89 Comments

1. oMan:

Assuming microcharging is logistically easy, it still leaves the reader with a tougher decision. Before, the reader paid two fees: the newsstand purchase price for the paper, and the time/hassle needed to filter through the ads to get to the stories (discounted by the value obtained from the ads: not inconsiderable). Now and henceforth, the reader pays a per-look charge. It would have to be higher than the newsstand price (because that is no longer subsidized by the ad sales). Ouch. And ultimately the reader may miss the ads’ informational content, as he/she searches for things. That search cost will get reflected elsewhere and, if the reader does buy the same things as before, their price will have to convey that cost. So won’t the reader end up paying twice? Who captures the extra money: the new ad service?

Not very satisfactory.

May 6, 2009 - 9:14 pm 2. wretchard:

We are now in situation where you don’t have to buy the whole newspaper, just the parts of the newspaper you are interested in. Those partial newspapers are now online in the form of RSS feeds or “our favorites”. Ads follows the readership flows and reward readership with revenue in some way. But those ad revenues are captured by the sites and not necessarily by the originator. Moreover, the ad model doesn’t really capture all the value people would be willing to pay for a piece of information. To do that we need a more efficient market.

On that market we could trade not only existing original information, but prospective original information. Suppose we could create a mechanism through which “assignments” could be funded. Essentially the readership would become the editorial board of a journalist. What’s needed is some way to do this in an abstract way, almost like seeing a bid and fulfilling it. Some online journalists with large followings already do this, usually by raising contributions for trips, research, equipment, etc. Personally, I’d be willing to pay five cents for a journalist I think is credible to go and research the issue of President Obama’s birthplace, for example, or maybe one cent to guy to ask a certain question in Waziristan. We might also be willing to pay some small amounts for confirmation or collateral information. Certainly people who are following news of commercial import might find it cost effective.

If such a market could be created, then its goal would be to provide either better quality information at as much or less than the old newspapers could or the same quality for a much lower price. I think it could because the new model would potentially make it possible to mobilize resources at any level of granularity and return information when aggregate demand for it grew beyond the cost of providing it. The market has to make that transacton easy and transparent to both suppliers and providers somehow.

Whatever emerges won’t work if the reader has to pay more money for less information. It will only work if the reader gets a much better and more reliable information product for as much as or less than before.

May 6, 2009 - 9:27 pm 3. Walt:

Can you tell me where we’re going
Said inventor to the scribe
The scribe had not the knowing
But he thought the scribbler tribe
Had naught to fear from printing
Though he wished to make it clear
That while Gutenberg was hinting
That the death of scribes was near
It was time, he felt, that reason
Should prevail in such a case
And that printing, while in season
Would not scribblers jobs erase
Can you tell me where we’re going
Said the journalist to the blog
The blog had not the knowing
But it knew ‘twas just a cog
In a world wide web of knowledge
That is there in one big store
So a journalism college
Isn’t needed any more
And the Gutenberg invention
That put papers on the lawn
Faces daily intervention
And will soon in time be gone
Now what happens to the readers
All the kiddies, dads and mammys
Why they’ll simply have new leaders
Guys in bathrobes and pajammys

May 6, 2009 - 9:32 pm 4. Charles Ganske:

“Indeed, those who quote a source in order to attack it will find themselves willy nilly contributing to the revenue stream of the source being attacked. The bigger the attack, the bigger the payment stream to the attacked.”

This would mean that attempts to set up black PR projects or troll blogs that smear other bloggers, like La Russophobe, would completely backfire. They already do in some respects, particularly when the troll is unmasked.

On the other hand, non or for profit bloggers truly have some work to do if they want to set up a sustainable business model. If someone could invent an external, all in one outsourced system beyond Google ads to monetize a website’s traffic, then that would in theory cover the royalties back to the old media stuff, while producing some very modest income for the site owners.

May 6, 2009 - 9:39 pm 5. whiskey:

Wretchard –

You’re touching on something I’ve thought about a lot. Which has been the decline of the mass culture somewhere around the late 1980’s. It was not driven really by technological changes (the LAT peaked in circulation in 1988 and declined every year after that).

Rather, deep demographic changes, a corrupt, insular, decadent, and protected from competition yuppie elite (aka Yuppie SWPL scum), and marketing fads for certain demographic sectors (mostly young women) drove pretty much MOST mass media into extinction and near extinction.

Let me give you an example. The LA County Metro Area (LA, Riverside, San Bernadino, Orange, Ventura, have a combined population of 17 million.

Now, 17 million may sound like a lot, but that population supports: exactly ONE Classical Music station, exactly ONE Jazz station, exactly ONE commercial Alternative Rock station. For a few years, “Indie 103.1″ competed with LA’s KROQ, with former Sex Pistol’s guitarist Steve Jones, DJs who used to front for the Vandals, and so on. The station was not commercially profitable because out of that 17 million people, there were only a few people interested in Alternative Rock. Most radio stations are Spanish Language because that is who lives in the Greater LA Metro area. Indie 103.1 went Spanish Language back in January. [The failure of LA to sustain a current, "hot" musical scene and cutting-edge acts who become national figures of interest is of course itself telling.]

The failure of Newspapers was to imagine that Mexicans read English language newspapers. They don’t. The failure of Television networks (which gave up Saturday nights, back in 1998, and now the CW will give up Sunday nights) was to imagine that Mexicans watch English language television. They don’t. [Nielson has handy stats broken out by Black/Hispanic/Everyone.] Both Television (Entertainment and News alike) and Newspapers alienated half or more of their natural readership (which was and is conservative), got stuck with a cost structure that only works for mass-delivery of content (paper, TV affiliate networks), and failed to understand the core reality:

DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE.

IMHO Micropayments and other attempts to create what amounts to “Hillbilly Armor” for legacy media or new media for that matter to leverage the Itunes or Amazon model of “long tails” simply won’t work for one basic reason:

We are running out of people interested in that sort of thing. Which is mostly White Middle Class Americans.

Look at Rock Music. NOTHING interesting or exciting has been done in twenty years, because America ran out of enough young White people to make Rock music both competitive and well-paying. Heck the average NFL fan is over 50. CBS’s viewership is over 59 for the median age, and ABC, NBC, and Fox are not far behind.

America is older, greyer, and ever smaller every year for White/Middle class. Our young people are mostly Mexican, don’t care much one way or another about English language media, culture, music, food, books, or much of anything else to do with America, for that matter. Mexicans don’t read English language books, listen to White American Rock music, follow White American sports, or read/watch White American news sources. Why would they? Mexico is right over the border and has all they need culturally and linguistically.

The new media empires are already here. They’re just in Spanish, and oriented for Mexicans only. No Gringos alllowed.

May 6, 2009 - 9:47 pm 6. Steve White:

It’s an interesting thought as the world greets the Kindle DX today.

Part of the appeal of the new Kindle is that one can subscribe to and read newspapers, magazines and blogs, as well as purchase and read books. Want to have the New York Times with you always? That’ll be $13.99 a month. The Washington Post is $9.99 a month. Other newspapers are similarly priced. Amazon touts this as having all the world’s best newspapers at your fingertips.

‘Best’ is in the mind of the beholder, but look at the model. Sure, you can have all these newspapers — if you pay. The NYT comes in at $168 a year. WaPo is $120. The others are similarly priced. Just how many will you subscribe to once the blush of your new Kindle wears off?

How about, at most, ONE. It’s a wealthy and news-hungry Kindle customer who will have multiple newspaper subscriptions.

Note that you can’t get the NYT on your Kindle DX if you live in the New York metro area (so the fine print says). That’s so that Pinchy can preserve what’s left of his home area advertising base for print. So if you’re one of the 30 million teeming masses in the New York metro area, you’re SOL.

You can read Instapundit on your Kindle. You could use the web browser on that device, such as it is, for free, or fork over $1.99 a month to read the Professor in the special Kindle way. Guess which way most people will choose to read a blog? Free versus making a monthly payment. Tough choice. Bring out the Book of Common Wisdom!

We’re coming to the point where one can get news and opinion everywhere, but we’re not going to be willing to pay very much for it on an a la carte basis, because it’s too much of a hassle and the individual transactions costs make each deal more expensive than it should be. The Kindle/newspaper model is almost as dead as newsprint/newspapers. It isn’t the medium that is the problem, it’s that we’re not willing to pay for something we can get for free, or almost free, or ‘free’ (as in hidden within other access fees), elsewhere.

We all understand that news costs something to generate. Journalists, even Robert Fisk, have to eat. Someone has to pull the news together somehow so that you can find what you want. Micro-charging is one potential way of doing that, but as Mr. Fernandez notes that model has substantial problems. The worst is that it maintains the cumbersome current system of resolving the transaction costs. Click a link and it’s a penny off your master account somewhere, but the cost of charging you that penny could well be more than a penny. That sort of hassle factor simply won’t fly. How often would you click the television remote if it cost a nickel each time you changed the channel?

There is another solution, and that is tiered news access through your broadband provider. To the extent you want news you pay a monthly fee and get access to that tier without additional transaction costs. This is similar to current cable/satellite TV models — if you want the NFL network, you pay extra. Bundling of news then would be done not by newspapers, web aggregators or journalists but by broadband providers who would cut deals with news providers in the same way they do with movie studios and TV networks. This has the advantage of keeping the suits in charge of news, instead of independent journalists such as Michael Yon. The suits own the news providers and make deals with the broadband providers who then tier the news for you to consume.

This, of course, doesn’t work in a ‘net-neutrality’ world, so watch that die a slow and quiet death when Pinchy finally figures out that Comcast is his best friend.

Better still for the suits and the ‘elites’, it maintains ideological journalism because a tiered news model provides, within certain limits, a guaranteed income. An enterprise that can’t deliver might be dropped from a tier, but one that shows it is getting a certain ’share’ (views, clicks, however you wish to measure it) stays in the tier. How do you best do that? Bundling, of course. That drives the eyeballs to you.

You thought bundling would die, right? The Web 2.0 was going to make the bundling wildly different news (sports, business, gossip, local, national, world, style) into a single package as dead as an Edsel. Nope, bundling lives because it allows the marketing department of the broadband provider to sell you something quickly and easily, and to hide the costs of that bundle in a single access fee. And that’s where the profit lies.

Bundling is the model newspapers have used the last four centuries. Instead of bundling via newsprint, they’ll bundle on the web through the broadband tier. It could be reasonably innovative from the marketing standpoint, and the suits would work to live in several tiers (Times and Times Select, as it were). The suits could own multiple news ‘outlets’ in different tiers. Small news outlets could work in micro-tiers — local news in local markets.

But the suits will own it, not the journalists and certainly not the readers. Count on the suits to keep it that way.

May 6, 2009 - 9:49 pm 7. Derek:

I don’t know what things will look like in the future, but there are powerful forces that like it just the way it is.

The political class, and the bureaucracy to a certain extent, depends upon the homogeneity that newspapers have produced. In an odd way the papers of note reflect back to the political class what they want to see of themselves. The newspapers act as conduits to the population, and have a certain limited function to keep a lid on the excess.

I fully expect to see government funding for the news media, if not the newspapers themselves.

Derek

May 6, 2009 - 10:07 pm 8. wretchard:

The problem the suits are going to face is from entrepreneurs who can find some way to offer you customized bundles conveniently at low cost. Right now the broadband providers have a potential advantage because there isn’t a viable rival bundling system. So they exploit their convenience advantage. But is this advantage one they can enjoy forever? For a while, I think, but not forever.

Moreover, the average bundling schemes have no way to create a market for prospective original information. There is a demand for audience driven original reporting. But that will require dismantling, or reducing the power of intermediaries, the suits, by definition. There is value to removing the suits; that’s the product. People will pay to remove the suits. The challenge is to find some way to make that economically viable.

I think the technical challenges to fixing this are still very large, but it’s the hurdle that has to be surmounted, otherwise the suits will only succeed in migrating newspapers online. That’s like creating a steampowered cavalry horse. It’s newer technology in the service of a retro concept.

May 6, 2009 - 10:07 pm 9. pharmaguy:

Perhaps movie production or expedition model might work as suggested by Wretchard: John Q. Journalist organizes a “company” to say, examine the issues of BHO birthplace or the real story behind the Chrysler bankrupcty, money is deposited in an escrow acct of some sort, 25% at start of project and the rest of the $$ come as reports are written.

Whiskey is probably right tho- the number of folks who care about these kind of things is shrinking. Alas, there’s no one to keep an eye on the rascals; too many journalists got in bed with the rascals.

From the far north fringe of “Houston” on Long Island Sound

May 6, 2009 - 10:21 pm 10. Kirk Parker:

oMan,

“Assuming microcharging is logistically easy,”

Here comes the spherical cow…

May 6, 2009 - 10:33 pm 11. Kirk Parker:

Steve,

Yes, even Robert Fisk has to eat, but there’s absolutely no reason he has to continue being a journalist.

May 6, 2009 - 10:35 pm 12. Scythianeedle:

Mooo.

May 6, 2009 - 10:50 pm 13. Leo Linbeck III:

So, I think there is a third model. I’m not sure who “invented” it, but I’ll call it the Stratfor model.

I subscribe to Stratfor, a group that publishes regular analysis on international issues. They’ve got a relatively small group of really smart and experienced policy guys. They write serious, thoughtful stuff on important topics in a pretty non-partisan manner.

I pay $395 per year. For that princely sum, I get access to all their material, plus regular email updates (seems like they’re about daily, though some days I get several, and other days none).

Some of their articles are available for free; that is how I found them, when someone linked to a free article. After a couple of samples, I decided this was worth subscribing. You could do a similar model where you have subscriber content that is released to the public after a certain time; say 2 weeks for subscribers, then everyone can get it. This could be especially powerful when the information is highly topical, and people would pay to get it in a timely fashion.

Now, how many people really need to subscribe to make this model work? Let’s say 10,000. That generates a revenue of about $4M per year, more than enough to run a website and pay decent money to a group of 10-20 writers.

I think this is a powerful model. The marginal cost of distribution is close to zero, so it’s about producing something of enough quality to attract sufficient subscribers to make your model work. One guy can’t really do this consistently, but a relatively small “club” of writers can make it work. For Stratfor, you have writers who are strategists, former intelligence officers, foreign policy experts, etc. You also have some Middle East experts, some Asia experts, some South American experts, etc. It’s kinda like HBO: some people buy HBO just for The Sopranos, some for Big Love, some for Six Feet Under, some for Entourage, etc. You just need enough of a critical mass of content to attract enough interested parties to make it work.

So I could imagine a website that was made up John Burns, Michael Totten, Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, etc. that focused exclusively on foreign conflicts. Or a website that just focused on financial issues (Roubini’s website is subscription based, IIRC). Or sports. Or the arts. Or education. Etc.

The other piece of this is editorial aggregation. Drudge or Glenn Reynolds would cut a deal with each of these subject matter sites; they’d have the right to link, for free, to content they found particularly compelling. This would support continued traffic to their portal, since they’d always have an interesting mix of stuff.

At the same time, the high-traffic editorial sites would drive people to the subject matter sites. If 1,000,000 people go to Stratfor from a Drudge link, they only need to convert 1% to make the economics work. They might have to kick some of the money back to the editors, although they might not; the editors could be supported by ads, since they have huge traffic. The editors develop a following that is based upon being a good filter for information (not necessarily unbiased, just consistent and transparent).

The fundamental change is that the writers are now independent of the editors, unlike the newspaper model where the editors rule the roost. Writers write about what they want, and they can make good money so long as they find their audience. The editors, on the other hand, don’t have to worry about managing the writers; their only task is to sort through the universe of writers finding material that is good and will draw eyeballs to their site.

Finally, the content guys can also cash in by repurposing their content in different forms. They can write books, movies, etc. And no micropayments are required.

Just a thought.

L3

May 6, 2009 - 10:59 pm 14. j willie:

Leo’s on the mark here. I bet half the people that read BC also subscribe to Stratfor. They also wholesale their content to the big media companies. Lots of ways to slice and dice markets with high quality content as a “mini-publisher”, but not for micropayments. Like somebody else note, you aren’t going to subscribe to more than a few such services. George Gilder has done the same thing in info tech investing.

I don’t however see micropayments working, for the same reason metered broadband usage isn’t ever going to work. Who wants to try to keep up with how many GB of data they’ve downloaded or how many articles they’ve read. Flat rate pricing has proven more viable time and again (cellular plans, online plans, cable tiering plans, etc). Cellular industry also went thru that whole roaming fee/blance of payments fiasco, which burdened users with the responsibility of paying usage tolls for “external network access” which was always a rip off.

And Steve White, you give way, WAY to much credit to the cableco/telcos. Those companies are full-fledged bureaucracies with deeply entrenched interests in the status quo and its extension. They may not even succeed in keeping their own video programming in bundles, much less start bundling rapidly shifting online content. Have several friends at ATT and Comcast who will tell you that there are at LEAST a half a dozen people who claim ownership over any decision with career enhancing or detracting ramifications in those companies.

May 7, 2009 - 12:50 am 15. Machias Privateer:

Newspapers will continue to decline as long as they push important, but against the liberal template, news stories down the memory hole.

This story
http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/1560690,daley-sales-tax-repeal-increase-chicago-050609.article?plckCurrentPage=1&sid=sitelife.suntimes.com

was posted yesterday (5/6/09) morning and the first comment was made at 11:14 CDT.

The same story did not make today’s print edition http://www.suntimes.com/index.html

If it’s not in the print edition, history will think it never happened. So much for “the local paper of record”.

The relevance of the story is immense in that it notes that even Presidnet Obama’s fellow travellers in the Chicago Democratic Party have taken not of the Tea Party Rebellion and are now in favor of repealing tax increases.

Who would have thought that from reading the print edition?

May 7, 2009 - 3:45 am 16. no mo uro:

The decline of radio culture Whiskey describes actually began in the ’70’s with the explosion of disco. I was in the business at that time and remember it well.

Classical music had always been unto itself, in the radio world. Jazz as well, however, as the popularity of both declined into the 1960’s, they often shared the same station, typically classical in the day, and jazz at night.

By 1970, bluegrass had ceased to be a popular style, for the most part. It got lumped in with country, which had broken off from early rock by the mid 1960’s. Nonetheless, many of the better country tunes crossed over to popular music even in the early ’70s.

Prior to disco in the ’70’s, you had top 40 format mostly aimed at the 9-14 demographic and what was called Album Oriented Rock (AOR) for the 14-40 age group. In the bigger urban markets, AOR was incredibly diverse. On one of these stations, you could hear,in order, a song by Elvis, followed by one from Pink Floyd, then one by the Grateful Dead, then Marvin Gaye, then Led Zeppelin, then Spyrogyra, then the Allman Bros., the Jimi Hendrix, then the Supremes, then Ritchie Valens, etc. This really was the glory time of popular music, you could hear great stuff of many, many different styles without changing the station.

When disco hit the scene big time, stations popped up which played all disco all the time (many were converted top-40 format stations). This caused a lot of the AOR stations to alter their playlists as well, becoming ‘classic rock’. Radio executives responded to this with a new business model which targeted an incredibly loyal microaudience instead of providing a little bit of everything for everyone. Every style of music had its own station and its own microaudience – classical, country, classic rock, disco/urban dance, indie/punk/new wave, fusion/smooth jazz. By 1980 there were almost no stations left in the country that would play a diverse mix of artists and styles that had existed on lots of stations only six years before.

A trend which continues to this day. XM and other pay-for radio formats are the ultimate expression of this trend.

Demographics has certainly contributed to this fracture, but it had a lot more to do with changing business models for marketing radio commercials to smaller but more loyal audiences that were conceived nearly forty years ago.

FWIW, from someone who was there.

May 7, 2009 - 4:20 am 17. Andrew X:

I can’t help but take the opportunity to post the YouTube that many of you have already seen, that of the White House press corps sitting down upon the entrance of President Bush, and standing in respect for the entrance of President Obama.

I really think this 22 second video is to a reality today what the ’sailor kissing the girl in Times Square’ was to the end of WWII, or that ‘helicopter on the roof of the US embassy’ was to Vietnam — well and truly a snapshot that tells almost the ENTIRE story in as much as a snapshot can tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VAfJyzN3ak

Prtotocol pretty much demands that people stand when a President enters, much like a judge into a courtroom. IF the White House press corps decides collectively that that “impedes partiality” or they are just not down with that, whatever, their call, I guess.

But if they are doing exactly what they ARE doing in this clip, that tells me something very important…. that these people may have found their way into an “important job”, woo hoo for them, but they have not the SLIGHTEST thing to say to me or do for me that interests me one bit. Why should it? They have a job, and it is to support a narrative and push an agenda which I am not a big fan of, but it is their right, as it is my right to hold them in contempt for it.

So down, down they and their organizations themselves go to the memory hole.

An aside. Anyone picked up TIME or Newsweek lately? They’re about as thick as comic book. As a reader long ago, I had this weird flash when I picked one up (not that I bought one) that it was like seeing an old friend who now has cancer: shock at “My God, what the hell happened to you?”.

But refer to YouTube video above. Why in the end should I care? I SHOULD care…. if they were the important source of IMPARTIAL information that they say they are. But they self-evidently are not.

May are weeping over their loss. Ask any one of those people if, in their heart of hearts, they would weep if the FOX network went belly-up next week. Uh huh.

I would weep for an amputated arm, but if it’s gangrenous, it’s gotta go.

Sorry.

May 7, 2009 - 4:31 am 18. RAH:

The problem with the news and newspapers is that there is very little news. Most that is printed and on the web is opinion. Opinion is cheap to produce but it is the best paid at newspapers and on news TV stations or cable stations.

The drive to get viewers has led to massive entertainment models, the sensationalism of FOX with celebrity news. FOX also uses the two opposites arguing to get entertainment for viewers.

Note the same use at Hot Air. Ed’s post are more substantive and Allah is provocative to enrage or amuse us.

One of the reasons I read the Belmont Club is that the intelligent posts by Richard. I started reading Belmont Club when he had his pieces posted on Free Republic.

Getting in depth news is expensive and time consuming it can take weeks to get the facts to write and the audience may not be interested in the details that cost so much to produce.

The audience is not often interested in real news. For instance the build up that Russia is doing in Georgia from the Russian promoted demonstrations to induce the President downfall to the mutiny effort. Russian troops are 25 miles from Georgia’s capital but the is very little on the ground reporting. Why? Because it is expensive to place an American there to report and there is very little interest in American populace who is more interested in sports and celebrity scandals.

The problem I have with newspapers is their bulk. Too much to go through to get the nuggets of news and opinion I want. Most of the newspaper is trash. Some of the best reporting and writing is in the Examiner yet they do not have a big enough revenue stream to pay for it. Local and free papers have local stuff that people are interested in. Weather and fast news is obtained via radio in a car while traveling to work and back.

Most newspapers go from delivery to the trash bin. I try to get news via the web but that is hard to get since most news sites use snippets from AP and Reuters, which is very limited in depth and scope.

Check Google or Yahoo news and is not current and very monotonous. It is the same news that every group decides they want to present so it is difficult to get foreign or good local news.

There is very little free time for most people to read the news and models that allow the people to get news when they are doing something else like radio will be the most successful.

There is a great hunger for people for certain type of news. Scandal is one of them and that is how the scandal rags mange to survive. Also they do not pay their writers much.

Most newspaper reporters and pundits are vastly overpaid. The web had decimated that model, since punditry is done for free from every blog. But the web does not produce the investigation that reporters were famous for. Mostly mostly unpaid amateurs who are enthusiasts of a subject do that. Lord Monkton for global warming for instance who has been researching and writing about the subject for some time.

Advertising is using new models to get air and print time. Micro payments are one of those that seem to on the beginning of a successful model.

Newspapers never could get paid using the primary service of news and depended on the subsidy from advertising dollars. With print and delivery costs being high and advertising going to free ads on Craigslist and other venues such as direct mail. The newspapers are suffering from the problem of over paid writers and desertion of their advertisers.

May 7, 2009 - 4:34 am 19. Herb:

Part of the attraction to this blog is that the quality of the posters (L3, RAH above) adds to the superb quality of the host.

They should get a cut. But this is Mr. Fernandez’ house and great prosperity to him. I do like L3’s idea, tho.

WRT the micropayments, at some point the law of diminishing returns has to kick in.

Maybe the Pajamas model of a network of sites can be part of the solution. I note that my personal set of (~16) daily reads is 30% PJM.

May 7, 2009 - 5:04 am 20. njcommuter:

It’s sweet irony that the Liberal MSM is citing the Huffing-Post as a threat to their survival.

May 7, 2009 - 5:09 am 21. Habu:

From the thread body.

“Over time the model will erode ideological journalism. The Huffington Post, for example, may find itself quoting Michael Yon (and hence providing a market for him) despite any ideological antipathy they may feel for him. Indeed, those who quote a source in order to attack it will find themselves willy nilly contributing to the revenue stream of the source being attacked. The bigger the attack, the bigger the payment stream to the attacked.”

From Adam Smith.

Every individual necessarliy labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.

He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, lead by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.

May 7, 2009 - 5:15 am 22. RWE:

For some time now people have advocated a choose-and-pay system for cable TV. I get all kinds of channels that I have no interest in, and as the cable bill keeps going up I pay more and more for more and more I don’t want.

Perhaps the answer for news would be to pay a subscription fee to a central point for websites that I want. Part of the fee would be doled out to my selections, based on my estimate of how often I want to visit them. The Belmont Club would be the No.1 use, Opinionjournal would be No.2, Florida Today would be No.56, India Times No. 458, the NY Times No. 99,568.

Now, I also get news from my ISP, which is the main source of the occasional items I send to Wretchard and a few other people. I figure I already pay for that through the ISP, which I presume has an arrangement with AP to pay them. And once you pay for a newspaper you don’t have to resell it to let someone else read it. If Wretchard wants to republish the item for discussion, I suppose it is reasonable that he pay for the privilege, rather like the ASCAP licensing for people who play music; I have no idea how this would work. I also have no idea how ASCAP licensing works.

But most people do not rely on analysis but pick up scattered bits of news from various sources and form a “feeling” about items. Iraq is hopeless. Afghanistan is really important. Global warming is killing the planet. Bush lied. But provide details and proof? They don’t need no stinkin’ details.

Thus, the development of such Pay for Play services will have the unfortunate tendency of giving such free news less direct money but more political power. Leo Linbeck III has the ability to tell the socialists to go to hell and provide waypoints with GPS coordinates as well, but the people who develop “feelings” about economic issues are not going to hear from him.

May 7, 2009 - 5:25 am 23. RAH:

Thanks Habu, that was lovely quote from Adam Smith. It is true that the miracle of markets is that the effects are often invisible to the producors.

Watch Milton Friedman’s video of the pencil which is a great example how selfish production desires creates a cheap and useful product.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

Howver most print newspapers had used AP and Reuters as a prime source of news and they paid for those services. Those services also gated news and slanted news. For example the great Reuters scandal of photoshopped pictures.

So I am not sure that a micropayment system will evolve into a non ideological news.

May 7, 2009 - 5:27 am 24. Cooldog:

Everything old is new again!

Back in the 60’s Ted Nelson coined the terms hyper-text and hyper-link. Eventually, it came together as Project Xanadu.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

The concept of micro-payments for reading linked content was included from early on.

I was with them in Swarthmore, for a time.

May 7, 2009 - 5:28 am 25. Ashcat:

Derek @7: “I fully expect to see government funding for the news media, if not the newspapers themselves.”

Agreed–the opportunity is too sweet for Government to resist. I look for an early, high-profile “bailout”–almost certainly the NYT. Then, let all others fail, with Gov’t saying “We can’t save them all”, and make ongoing NYT subsidy dependent on a name change to something like “The New American Times”. Izvestia/Pravda reborn.

j willie @14: “George Gilder has done the same thing in info tech investing.”
Gilder began writing his tech newsletter in about 1997, and a subscriber message board grew up around it on his website. He has/had vision about tech trends investing and is a brilliant man in many ways, but lacked the financial discipline to be giving investing decisions. He tried to hire others to provide it, with some measure of success. I was a Gilder subscriber for 11 years, until 2008, when he had by then ceased writing the newsletter and, with several financial types, started a hedge fund (!). He was a regular message board contributor, but when he became aware of the potential for conflicts of interest, he nearly stopped posting. Last I knew, the message board still exists, but you have to pay $199/year for the privilege of reading/posting comments with quality similar (but more focussed) to that found elsewhere for free (such as Silicon Investor).

The idea of micropayments has been around for years. I recall educating myself about it ten or so years ago, but haven’t kept up much with developments. What’s new with micropayments that will enable their success now, that wasn’t thought up a decade ago but which, clearly, has been unsuccessful?

May 7, 2009 - 5:30 am 26. Bill R:

With L3’s idea, I would switch my $25/Month from buying a paper based aggregation of fawning news stories about Barak Obama to something on-line.

Does this, like Wretchard seems to indicate, mean that I will migrate to higher quality content?

Micro-charges are technically possible, but L3 is spot on. Newspapers are dying out because of the internet and will continue to do so. The only question left is how to pay for quality after they are completely gone.

May 7, 2009 - 5:35 am 27. Habu:

1ST AMENDMENT ON TRIAL
Hostile bloggers facing fines, jail?
Proposal ‘comes close to making it federal offense to log onto Internet’

Posted: May 06, 2009
10:39 pm Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Jail cell
A new proposal in Congress is threatening fines and jail time for what it calls “cyberbullying” – communications that include e-mails and that “cause substantial emotional distress.”
The vague generalities are included in H.R. 1966 by California Democrat Linda Sanchez and about a dozen co-sponsors.
But it already is being condemned as unconstitutional, unrealistic and probably ineffectual.
At Wired.com , in a report labeled “Threat Level,” writer David Kravets criticized the plan to demand “up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to ‘coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress.’”
“Instead of prison, perhaps we should say gulag,” he wrote.
Such limits never would pass First Amendment muster, “unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing,” he wrote. “So Sanchez, and the 14 other lawmakers who signed on to the proposal are grandstanding to show the public they care about children and are opposed to cyberbullying.”
The plan is labeled the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, after the 13-year-old Meier, whose suicide last year reportedly was prompted by a woman who utilized the MySpace social networking site to send the teen critical messages.

The defendant in the case, Lori Drew, was accused under the Computer and Abuse Act.
“Sanchez’s bill goes way beyond cyberbullying and comes close to making it a federal offense to log onto the or use the telephone,” Kravets wrote. “The methods of communication where hostile speech is banned include e-mail, instant, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages.”
“We can’t say what we think of Sanchez’s proposal,” he said. “Doing so would clearly get us two years in solitary confinement.”
Wrote a contributor to the Wired forum page, “If passed, this legislation could be easily abused with the effect of criminalizing all criticism. You probably [couldn't] even criticize the legislation itself because it would cause Sen. Sanchez emotional distress or possibly be considered a form of intimidation.”
The bill, which has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, states, “Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
It states: “Cyberbullying can cause psychological harm, including depression; negatively impact academic, safety, and the well-being of children in school; force children to change schools; and in some cases lead to extreme violent behavior, including murder and suicide.”

http://tinyurl.com/d3hp5w

May 7, 2009 - 5:41 am 28. michael hoskins:

Suit here. So, as a fictional marketing exec–
Now…I place my ads (and pay the rates) based on circulation, which is readership. I am hoping that some portion of the paper’s readers see and read my ad interspaced with the content and competition.

Tommorrow…I select a popular blogger/ consolidator and place my ad there, with a much more targeted delivery. Rates are rates.

As myself…I recently went to web site to look at…of all things…suits and shirts, of a well known clothier. Now, on this very site and others, the banner ad is from that company,

It looks like the “suits” are already working out various models. And I don’t pay nothing.

Works for me.

How money flows down hill, donno. But I suspect that someone will soon “pay” Yon, Fernandez et al for thier content based on hits.

May 7, 2009 - 5:45 am 29. markb:

Bundle it with a MicroVAT.

They won’t be able to say no. Government ownership scares me more.

Although ThePirateBay model is appealing.

May 7, 2009 - 5:53 am 30. Lifeofthemind:

The same political environment that is unable to establish a penny charge on outgoing email that would eliminate the cancer of spam which chokes the internet, a cost that would be almost universally accepted, is unlikely to do the serious work to craft a set of regulations needed to support micro-payments. Also the trolls who are still flinging poo at the mention of Bush on the comments for the Youtube linked above panic at the thought of losing their anonymity.

Much, maybe even most, of the content provided as news and opinion really is advertising. Content is sponsored by the government or a corporation or some NGO or foreign government’s publicity flacks and repackaged as “News.” What is needed is for the content provider to be up-front about who is paying their bills. This could be a return to the old system of authors prefacing their work with a dedication to a wealthy patron. “This report on Global Warming is brought to you courtesy of GE, the manufacturer of Wind Turbines.”

May 7, 2009 - 5:54 am 31. mariner:

Habu:

Such limits never would pass First Amendment muster, “unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing,” he wrote.

Limiting political speech would never pass First Amendment muster either, but McCain/Feingold was ruled constitutional by our Nine Robed Masters.

Government confiscation of private property for private benefit didn’t pass Fifth Amendment muster, until Kelo.

Fascist Democrats have power and they mean to keep it, Constitution be damned. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

May 7, 2009 - 6:12 am 32. RAH:

I would like to do what Totten does and travel and write about the locations and take photos. I assume he was a writer before he took the plunge into private funding his travels and writing.

I have read his pieces on online magazines as well as his web site. It is good that it gives an excerpt on his site and link the the paying article.

May 7, 2009 - 6:23 am 33. Alexis:

We are now in situation where you don’t have to buy the whole newspaper, just the parts of the newspaper you are interested in.

If that model could be applied to newspapers themselves, newspapers could thrive again.

For that matter, imagine a kiosk or vending machine where a consumer could pick what he wants and then get a customized newspaper he picks out.

The problem that really afflicts the newspaper industry is a lack of imagination within their circulation departments. As a rule, a newspaper’s circulation department gets run like an old fashioned plantation by a bunch of numbskulls who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag.

It wouldn’t be difficult to turn newspapers into a thriving concern again even without microcharges. If newspaper publishers saw their newspapers as printing factories first and foremost, as opposed to being soap boxes for self-important editors, they would understand how there would continue to be a strong demand for their product.

The internet isn’t the cause but instead the scapegoat for the demise of newspapers.

May 7, 2009 - 6:33 am 34. Frank Ch. Eigler:

See this (reference to) a larger essay about the likely failure of micropayments to finance newspapers of the future:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/clay-shirkys-newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable.html

May 7, 2009 - 6:36 am 35. NullificationNow:

RWE Your concept is valid and to further define, I don’t mind watching short ads but there are sites that are virtual ongoing ads. Engadget, autoblod, uncrate etc. promote many products in a non commercial way, a credit of sorts could be issued for browsing these sites and applied to the more esoteric sites Belmont, PJ. American Thinker, Free Republic etc. The exchange of actual fee based browsing would in effect be subsidized.

May 7, 2009 - 6:44 am 36. Alexis:

Whenever a local newspaper relies upon its own sources and not upon wire services, it delivers a product that can’t be found on Google or Yahoo. Otherwise, it’s rather like finding out that the bottled water one had been buying at the store is no different from water from the tap.

If the main problem in the newspaper industry comes from the corruption of its wire services, it may be a good idea to create some organization that would compete against the present day dinosaurs.

May 7, 2009 - 6:48 am 37. Habu:

31. mariner:

I couldn’t agree more. However one thing we have to be aware of is that here at BC we are in the vanguard of having discussions and thus formulating public opinion on issues. Leaders cannot get too far in front of hoi polloi as to lose them in the fight.

How many people on the street could answer one question about Kelo, or McCain/Feingold? One in 5,000?, 10,000? …anyway not a helluva lot.

There is no doubt we are in a real fight and I have on the last thread extended some remarks as to some ideas that can be employed and honed so that they can be implimented so we can get back in the fight.

Great examples however.

May 7, 2009 - 7:28 am 38. Habu:

Must run do a LONG list of honey do’s…later.

May 7, 2009 - 7:29 am 39. James the lesser:

If the economy keeps sliding I’d expect ad revenues to dry up. It isn’t just newspapers that rely on those–so does Google (search, youtube, blogger, etc). If the gov’t bails out NYT, it would probably be urged to bail out Google as well. And with the “who pays the piper” rule come predictable regulations–all for the sake of “fairness” and “the children,” of course. IIRC, PJM has been having some cash flow problems too.
5 years from now, how will we get alternative news sources?

May 7, 2009 - 7:39 am 40. feeblemind:

Re nickel charge/article: I read maybe 40 posts/articles/day. At a nickel a pop that adds up to $2/day, $730/yr. I can’t afford that. In the event of micropayments, I become much more discriminating in what I look at. I don’t know if everyone thinks that way, but I can’t help but believe it will reduce overall traffic.

May 7, 2009 - 7:50 am 41. twobyfour:

OT – Odd News
Zombies

H1Z1.

Similar to a scare originally found in Cambodia back in 2005, victims of a new strain of the swine flu virus H1N1 have been reported in London.

After death, this virus is able to restart the heart of it’s victim for up to two hours after the initial demise of the person where the individual behaves in extremely violent ways from what is believe to be a combination of brain damage and a chemical released into blood during “resurrection.”

According to the article distribution maplet, 12 cases of Z variant have been reported from Mexico.

May be a case of misdiagnosis = something else is piggybacking on the H1N1, it may be some kind of a parasite.

Or it may be that the actual heart beat rate goes into a major slowdown so on a superficial observation the heart would seem stopped.

1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive.

May 7, 2009 - 8:15 am 42. SunSword:

I think this:
(1) Newspapers printed on paper are primarily of interest to people who cannot access news on the web. So for example, if I travel by public transportation, and it has no web access, then I am likely to subscribe to a paper or buy one every day at a box at the station. Otherwise, why get paper?
(2) Like other industries, to survive the papers need to go national. There is no reason a few flagship papers cannot simply go national and distribute their data to local printing centers. This increases their potential customer base by an order of magnitude or more.
(3) Assuming they go national, there is probably room for 3 major “news” papers — a left of center paper, a center paper, and a right of center paper — all targeting their one demographics. Plus specialty papers like the WSJ (business), a sports paper, etc.

Now, once public transport all has web access (for example, if the Metra train service in the Chicago area was to provide web access as part of the monthly ticket) then the papers will all die their final death and all news will be via the web. The Chicago Tribune would die — unless it adapted and became the National Tribune (probably by capturing that center of the road national niche).

May 7, 2009 - 8:27 am 43. Dave D.:

…Somebody, somewhere on the net, will have news for free, free being ” not charged money “. If I can’t get it on the net, I’ll get it on the radio, but I won’t pay for it. Nobody is going to uninvent mass communication via electrons. Newspapers are dead, or dying; they’ve run their course, as trubadours did, as town criers did, as handbills did, as mimeographed papers did.
…Creative destruction is bass ackwards…first comes the destruction, THEN the creation. I’m enjoying the destruction part immensely

May 7, 2009 - 8:32 am 44. Alexis:

One of the strongest markets for newspapers is people who don’t like watching a computer. Even if they do use the internet, they prefer to read a paper printout. For such people, newsprint would serve a purpose, especially if the newspaper industry got off their butts, stopped whining, and started listening to what people want for a change.

In India and Japan, newspapers also double as printers for comic books. Imagine that. Imagine your local paper as a printer for comic books by local artists. Imagine getting the New York Times printed by your local newspaper.

The problem with the newspaper industry isn’t the internet, it’s how it is run by a bunch of smug jackasses who are so full of themselves that they can barely comprehend that their monopoly power is gone, never mind imagining how they can survive in a competitive environment.

May 7, 2009 - 8:49 am 45. twobyfour:

Dave D,

I’m enjoying the destruction part immensely

I was not entirely sure, Dave, but now I am–please seek medical help.

May 7, 2009 - 8:49 am 46. mwalls:

Something to thing about on micro-payments systems. Who gets to profit from the information of your purchases. Imagine the fun tracking the news/opinion payments for political gain.

May 7, 2009 - 8:52 am 47. twobyfour:

mwalls, a good point, that would be how to make micro-payments “profitable”. Providing that the tracking system is centralized. Or another way — a subscriber can get a certain type of tracking analysis. It actually would be desirable to create it as a party-independent entity for CYA purposes.

May 7, 2009 - 9:08 am 48. Dave D.:

..twobyfour…I’m glad you are entirely sure of something.

May 7, 2009 - 9:13 am 49. mwalls:

On micro-payments, I’m thinking as the collection agency I can do traffic analysis to produce the critical nodes of any potential opposition, and sell that to the ‘powers that be’ for pickup/surveillance by the appropriate enforcement group.

May 7, 2009 - 9:29 am 50. twobyfour:

mwalls,

Yea, that is how I understood your idea.

May 7, 2009 - 9:34 am 51. Mark:

L3 writes: “Or a website that just focused on financial issues (Roubini’s website is subscription based, IIRC). Or sports. Or the arts. Or education. Etc.”

A good finance site would be helpful and worth a subscription, something with honest and savvy analysis and advice over the long term.

I suspect the Boston Globe’s sports section might have spun off into some internet entity. It’s worth reading. Nothing wrong with slanted, biased, hand-wringing reporting when it’s about your sports teams.

Pandora is a great internet-based and wireless music and radio subscription service. Easily worth $11.99 a month. It’s a payment system that must be working for artists and Pandora.

Some aggregators assemble non-commercial and commercial stuff, and you have to sort through it on your own. I’m not sure there’s ever an alternative to sifting and winnonwing. See ‘Climate Debate Daily,’ a nice pro and con aggregation of opinion and some research.

About the sinecured journalists: rent seeking knows no end. New rent seekers are going to provide better services and the dollars will flow to them. On the other hand, I don’t doubt that a government can stifle competition and cripple the invisible hand. Would the guvmint subsidize a particular kind of media and create new kinds of sinecures? Ask NPR.

Ultimately, media expression partakes, willy-nilly, of some “comprehensive narrative.” If you listen to NPR or watch EWTN, you get the idea. In the words of the lately departed Fr. Neuhaus, “It is one of the less charming oddities of our time that, in many circles, atheism, or at least a declared agnosticism, is assumed to be the default position of disinterested ethical discourse. As though proceeding from the assumption that there is no God is less consequential than assuming that there is. Neither is a neutral position.”

May 7, 2009 - 9:35 am 52. aaron:

H1Z1 virus: that was a satirical reference to currently popular zombie flicks set in england, such as “28 days later”.

It got attached to the news feed for the swine flue frenzy by some illiterate editor somewhere and is causing a “war of the Worlds” phenomena.

May 7, 2009 - 9:39 am 53. RWE:

Nullification #35: I was going to mention ads but thought I had gone on too long anyway, so I am glad you did.

Some websites have become damn near unusable due to ads. Ebay is an example. It does not matter how fast your connection speed is, every single page you bring up has to load all those dancing men selling home mortgages and crap like that. It used to be via pop-ups, so pop-up blockers were developed, and now they just mash the ads in with the content. On a commercial site like ebay this is particularly unnecessary and irritating.

May 7, 2009 - 9:42 am 54. wayne parman:

What you’re describing is a “clearing system” for the revenues. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has run one for futures and options trades for more than ten years. It keeps track of brokers who “execute” trades that are “cleared” at some other firm. At the end of any month, the CME sends a bill to the “clearing” firm to pay the executing broker. The funds are deposited automatically in that broker’s bank account or his firm’s bank account. The software to do this is not complicated. All that is required is legal agreements among the brokers and clearing firms, which are standard, two-page documents signed in advanced by all parties. I’m not sure how the AP collects its fees, but it can’t be THAT much different from what I’ve described. Wayne @ TimberLand

May 7, 2009 - 9:52 am 55. Scythianeedle:

The problem per se is not that news has an ideologic slant; it is that the so-called news organizations INSIST that NO, they are completely objective.

The more they have come to make this silly claim, the more the blatantly clear it’s become that they’re just a bunch of partisan liars who will report only the tidbits that coincide with what they want you to think, and either suppress things that don’t, or just make up stuff to reinforce their views.

So much for journalistic ethics.

Well, you can say that a willingness to consider information that does NOT support your narrative and viewpoint is an ideological choice, too. Information theory holds that sometimes data contrary to what you want to believe is far more crucial than reports that merely confirm what you already think is true.

Kinda like the institution of the Court Jester, who traditionally was allowed to say things that other people might be thinking, but were constrained from saying.

Well, I suppose there were plenty of Jesters that paid a penalty along the way, too.

May 7, 2009 - 9:54 am 56. Pajamas Media » ‘Value Added’ Journalism:

[...] Read the rest of the story here. [...]

May 7, 2009 - 10:34 am 57. NahnCee:

I can see paying a subscription fee for Instapundit because what I’d be paying for is Glenn Reynold’s point of view and legal background, with very little in the way of outside comments.

I don’t think I’d want to pay a subscription fee for Little Green Footballs, however, because I quit reading the comments there a couple of years ago when it devolved into more of a flirty social club. And while Charles Johnson has been a good source of news since 9/11, recently he’s gotten bogged down in European neofascism, creationism, and Obama apologia to the exclusion of everything else.

But, the thing that leaps out at me to question is what would you do with a site like Belmont Club where the comments are at least half of the reading experience — several extremely competent, educated and experienced people writing about their areas of expertise, in addition to the competent, educated and experienced moderator.

It seems to me that if you’re paying Roggio, Yon & Totten to read what they’re saying, that somewhere along that food chain there should also be some sort of recompense for “consultants” like the commenters here on Belmont Club who are NASA experts, military strategists, retired CIA spooks, and Wall Street guru’s. (We won’t bother with trying to figure out how to reimburse the Russian sock puppets who flood in during Putin’s various excursions.)

May 7, 2009 - 11:03 am 58. JMH:

I don’t think ad-supported business models are going to do very well in the near future (as James the Lesser points out, ad revenue is going to be thin until the economy recovers, which might be a while). I expect the bulk of advertising in the near future will be government funded (”this message brought to you by the Ad Council…). That’s an added problems for, um, non-conformist news and opinion outlets. If Obama can’t use the Fairness Doctrine to shut up Limbaugh and Hannity, he’ll try to cut off their revenues – no more Ad Council buys and expect some sort of directive that prohibits companies caught up in the ever-widening TARP net (or TARP TRAP if you will) from buying ads on “hate speech” outlets.

May 7, 2009 - 11:06 am 59. Oh, bother:

I think I would pay a certain amount for daily delivery of my favorite blogs: BC, wattsupwiththat for the climate wars, wunderground for local weather and hurricane season, drsanity and neoneocon, and some others. For news? *cricket chirping* I would pay for a “just the facts” news feed. I can determine my own opinion without editors or suits.

I wouldn’t want to have to pay more to read the comments. I learn so much from the commentors here and at wattsupwiththat, it’s almost like going back to school with no calculus required. I would find it quite a loss to miss the thoughts of (in no order) L3, habu, RAH, twobyfour, Alexis … I can’t name them all. For the same reason I would hate for commentors to be charged, lest I lose some good stuff. At a blog like this one, the owner should be able to designate certain commentors as essential accessories before the fact, so to speak.

I would also pay for transcripts of interviews, which my system displays in stutter-step fashion. There is an interview right now on PJTV I just don’t have the time to listen to. RWE (who also goes on my list) is right about sites with ads — some are just not worth it.

The only traditional pundit I would pay to read is George Will, on those rare occasions he rights about baseball and especially the agony of being a Cubs fan. There’s a lot a Rangers fan can learn from those.

May 7, 2009 - 11:07 am 60. Habu:

59. Oh, bother

I talked with George Will a while back, got his private number ONLY because I had some Cubs autographed baseballs from their 1932 World Series team on which my grandfather played…..he wanted me to give it to him ! !
We never did any business but from time to time I talk to him about thee Cubs of 31 and 32, relating stories my grandfather told at Thanksgiving and Christmas..oh the humanity !!!
I have a Billy Herman game used bat he also wanted me to donate to him ..he’s like rich and ..well anyway I like his commentary but I wouldn’t give him the bat.

May 7, 2009 - 11:19 am 61. Lifeofthemind:

The royalist paradox. Being rich and famous means that you can expect to get stuff for free. Did Adam Smith ever see it coming?

May 7, 2009 - 11:52 am 62. Habu:

61. Lifeofthemind:

I don’t recall Adam mentioning that in either
The Theory of Moral Sentiments or An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations but Mr. Will is a much better interpreter of the human condition than I am. No doubt it will make it into obama’s rewrite of Mr. Smith’s works.

May 7, 2009 - 12:08 pm 63. Captain Ramen:

feeblemind @40:

What about a two tiered flat monthly payment system? One for reading (end user) and one for quoting. I’d shell out $60 year for a PJM superpack – instapundit + 5 favorite bloggers.

People like to say they are against paying for stuff like this but so many people piss away $200 a month on digital cable / satellite to watch 5 channels.

whiskey @5:

I was sad to see 103.1 go. Great station. However, I think there is more to it than demographic doomsterism. The parents might listen to chunty-ass banda or Piolin all the time, but their kids don’t. If anything they listen to both, including hybrids like roque en español.

We used to have two classical stations here until 105.1 turned Spanish (although now it is country music!). Lamentable, sure – but there is much better selection with streaming radio. I hate almost everything after the 18th century, and I have plenty of baroque only channels to choose from.

With music downloading, legitimate or otherwise, I can’t see why anyone would even listen to the radio… it’s the same crappy 10 songs over and over again. Jack FM being the exception.

I know a guy (first generation from Mexico) who is constantly complaining that the 2nd generation doesn’t ‘feel Mexican in their blood.’ That particular quote was about the son of his friend that had an ipod and rode a skateboard. While we do face an uphill challenge assimilating Hispanic immigrants it is not as hopeless as you think.

May 7, 2009 - 12:20 pm 64. Rob:

Fair use laws make your second option of highly questionable legality.

May 7, 2009 - 1:04 pm 65. ajacksonian:

For the equivalent previous change it is necessary to look at the printing press, itself. It broke the stranglehold of illiteracy and the near monopoly of the church for written materials. While you did have troubadors and bards, their output was decidedly limited in scope, content and availability. Martin Luther could not have done as he did without the printing press to spread his words far and wide: a century previous to that and his words would have been limited to a very small area and his very life at threat.

The world previous to the moveable type printing press was transformed, and we can only with trouble think of a world in which books are rare, libraries scarce and knowledge limited. What happened to the bards? They wrote their stories down and sold them… or had them transcribed, but only a very, very, very few of them. Troubadors became reporters, their news printed and cheaply distributed, so they no longer had to sing for their suppers. And while the Holy Bible remains the most printed book on the planet, that now has to be broken down into all the different versions and interpretations of the original works… just as Martin Luther wanted. After that is a work of a bard: Homer’s Iliad. After that we start to find works that could not be possible without the press: novels, speculative works, works of science and literature that now have print runs in the thousands, tens of thousands, millions.

How did we ever survive without those strictures, those ways of thought, that clamping down of information? With some very bloody wars, of course, but also steeply increasing literacy and knowledge. Now the internet offers something that is, yet again, cutting obliquely across all the old institutions of newspapers, television, films, books, essays… if the past is any indication, they will not survive save for some cherished works that are moving to us as people. Those who were once bards, troubadors, minstrels, etc. did find new ways and means to live.

We no longer expect all revealed wisdom from a central church that tithes us.

Soon we will no longer pay for news from centralized sources, and possibly not at all, as reporting events is a human endeavor not one that is sacrosanct to some priesthood that oversees printing presses. Many still put some money into the plate passed at church, but that plate now no longer goes out into the community to extract it.

And there is one other venue that is earning well off of the mixture of old and new. Baen Books, where after a couple of years their material is put up for free… and stimulates the sales of ink on paper as people still like it as a convenient form and format, with high resolution and needing little energy to run. Authors there now realize that ‘free’ can make money… good and constant money better than the old way of doing things… yet who would have thought that giving something away for free would stimulate them to pay for it?

Strange that.

And wonderful.

May 7, 2009 - 1:08 pm 66. Habu:

OK, for the jumbo package I’ll provide a room and private bath* and point out “where the big ones are” in numerous secret Montana trout streams.

Normally an Orvis endorsed lodge would charge thousands for this.

But wait there’s more. Free “Big Sky” vistas from the front porch. (Small house dog doing the wild thing on your shin is extra)

*bed,soap,towels,toilet paper extra.

May 7, 2009 - 1:16 pm 67. dla:

The “news media” doesn’t produce something of much value. The Wall Street Journal, one of the nation’s best, tried and failed with a pay-per-view model.

The supposed “journalism” in America has to face the fact that they don’t offer anything of value. They were protected by a closed distribution system in the past.

If “journalism” raised the bar, i.e. set such high standards that it could regain the trust of Americans, it might have a product. But right now there’s no content difference between some kid on YouTube and Katie Couric on CBS.

May 7, 2009 - 1:25 pm 68. Oh, bother:

Habu: Give it to him?! Who does Will think he is, the Hall of Fame? He’s off the list. I grew up in Houston in the 60’s. I probably know all I need to know about cheering for a losing team.

May 7, 2009 - 1:49 pm 69. buckets:

Way back before I knew what “liberal” or “conservative” or “objectivist” meant, I stumbled across Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Apart from the protagonist, what I remember most about it was Rand’s absolutely scathing commentary on modern news and the deliberate control of its content.

I had never heard ideas like that before, and the audacity was alarming: to think that purveyors of vital information would be so brazen and dishonest as to filter their content! Innocence like mine never lasts forever, and neither, apparently, does Leftist propaganda in the guise of impartial presentation of news.

The newspapers are dead. Long live the [government-funded] newspapers!

May 7, 2009 - 1:54 pm 70. Pat J:

There are all sorts of things going on in the media these days and over the last few years some posters have mentioned which I find interesting.

@5 whiskey – Agreed. Changing demographics have an impact but you’re overgeneralizing your market. I’m sure there are plenty of Hispanic kids who don’t listen to 100% Mexican radio. Yet I agree that Spanish-speaking people are more likely to read newspapers in Spanish.

@ 15 uro – Complete agreement. The disco fad meant the death of block radio programming. Stations that were top 40 branched off into different formats. Also keep in mind this was the same time as the rise in FM radio, hence the birth of the Classic rock, AOR, urban contemporary formats and others.

@44 Alexis – Good point. The folks who don’t have computers are generally elderly people who are often newspaper subscribers.

Rah – You make some excellent points about what I would call the “dumbing down” of the people receiving the news. They are more interested in celebrity scandals or sports news that true hard news. Good example with Georgia, especially the point about how news organizations can’t afford to send a reporter there. There’s plenty of real news but its being overshadowed my the latest missing teenage blonde.

In summary, there has been a seismic shift on how people receive news information. Two other factors come into play.

First, consolidation. in markets like L.A. you might have one radio cluster with 8 stations, maybe with eight different formats where at one time each individual station might have had it’s own individual news department. The news department at an 8 station cluster is very small, unless one station is news/talk and even then, it’s mostly “talk.”. Listeners won’t stick around for hard news. They’ll log on or turn to their ipods or whatever. Consolidation arguably has led to a decline in news outlets and news journalists. Corresspondingly, listeners and viewers are more interested in “infotainment” instead of credible news content.

Second is there has been an overall trend in the last few decades in a decline of credible journalism. Pretty much due to the reasons I mention above and elsewhere. #67 dla – Exactly. The so-called “journalism” in America provides little of anything of value due to poor journlaistic standards. Critical thinking seems to not be taught in our journalism schools anymore. Obvious example is Fox News which I consider propoganda.

Good discussion. Thanks.

May 7, 2009 - 1:57 pm 71. Matt Beck (Man of the West):

We’ve had this discussion once before, and I still maintain that the internet is not going to affect any paradigmatic shift in the way news is gathered, presented, or funded. While I often stand in awe of Richard’s insightful analysis, I have to take exception here. These micropayments are a non-starter, and any expectation of a technological fix is both utopian and ridiculous.

Nobody is going to want to pay for that: they’ll conclude that it isn’t worth it and revert to getting their information at the barstool or the watercooler. The present amount of connectivity we enjoy is a luxury that results only from the lack of major geopolitical upheavals over the last 70 years. The internet and its exigencies will not survive the next global war. It will first be fortified, then censored, and finally mined for its raw materials (while rationing meanwhile makes repairs and upgrades impossible). There is a lot more at stake here than just the fate of the newspapers; the very historical period to which they belonged is drawing to a close.

May 7, 2009 - 2:01 pm 72. Belmont Club » Micropain:

[...] before the last post on the future of the news business model appeared on this site, an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review described a Chinese government [...]

May 7, 2009 - 2:22 pm 73. BPT (Australia):

Liberals should pay people to read their painful essays.

May 7, 2009 - 2:45 pm 74. Promethea:

My favorite blogs are Instapundit, Belmont Club, Dr. Sanity, Neo-Neocon, Little Green Footballs, and Ace of Spades. All these sites attract knowledgeable or funny commenters.

Although I’d love to see the people who run these sites get rich from their efforts, I wouldn’t subscribe to any of them (might contribute, however). Part of the joy of reading blogs is the feeling that one is in the room with people of similar interests. The blogger follows his or her interests, and the commenters come and go. I’ve followed the six sites mentioned above for more than five years, and I see how they evolve.

If these bloggers were trying to make money from their sites, then they would begin to follow the demands of their audiences. Soon the blogs would become more like magazines and less like the intellectual salons that they are now. Wretchard, for example, is all over the place in his interests. It’s hard to categorize. That’s what makes it a great site.

Look how many people have complained about Charles Johnson’s recent focus on creationism and rightwing European groups. I happen to be among those who think Charles does a good job with these important topics–but they’re not for everyone. His blog will remain fresh so long as he’s interested in the topics he writes about, but if he tries to follow the market, his blog will suffer.

Two examples in support of what I’m saying: (1) as an artist, my own work is much more satisfying and more interesting when I follow my personal interests rather than trying to appeal to the market for my particular form of art. (2) the subject of creationism has probably kept hundreds of thousand of former “liberals” from calling themselves “conservatives.” (Scare quotes because the real terms should be “statists” and “small government advocates” or some such label.) Creationists also have a lot of power in many state school systems, and that affects what’s taught in the public schools.

May 7, 2009 - 3:24 pm 75. Oh, bother:

I’ll ask the commentors: If all journalism schools disappeared from the US, what do you think would happen and how long would it take?

May 7, 2009 - 4:28 pm 76. Subotai Bahadur:

If I may, I’d like to combine two of the ideas that have come up here. Yes, the news market has changed. Drastically. Almost all “news” in print journalism, and many of the leads for nationwide broadcast journalism, come from the news services and are written as much for political goals as anything approximating that lost art known as journalism.

There used to be a form of check and balance on what the news services could put out with some credibility; because there were independent reporters from networks, larger newspapers and chains, and the larger broadcast stations. The possibility of an outsider [who was something they do not have now, "competition"] either beating them to a scoop or coming up with information that would debunk something that they had said meant that there had to be some veracity in what was sent out.

Today, only the networks, the news services, and a very, very few of the larger outlets can afford to do anything more than to tear the sheet off of the teletype printer [yes, it has been that long since I spent time in the editorial offices of a major newspaper]. The number of individuals involved in the shaping of the news is now relatively small. They all know, or know of, each other; and they share a professional and political Weltanschauung that shapes what they do.

They are very cognizant of their power, and they do in effect conspire to coordinate their stories. No, that is not tin foil hat material. Look at the “JournoList” online group to which those who write the news now openly belong, and which in addition proudly sets the group think in our stories. Note also that amongst all the benefits of being in this group is to have access to the members of the Administration who participate, and thus shape the news [and the threat of removal of that access is what keeps the media on the reservation. There is a real reason that you have to go to foreign news sources to get any real analysis of what is going on in the White House.

So far, there is little I have mentioned that is not relatively common knowledge. However, if I may take another point to the next level. From Iraq, Georgia, Israel, Iran, or Afghanistan; there is a common thread beyond cost that prevents worthwhile reporting.

In each of the locations where the United States is in conflict with a hostile power, we are up against a foe that, to put it plainly, does not respect the lives, or any "special status" of a reporter. If captured, or if they contact [or are hunted down by] that foe later, there is a real risk that even if they are treated like other Americans would be treated and killed out of hand; that if held longer it might be found out that they had published something unsypathetic to the enemy, or perhaps even harmful to it. That would not be forgiven, and they know it.

The only way that they can be “safe”, however that is defined; is to be embedded with our troops. However that has its own hazard from the point of view of the media. Those reporters who involved themselves with our troops in large numbers, the last time that happened during the invasion of Iraq, did something that is against the group think of the media. They came to actually like and admire the American Soldier. Unacceptable, and in the main the media have avoided embeds in any great number since.

The limited number of reporters remaining today regard themselves as an elite, literally. As a member of the elite, it is unthinkable that they put themselves personally at risk from the barbarians who they fear greatly, merely to get a story. They have no such fear of the United States, and it shows in their coverage.

It would be unacceptable to send lower level reporters to cover these stories. Besides the risk that they would reveal stories that would counter the preferred narrative, if they became popular they would become competition to the established sources of news. The larger the media, the less important each member is. The growth of alternative media scares the goolies off of them.

Thus, in addition to the economic reasons cited, and the resultant cutbacks in coverage; there are the additional drivers of personal cowardice and professional jealousy. Strong motivators, these.

These are not going to change [and therefore the coverage of the news is not going to change] until some element of fear of consequences for the current situation enters their minds. Until they fear the people of the United States as much as they fear its enemies, until it becomes singularly unprofitable to be the Left’s lapdog; they will remain the same.

The economic collapse of the current media paradigm may be part of one of the conditions for change.

Subotai Bahadur

May 7, 2009 - 5:48 pm 77. Sebastian Shaw:

I would think the government ownership of newspapers would be a catalyst for losing the remaining audience the dying newspapers a trying desperately to keep; therefore, I believe the editors just need a fundamental change in their biased left wing business model to get the remaining 50% of their audience. This problem will not go away on the internet (see the New York Times).

May 7, 2009 - 5:51 pm 78. Dougf:

Won’t work. I’M NOT PAYING and I’m not alone.
Not a dollar,not a dime.

The worst that can happen is that I don’t have that piece of information, and since it was in all probability an ‘optional’ piece of my total existence I will therefore not miss it. There’s always the Library should I really need a ‘fix’.

Out of sight —– Out of mind. That is in fact what will happen.

The ONLY result of these ‘micro-charges’ is that the overwhelming mass of the population becomes even more clueless, uninformed and easily misled. What a great development. But the ‘media’ won’t be saved and neither will ‘journalism’. It will just increasingly become a ‘niche’.

Push comes to shove, if music,films, software can’t be protected from the dark side of technology, how will mere ‘information’. Answer — it won’t. When it becomes ‘useful’ to crack the protection system of these micro informers, then cracked it will be.

Don’t know the answer but his won’t be it. I guar-ahn-tee that.

May 7, 2009 - 6:55 pm 79. buddy larsen:

Close the J schools? Force people who want to write journalism to read some of it and just “do it like that”? well, ok.

May 7, 2009 - 7:07 pm 80. JoeHill:

There is nothing wrong with newspapers and magazines but there is a big problem with journalism and the people running newspapers and magazines. Fact is people don’t buy papers for the news they buy them for the ads. It is pretty much the same for magazines. People cancel their subscriptions because they are agravated but the political slant or broke or the bird died.

Editorial content is as the late Lord Thomson said “The stuff between the ads” neatly summing up his generally successful approach to the newspaper business. Paper is still a superior technology. You can take it to the park, the beach, the subway, the crapper. It doesn’t need batteries or electricity. It doesn’t short out in the rain and if I get tired of carrying it I can throw it away, line the birdcage, train the dog, start the fire etc.

May 7, 2009 - 7:34 pm 81. sf:

In the coming year the dying newspaper industry will probably explore two tracks in order to survive. The first and most obvious is for newspapers to acquire some kind of public funding or bailout money to keep providing the “essential service”. But that is unsustainable.

Respectfully disagree. With the Dems controlling the entire fed govt–and a veto-proof majority in the Senate–and the public having accepted the gift of tens of billions of dollars to GM and Chrysler with no detectable problem, the way is clear for Obama to subsidize all leftist papers for the rest of our lives.

Since no one was able to keep the Dems from passing the clearly unconstitutional GM and Chrysler gifts, it seems clear that they don’t regard the Constitution as binding on them. In that case not one single legal restraint remains against the government giving tens of millions to leftist papers each year.

May 7, 2009 - 8:24 pm 82. buddy larsen:

Whiskey/5; scroll down a little to “a few afternoon links” –the Maggie’s Farm post with the babe smoking a cigar –they’re featuring your comment #5.

May 7, 2009 - 9:10 pm 83. RAH:

Disagree with #80. I do not know that many buy print papers for the ads. Considering how much people hated popups and use popup blockers to get rid of ads that distracted them from what they were reading, I figure most do not look for ads. That may be different for fashion and diet stuff since people are looking for that info and that info is in ads.

The biggest problem with large papers is the volume. The Washington Post is far too large. I only check the A section and maybe Style. Others only look at the sport section. The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s people are searching for financial news and are will pay for that.

In order to pay for the printing plants and the writer, papers need large advertising revenue. The loss they are suffering is because their product, news is not worth paying for when we have the net, radio and TV all for free.

Mostly we get is analysis or punditry and that is really a dime a dozen. Yet pundits get paid very well.

Some we love are amusing like Lilek’s and we will pay for that.

I agree that printing costs can be reduced when the plant is used for books, comics, and multiple papers. Some have changed to that model. Not WaPo.

This is similar to publisher’s woes. They produce books but can’t get a lot to get shelf time to get exposure.

Baen started webscriptions and considering the quality of some of their writers, the buyers choose to buy ebooks and set the price. Baen does not encrypt and is against DRM and cheap and has been successful.

They allow samples to get interest and then people buy.

Print on Demand for books are starting to become viable and Print on Demand for papers is possible. The problem is what to know what to print. Will the newsstand allow you to read the paper to decide what to print?

Do you instead go with your standard and only print the local, business or sport sections?

The Kindle solves reading papers on subways. You can download your paper and read on the way to work. That will help in the cities among those who do not drive but that is not the majority of people.

Papers can survive but they have to slim down drastically. Multiuse the print plants. Stop paying salaries that are extreme. Most papers only may pay small sums to writers and columnists only got money since they were syndicated like the comics in many papers. That reduces the opinion makers to a few. The web allowed anyone to become opinion makers and that had expanded the punditry class but hopefully will reduce the compensation.

The question is can the papers slim down to print news and info that people want and get paid just for that or with smaller ad revenue? I am skeptical. Lots of local papers are free and have been subsidized by the ads and that is not successful. They do not pay the writer a lot but the printing costs do consume a lot of money. They pay a pittance for delivery.

Maybe the solution is to produce the broadsheet and reduce the news to one sheet for a penny and pay the boy to sit on corners and offer it in the cities.

Maybe the solution is like Instapundit. Short one-liners with links to get the full story. I do think a digital format like Kindle is the future for news.

May 8, 2009 - 1:13 am 84. Tomp:

75. Oh Brother – They still exist?

May 8, 2009 - 4:49 am 85. Oh, bother:

Yeah, they do. C. S. Lewis famously remarked that most ordinary folk don’t read the leading articles and intellectual journals; they read the sports pages, which are mostly true. What was true fifty years ago is true today.

Newspapers publish the funnies (comic strips), which entertain kids of all ages. The next good comic strip could be worth millions to its syndicaters and incidentally, the artist, especially if it lends itself to production of plush toys and window stickers. The sports section is probably the most popular section. The sportswriters have to be truthful because sports devotes get their sports news from many sources and therefore, will smell a rat if the writer tries to pull something (see above). The same for the business section — reporters have to play it straight there, too.

Shoppers like the ads and coupons. Women and girls who like to shop get their own section and apparently help subsidize the funny papers (and the crossword puzzle). Not being a shopper myself, I don’t get it; but Mr. Bother was always happy to see the Frye’s ad in the Friday paper.

The more I think about it, I’m not sure who wants to look at the rest of it.

May 8, 2009 - 9:16 am 86. kbdabear:

Am I going to shell out a nickel for fluff stories from our Watch The Dog Media about the First Couple’s Saturday night strolls or the nuances of Bo’s latest bowel movement?

Nope

May 8, 2009 - 12:51 pm 87. GlobalObserver:

So now, instead of attributing information to the Associated Press, Reuters, or the New York Times, bloggers and low-budget news providers will simply reformat things like this:

“According to press reports, 5 out of ten Americans agree with the President’s policies.”

Who get’s the royalties then?

Plagiarism is tough to prove, if smartly done. You re-word things, pop in a few original quotes, disguise sources in a way that doesn’t provide a clear trail to where they originated.

Politician “X” gives a speech, it’s on television, lots of people were there. Who’s to say you weren’t? You pick up the quote, maybe even change a word here or there, paraphrase it, etc.

When the time comes where anyone has to pay money for attributing information, writers and editors and bloggers and linkers are going to come up with incredible ways to avoid those fees.

Newspapers themselves have already been doing this for years. A story appears in a competing newspaper, and in order to avoid being totally scooped a reporter on the city desk is given the assignment of making a quick call for a fresh original quote or two. Then the reporter writes up the piece in ten minutes from clips and goes out to lunch.

May 9, 2009 - 7:19 am 88. JoeHill:

It would be very difficult to plagiarize anything in the WaPo or the NYTimes because they mostly just reprint White House press releases.

Want ads, car adds, apartment ads, grocery ads, movie ads, real estate ads. I know people who have never read the editorial page who buy the paper and that has been the papers saving. Once they put that junk on the front page instead of real news they were more or less doomed but the problem isn’t the medium the problem is the content and the people who make the content decisions.

May 9, 2009 - 7:29 pm 89. Skeej:

Great article.

Exactly so – I’d pay money to visit Belmont Club for the wisdom of the content and the qualiity of the community feedback, but I would not for HuffPo.

I pay for WSJ because it offers a collection of information I cannot find elsewhere, that is reality and fact-based, but I do not pay for WaPo because of the exact opposite.

I also wont pay for something I find culturally repugnant, for example I stopped listening to NPR at 0635PST on 9/11/01 precisely because I heard Daniel Schurr reflexively blame America, in the first reports.

May 10, 2009 - 2:52 pm

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