journalism into advertising 24/7. There is a-l-w-a-y-s an agenda.
Bushco over-loaded the propaganda arms so severely, a decent news story couldn't find an inch to fit in. Naturally the dark cloud of doom resulted from the "unthruths" and the demise was inevitable.
Even people with a sense of humor and a bit of sentimentality for the paper paper couldn't continue to stomach the convoluted obfuscating foolishness served up as news.
They "unwrote" their own demise...a­nd they did it for the dollar obviously or we would have read the truth. And they did this at the very time when Pulitzer Prize winning stories were flooding out of our govt 24/7..and ignored. For Shame!
From the start, newspapers didn't survive unless they delivered what people needed and wanted...D­UH.

[sodisenchanted]

Real journalism started dying about 25 years ago. It's death isn't really connected to the death of paper news sources. It is directly related to corporate ownership of news sources.

Only a few older people will miss their paper newspapers. I've gotten my father a laptop, hooked it to a wireless router and shown him how to take it out on his back porch to read the news on it while he drinks his coffee and watches the waves roll in on the beach. Now he doesn't even miss the paper any more.

[philistine]

Thank you for your perspective on the changing paradigm for news, and its similarity to music distribution. Your point makes sense, and essentiallly refutes an earlier post by another blogger that I felt uneasy about. One pressing issue presents itself, however, that seems very persistent. The production of news - the travel, reporting, research, etc. - is costly, and impossible to replace. How does the "free" web content pay for that required service?

David Sirota recently posted a story that pointed out the monied class's ability to fund money-losing efforts like "Politico" and "New Republic" despite the relatively few people with views served by their right-wing slant. He felt that the enormous cost per website visit of these new sites would eventually lead to more progressive news, since most people's viewpoints were progressive. I am less sanguine than he about that notion. Reporting seems to fit that paradigm as well. I wonder how we can receive news uncolored by the views of those with the money to provide it.

[Len Strazewski]

I'm not sure journalism needs saving any more than poetry needs saving. Lots of people writing poems--from greeting cards to poetry slams and high art in between. Not so many getting paid for poetry. That's the big concern about journalism, i.e. that full-time journalists won't be able to get paid what they believe they are worth and that the product will lose its consistent level of "quality." Real issues, but hardly absolutes in a changing world.