Archive for September, 2009

Earlier this week, Jeff Reifman of Newscloud wrote an essay, “How Micro-payments Could Save Journalism,” which he says was inspired by most recent Editor & Publisher column, “Your News Content Is Worth Zero to Digital Consumers.” (I’m a bit slow to respond due to a busy work week.)

Reifman wrote: “I disagree with the premise of Steve Outing’s column last week. … I think consumers will pay for news content and that an aggregated micro-payment system has a place in solving the sustainability challenge facing journalism.”

In general, Reifman and I simply disagree, and you can read both articles yourself if you’d like to compare and contrast our views. (You’ll discover that both of us wrote headlines that overstate and exaggerate our positions!)

Rather than a point-by-point rebuttal of Reifman’s article (and I do find some good ideas in his writing), I want to suggest an alternative to one idea he pitched: turning on a counter or meter so that a website or blog reader sees how often he/she has used your site. He wrote:

“Place widgets on each page that show readers quantitatively how many stories they’ve read and how much time they’ve been spending on your site. … Set a threshold at which you expect readers to start paying.”

Now, I see that as essentially a negative approach. Let’s determine who our best customers are, then “punish” them by demanding that they start paying small amounts.

Here’s what I’d rather see. I like the idea of telling a reader how much they’ve used your website. If their personal counter widget clearly shows that they put a lot of time into viewing content on your site, then that’s a social cue to “do the right thing” and voluntarily donate some money to support it. (The donation mechanism must be fast and super easy.)

But just as Reifman admits that micro-payments alone won’t solve the news industry’s problems, neither will a donation strategy alone.

So let’s go one step further, and turn Reifman’s negative approach into a positive one! Instead of the counter or meter punishing a web user for over-using your website, reward that frequent user! Turn the personal counter into a tool to encourage more visits. (Most newspaper websites, in particular, have a problem with low average visits-per-month by users.)

This can be as simple and low-cost as making it a game. The “reward” for being in the top 10 users of a site in any month might be nothing more than being highlighted as one of the site’s biggest fans. (Run a photo of your site’s most frequent visitor each week.) Better would be some tangible reward, in the same sort of way that airline affinity programs reward you with points to be accrued and used to get free plane tickets. Reward points to individual users for visiting your site often; they might “spend” the points accrued over multiple visits on accessing the limited amount of premium content on your site rather than having to pay real money.

Or reward frequent visitors with real prizes: The most-frequent site users could win free-meal restaurant coupons or ski lift tickets from advertisers. The top 10 visitors could be entered into a drawing for a weekly prize supplied by an advertiser. I’m sure you can think of many more variations.

Will my approach save the news industry? No, of course not. But I think that Reifman’s micro-payment strategy will bring in little revenue, and turn off lots of online users of your site because of the negative nature of the strategy. By taking the positive approach, news sites can actually encourage more intentional repeat visits. User behavior is clearly trending toward people finding news on your website via other referral sources, rather than purposefully visiting your specific site. A positive “reward” strategy at least has the potential to encourage more loyalty and repeat visits.

None of this solves the news industry’s crisis. I think my positive spin on user usage-feedback could be one little piece of the puzzle. I put more faith in strategies like membership programs, charging for unique niche content (i.e., low pay-walls), network donation solutions (which I’ve written lots about in recent months), and improvements in online advertising. (In fact, I’m feeling more bullish about online advertising for news websites — for the first time in a long time — after learning about some developments that could be game-changing for media companies. Since I typically respect embargo requests from companies, I won’t be writing on that topic until a bit later on.)

SaveTheNews.org’s first big public meeting of journalists and community members (September 16) — strategically planned for the U.S. city at ground zero for the “News Crisis,” Denver — was clearly a success in sounding the alarm about the decline of serious public-interest journalism. Six months ago, the city lost one of its two major daily newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, and other newspapers and traditional media outlets in metro Denver and around the state have suffered severe cuts. The result: important stories not told, an environment ripe for abuse by less-closely monitored public officials and business leaders, and a less-informed citizenry.

The SaveTheNews event attracted a capacity crowd of about 200 people who filled the bottom floor of the Colorado History Museum just south of the State Capitol Building. While the abundance of laid-off journalists in the room (many once employed by the Rocky) were looking for answers to the question of how to fund public-interest reporting — and thus continue making a livelihood from doing journalism — the room also included a large contingent of community members alarmed by the Rocky’s demise and wondering where (and if) they will get news about the most important things going on in their hometown in the future, if things keep getting worse.

The event included 14 small-table discussions on a variety of sub-topics, which preceded a general panel discussion featuring former Rocky Mountain News editor and publisher John Temple and other local luminaries. At the discussion tables, facilitators (including me) warmed up the attendees with intense exchanges about how to tackle the various facets of the problem. It was our job to ask questions and listen, not to lecture on what we know or believe.

I was assigned as the facilitator of the “Commercial News Models: Where will we get our news?” table, and interest in that topic outnumbered the chairs available. Our standing-room-only group was animated and opinionated, and not of one mind when it came to solutions. And even though the journalists around the table outnumbered the non-journalists, the community members, I think, gave we journalists some hope that the issue of sustainability of public-interest news reporting is beginning to resonate outside of the media cognoscenti and news-industry working stiffs.

Continued

Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites and makes them the entry point to finding the best content on media sites. The idea and design seem a bit old-school to some critics.

I like Fast Flip a lot, for several reasons:

1. It’s an “alternative Google News” for those not wanting to be overwhelmed with selecting from thousands of media sources.
2. It’s a more comfortable interface for some people, especially, I would guess, older online users who are still most at ease with print-like design than with lists of headline links to choose from.
3. It’s not a replacement for Google News, but an alternative for those looking for a different way to find and read the best content from a selected group of quality sources.
4. It’s Google’s first time in sharing with publishers some of the money earned on its own pages. The search giant doesn’t share revenue from links to news websites’ content on Google News, so this is a significant change in policy, even if only experimental — a way for Google to directly support media publishers, including those who complain that Google is eating their lunch by profiting from links to their news.

Frankly, I’m feeling a bit vindicated by Google’s introduction of Fast Flip. Last April, I wrote several blog posts suggesting that it would be in Google’s self-interest to turn Google News into a news search service that shared ad revenue with publishers that are included in Google News:
Google could come to the rescue, but won’t?
How can newspapers help Google?
To Eric Schmidt: What happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?

I also sent e-mails in April to Krishna Bharat, Google Distinguished Researcher and creator and leader of Google News, suggesting that revenue-sharing with news publishers would be a good thing for both the news industry and Google (and, thus, society in general as citizens remained well informed by a healthier news sector). I never heard back from Bharat, even though I’d met him in person a few weeks earlier at Stanford University during a fellowship interview.

If you read through the comment threads on the blog items above, you’ll agree that this was not among the most popular ideas I’ve ever floated in my writing over the years. I got lots of pushback, much of it to the tune of: Google is just smarter than media publishers; Google owes the news industry nothing because it’s already giving news sites millions and millions of user visits, but the publishers aren’t smart enough to figure out how to make money from that.

You can read the links above if you care about my original (unpopular) argument, but the crux is that by sharing revenues, Google would prevent angry and scared news publishers from locking down their content online, AND it would make it politically possible to turn on the ad spigot for Google News because it would share some of its new revenues with the creators/publishers of the content it links to.

While Google didn’t follow my suggestion for opening up Google News for revenue sharing with news publishers, it has done so with a few dozen selected media companies that are taking part in Fast Flip. It’s a variation of what I suggested last April to a generally vigorous assault on the idea.

It’d be nice to think that my humble blog had something to do with the Fast Flip revenue-sharing model, but that’s likely wishful thinking. (If it did, perhaps some nice Google executive will share some of that big pile of G-cash with me. Ah, but life doesn’t work that way.)

Anyway, I’m happy to see Google executives decide that it might be in their interests to share some ad revenues with media publishers. Fast Flip will be an experiment we’ll all be watching closely. Perhaps it will lead to a news-industry revenue source that starts to chip away at the News Crisis we find ourselves in.

Yesterday in Denver felt like ground zero of the Future of Journalism and the News Crisis. Not only did HuffingtonPost launch its Denver edition (with 22-year-old Ethan Axelrod as editor and sole employee), but last night SavetheNews.org held a well-attended community forum at the Colorado History Museum; the event drew a mixture of working and laid-off journalists, interested citizens, and a few community activists.

Before a traditional panel discussion (including ex-editor of the now-expired Rocky Mountain News, John Temple), the forum included a bunch of small roundtable discussions on various save-journalism topics, each with a facilitator.

I facilitated the “Commercial News Models: How should we pay for news?” table discussion. My table mates each received a 2-page handout quickly scoping the news industry’s problems and the evolving news landscape for a metro area like Denver, plus a list of potential revenue sources and ideas for new and old news entities. In case it’s worthwhile to anyone else not at the event last night, I’m sharing the handout here:

Possible Solutions for Commercial News Media (PDF)

My latest Editor & Publisher column was posted today. I think you’ll find it provocative.

Your News Content Is Worth Zero to Digital Consumers

Admittedly, the headline overstates things a bit (hey, just trying to get you to pay attention!), but my main point is that whether online or on mobile devices, news publishers need to figure out how to offer something that’s tangible, not ephemeral. Selling fleeting digital news stories is a non-starter. The mobile platform offers some alternative opportunities.

Since EditorandPublisher.com doesn’t support comments on my column posted there, please feel free to engage in a dialog with me and anyone else interested in this topic in the comments area below.

What do you think?

On the latest Journalism Now Podcast (where I’m one of the regulars), we interviewed Jacob Colker, founder of a very cool “micro-volunteering” service using the iPhone (and the web).

The Extraordinaries is a brilliant concept in empowering the crowd to do good things. Foremost, the idea is to allow people to use the little bits of spare time they have (riding the bus home, waiting at the DMV, waiting for the movie to start, etc.) to do small bits of volunteering using the Extraordinaries iPhone app. Examples include tagging photos for the Smithsonian or other museums. The San Diego Voice investigative news website is asking people to use the app to record location and photos of city agencies and buildings wasting water during the current drought period.

This app and model of micro-volunteering has potentially huge implications for journalism. Reporters and editors should be thinking about how Colker’s project can help them improve and expand their reporting and research projects. I hope you’ll listen to the interview.

The American Press Institute’s invitation-only “Newsmedia Economic Action Plan Conference” this morning included a presentation by Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive and Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishering, showing the results of a survey of 2,400 U.S. newspaper executives. (You can see the full 80-slide presentation here.)

I find much evidence that newspaper leaders remain delusional about how charging for online content (some or all) is going to become such a big revenue stream that it will save them. Below is the slide that just screamed out at me the main problem: Newspaper executives are out of touch with the online audience to a huge degree.

Click the image below to see an enlarged view.

For the benefit of anyone not able to see the chart in an RSS feed or mobile version of this blog, the graphic shows that 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case; the No. 1 choice (at 68% of respondents to a 2009 Belden survey) was to look to “other local media Internet sites.”

Wow. That pretty much says it all. Many newspapers are doomed without management change at the top, moving people into the executive suite who have a better grasp of reality. Or the people already occupying those offices need to get new glasses.

Disclaimer: I think Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly is a big-mouth wingnut who spouts dangerous ideas. (Yes, Glenn Beck is worse.) I never thought I’d compliment O’Reilly, but I’ve been pondering voluntary membership models for news websites lately, and I like what O’Reilly and his team have created with the BillOreilly.com Premium Membership. Overlook the arrogance and there’s an online business model there.

O’Reilly’s website for his The Factor show is, of course, mostly free. But if you’re an O’Reilly fan and want more of Bill than you can see on TV or his free site, then there’s more to be had, for a price: $49.95 a year (auto renews on your credit card!) or $4.95 a month.

This is exactly the model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have been talking about lately, though many are having trouble figuring out what they’ve got that they can charge for.

Bill’s got it figured out. Premium members get such “goodies” as:

• Bill’s exclusive critique of the night’s show, recorded by him immediately after the show ends.
• Exclusive video clips.
• Access to audio archives of The Radio Factor show.
• Weekly backstage live chat with Bill exclusively for Premium members to ask him questions.
• Access to exclusive photo albums of Bill with celebrities and doing his thing.
• Priority e-mail. Your message to Bill will not get tossed in with all the other e-mail he gets, and Premium members are promised “priority treatment and a guaranteed review.”

In all there are 16 benefits to being an O’Reilly Premium Member. Some are comical, like the “Rate The Factor With Viewer Voting.” I doubt his loyal fans who are paying members give him much flak. The Bill O’Reilly screensaver Premium offer with the great one in front of a bunch of American flags likewise made me laugh. (Unlike Stephen Colbert, O’Reilly’s not doing this stuff as satire.)

The O’Reilly Premium Membership isn’t especially innovative, in that some Hollywood stars, other celebrities (and especially porn stars), and athletes do the same sort of thing. E.g., Miley Cyrus‘ special fan site will cost you $29.95 a year or $2.95 a month.

But you don’t see much of these paid online fan clubs or premium website memberships for news people. Journalists are too serious, and this just proves that Bill O’Reilly is an entertainer, not a newsman, right?

Actually, as the news industry ponders news membership models, creating Premium memberships that get you more from a favorite star journalist and access to the person could be worth paying for. As I reported here a few days ago, Men’s Health magazine turned its Jimmy the Bartender advice feature into a paid iPhone app; that’s sort of a premium membership, albeit a cheap one at $2.99 to buy the app and no recurring fees. Other magazines may be able to turn their star columnists into Premium memberships.

Even for newspapers I think this has potential. Consider a paid Premium membership for New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman for, say, $20 a year; or a Financial Times niche columnist Premium membership for $100 or more a year. Friedman might offer extra content like full video or audio interviews of the world leaders he interviews, and exclusive webcasts or live chats restricted to paying Premium members. The FT columnist, because of his focus on an arcane slice of the business world, can offer Premum members additional inside-baseball information and stats that business people will pay for. Ergo, a financial niche columnist might be worth more with the Premium Membership model than a rock-star columnist like Friedman, who covers more generic news topics.

This could even filter down to the local level. Could a newspaper reporter who covers city council and city politics have a Premium Membership that offered paying members extra insider info and reporting, in the way that inside-politics newsletter editors of decades past charged political junkies and people affected by local politics for their in-depth knowledge and digging?

It’s worth exploring. My gut reaction is that individual premium memberships might be an easier sell than a similar membership for an entire news brand. Or follow the cable model and offer basic news-site memberships, but charge a la carte additional fees for valuable columnist or specialty-reporter member benefits.

Who’s up for experimenting with this? Who’s already doing this? Is Bill O’Reilly (I find it hard to fathom) onto something important?

Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora of the Knight Foundation explain what they’re looking for and how to craft a proposal for the 2010 Knight News Challenge that stands the best chance of winning some of the $5 million in grants.

Application Tips for the 2010 Knight News Challenge from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

This is year 4 of the 5-year grant program.

A while back I noted that a new iPhone app from Men’s Health magazine broke some new ground by selling add-on content within the app itself, beyond the initial price ($1.99). Now the magazine is trying again, this time by taking one of its regular features, the “Jimmy the Bartender” advice column, and turning it (him) into an iPhone app.

The Jimmy app costs $2.99, and this is what you get: “Jimmy the Bartender serves up his legendary no-nonsense answers to hundreds of life’s questions, a GPS-enabled guide to his favorite watering holes near you, can’t-lose tips for approaching any woman, cocktail recipes, Eat This: Not That! At the bar, and dozens of other features.”

Frankly, I don’t find Jimmy particularly appealing and wouldn’t pay for this app (disclosure: Men’s Health sent me a free download code so I could review it), but that’s because I don’t hang out in bars or try to approach eligible women. A younger man sans wife and kids might find the content more appealing.

So let’s assume that there is a market of iPhone-toting men who would find the Jimmy app worth 3 bucks for such features as the “Ultimate Wingman,” shown in the image at right. Dial in your social situation or dilemma and Jimmy dispenses some advice on how to approach the desired woman. It doesn’t do much for me, but with the promotional power of Men’s Health magazine’s printed edition, I bet some decent money will be made from guys buying the Jimmy the Bartender app.

If Men’s Health is ahead of the curve on this, it’s in taking a media personality and turning him into a phone app. It makes sense. If I’m a fan of Jimmy’s feature in the magazine, I might be inclined to pay a few bucks for his phone app; whereas, a Men’s Health iPhone app holds less appeal since I can just visit the magazine’s website on my phone’s browser for free.

Other media companies might want to consider creating their own personality mobile apps. For instance, why isn’t there a “Dear Abby” app? A regular newspaper reader whose favorite feature in the paper is Abby probably would buy a Dear Abby phone app, if it was well done and included features such as searching for Abby’s archived answers on a specified topic, and conveniently sending in questions to Abby via the phone. Hey, Abby’s syndicate: How about it?

I think it will take some star-power to sell personality phone apps, but certainly Abby, Dan Savage, Ask Amy, and other media personalities could spin some cash from personal iPhone apps.

I dare say the right individuals could do better in the mobile-apps sales game than the media brands they may write under.

The trend already has shown up with professional athletes. Cincinnati back-up quarterback Jordan Palmer even started an iPhone app development company to create apps for athletes to allow them to better connect with their fans. Cincinnati quarterback Carson Palmer has a SuperFan iphone app that costs 99 cents. Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong has a new Calorie Tracker iPhone app for $2.99.

OK, media companies, take the hint. Which stars are in your stable worthy of having their own paid mobile apps? And MSNBC, why is Rachel Maddow’s iPhone app free?

(Please include any media personality mobile apps I may have missed in the comments section below.)