Concerned Citizens

Today in the NY Times’ Media and Advertising section an article discusses some of the new moves occurring in the media industry around media pay walls. The article starts to delve into the challenges faced by traditional media and some possible solutions. It’s become a hot topic, especially with the efforts by Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. to develop a pay wall system for his various publications. The problem is that Murdoch may be ahead of his time in developing such a system but at least it has started the conversation. Similar efforts have been launched by a consortium that inclules Time Inc., Conde Nast, and several others aimed at building a new delivery model that would leverage technology such as e-readers along with a paid subscription model for content delivery. But the bigger question is would people really pay for digital content?

In the middle part of the Internet era (if there really is such an era) media publishers started experimenting with delivering their content over the Internet to potentially capture a new source of revenue through Internet ads sprinkled throughout the content. The problem was that at that time no one really understood how to market using the Internet and how to measure marketing success or ROMI (return on marketing investment). Just putting an ad on an Internet page was not enough since the real estate was limited and some marketers tried to force ad visibility through annoying technology tools like pop-ups or page redirection.

To meet consumer demand many browser companies and developers provided tools and plug-ins that would block pop-ups or prevent the redirection of pages. Along with that consumers developed a sort of immunity to ads and would ignore the ad content presented on the page, focusing more on the media content instead. Top that off with limited click-through measurement and a recession and you have the perfect storm for an Internet ad meltdown where companies could not justify ad costs on Internet sites.

The problem is content creation has a cost associated with it and must be covered. Traditional media content providers have leveraged their print model to help subsidize the online free delivery. This worked during the early days of the digital media era. However, as more subscribers began changing their channel delivery from print to online and dropping their subscriptions revenues for print began to erode, leaving traditional providers with fewer funds to offer to digital delivery.

Thinking that the print model must survive with all its cost structures and expenses, traditional media began the cannibalization of content by laying off reporters and contributors at the same time maintaining an expensive print and distribution environment. As I’ve written before, this seems counterproductive in my mind as it eliminates the reason people read the publication in the first place. A media product is only as good as its content, not the medium the content is delivered through.

The NY Times article does point to another media model focused solely on digital, eliminating the need for print and distribution costs and expenses. This model has come in a variety of flavors from totally free such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencier to a contributor model like that of public television or radio. This model is evidenced by the Minneapolis Post and the newly launched Texas Tribune. One model seeks to leverage ad revenue to cover the cheaper costs of an online publication that also leverages citizen journalists. The other leverages benefactors to help cover the costs and still provide a quality publication.

Some think the solution to the problem is in the blogosphere or citizen journalism. Addressing the former, bloggers are people who do not have the time to properly vet a story and sometimes alter the content to cater to their personal opinion or ideology. As such, a blog such as this one should always be taken as an opinion or augmentation of original content. Likewise, when addressing original content blogs should link to or acknowledge the origin. So I rue the day that blogs are assumed to fill the gap of journalism.

Secondly is the area of citizen journalism. This is an idea that just might work provided the content has an editorial process in the mix, leveraging seasoned journalists who understand the proper approach to reporting. This might work if it follows an approach presented by Steven Berlin Johnson at SXSW 2009. As you can see from the diagram deep in the talk it requires a multi-tier model to validate the information to be distributed to the masses. Without these layers content must be considered suspicious as it will not have been vetted before distribution. Granted the crowd will most likely correct the content but usually after it  is too late.

So what is the answer? Personally I think the pay wall models will prevail provided a reasonable pay system is developed that is easy to use and reliable. In the new pay wall model content will be delivered in sort of a sample mode where the reader can determine if the content is worth reading or of interest. Once selected a pay subscription model that would resemble cafeteria style selection would allow the reader to view the deeper content of the article. Payments could be processed in a micropay style or as an aggregate. If the subscriber deems the publication to be of regular interest then a monthly subscription fee would allow the reader to an “all you can eat” approach to content delivery, much like many pay wall publications have today. This is very similar to the iTunes store of Apple or the e-reader store within Amazon and both seem to be working to the model with their readers.

The challenge will be in plagiarized content that is pulled from the articles. Digital rights management is the only solution to address this challenge and that technology is far from ready for such a market. So in the meantime we will see 2010 to be a year of discovery with new e-readers such as the rumored Apple tablet and new ventures such as the Time et al consortium. Regardless you will have to pay for content in the future.