Written by Chris Magyar
Thursday, 19 March 2009 12:16
Dan Gillmor, the head of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has been enjoying a feisty and controversial run as guest blogger over at Boing Boing, calling for, among other things, a bloody revolution against the government for its collusion with financial institutions. (Okay, to be fair, he’s merely been wondering and questioning, loudly, why such a thing hasn’t already occurred.) Now, he posits a future for the news industry, in which the nation’s largest papers coalesce their newsrooms into one hegemonic entity that charges a subscription, thereby locking all the in-depth breaking news behind a wall.
He all but admits up front it’s a troublesome idea, and expends many pixels in picking it apart and/or defending it. But it’s more than a troublesome idea; it’s ridiculous. And a long-time journalist like himself should immediately spot the problem.
Q: How did you come up with your membership list? What rules did you use for who gets included and who does not?
A: No rules except their ability to do excellent journalism — it’s a first cut. I’m sure there are some organizations that don’t belong on the list, and others that do. I’d add National Public Radio and the Guardian if the ownership/nonprofit issues could be resolved, for example. And maybe the McClatchy Washington Bureau.
Let’s say that leaves out — on the basis of “excellent journalism” — the New York Post (daily circulation around 725,000 readers). I choose the Post as an example because it’s seen by many as the apotheosis of bad journalism, a Murdoch-run zombie of low-brow culture, bad pun headlines, and guilty pleasure subway reading. Now let’s say all the nation’s “great” journalists take their toys and go home behind this subscriber wall that costs $10 a month (Gillmor’s estimate), and ply their trade while waiting for the money to roll in. Let’s even say that, initially, based on the cachet of having NYT and WSJ reporters in there, a bunch of subscriber lemmings follow.
Now let’s put a basic truth about journalism out there. Great news organizations do not get scoops because their reporters are better at scooping. Those reporters might be smarter, or better at writing, or able to synthesize information more intelligently (and I really emphasize that ‘might’), but they don’t have a magic talent for scooping. The talent for scooping, like the talent for clutch hitting in baseball, is a myth created by statistical noise.
The noise, in this case, is the size and prestige of the newspaper’s audience. The reporter for the NYT or AP has more access to important people than the reporter for the Tulsa World or Idaho Statesman, and more sources with big stories will approach the NYT and AP with their information, because those venues are the recognized way to get sizzling information out to as many people as possible. Scoops are a part of the feedback loop between size of audience and quality of content. Quality content builds audience size, but audience size generates quality content. And hard numbers aren’t all that determine audience size: not many people read the New England Journal of Medicine, but its relative prestige in the field makes it the go-to place for top-notch papers to be broken.
Gillmor is betting that the organizations with today’s size and prestige will continue to hold on to it after this mega-merger-retreat, somehow survive the government’s inevitable hand-wringing over allowing a monopoly, and use its top-notch journalistic talent to keep churning out breaking news.
Back to the New York Post. It doesn’t get into the country club. It probably keeps its 725,000 readers in Manhattan, more or less, while the NYT probably takes its readers behind the firewall at first. A few years go by. You’re a cab driver. You just drove a drunk woman from Gracie Mansion to her home in Queens. She confesses she was bonking the mayor. In fact, she’s distraut because he threw her out, when the bonking was interrupted by a phone call by someone important sounding, and he got real angry, and said something about something, yadda yadda yadda. Now, if you’re that cab driver looking to feel important and make something out of this chance encounter, do you call the Times, or the paper you’ve been reading every day for the past few years? Boom, the Post reporter gets the scoop.
Turns out, when he tracks down the woman, what she overheard leads into the maw of a deep impropriety, in which the mayor is doing something very naughty with his official powers. This reporter just got the scoop. He starts making phone calls. Almost anyone will talk to the Post. After all, almost everyone reads it. Those who don’t talk are the ones who have something to hide. He digs and gets the story. The Post, realizing the import of what it has, runs it fairly straight on the cover (okay, maybe a gigantic headline), and has a runaway hit.
Now, real news is happening outside the firewall. The firewall reporters scramble to pick up the pieces, and maybe even get deeper into the details than the Post reporter got, but the thing is, the one advantage the Cabal had — being the first place to find out stuff — is gone. And every time something like this happens (and something like this happens several times a year; it’s the very building block of journalistic competition), it chips away at the Cabal’s reason for existing.
The Post’s audience grows, which feeds its abilities to get more stories, which … attracts better reporters, who just want to be read.
Look, the daily newspaper business model is definitely a wreck right now. The profit margins were so high, for so long, that it became riddled with fluff at the management level and the content level. Entire divisions of what used to be “normal parts” of a daily paper — classified ads, comics, daily columnists, ad pages with shopping bargains, sports results, movie times, local opinion — are being decimated by the internet. What’s left is news, and local news at that.
As moguls sift through the ashes trying to figure out where to go, they must remember the simple nugget of truth that got all this print journalism business going in the first place: the audience is everything. Grow one, feed one, and you’ll live, somehow. Ads? Subscriptions? Donations? It doesn’t matter. If you have an audience, you have a future. If you don’t, you don’t.
Locking “great” journalism behind a pay wall is not a strategy for growing — or even maintaining — an audience. And thus, in the long run, it is an idea doomed to failure. The dangerous aspect of it is how many economic rules about fair competition and free speech we’d have to trample just to try it.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Commentary, Features.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
19/09
Thursday, 19 March 2009 12:16
Dan Gillmor, the head of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has been enjoying a feisty and controversial run as guest blogger over at Boing Boing, calling for, among other things, a bloody revolution against the government for its collusion with financial institutions. (Okay, to be fair, he’s merely been wondering and questioning, loudly, why such a thing hasn’t already occurred.) Now, he posits a future for the news industry, in which the nation’s largest papers coalesce their newsrooms into one hegemonic entity that charges a subscription, thereby locking all the in-depth breaking news behind a wall.
He all but admits up front it’s a troublesome idea, and expends many pixels in picking it apart and/or defending it. But it’s more than a troublesome idea; it’s ridiculous. And a long-time journalist like himself should immediately spot the problem.
Let’s say that leaves out — on the basis of “excellent journalism” — the New York Post (daily circulation around 725,000 readers). I choose the Post as an example because it’s seen by many as the apotheosis of bad journalism, a Murdoch-run zombie of low-brow culture, bad pun headlines, and guilty pleasure subway reading. Now let’s say all the nation’s “great” journalists take their toys and go home behind this subscriber wall that costs $10 a month (Gillmor’s estimate), and ply their trade while waiting for the money to roll in. Let’s even say that, initially, based on the cachet of having NYT and WSJ reporters in there, a bunch of subscriber lemmings follow.
Now let’s put a basic truth about journalism out there. Great news organizations do not get scoops because their reporters are better at scooping. Those reporters might be smarter, or better at writing, or able to synthesize information more intelligently (and I really emphasize that ‘might’), but they don’t have a magic talent for scooping. The talent for scooping, like the talent for clutch hitting in baseball, is a myth created by statistical noise.
The noise, in this case, is the size and prestige of the newspaper’s audience. The reporter for the NYT or AP has more access to important people than the reporter for the Tulsa World or Idaho Statesman, and more sources with big stories will approach the NYT and AP with their information, because those venues are the recognized way to get sizzling information out to as many people as possible. Scoops are a part of the feedback loop between size of audience and quality of content. Quality content builds audience size, but audience size generates quality content. And hard numbers aren’t all that determine audience size: not many people read the New England Journal of Medicine, but its relative prestige in the field makes it the go-to place for top-notch papers to be broken.
Gillmor is betting that the organizations with today’s size and prestige will continue to hold on to it after this mega-merger-retreat, somehow survive the government’s inevitable hand-wringing over allowing a monopoly, and use its top-notch journalistic talent to keep churning out breaking news.
Back to the New York Post. It doesn’t get into the country club. It probably keeps its 725,000 readers in Manhattan, more or less, while the NYT probably takes its readers behind the firewall at first. A few years go by. You’re a cab driver. You just drove a drunk woman from Gracie Mansion to her home in Queens. She confesses she was bonking the mayor. In fact, she’s distraut because he threw her out, when the bonking was interrupted by a phone call by someone important sounding, and he got real angry, and said something about something, yadda yadda yadda. Now, if you’re that cab driver looking to feel important and make something out of this chance encounter, do you call the Times, or the paper you’ve been reading every day for the past few years? Boom, the Post reporter gets the scoop.
Turns out, when he tracks down the woman, what she overheard leads into the maw of a deep impropriety, in which the mayor is doing something very naughty with his official powers. This reporter just got the scoop. He starts making phone calls. Almost anyone will talk to the Post. After all, almost everyone reads it. Those who don’t talk are the ones who have something to hide. He digs and gets the story. The Post, realizing the import of what it has, runs it fairly straight on the cover (okay, maybe a gigantic headline), and has a runaway hit.
Now, real news is happening outside the firewall. The firewall reporters scramble to pick up the pieces, and maybe even get deeper into the details than the Post reporter got, but the thing is, the one advantage the Cabal had — being the first place to find out stuff — is gone. And every time something like this happens (and something like this happens several times a year; it’s the very building block of journalistic competition), it chips away at the Cabal’s reason for existing.
The Post’s audience grows, which feeds its abilities to get more stories, which … attracts better reporters, who just want to be read.
Look, the daily newspaper business model is definitely a wreck right now. The profit margins were so high, for so long, that it became riddled with fluff at the management level and the content level. Entire divisions of what used to be “normal parts” of a daily paper — classified ads, comics, daily columnists, ad pages with shopping bargains, sports results, movie times, local opinion — are being decimated by the internet. What’s left is news, and local news at that.
As moguls sift through the ashes trying to figure out where to go, they must remember the simple nugget of truth that got all this print journalism business going in the first place: the audience is everything. Grow one, feed one, and you’ll live, somehow. Ads? Subscriptions? Donations? It doesn’t matter. If you have an audience, you have a future. If you don’t, you don’t.
Locking “great” journalism behind a pay wall is not a strategy for growing — or even maintaining — an audience. And thus, in the long run, it is an idea doomed to failure. The dangerous aspect of it is how many economic rules about fair competition and free speech we’d have to trample just to try it.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Commentary, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.