Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been playing around with alpha and beta versions of some content payment and donation solutions. Today I deactivated Payyattention, which added a widget at the end of article pages asking for a quick, voluntary payment if [...]
One of my strongest interests this year has been news and content business models, and how to pay for content that’s given away free online. As a blogger (and my professional interest as a writer, researcher, and consultant on news business models), I’m especially interested in the [...]
I’ve been getting some pushback on my previous blog item about Newsday’s decision to put up a subscription wall to its website content except for Newsday print subscribers and subscribers of Optimum Online cable/Internet service (same ownership). This actually is a good business model for Newsday [...]
What’s wrong with this webpage I encountered the other day?
Besides the lack of wisdom of a general-interest newspaper (Newsday) putting a pay wall on its website for non-unique content (my opinion, shared by many other media experts), the worse part is that Newsday.com [...]
Earlier today Howard Weaver tweeted the following, which I can’t answer in 140 characters (!) so I’ll respond here. …
“Why do people (@steveouting et al) keep saying ‘block level’ info is best premium opportunity? Seems *most* likely to be citizen generated.” –@howardweaver
I don’t recall saying it’s [...]
So, it appears that we’ve passed the point within the newspaper industry of utter panic and all the publishers will not be colluding (ahem… I mean cooperating) to put most of their websites’ content behind pay walls. At least that CEO/publisher-group insanity is over — I hope.
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Some folks who attended my “Why now is the best time ever to go into journalism!” keynote talk at the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas, on Friday asked how to get a copy of my presentation. A PDF version (big file!) is here.
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I’m sure this will be mainstream across many professions before long, but for now it’s mostly limited to technology and media conferences. I’m talking about how speakers now get feedback from their audience as soon as they finish talking, via tweets from audience members posted immediately to [...]
A new, and very large, Barnes & Noble bookstore opened here in Boulder, Colorado, recently, replacing a smaller store half a block away. I’ve wondered since construction started how the giant bookstore chain could justify a larger store when more and more we’ll be seeing people buying [...]
My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has been published: “Real-time, Relevant Ads Matched With Real-time News? What a Concept!.”
This is a really interesting topic, as we’re closing in on being able to match ads in real time contextually with news events as they quickly grow [...]
Reading the new report by Len Downie Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” today, I kept wondering: Who is this report aimed at?
Commissioned by the Journalism School at Columbia University, the 96-page report offers nothing much new to media geeks. If you [...]
Some of the most popular content of the New York Times is (shocker) opinionated and biased. Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Paul Krugman … As op-ed columnists they get to report AND express opinions that influence readers. The Times felt that their content was so important [...]
Take a look at the left column of this blog, at the top just under the masthead, and you’ll see something new. It’s an experimental counter that tracks your personal usage on just this site. [Clarification: you may not see the counter widget until you've clicked around' [...]
Earlier this week, Jeff Reifman of Newscloud wrote an essay, “How Micro-payments Could Save Journalism,” which he says was inspired by most recent Editor & Publisher column, “Your News Content Is Worth Zero to Digital Consumers.” (I’m a bit slow to respond due to [...]
SaveTheNews.org’s first big public meeting of journalists and community members (September 16) — strategically planned for the U.S. city at ground zero for the “News Crisis,” Denver — was clearly a success in sounding the alarm about the decline of serious public-interest journalism. Six months ago, [...]
Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites [...]
Yesterday in Denver felt like ground zero of the Future of Journalism and the News Crisis. Not only did HuffingtonPost launch its Denver edition (with 22-year-old Ethan Axelrod as editor and sole employee), but last night SavetheNews.org held a well-attended community forum at the [...]
My latest Editor & Publisher column was posted today. I think you’ll find it provocative.
Your News Content Is Worth Zero to Digital Consumers
Admittedly, the headline overstates things a bit (hey, just trying to get you to pay attention!), but my main point is that whether online [...]
On the latest Journalism Now Podcast (where I’m one of the regulars), we interviewed Jacob Colker, founder of a very cool “micro-volunteering” service using the iPhone (and the web).
The Extraordinaries is a brilliant concept in empowering the crowd to do good things. Foremost, the idea [...]
The American Press Institute’s invitation-only “Newsmedia Economic Action Plan Conference” this morning included a presentation by Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive and Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishering, showing the results of a survey of 2,400 U.S. newspaper executives. (You can see the full 80-slide presentation here.)
I [...]
Disclaimer: I think Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly is a big-mouth wingnut who spouts dangerous ideas. (Yes, Glenn Beck is worse.) I never thought I’d compliment O’Reilly, but I’ve been pondering voluntary membership models for news websites lately, and I like what O’Reilly and his team [...]
Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora of the Knight Foundation explain what they’re looking for and how to craft a proposal for the 2010 Knight News Challenge that stands the best chance of winning some of the $5 million in grants.
Something I’ve been tracking for months now is the wave of new solutions for getting people to pay for online content, either through voluntary donations or mandatory payments. Some are in beta now; others due in the coming months.
Currently, I have a Payyattention donation box at [...]
Here’s the CoverItLive archived version of today’s ASNE online chat about new news business models. The event was hosted by Steve Buttry, with panelists Mark Briggs, Charlotte Anne Lucas, Dan Conover, and me. Did we solve the news industry’s problems? (Umm, I doubt it. But some good [...]
A while back I installed Tracer on this (Wordpress-based) blog, as an experiment to see what people were copying from my blog entries. It’s interesting information, but I regret setting Tracer up so that it would also include a customized link request that shows up whenever [...]
You usually don’t have to look too far to see an outrageously backward suggestion for “saving newspapers.” This weekend’s most ridiculous opinion column on the topic without a doubt would be Tim Rutten’s, writing for the Los Angeles Times: “Setting the price of a free press.”
Here’s [...]
This week I was lucky enough to participate in an Aspen Institute conference, “Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism.” The participants were an all-star bunch, including Madeleine Albright (a journalist before becoming a diplomat) for day 1, Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Marissa [...]
My time to speak at the Aspen Institute’s FOCAS conference, running through Wednesday, got squished, so I had to skip slides and make other adjustments (ugh). The talk was on “Paying for Digital News: The Future or Folly.”
A bunch of folks asked that I posted the presentation [...]
Whether traditional news publishers believe that user/reader donations represent a viable revenue stream or not, entrepreneurs are hot on the idea, judging by the number of variations of solutions under development for getting people to voluntarily give money to support websites and blogs. I’ve begun using this, [...]
I’m not sure anyone outside the Associated Press’ top leadership truly understands its intentions regarding use and re-use of its content outside officially licensed deals. But over at Poynter.org’s E-Media Tidbits, Megan Taylor makes a brave attempt at sorting through the muck: “How AP’s News Registry Will (and Won’t) [...]
Periodically I hear from retired management consultant Frank Pecarich, who has for the last few years watched with dismay as the newspaper industry follows the path of what he terms the classic industry death-spiral, failing to act and change course based on the data that its leaders are presented with [...]
If you follow the news industry like a good media geek, you’ll already know that the New York Times is pondering its future online business model. Reportedly, the main choices under consideration are 1) a “metered” pay wall (i.e., a site visitor can view “X” number of stories before a [...]
If you’re a publisher and want to get online users to pay for news content, you’ll have to work the psychology angle. That goes for persuading people to voluntarily pay for news using some of the new and under-development online-contribution systems, as well as requiring people to pay if they [...]
I’ve got yet another “micropatronage” service to tell you about. But while the other ones I’ve written about in recent months have the online user voluntarily ponying up some cash to support the websites and blogs that they visit or like, or the articles they value most — Kachingle, [...]
Here’s the video promised by Cleveland Plain Dealer Impact Editor John Kroll (representing the paper’s online/digital side) having a follow-up debate with Reader Representative Ted Diadiun about some disparaging comments Diadiun made toward bloggers and Internet news sites during a previous video chat, which generated quite a bit of heat. [...]
In my previous blog item, I piled on to the large number of critics of Cleveland Plain Dealer “Reader Rep” Ted Diadiun, who sounded quite curmudgeonly during a video interview posted earlier this week. An old-media guy calling bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks” tends to get the blogosphere riled [...]
(I know I’m piling on here, but I can’t help it. This requires lots of rebuttals.)
The video below is of Cleveland Plain Dealer “reader representative” Ted Diadiun commenting on the controversy created by one of the paper’s columnists advocating rewriting copyright law to protect newspapers from those who might “steal” [...]
I recently purchased the new iPhone app Men’s Health Workouts for $1.99 on the iPhone App Store. Yes, I really should use it to get in better shape, but rather I bought it to try out a new form of mobile app payment made possible by Apple’s recent release [...]
The debate rages on about whether news publishers — especially newspapers — should charge for news on their websites. Meanwhile, new technology solutions keep popping up to facilitate paid online content, though the decision on what to charge for and what to offer free remains with individual publishers. These new [...]
Almost forgot to plug my latest Editor & Publisher Online column here: “Readers Want to Pay for News Online — So Let Them.”
It’s a summary of the growing number of solutions to allow online users to voluntarily financially support the websites and blogs they visit, or like, or individual [...]
I can’t imagine this is new, but it’s the first time I’ve gone to a restaurant and received a coupon at the table prompting me to use my cell phone to get a free item. Last night when my family and I went to Beau Jo’s Pizza in Boulder, [...]
Today I finally got around to fixing this blog’s RSS feeds, which got messed up some time ago when I stopped using another domain name and fouled up my Feedburner settings. In repairing the damage, I seem to have lost lots of people who subscribed to this blog’s feed. Ugh.
If [...]
My friend Pete Welter passed along some fascinating research about consumer behavior when it comes to free vs. paid products and services. There are some lessons for the newspaper industry as it debates things like micropayments vs. free news content on the web, and how it will handle charging for [...]
I must say, I’ve never felt this pessimistic about the future of newspaper companies. (Thanks, API for suggesting a suicidal strategy to the industry.) Sure, I’ve been uncertain for a LONG time that newspaper companies could make a graceful transition into the digital age, but I’d felt that [...]
We all know that journalists are poorly paid, in general, and long have been. Now with news companies laying off staff and cutting wages of those remaining, it’s even worse. That got me thinking about my last blog post about a new tipping system that allows a reader to [...]
Since much of my attention these days seems to be on how to get writers and media companies paid on the web, allow me to pass along the latest scheme I’ve learned of. Payyattention.com (2 y’s?) looks to be promising for bloggers and individual writers wanting their fans to [...]
If you’ve read my columns or blog lately, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of forcing web users to pay for news content. (See previous blog item posted earlier today.) I DO want people to pay news companies to support the important journalism that they do, but the [...]
Over at the increasingly wonderful Neiman Journalism Lab blog, Zachery Seward has published a transcript of his interview with Journalism Online founder Steven Brill. (If you prefer you can listen to the 23-minute audio interview included with the article.) JO, as most of you know, is an attempt [...]
I’m on record as being opposed to charging for generic news content (including locally reported stories) on newspaper websites. I covered that in my last Editor & Publisher Online column, where I also outlined an alternative strategy to supplement weak online ad revenues. I also liked Steve Buttry’s “[...]
This has happened a few times (including recently), and it’s become a pet peeve that I need to get off my chest. As I occasionally do digital-media consulting work for media companies, or bid on consulting jobs, it’s not uncommon to be asked after presenting a new idea: “Has anyone [...]
Hint: It’s the leadership and corporate culture!
Check out this video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt being interviewed for WashingtonPost.com’s “On Leadership” series by Steven Pearlstein:
Wow. I hadn’t heard Schmidt talk about the Google corporate culture before, but watching this video interview made me realize why his company is so successful, [...]
My May Editor & Publisher Online column was published today — “Getting Money from Readers Who Won’t Pay for Online News” — and it’s mostly getting positive reviews so far. I make the case against daily newspapers’ shift toward charging for local news on their websites, and suggest an [...]
In this Denver Post story about parent company MediaNews Group’s new plan to charge for online news content, there’s an informal online poll. The results aren’t pretty for MNG.
I’m quoted as the dissenting voice in this piece by reporter Andy Vuong, but it’s a tiny clip and he [...]
An alert listener of Colorado Public Radio heard my interview last week on the “Colorado Matters” program, and noted that I erred in citing ProPublica, the independent investigative reporting website, as “ProPublica.com.” Well, I can’t very well fix my recorded radio voice to the correct ProPublica.org, but I’ll [...]
If you’ve been to a media conference lately, you know that it’s increasingly common for audience members to be posting to Twitter during speeches and panels. At the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas recently, during a panel I was chairing, not only were some audience members tweeting [...]
I have a new, complimentary subscription to Field & Stream magazine (print edition). Why is that? Since I don’t fish or hunt, or have any interest whatsoever in reading about either, publisher Bonnier is wasting money by granting me an unasked-for 1-year subscription.
I’m thinking this started with my paid subscriptions [...]
Yeah, I’ve been playing hooky quite a bit lately. In the previous couple weeks I’ve mountain biked 4 days on Utah’s famed White Rim Trail, then succumbed to an invitation from a friend to drive to southwestern Colorado and ride some great trails near Cortez and Durango for 2 days. [...]
So on Wednesday, Amazon will be introducing a larger Kindle e-reading device. I’ll be away from the Internet on my mountain bike in southwestern Colorado so will probably miss the announcement. But I can’t help but ponder the significance of the advancement of the portable e-reader.
While I do believe [...]
A reader of one of my recent Editor & Publisher Online columns takes me to task for using “digital” rather than “online” to describe what we used to call “new media.” He prefers “online” as more accurate.
Actually, I’ve shifted my word usage to “digital media” on purpose, and think I’m [...]
I’ve tried to make the case in the last couple of blog posts that it’s in Google’s interest to share ad revenues with news providers, by opening up Google News fully to advertising and offering a story-clickthrough-based rev-share program for participating publishers tracked by the service. Without [...]
What goes around, comes around. … Sometimes when you’re having trouble coming up with a solution to a difficult problem, it helps to turn things upside down and get a new perspective.
I’d like to see the newspaper industry, especially the big metro dailies which are in the most trouble and [...]
I was disappointed in Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech to the Newspaper Association of America today. (Audio here, courtesy of Bill Densmore. Transcript of Q&A portion of Schmidt’s session, thanks to Poynter.org.) Oh, it was a fine speech and Schmidt educated some of the backward-thinking publishers in [...]
My latest (”March”) Editor & Publisher Online column was published today:
Can Former Newspaper Employees Invent a Brave New News Model?
This is actually my March column because I ran into an odd situation that held up publication till today. Mid-March, I interviewed Ron James, founder and publisher/executive editor of [...]
In case you missed it, Stephen Colbert interviewed NAA president John Sturm on Tuesday night’s Colbert Report. Enjoy!
The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Better Know a Lobby - Newspaper Lobby comedycentral.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest [...]
Take heart, newspaper aficionados and media curmudgeons. You’ll still have the comfort of the printed newspaper as you travel in space in the year 2259! (Well, that assumes you’ll be getting cryogenically frozen and are revived in a couple centuries.)
Credit my friend and colleague Christopher Ryan for [...]
Hmmm. InDenverTimes, the digital-only “replacement” for the dearly departed Rocky Mountain News, to be staffed by about 35 former Rocky journalists and funded by three non-publisher entrepreneurs, wants to get by on paid subscriptions (at least initially). If 50,000 noble people sign up for monthly subscriptions by April 23 [...]
Increasingly of late, I’m seeing writers use the term “hits” when talking about webpage usage. I’ve lost count of how often this has assaulted my ex-copy editor eyes, but it happened again in this story. An excerpt:
“Thousands of Seattlites will miss their morning ‘fish wrapper.’ But as other newspapers [...]
Over at ReinventingClassifieds.com, we have not given up on newspapers turning those downward-and-steepening revenue trend lines back upward.
Christopher Ryan, president of FutureofNews.com, and I have written a Classifieds Manifesto with some solid solutions for revolutionizing newspaper classifieds.
If you are involved in newspaper classifieds, are in a [...]
Last night I was reminded of the power that digital media have of bringing people together. My wife and I attended a birthday party for our friend, Bud, who chose the occasion to hold the debut public concert for his basement band, tentatively called “Doc Hollywood.” He rented the [...]
A poignant video goodbye from Rocky Mountain News staff. If you love(d) newspapers, or grew up reading the Rocky as I did, it’ll bring a tear to your eye. The staff did a great job on it. Personally, I’m feeling a combination of sadness and anger. The latter is because [...]
No, this post is not about religion, it’s about media and how to pay for online news.
So the debate rages on about “micropayments” for news and other techniques to get Internet users to pay for news content, so that newspapers and other news entities get a nice supplemental revenue stream [...]
My recent E&P column, “Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content,” generated a ton of conversation, blog items, and mentions in news articles around the world. I’m pleased with that, because a wave had been building of (mostly older) prominent journalists and publishers recommending that [...]
My latest column is up at EditorandPublisher.com, and I suspect it will cause some debate:
Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content
If you follow the media biz, you’ve surely seen the brouhaha over new calls from prominent journalists like Walter Isaacson and Steven Brill for news [...]
This strikes me as so funny and unusual, I have to blog it. … So earlier today I posted this to Twitter:
A short while later I notice that I’ve turned up on Columbia Journalism Review’s website on its “The Kicker” blog, where the (short) blog item is actually [...]
Ah, the irony. … I had a great conversation earlier today with a journalist recently laid off at a major U.S. regional paper. Of the more than 100 journalists laid off with him in recent months, he’s gathered about 40 of them together to create an online news service covering [...]
The new Journalism Now Podcast I mentioned previously is now online with podcast No. 1. The eight panelists (including me) and host David Stanton all introduce themselves for this first episode, then finally get into actually discussing some issues and predictions.
We’re all participating using Skype, and the audio and [...]
This afternoon I took part in the first-ever recording of the “Journalism Now Podcast,” which is a weekly online roundtable discussion covering “multimedia, data and social aspects of modern news.”
Podcast founder and host David Stanton, who teaches digital journalism at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, [...]
My latest column for Editor & Publisher Online was posted this morning:
The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future
It’s my take on what a newspaper that’s decided to completely ditch its print edition but survive and reinvent itself as a digital-only local news entity will look like. I envision a [...]
It’s one of those thoughts I can’t believe hasn’t crossed my mind till now. (Though I’m certain it’s not original.) But I just noticed that lots of journalism schools at universities are still called the “School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”
Don’t you think it’s about time that they all [...]
This afternoon at 3:14 p.m., a few minutes after my daughter’s school ended for the day, I received this e-mail alert from the school’s principal:
“Dear Parents:
“An incident occurred today that we wanted to make you aware of. At around 12:45 p.m. the school received notice from BVSD that a threat [...]
I think this post by Robert Scoble today deserves a reading by all journalists: “Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age.” The A-list blogger was watching his Twitter and Friendfeed streams for news from people about the Steve Jobs announcement of the Apple CEO taking a medical [...]
Over on my site ReinventingClassifieds.com, we’ve just announced the winners of a couple Best Idea contests — one for media professionals and one for students. The idea for the contest was to tap the power of the crowd to come up with creative new ideas for reinvigorating newspaper classifieds [...]
Plenty of people have commented on David Carr’s piece in the New York Times, “Let’s Make an iTunes Model for News.” I’ll try not to repeat arguments already well made by others. (Rich Gordon has done a nice job refuting Carr’s ideas on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits; also see [...]
A couple stories in recent days remind us that the days of privacy are over.
Example 1: The naked upside-down skier
Surely you saw the story about the unfortunate man skiing with his son at the Vail resort in Colorado. There was a problem with the chairlift seat, and he [...]
My latest Editor & Publisher Online column is up: “Need to Make Profits Online? It CAN Be Done.”
It’s a follow-up to my previous E&P column, which advised newspaper CEOs on 11 key strategies to reinvent their enterprises. But since I didn’t focus so much on the money angle in [...]
One of my new favorite bloggers, Martin Langeveld, mentioned one of his favorite new bloggers, John Thornton and his Insomniactive, where the Texas venture capitalist spouts off smart opinion and analysis of the newspaper industry. Great stuff; add Insomniactive to your RSS reader if you care about newspapers.
I [...]
I’ve lost track of how many years I’ve blogged this, but it’s still good advice…
Remember to check your website or blog’s footer and change it to ©2009 tomorrow.
Sure, some systems are set to do this automatically, but MANY aren’t. I’m no longer shocked to see some website in June have [...]
Last night in Boulder (and not ending till this morning) we had one of our area’s famous windstorms. I saw reports of 80 to 90 mph wind gusts in some areas of the region. (I didn’t get much sleep last night due to the noise, as I’m sure was common [...]
If you’re in the news business and still think Twitter is silly and/or a waste of time, and of little consequence to journalism, this should wake you out of your stupor:
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Read his Twitter feed for a survivor’s experience of what he went through and saw — before [...]
OK, so yesterday I tossed up a 100% unscientific poll to see what you thought would happen with the Detroit and Denver newspaper situations. Since we now know what the Detroit decision was (Thurs-Fri-Sun home delivery with papers for sale on newsstands only on other days), here are the [...]
The speculation ended quickly enough. Detroit newspaper executives announced today their plan to (they hope) survive the industry crisis with two newspapers intact by implementing the following in spring 2009:
What an exciting (and yes, depressing) week it’s been in the newspaper business. The cities to watch right now are Denver and Detroit.
Denver: E.W. Scripps has put the Rocky Mountain News up for sale through mid January. No buyer: The Denver Post becomes Denver’s sole daily paper. Buyer: Who knows?
Detroit: [...]
I’m looking forward to Tuesday, when Detroit’s newspaper executives apparently will unveil a bold new plan to save themselves. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “the leading scenario set to be unveiled calls for the Free Press, the 20th largest U.S. newspaper by weekday circulation, and the News [...]
In a mostly complimentary review of my last E&P Online column, “My ‘Crisis’ Advice to Newspaper Company CEOs: 11 Points to Ponder,” the North Carolina Press Association Idea Bank blog (post written by “The Seeker”) referred to me this way:
“From the times I’ve read Outing’s columns, he doesn’t [...]
