Something there is that doesn’t love a paywall

August 20, 2009 by 4 Comments

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!
– Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

This week the conversation about pay walls for news sites online — a/k/a the “how do we make them pay for news?” question — has reached a feverish pitch. In what may well be remembered as the apex of the ostrich argument, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi maintains, in the American Journalism Review, that newspapers should either “build that paywall high” or — this is where the ostrich beak burrows far below daylight — quit the Web entirely.

“Downplaying the Web, or dropping it altogether and going back to print only, looks not just smart for the struggling newspaper industry, but potentially lifesaving,” Farhi writes.

Never mind that newfangled printing-press thing! Can’t you see we’ve got scribes to support?

A number of exasperated media observers who think the paywall is a bad idea but who have grown tired of the endless debate are echoing Farhi’s cry: If you think it’s such a great idea, they’re saying to publishers, shut up already and just start charging.

For the thorough explanation of why the strategy is doomed, just read Alan Mutter’s post today: “Publishers consistently have told me that they fear they could lose 75% or more of their traffic and banner revenue if they started to charge for content.” My experience at Salon –where we briefly went “all pay” after 9/11, when the ad market disappeared — suggests that even this number is optimistic.

I’m exasperated too, but I won’t join the “put up or shut up” crowd because I’d hate to see the further ghettoization of oldfashioned journalistic expertise on the Web. New models for news are sprouting on the Web every day. The journalism profession has a wealth of expertise and knowhow; the support of a dying industry’s paychecks will continue to dwindle, but the expertise can still be transmitted to a new generation of journalism ventures. That won’t happen If major media outlets wall themselves off from the Web. They will cut off not only their revenue but also their chance to influence the practice of journalism as it evolves online.

The alternative to “go ahead, build your wall” is for newspaper companies to accept that monopoly profits will not return and cannot be replaced. (Yes, I know that accepting such a reality is difficult and unlikely.) Instead, begin exploring new business models by starting from the revenue side and seeing what sort of complementary journalism can be supported.

John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record, has taken this notion to heart and called for ideas and proposals. Brainstorming rather than masonry — what a concept!

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Time to retire the term “blogger”?

August 18, 2009 by 12 Comments

Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?

Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):

We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.

Rosen later elaborated on Twitter:

We don’t say “Emailer James Fallows,” even though he uses email. Eventually, it will be the same with the term “blogger.”

Let’s unpack this.

“Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.

Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion.

Still — wary as I am of taking issue with Rosen, whose prescience is formidable — I don’t think we will see the term “blogger” fade away any time soon. There’s a difference between a term that’s so broad it’s lost all meaning and a term that has a couple of useful meanings that may conflict with each other.

After all, we still use the word “journalist,” even though it has cracked in two (“journalist” as professional label vs. “journalist” as descriptor of an activity). This is where human language (what programmers call “natural language”) differs from computer languages: our usage of individual words changes as it records our experience with their evolving meanings.

In other words, the multiple meanings of the word “blogger” may bedevil us, but they also tell a story.

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Some Say Everything links

August 17, 2009 by 1 Comment

Say Everything is getting around. Here’s some links to recent coverage and related stuff:

My two favorite speaking gigs about the book are now both online. Fora.tv was there at the Hillside Club in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video, in which you can, among other things, hear my “Top Ten Myths About Blogging”:

Also online now is a slightly different version of the same talk, which I gave at Microsoft Research earlier in July. Microsoft does a neat trick with timing the video and the presentation slides — but, warning, it will only work in IE.

Todd Bishop of Seattle’s TechFlash did a nice in-depth Q&A with me:

Q: What have blogs meant in the evolution of the Internet?

Rosenberg: I identify blogging as the first mass experience of having a read-write web or a two-way web or a user-generated web – all these terms mean the same thing. They mean a web that we create ourselves. 1994, 1995 was when people first saw browsers and got excited, and it took a good five, seven, eight years from that point for blogs to show people, this is what that vision is about – this is what it looks like when anyone can contribute..

Other Q&As are at Time.com, by Dan Fletcher. (But, hey, Time, what’s with the little red links every couple of paragraphs? Pretty crude.) And over at the NewsHour’s Art Beat blog, by Chris Amico. Also in Reason, by Jesse Walker:

Reason: Of the ’90s pioneers you write about in the first section of the book, are there any that you feel haven’t really gotten their due?

Rosenberg: In a way, that whole era is unjustly forgotten. The tech industry and indeed the online world have very little memory of history. One of my purposes in writing the book was to get it down while it’s still fresh in my mind, everyone’s still around to interview, and the pages can still be hauled out of the Internet Archive.

The Web moves really quickly, and we’ve had several generations of excitement. Today we have Twitter and Facebook and all of that, and people are having experiences in which they feel that they’re doing things for the first time. But nearly all of these experiences are things that people went through in the ’90s or the early part of the 2000s, whether it was revealing too much of your life and getting in trouble, or dreaming of some sort of utopia where we can all express ourselves and never get into fights. Telling those stories just seemed important.

On the review front, we’ve been in Business Week (“Gracefully written and well researched, Say Everything captures the drama of blogging’s rapid-fire rise”), the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall St. Journal.

Then there is Andrew Keen’s review, in the Barnes and Noble Review:

Rosenberg criticizes mogul Barry Diller for suggesting that talent remains the one scarcity in today’s media. But this book is a glitteringly subversive argument against Rosenberg’s own thesis. It’s a beautifully written and meticulously fair narrative about the past, present, and future of the blog. Only somebody with Rosenberg’s incomparable ability could have written Say Everything. We are lucky to have his unique talent.

My point about Diller, of course, was never meant to suggest that talent is or has become widespread or universal. Rather, I took issue with the media exec’s smug attitude that the old world he inhabits already does a thorough job of locating and rewarding talent. But, er, I’d be foolish to argue too strenuously here!

I’m also grateful to all the bloggers who’ve posted about the book so far, including, but certainly not limited to, J.D. Lasica, Peter Merholz, Rafe Colburn, Paul Kedrosky (“funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed”), Rogers Cadenhead, Ed Cone, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, John McDaid, and Scott Carpenter (“An amazing job… It is a real joy to find a book like this one, where I can fall under its spell as I increasingly trust the author to tell a good tale”).

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Y Combinator’s “request for startups” in journalism

August 16, 2009 by 10 Comments

I’m fascinated by this: Paul Graham’s startup-seeding outfit, Y Combinator, has announced that, with each new funding cycle, it’s now going to issue a sort of open call for submissions in a particular area. The general idea is what interested TechCrunch in writing the story up. But what caught my eye was the substance of the first request: “The Future of Journalism.”

The reason newspapers and magazines are dying is that what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it. In fact, most journalists probably don’t even realize that definition of journalism they take for granted was not something that sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but is rather a direct though somewhat atrophied consequence of a very successful 20th century business model.

What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money–as print media once did–instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?

Bingo! To me, this passage crystallizes the problem with so much of the “how do we get consumers to pay?” headscratching that is consuming media pros today. The death spiral of the old business model for news has some more twists and turns before the beast expires, but it is irreversible. The old bundle of information services and advertising that supported print journalism is gone, Humpty-Dumpty style, and nobody’s going to glue it back together. A deeper rethinking is needed, and those of us who want to see journalism thrive ought to be working hard to come up with answers to Graham’s question.

Graham envisions small teams that encompass writing, programming and design skills; in the Y Combinator model, they get a (very) small investment upfront, some bureaucratic assistance and some networking help. That’s one way of seeding lots of experiments. But I think Graham’s stark framing of the problem is as valuable as the bits of cash he’s spraying around; ambitious journalists and their programmer/designer friends don’t need to wait for Y Combinator to take up this challenge.

I have to admit that the phrase “treating how to make money from it as an afterthought” struck a nerve, because that really was how things were at the beginning at Salon and so many other journalism-oriented startups in the early years of the Web. This approach was understandable, and maybe excusable, in 1995; today, it’s a non-starter.

Graham’s challenge is elegantly simple: Instead of starting with the journalism and then puzzling out how to support it, start with the plan for revenue, then figure out what journalism might complement it. Recognize that the realm where innovation is most needed is the business side and how it relates to the journalism. Stop thinking of the two as a pair of unrelated entities lashed together, like some ungainly antique motorcycle/sidecar combo. Begin dreaming up, and testing out, approaches that provide a more organic connection between the reporting we need and the income that supports it.

This will sound alarms and seem heretical to all of us who grew up in the old “journalism on one side of a wall, business on the other” world. And yes, media businesses conceived along Graham’s lines will need not only a business plan but a plan for earning and keeping their readers’ trust.

I’m not too worried about that. It’s the easy problem, one that smart journalists already know how to handle. The business side, that’s the wicked problem. Ideas for solving it ought to make good starting points.

I’m grateful to Graham for boiling the issue down so neatly. And no, I don’t have any specific examples or ideas yet: if I did, I’d be assembling a team! But maybe you do.

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Saying everything on KQED Forum

August 3, 2009 by 2 Comments

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of talking about Say Everything with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum. I don’t think I fully infected Michael with my enthusiasm for bloggers and their place in our culture, but I was grateful for the rare opportunity this show (and host) provides to dig really deeply into a subject over the course of an hour.

One of my arguments is that blogs — so long derided as trivial — are actually the format we employ today when we want to go deep into any subject or topic. Forum and blogs: separated at birth?

Here’s the audio from the show:

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