Damien Mulley has a very interesting post today on the future of news and media and the furory around the iPad.As Mulley points out, the technology itself will not save news organisations that produce crap content, nor will simply attempting to charge people for online content save the news industry.
It goes back to David Simons excellent summation of the state of the US newspaper industry:
"When you hear a newspaper executive claiming that his industry is an essential bulwark of society and that it stands threatened by a new technology that is, as of yet, unready to shoulder the same responsibility, you may be inclined to empathize. And indeed, that much is true enough as it goes.
But when that same newspaper executive then goes on to claim that this predicament has occurred through no fault on the industry's part, that they have merely been undone by new technologies, feel free to kick out his teeth. At that point, he's as fraudulent as the most self-aggrandized blogger."
Newspaper managers and shareholders have a lot to answer for the decimation of the industry and in the same way that the demise of quality news is not solely the fault of the web, nor is any single product or technology going to save the industry.
Charging for bad content, whether it is online or offline, from under-trained, ridiculously over-worked journalists who don't have enough time, energy or resources (and who occasionally are just bad journalists) to produce good content is not a realistic option.
The problems that face the news industry now are many and complicated. At their core though, they go back to poor management. And not even an iPad can save an industry who's managers don't understand their product.
I've heard people argue that the technological saviour of online journalism is going to be the advent of a good and widely used micropayments system - i.e. something that is secure, convenient for users, and makes economic sense with small amounts of money, i.e. read an article and pay a few cents.
ReplyDeleteThe subscription model doesn't work, clearly, and it messes with the whole beauty of the web and hyperlinking etc. You might subscribe to something you read a lot but probably not to something you browse to. Likewise I usually will not bother with the faff of paying for an individual article on a pay site, even if I'd quite like to read it - but that's more down to the hassle of signing up and making the payment than the reluctance to actually pay.
Someone needs to set up a payments system (something along the lines of paypal), get some of the large content providers to start using it on their sites (after which smaller ones will follow - make it really simple to integrate with, make it work well on 3G phones), and make paying for a single article as easy as say using Amazon one-click ordering. Price a single article at a few cents a go, really low. The long tail of people potentially accessing that article for months or years will make it worthwhile. Then people might start paying for content.