An email from mother today: “Buy today’s Seattle Times for the article on pages B6 and 7 by John Nichols and Robert McChesney of The Nation (then give it to Anthony Hecht).”
So I did my part to kill the American newspaper (the subject of Nichols and McChesney’s article) by reading it online.
The article is worth the trip, with the familiar rundown of how American newspapers are terminally screwed and a few modest proposals to unscrew them: tax credits for American newspaper subscribers, waiving postal fees to ease distribution costs, and billions in annual government subsidies. Bob and John don’t think federal handouts would corrupt reporting, but that’s a little tough to swallow, since reporters and editors have failed in their watchdog roles over the last 10 years, even without being on the dole. As Bob and John write:
While there are tremendous journalists doing outstanding work, most commentators are loath to acknowledge that the quality of journalism in the United States is dreadful.
The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real economy could sustain. Today, they do almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on “Octomom.”
While government subsidies would be nice—who are we to refuse a handout?—but I’m holding out unrealistic hope for a magnanimous billionaire to start a newspaper non-profit like the Scott Trust, which owns the company that owns the Guardian.
George Soros has poured money into independent media in Soviet and post-Soviet countries. And the man himself has written that capitalism is the next (or, rather, the current) great threat to free societies:
“Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.”
Maybe Soros—or a Soros emulator—could see his way to starting a trust for an American Guardian. Imagine a great non-profit newspaper that puts the Times and the Journal and the Post to shame, shows us all how it’s done.
The other solution, having people pay pennies to read articles, sounds dubious—can you make people pay for things on the internet?— but might work if we go all the way. A couple of weeks ago, a Dutch documentary filmmaker drunkenly explained the idea as a newspaper version of the mafia Apalachin Meeting in 1957: Having major rival publishers meet—in someone’s mountain chateau—to hammer out a universal system in which people submit their credit card numbers once and then just hit a button to read popular articles and columns from Harper’s to The News Tribune.
The drunken Dutchman said something similar happened in his country a few years ago—the Dutch were not in the habit of using credit cards, so a bunch of competing businesses got together to design a system that’d force their customers to use credit cards. I didn’t understand the slurry details, but he was convinced it work.
“You can steal this idea from me,” he said. “It will save the American newspapers and make you rich!”
Then he took another big hit off his joint.
I pretty much have only the tiniest of slightest of teensiest connections to the world of publishing and media, so I am probably not qualified to even ask this question but…is anyone looking at kachingle seriously?
Quite some time ago, friends and I were talking about the changes in the entertainment world and we sort of arrived at a similar system for being a way we would pay for content we used. When I heard about it on Marketplace a couple months ago, I thought, oh, hey, yeah, someone is doing the thing we civilians thought would be a system we’d use. But then I haven’t really seen anything else on it.
It just seems like the only way to make people pay for content is, to the drunken Dutch documentarian’s and kachingle’s point, is to not make you have to think very often about your payment of it, so that you don’t have to decide all the time what value you place on the content, it’s sort of done once and then you can go back to just using it how you did before…
How are newspapers in non-America handling all this?
Give me the technology from the TED talk posted a few days ago coupled with contacts capable of projecting image and video straight into my eyes and I’ll be able to read a newspaper without actually having it delivered or having to sit in front of a computer.
Meh.
This was boring.
And avoided the actual reasons why most people would want to buy a paper.
Isn’t that how the electricity and cable industries work?
Seriously, though, there are pay-to-read content distribution systems on the internet. The newspaper industry just never seriously implemented them the way that, say, ESPN implemented their Insider premium content. I vaguely remember the NY Times trying out a premium section, and then they kind of gave it up, though my memory could deceive me there.
One big problem is that most newspapers publish syndicated AP/Reuters stories that are already all over the place and thus have no real value. The problem in offering local news at a premium is that it probably doesn’t have enough value for enough people to pay the premium for it to make it the key funding source for a viable business model. Most people are only interested in that same syndicated national news, which is why the local rags syndicated it in the first place.
I think the stoned Dutchman is right: you set up a Microsoft Passport-like login system that works on multiple sites for content, and they are paid from the pool based on clicks, etc. People pay once a year for their passport access and with it can use myriad sites.
That said, Dutch people are often quite annoying.