Initiating a Culture of Compensation

Modern day journalism school is a lot like the Make-A-Wish Foundation: for a steep price, ill-fated youngsters earn the company of industry luminaries, who recount their sterling careers — the very calling to which these kids would aspire were their futures not terminally stricken — while struggling to conceal the sad truth from (and about) their audience.

Fifteen years ago, journalism schools themselves were thought to be malignant (see "J School Ate My Brain" by Michael Lewis in a 1993 edition of the New Republic). Today, the tumor has metastasized and infected the entire profession. Any way you look at it — left or right, fair or balanced, in the Blogosphere or on the Op-ed pages — the consensus is clear: journalism as we know it is not long for this world.

Figuring that they can't write themselves out of this dilemma, journalists have dropped the pen and polished the crystal ball. They come to us daily — I'm a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, the butt of Mr. Lewis' long-form joke — with their predictions and prognostications, as if some sliver of hope might redeem our moribund futures. And for those of you who skipped out on the $40,000 bill (i.e. full tuition at Columbia), the pain can be — and has been — suffered vicariously all across the media, new and old.

Among other suggestions, David Carr imagined an iTunes for news; Jack Shafer said no way (and trashed the Kindle); the CIO of Yale said newspapers should become foundations; Steve Coll agreed; Jack Shafer said no way; Walter Isaacson championed micropayments; Michael Kinsley said no way; and a whole bunch of people weighed in at the New York Times. And those are just the high points.

In sifting through these myriad commentaries, what's left of my half-eaten brain has reached a conclusion — or better yet, a no-brainer — shared by none other than Rupert Murdoch: that major news outlets like the New York Times should start charging online subscription fees for access to their websites — the primary access point for most consumers of news today.

Despite Andrew Sullivan's assertion that web subscriptions are never going to work, Henry Blodget has offered a fairly comprehensive plan for saving the Times that includes, among other suggestions, charging an online fee. He estimates that with a hybrid payment model, like that used by the Wall Street Journal, web traffic to NYTimes.com might initially fall by 50 percent; and if all content were protected behind a paid firewall, as much as 90 percent.

Are newsreaders really that greedy? Is it really so hard, as David Carr writes, to convince "the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspaper sites that it's time to pay up"?

For one thing, Blodget's numbers err on the side of extreme caution. With something close to 17 million unique visitors to the website in January, the Times is an online juggernaut. To say that 15 million of those users would rather go elsewhere than pay a small fee strikes me as unlikely. But I also think his doomsday scenarios are mismatched. If the Times Select experiment, in which users had to pay for opinions or archives, showed us anything, it was that partial paid content scares readers away. For the whole shebang — all or nothing — I'm willing to bet that a message like this could convince customers to pay up:

Dear Reader,

We are a company of professionals who toil each day to provide an essential service to the country and the world: the news. For a long time, we operated under the illusion that the Internet might become an oasis of content served gratis, where tiny advertisements on the side of your screen for penis enlargement or class reunions could sustain our modest business. As the years went by, this pipe dream rang hollow, and today we will be selling our newspaper online--the very same content you paid for year in and year out for home delivery--for a small fee: $20 per month, or $100 for the full year.

Respectfully,

Pinch & Punch

And that would be that. You pony up the fee — really, just the cost of a Valentine's Day dinner — for a full year of news, or you "x" out of the window. Those who already subscribe to the paper version would be privy to the web edition.

So, you say, I'll circumvent the miserly Times and hit the blogosphere for my morning news, be it Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, or Slate. But now you'd find the many Times articles to which these blogs link similarly affixed with the same urgent plea: please pay us for our (linked) content!

In the Daily Beast in particular, Tina Brown has built an entire business around online bricolage. The Beast's main attraction — unabashedly advertised as the "Cheat Sheet" — is an agglomeration of major news reports, recapitulated in snarky prose. Because the Times has stubbornly (and inimically) refused to protect its hard-earned content, sites like the Beast or The Week can rummage through full papers, take the wheat, and leave the chaff — all without paying a dime.

As Isaacson has observed (somewhat ironically on the Huffington Post), traditional outlets have "put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free." Sites like HuffPo, meanwhile, are reaping the advertising benefits, even though, as Isaacson points out, they "did not actually create content, especially not journalistic reporting, but instead piggybacked on it."

Ergo, another no-brainer for the Gray Lady: stop giving out reported content like Thanksgiving turkeys, and start charging third parties for linked content. Sure, there's a whole case to be hashed out before the Supreme Court over fair use, but at the end of the day, blogs should have no more right to copy and paste from the Times than I have to pilfer scenes from Hollywood movies and sell them off as a highlights reel.

(To put the problem in perspective: the Times alone pays $3 million every year to support a bureau in Baghdad; shouldn't online outfits remunerate news outlets for this critical--and critically dangerous--reportage?)

Now, it's argued that readers will spurn a fee-based system. They'll bypass the firewall with digital trickery, or else turn to alternative news sources. Herein lies a fundamental misunderstanding of American consumption in the digital era. When the selfsame product is easily accessible for free (i.e. full music albums on Napster), the rational shopper will opt for the free choice. That's just common sense. But when an industry leader (i.e. Apple) offers a reasonably priced and quality-assured platform for purchasing that same product, Americans will buy in.

It's amazing how quickly the cultural paradigm can shift. In the days of Napster and Kazaa, the music industry devolved into digital speakeasies, where surreptitious (and ultimately illicit) dealings were very much in vogue. But today, 70 percent of 9- to 14-year-olds--a.k.a. tweens, the next generation online--are using legal means to download music.

All the divination and bloviation (to use a Frank Rich word) in the world won't alter an irreducible truth: "Free," in the trenchant words of one analyst, "is not a business model." Those who advocate micropayments would use a scalpel where an axe is needed; and those who want to endow news would only reify the pernicious notion that news should be free. Just like Harvard can dictate policy in higher education by accepting A.P. scores or eliminating early decision, so too could the Times usher in a culture of compensation as the industry standard.

The future of journalism does not turn on the means of production. However consumed, good news involves good reporting, good writing, and good editing. Whether that product is scrolled down a BlackBerry screen or spread across the kitchen table is irrelevant to the cost; no one would suggest that a book read on a Kindle should be free, and thanks to iTunes, few people expect a record to cost less on an iPod than a CD.

Giving away news for free was a terrible folly, whose consequences have been rehearsed ad nauseam. Blogs, editorials, editorial observers, lectures and lamentations have yielded a concatenation of solutions as protracted as it is inconclusive. It's time now to move on and cough up.

Inundated as we are with bad news about the news, I question the logic of J-school every day. But is it so crazy to pay for an education in an established profession? No, what's crazy is when that profession decides to eschew profits because of some insane notion that information, like love in the '60s, ought to be free. Why journalists have decided that compensation is beneath them, I don't know; but until that changes, I want my money back.

Comments

[dadw5boys]

Since the Food Lion Law Suit no reporters are allowed the really take chaces and report the tough stories so what the Advertizers pay and the small price for the paper is about all it is worth..

9000 reporters missed this economic crash !!!!!!!

[totalliberal]

Why pay for hand loomed woolen goods when steam machines can do it so much faster, better and cheaper. I like paying more for something I can get for free. Give me a break, the money made from street sales cover the cost of printing and distribution.. Advertising covers the rest. On-line advertisers will eventually pay for the Jason Linkins of the world.

Luddite.

[texastrixie]

I read the NYT daily. Because I have a university­-affiliate­d email, I was spared the fee when it was in place. I only read a few business articles and the opinion pages. If I had to pay even $100 for this priviledge, I would simply go to the library.

Most people who care about newspapers are OLD. Maybe not in the grave, but newspapers are decidedly a boomer-nation fixture, not Generation X or younger. The Boomers are fixing to retire, and many of us don't have a lot to retire on anymore. Younger people may read online, but they are not reading newspapers.

If I could access the little I read NYT, WSJ, etc. for about $2 a month, I would do so. $25 a year. Anything over that, I will simply rely on the TV. Many newspapers are dying because there is not enough ad revenue. I think this is stupidity on the sellers' part since one of the major reasons I have always taken the local paper on Sundays (even if no other time), is for the ADS. I don't care about 25% off ads on tv - I want a picture of the purse I have been longing for with a big 25% OFF overlay on top of it.

If you expect all of us to pay $100 a year to read anything online, forget it. Most of us are trying to figure out how we will eat on $100 a month after we retire.

[thewebdoc]

The NYTimes already tried this, at least twice. Looks like one thing they aren't teaching you in Journalism school is research.

Here's an idea though: Why not offer, or at least test, a subscription based service where you could access an advertisement-free version of the website. I might be down for that.

Either way, my prediction is that the NYTimes, at least its print version, will one day be a non-profit organization.

[Lisa-G]

How are people with no money supposed to have access?

[WaspMan]

Papers are available in any public library.

[imsosure]

Probably ought to go ahead and quit school kid, after all if you think the NYT is the gold standard for journalism you are already to far gone to do me any good.

[Matt Neufeld]

The news business is a business just like anything else. And you can't continue making money by giving away your news content for free. It's obvious that the decline started when news organizations started giving away their content for free-without the required number of ads to make a profit. Still, to this day, most news web sites--and most web sites in general, actually--do not make money. The Post just reported this week that the creator of the one of the web's most-trafficked web site, 4chan, does not make money. Facebook and MySpace have downgraded their worth. None of the major newspaper, radio, television, or magazine web sites make money. The answer to journalism will remain this simple tenet: Report the news. Itcomes down to reporting accurately, objectively, fairly, and intelligently the who, what, where, when, why and how of a story. You get away from that and worry about money-losing technologies that have nothing to do with the news and have nothing to do with real journalism, and you continue the sorry dumbing-down and wayward wanderings that have destroyed the industry. Just focus on reporting the news, with paid ads that make a profit, and if that means charging for content on the internet, then charge for content. You cannot give a product away for free and expect to make a profit. And you can't get away from reporting the news and expect people to give a damn about journalism. Just report the news.

[OtayPanky]

Matt Neufeld: You cannot give a product away for free and expect to make a profit. And you can't get away from reporting the news and expect people to give a damn about journalism. Just report the news.

===

If you just want the news, AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo and Google give plenty away for free. The whole point of having a NY Times is their supposed value added stuff - their op-ed writers, their other analyst writers, and their sections on various subjects of interest like arts, books, movies, science, health, etc.

The GOOD op-ed writers (eg Frank Rich) can always find a home at a magazine, on TV or wherever. Same with the really GOOD national level investigative journalists (like Judy Miller, right?).

There will be a lot of fall off from the second stringers, who will end up working a locally oriented newspapers and or magazine that will retain paying clientele with a print version, and may not even be on the net at all.

The real question is whether all that other Timesy STUFF is worth paying for. Is it the journalistic equivalent of Justin or Britney, worth a buck or two a tune? I don't think so. Most of it is easily available elsewhere for net savvy folks who Google and have their own sites of interest (forums, etc.). So the idea of the Times as stuff dispenser may well be a buggy whip proposition.

[jestevens]

When US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River, people on nearby ferries Twittered and sent photos to Flickr. TV news helicopters transmitted video, which appeared on YouTube. USAirways and the FAA posted updates on their Web sites. Personal bloggers picked up CNN and AP news.

Do newspapers really think they have a chance of charging even micropayments for news in such a situation? Everybody’s on that story, including non-journalists.

People who say that readers should pay for news still think in terms of an individual articles that can be packaged to sell alone. However, in a Webcentric world, serial, collaborative beat blogs managed by journalists will dominate -- see WestSeattl­eBlog.com.

So, if it doesn’t make sense for news organizations to charge for news that everybody has, or to charge for individual blog posts because they don’t have enough context AND they’re collaboratively reported (does the community member get a cut?), what could news organizations charge for?

Iconic storytelling? investigative reporting? How much of a metro news organization’s content is this? Enough to support a 200-person news organization and keep it afloat in a sea of free content? Probably not. The days of large metro newsrooms churning out general-interest, been-there­-done-that­, stand-alone, we-talk-you-listen reporting are waning. They'll be replaced by hundreds of small news shops, as the explosion of ad-supported niche-based organizations, geographic and topic-based, continues.

[luziannagirl]

Oh, jeez. I clicked on this before reading the title carefully.

I thought it said, "Initiating a Culture of Comprehension".

[Mahi Joe]

LOL that would be one small step for manking huh?

[DogLeg]

This idea was propounded on in the wee hours of the fifties. I do not have any interns, or legions of followers, to do the research, the universe can sort out the fabrications.

Newspapers thought the growing T.V. populational statistic was going to end ink journalism. I, at seven or eight years old, was worried about the publishing industry and my favorite reading material, books, and the escapism of libraries. One thing for sure, books did not have advertising. There was the quaint idea that 'thought' as opposed to mere 'observation' required no corrupting by the shenanigans of ad agencies.

I hate being read to. I know newspapers claim that advertising isn't paying the costs. But they don't say it directly since the evidence is against them. Put a seemingly liberal President in office and need suddenly becomes part of the corporate agenda. All those journalism degrees have much louder voices than say...Physicists, school teachers, mathematicians, even M.B.A.s' working as bartenders.

Sorry. The hook to try and sink a 'free internet.' Well, I looked at my 'Communications' monthly billing and compared it to my 'Energy' bills, i.e. electric, gas, and auto fuel. Then threw food costs in.

I have to ask in this economic climate, "Does what I pay for deliver what I need to participate in culture?" The answer resoundingly a "NO."

It may be that the fascination with instantaneous response is losing it's grip.

[tonkamatthew]

It is not free when there is a fast food ad on the same page as the article being read! Surrounded by advertisersing has its cost, remember when cable tv was going to be ad free.

[KansasWrangler]

Hey! I remember the hype about cable stations being ad free. I had totally forgotten that until you mentioned it.

[KansasWrangler]

I am more than happy to access information I am interested in on NYT or WaPo, but I am not willing to pay a premium for the occasional unique insight in one of these pubs. I might consider paying a site like HuffPost for collecting the best of the newspapers and placing it in one location for me. That way I get what what I want in one place and everyone along the way makes a profit. Lets say a site is set up as a clearing house for newspapers, subscribers select what they want cafeteria style and pay for that content. I could get content from the TImes, WaPo, Tribune, LA Times that I want and not have to pay for crap from the Post or whatever. (Gee, I wish cable were set up this way - just don't let the Government get involved or it will be).

[earthmann]

I should could use one of their editoes, though.

[earthmann]

I have my journalism degree, and if the industry as we know it goes up in smoke so be it.

I know your're not talking about all the wonderful independent media out there.

No, what your talking about all these little ivory stumps where the Fred Hiatts and the George Wills of the world gather around and pretend to possess some insight as to how the world should be ran, what conventional wisdom should be, or the heartland feels. A world where the truth is not spoken and we know, but that's just the way the world is.

How many news outlets apologized for "The March to War" that was Iraq?
How many news outlet published death tolls of Iraqii citiezens?
How many news outlets allowed voices from te region where we slaughtered hundreds of thousands to speak to American cameras?

Let the house burn down.

It is truly a pathetic spectacle we have here in this country where people read the war-mongering paper in the morning and then gape like fools at there blinking TV "news" in the evening. If you want to know what news sounds like pick up an Asian Times or watch some Democracy Now. And, please, stop rattling on about how the NYT is some precious, nonrenewable resource. If mainstream journalism were a horse, they'd shoot it.

[Mahi Joe]

You are so right about how selective our MSM is when reporting. Even if these newspapers shrink I honestly think journalists are smart enough to seek other venues to report the facts. People like Seymour Hersh are contributing reporters and could just as easy publish their works on a blog as they can in a newspaper. Would I pay to read Hersh's stories? H3ll yes I would. My real concern is not so much with the written word as it is with the spoken word. When the TV news media is dominated by the likes of Fox News one should begin to worry about the lack of substance, relevance and lack of facts spoon fed to a huge viewing audience. Who are the Walter Cronkites and Edward Murrows of today's journalism?

[SouthPrairie]

Hellooooooo, advertisors are paying the bills.