Newspapers are going to war with the Internet--or trying to.
So far it's more accurately a phony war. Newspapers aren't really doing anything other than saber rattling. While they might be threatening to charge for their content, or, in the case of the Associated Press, which is owned by newspaper publishers, threatening unspecified legal action against some unspecified use of AP content, their real act of aggressiveness is a little storm of newspaper stories about charging for content. We're so mad, in other words, we're going to write bad things about you.
It's a nostalgist's story about the value of what newspapers offer, and about trying to conjure some clever business circumstance in which people online might pay for that theoretical value. It imagines nothing less than the conversion of a medium that has, in its 14 years of commercial existence, achieved ubiquity by being free to a paid business model. It's a plaintive appeal. "Airlines charge for luggage, meals, even pillows," pleads the New York Times.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, now the world's dominant content distributor, gave a speech yesterday about this very issue, which was so bland it seemed to mock the controversy itself.
Continue reading at newser.com
Actually, you can extract the words from your articles, remove duplicates, sort them, and let Google be able to include or eliminate an article from a search, present the little highlight snatch of text to let potential readers determine if they are interested and then the post office can: 1) let subscribers access the article OR 2) charge for access to the article.
This last part, subscription fulfillment or piece-meal charging, would be done by the post office. Nobody has ever had a problem paying for a stamp or expected a letter to be delivered without a stamp.
Once the “news” becomes the “olds”, say after a week for most articles, let Gooogle have at the original that you can store in a separate server.
a) The transmission of the articles is almost free.
b) The distribution of the articles is almost free.
c) The access is cheap but NOT free and the post office sees to that and that helps them with with their business model.
d) The post office send you a share of the money collected (and YOU KNOW HOW OFTEN AN ARTICLE IS FETCHED OFF OF YOUR SERVERS FROM A PARTICULAR IP ADDRESS.)
There is a business model that would work, it would
1) let new gathering organizations gather news,
2) let readers read,
3) let the post office disseminate and collect payments and disburse funds
The only thing that will remain is going to be vanity presses like HP is proposing with their printing service [ http://magcloud.com/ ]
We didn’t fight for the rights of the buggy whip makers either … Suck it up.
Journalism however is definitely NOT DEAD.
It has been democratized, popularized, localized, opened up, opened on and opened for a new business model.
If you worked as an editor or for an editor, you are going to find that the average person hasn’t suddenly improved in spelling or grammar, logic or comprehension, ability to communicate or in layout skills.
We just have to find you a new way to get news that you write out there; .PDF files on your servers being distributed via RSS files that the Post Office has on their server and that gives access to the latest content for $ would go a long way towards granting you a new lease on life.
The RSS file can even contain the highlights and a little bit of text from the articles which are still on your servers.
... more ...
Oops-There's four parts
Part Four
And by choosing to engage in some sort of self-aggrandized epic battle with the very folks with who they should have the world's most natural alliance, will they wind up being part of a Newseum exhibit.
Can the AP, under Mr. Curley's insistently incomplete understanding of the internet news business, survive? Can Mr. Curley internalize and understand that in order to be successful in the future, he will need to abandon a number of the business behaviors that have made him successful in the past?
I don't know. I believe it has a good enough product (in general), with enough brand loyalty (so far, but is decreasing) that it deserves to survive. However, after watching Tom Curley this evening, one thing became obvious--If the AP is to have any chance to survive, Mr. Curley should be dismissed from his position immediately.
Firing him yesterday couldn't have been soon enough, and firing him tomorrow will likely be too late.
-----
Respectfully submitted in response to your post-
Genoasail
Part Three
Unfortunately though, neither of those reasons is why Mr. Curley will never be able to solve the problem of how to monetize AP's content. The reason why he cannot solve the problem is because he doesn't begin to understand how to think about the problem. He doesn't view his business as one that needs to think about or deal with consumers and he said as much on Charlie Rose. He sees his model as one that deals strictly business to business.
And that's the problem. The AP simply cannot exist thinking that the internet consumer has no place in its business model. The internet news model is driven by consumer desires and portability. This is especially true in the case of AP, which is increasingly replaceable by real time citizen journalism and event reporting. And what the AP is seeking to do to solve it's problem is to own the news event itself, and charge for anything past the lede. It's that type of thinking that shows Mr. Curley's complete lack of understanding of how news travels through the internet. And Mr. Curley doesn't address these matters. He doesn't address them because he doesn't understand them. He lack a fundamental understanding of how news on the internet works. He doesn't understand the reality he is deperately trying wrangle into some sort of submission.
Part Two
Mr. Curley's somewhat churlish, and at times, openly hostile attitude towards the very idea of consumers, let alone having to think about dealing with consumers, struck me as bizarre. Even more odd, is that AP, which is in fact, a not for profit corporation, gave the impression of being all about the Benjamins.
Mr. Curley, hired by AP in 2003, is only the 12th person to hold the highly honored position of CEO of the famed new aggregator, the Associated Press. After watching his performance this evening on Charlie Rose, I am increasingly certain that he will be the last. When he was hired in 2003, his was the CEO of USA Today, a job that gave him more than enough insight and experience to be expected to know that the existence of the internet was going to have a disruptive innovation effect on all aspects of the news business. His response to that disruptive innovation should have been expansive and creative thinking. Instead, they were slow to innovate, hostile to independent thought, and still believe that the solution to their financial problems lies in making the world a smaller place.
On a side note, the decision to make Ron Fournier the Washington Bureau Chief, and Fournier's decision to have his writers produced highly editorialized point of view pieces as straight factual news has seriously damaged the Associated Press's credibility.
.
This is part one of a three part comment, since there is a silly 250 word limit.
Part One
This evening I watched Ariana Huffington and Tom Curley discuss this exact of what Mr. Curley has given the agressively musculaf name of "Web News Piracy" and the rest of us call the web based copyright issues. These copyright issues are in some part arising out of increasingly portable news content, the desire of consumers to want their news to be portable and self aggregating, and mostly because of the sharp increase in the number of newspapers in America on life support.on The Charlie Rose show. Maybe discuss is too polite a term. Ariana discussed. Charlie moderated . And Tom Curley insisted that the most important thing in the world is for all of us to figure out how he's going to get paid, or he's taking his ball and going home. And he's taking the sandbox with him, too. So there!
And I thought to myself, "Hey buddy, you need to wake up. There are DIY sources everywhere on how to make whatever kind of sandbox a consumber might want, or where to find another sandbox, and social networking to find all the new folks who we want to hang out with instead. Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, pretty much everyone has their own balls these days, thank you very much."
However, when you are dealing with news wholesalers like AP, the information is the basic product.
In an effort to protect product, I see increased efforts to create more and diverse pay-to-know access points.
The Times tried to do a "premium" online feature, where certain popular columnists had to be accessed by paid subscription. It didn't work and they dropped it. Some people will only read online, and they are used to reading for free, they simply ignored the premium columnists. The Times would be better off pursuing an online strategy of higher advertising revenue.
Alec Baldwin is right, we need to support the papers, and the unique resource that they are. At the same time, print, broadcast and web need to work out issues in a way that preserves the position of news and information in this country. It needs to be accessible. No one owns information, and without it we are vulnerable to....ourselves.