Monday morning roundup: Two looks at ways to make journalism pay

A short Monday post for right now.
TechCrunch has an interesting, detailed take down of the idea that micropayments are the future of journalism.

Some salient points (I’ll let you read the whole thing if you want to):

• Everyone NEEDS to make profit, but only strong businesses will. In other words, just because you run a media company, it doesn’t mean you automatically deserve to make money.
• The micro-payment ideas might be great for publishers or companies like Google, but not necessarily for journalists.
• And this quote, from Freakonomics: “Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news.”

The founder of Spot.us has a lengthy post on PBS‘s MediaShift Idea Lab blog with some insights on the start-up’s first six months.

The big takeaway? Readers are less willing to pay for the quick-hit, short journalism that dominates so many newspapers these days. They want something in-depth, well-reported and that presents original ideas. Big-think analysis pieces (like the one I’m writing now?) aren’t as popular.

So what say you? Find any interesting media analysis today?

Metered web reading is our savior?

The New York Times has a fascinating proposal to make some money off Web content: metered reading. You’d get so much for free, then to continue, you’d have to pony up.

It strikes me as a quintessentially New York solution, in that it reminds me of a taxi’s meter. And it might work for them. Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff that there needs to be a balance between too small a free period, which would drive people away, and too long, which wouldn’t get much revenue.

The Times is in a strong position, as they already make a lot of money from online ads. But not all local sites are. It could be that their sales staff isn’t good at selling online ads, or their advertisers don’t understand the value, but they aren’t able to claim much revenue from the Web.

So you can see why executives at local papers might be tempted to follow suit. But before we rush, lemming-like, to implement this (actually!) new idea, let’s have a think about it.

The Times is in a really great position in terms of content. They have fresh, constantly updated stories from all over the world, covering any topic you can imagine. You could spend hours roaming around the site, and, indeed, some people do. They also have hundreds of journalists filing stories. Do you?

Say you’re a mid-sized local paper with about a dozen reporters filing stories every day. You’ve convinced them to file early and often for the Web, and they’re doing that. On a good day, you add a few dozen stories during the day, covering breaking news, crime, traffic and local government. That appeals well to your base of readers, but your base is much smaller than that of the Times. And how long would it take to read all those stories?

Revenue models aren’t one-size-fit-all, as we should already know. This metering plan MIGHT work for very large, national papers with rich archives, lots of fresh content and many different topics to choose from. But for smaller papers, ones that have to compete with television stations or other media sources, it might end up driving people into the arms of their competitors.

There are other models out there, which might fit better. (And I hope to talk more about some soon).

My two-line social media policy

A lot has been written about the Wall Street Journal‘s (somewhat paternalistic) social media policy and the one being hashed out at the New York Times, as well.

Smarter people than me are weighing in, but I think I might be able to add something to this conversation, since I’m training the staff at The Gazette on using social media.

My two-line social media policy:

If you’re using an account for work purposes, identify yourself as an employee of The Gazette.

If posting something would embarass you or the company, or call your professional reputation into question, DON’T POST IT.

That’s it. I give out pages of best practices, too, but those two get to the heart of the issue. Just as we would have never in the past expressed a political preference, we should refrain from doing so now. if it seems like common sense, it kinda is, but it still bears repeating.

The biggest issue people seem to be taking with the WSJ policy is that it shuts down transparency. It forbids staffers from discussing how a story was reported, written or edited. Bad advice, and among the reasons so many newspapers are failing at social media. When there was one edition a day, the story was all that mattered. Now, reporters need to be transparent at all stages. How they source and write the story is important, and so is the discussion afterward.

Rather than grasping and trying to control something (since no one’s been able to control falling readership or declining revenue), newspaper executives need to trust their reporters, calm down and embrace social media.

I can’t close any more eloquently than Patrick Thornton did.

Just use common sense, and common sense says not being social on social media doesn’t make much sense at all.

You only THINK you’re paying for content

(Note: I’m back, at least for a while. It’s a time of even more upheaval in the newspaper industry, and I’ve found myself with a lot to say.)

There’s been a lot more talk about making people pay for online content recently. Dean Singleton made a big deal of that at the AP conference, and has now announced a plan to make people do just that.

It’s a bad idea, one I made fun of and Jeff Jarvis did an intelligent take down of. I could keep making jokes at Singleton’s expense (and still might, actually), but I also want to explain why this idea is so wrong-headed.

The argument is that people pay for content when they buy a newspaper, so they should do the same when they read content online. I’ve been wondering how much people actually pay per story in the newspaper.

Between May 4 and May 8, The Gazette published 335 stories (collections of briefs are counted as one story). That works out to an average of 67 each day. A few years ago, that would have been much higher, but with cutbacks, that sounds about right for a mid-sized daily in a small city. The Gazette’s newsstand price is $0.75 per issue. That means if you bought the paper at your favorite convenience store, you paid an average of about $0.01 per story. In weeks where the number of stories is higher, you’d be paying under that. If you subscribe, that number will come down even further. That penny doesn’t go toward reporting and writing the stories, either. It goes toward the (many) costs to make the physical newspaper.

But who reads all those stories? Some do, I know, but I certainly don’t, and I’m not alone. I read stories that I already know will be interesting to me. But when you’re buying a paper, you have to buy the whole thing, not just the news or sports sections. Online, there’s no such requirement. And who is willing to pay for stories they’re not going interested in?

Now think about how much it costs to publish a newspaper every day. Presses, workers, paper and ink all cost money, not to mention paying people to plan routes and then deliver the papers. The paper shows up at your door, and that’s why you’re willing to pay for it.

You have to seek out—at least somewhat—news stories online, and it doesn’t cost the company nearly as much to publish or display them. So what’s the justification for charging?

I don’t have good figures about the exact daily cost of printing a newspaper (does anyone? I’d love to hear them), but let’s be generous and say it costs twice as much to print a paper than to display it online (I bet that number is closer to five times more expensive). That makes each story online worth about $0.005. How do you collect that? How do you handle readers who feel the story didn’t deliver what the headline promised and want their money back? And, more importantly, isn’t it time to figure out a truly new business model, one that might actually work and help media companies survive, instead of hastening their death?

Where do we go from here?

This will be the last post here, at least for a while.
My colleague, Annette Schulte, talks about struggling with the muse, and I’ve been engaged in a battle with mine for a while now. I’m passionate about this topic — media and technology — but I’m not getting anywhere by writing about it.
I’m not adding anything to the conversation, and I’m not spending the time here that I need to to change that.
This is the second failed incarnation of this blog, which I think says more about me than I’d like it to. I’m struggling to see if there’s another direction I can take this that I’ll actually keep up with. But I’m not sure.
That doesn’t mean I’m disappearing. If you care to, you can always follow me on Twitter, and you can find me at http://jamietie.com as well.

Toward a comprehensive set of expectations for commenters

I made a joke on Twitter earlier about how a lot of Internet commenters might fail a Turing test.

Ha ha, but there’s a a sad truth in the joke. I’ve written about comments before, but one thing I’ve been trying to figure out is what expectations we should have for our commenters. I’m not talking rules here: most sites already have plenty of rules about what we will and won’t allow. Rather, I’m talking about the kind of behavior we WANT our commenters to engage in, rather than the behavior we DON’T WANT them to engage in.

Clay Shirky talks about this at length in his essay: A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.

And we do need to empower members of the community to create their own standards; this isn’t just our community. But it is useful to set a baseline. How about:

• Be civil. Don’t say things to someone or about someone that you wouldn’t say in their presence.
• Be honest. That means more than just not lying, it also covers half-truths and evasions.
• Be yourself. If you post as an anonymous coward then we won’t take you nearly as seriously as if you’re clearly a real person.
• Add value to the comment threads you take part in. Look at blogs like Gizmodo and Jalopnik. They have well-informed, generally useful comments. There’s some level of idiocy, and that’s OK. Sometimes it’s even entertaining. But it’s not nearly as bad as it would be on, say, Digg. One of the reason the commenters behave is the judicious use of the ban hammer and that might not be the model we want to use, but it does work.
• When you’re being provocative, do it for reason. Rather than writing things for shock value, try to enlighten and inform your fellow commentariat.
• Tread lightly. Some threads feel like a barroom, while others feel like a church. Be mindful of those tones, and don’t disrupt them needlessly.
• Lastly, another don’t: Don’t be a troll. Nuff said.

So what would you add to these expectations? Am I being overzealous on some of these?

Honesty is a good thing

We all know I’m a twitter addict (as are many of you), so it shouldn’t be surprising that I follow the twitter status blog fairly religiously.

Today, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, wrote on the blog today that IM support, which has been gone for months now, won’t be back any time soon. That’s going to disappoint plenty of people, but it’s not such a bad thing. First of all, it’s been gone for months already, second of all, what good is IM support if the system itself is shaky? Twitter went through some really rough growth spurts earlier this year, with many people threatening to leave for good because of spotty connection and the seemingly omnipresent fail whale. They’ve gotten better. Not perfect, but much much better. It would really be a shame to lose that for IM support.

But more importantly, Williams’ entry makes Twitter more transparent. Web 2.0 and social media are supposed to be about transparency and connecting with users, after all, and saying you’re going to do something you have no intention of actually doing is a great way to alienate your user base.

It’s dangerous to not give your users what they want, but it’s much more dangerous to lie to them.

A case study

I blogged about the way we can use social media to help cover stories here.

The story itself is very simple, and the writing isn’t anything special. But I think it is a good example of what we can do, at least to start out.

And it taps into the ultra-local market, which is the place newspapers need to be.

To what end Facebook?

So today was my first day on the job as Social Media Guide at The Gazette, and it was a good one. We now have a newsroom blog, to help making us more transparent.

I also posted on Wired Journalists, asking for some advice. I got one commenter; he suggested two things: twitter to send out updates and using Facebook.

We’re already using Twitter, and I think we do it pretty well, but I’m not sure how we can use Facebook well. I already have a profile, and The Gazette has a page. But what do we use it for? Do we turn it into a glorified RSS feed? A calendar for events? A place for people to talk about what we’re doing?

It’s not really ideal for any of those things, and we have better solutions for all of them anyway. So I’ll put it out there to my tens of readers. How should we be using Facebook?

More about using Twitter

As we at The Gazette are getting better about using Twitter to communicate with readers and each other, I’ve been thinking about more ways that reporters can use Twitter.

My feed went crazy for the past two weeks, with people sending out near-real-time reaction tweets to both political conventions. If you’re a political reporter and aren’t following those kind of people, you’re missing out on a real wealth of sources.

And even for local issues, it’s a great way to get reaction to big happenings. Simply ask a question to your local followers and they respond. You can gauge if the issue matters or not, and if it does, you can try to turn those followers into sources.

Don’t know where to find local people to follow? Try Twellow, a search engine that compiles where people are from.

Twitter is constantly evolving. How are you using it differently now than you were six months ago?