Thumbs up to Dana Dussing Berry for a note regarding this interview with Alan Mutter, the mind behind the blog Reflections of a Newsasaur. In the interview he outlines a strategy for saving media companies, and it doesn’t involve charging for content.
We came to the realization that advertisers needed to know a lot more about customers on the Web, and that if publishers owned that information and could sell it, [they] could sell advertising at a much higher rate than they can today. If publishers owned their own system to capture demographic information about their readers and the content that they are reading, they could really gain a considerable amount of the power that they’ve lost in terms of being able to sell and the profits that they can extract from that business.
Compare this to the idea that Steven Brill, the mind behind the recently failed CLEAR airline security program, has for the industry. His model, Journalism Online, is an e-commerce tool that allows for owners of Web properties to set up, essentially, accounts for each user who can then shop for online news. The model allows for the Web properties to charge for subscriptions, day passes and single-use articles.
Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?” has developed yet a different model that relies on Web properties to cover hyper-local content. He anticipates the collapse of large regional newspapers.
Jarvis’ prescription for journalists, oversimplified, is that they should offer news online free of charge; they should blur the line between amateur and professional newsgathering; disclose personal beliefs and biases; and conduct their reporting in public view. Jarvis argues that people need to prepare themselves for the collapse of big regional newspapers, which he says have failed to adapt to the Internet age. In their place, he proposes alliances of small news Web sites — each intensely focused on local news. He says they can provide useful coverage and still be profitable at a much smaller combined cost than the big older newsrooms.
Over the course of this year I’ve written a lot about the future of the newspaper business. I’ve been fairly adamant in my view that a pay model will fail, not because I believe journalism should be given away for free, rather that I don’t think you can reverse a decade-plus of consumer behavior. Plus, it’s unlikely that any of the major online news sources are going to jump in knowing the others are still offering free online content. (American antitrust rules prevent newspaper publishers from colluding on payment structure.)
I’ve also been consistent in suggesting that readers are – and will continue to be – more interested in hyper-local content: school board meetings, high school football scores, marriages, obituaries, city council activities, etc. and that large newspapers can’t provide substantive coverage of those issues. (I’m thrilled about NPR’s hyper-local initiative which received funding today.)
Mr. Mutter’s model would dovetail nicely with what Mr. Jarvis proposes. The data, more than anything, is what advertisers want. And they’re willing to pay a lofty price for it.