Wall Street Journal to launch micropayments service

The Wall Street Journal plans to start a micropayments service for individual articles this fall. Let the echo-chamber pooh-poohing begin! (Quote below is from Jeff Jarvis; emphasis is mine):

So if the Journal brings on micropayment, I fear for them that they’ll lose doubly. They’ll lose my subscription. They’ll lose my even occasional readership and the ad revenue that can come with that. They will, in a cruel irony, replace digital dollars with micro pennies.

Or, conversely, WSJ could increase readership by allowing the purchase of individual articles without the need for a yearly online subscription. Time will tell.

Wiki-fy the news

The New York Times‘ article about Journalism Online L.L.C. says the prospects of  the venture’s success is “doubted by many media analysts.”

It never mentions a single one of those analysts. Doesn’t provide so much as a hyperlink.

Nor does it explain what is meant by the provocative “The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work.”

And you know what: That’s OK. Sort of.  But you have to let readers know that you’ll be following up on the story, that the report isn’t just a one-and-done deal.

Regardless of whether you as a reporter will provide more context, here’s my big idea:

Don’t fight Google, work with it

Forget walled gardens of content: Steve Outing says the newspaper industry can help itself by working with Google, not against it:

So here’s an idea for newspapers, the AP, et al: Think through how you can help Google make more money! Figure out how to spread your content much more widely instead of focusing on how to restrict its flow. …

… If they can achieve an intelligent dialog with Google and come up with a plan that benefits both sides, then newspapers can follow Huffington’s advice (of which I concur, 100%), and do everything they can to get their content everywhere possible online. Monetize it not just within your walled garden (website), but on every blog or website that your content appears on.

Digital newsbooks for the stories you missed

Here’s a product that’s long overdue. Major newspapers will start selling multipart investigative series repackaged as digital books:

Later this month, a coalition of news organizations — including the Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Associated Press — will try selling some of their multipart series as repackaged “digital newsbooks” for e-reader devices. Fainaru’s series, “The Private Armies of Iraq,” will be among those available for $4.95.

Zachary M. Seward, the article’s author, lauds the effort:

Newspapers “blew it,” but is it too late?

Jeff Jarvis doesn’t mince any words. In fact, he repeats the same three over and over (and over) again: “You blew it.”

Who is this “you”? Well, it’s the newspapers, natch. And the “it” they blew was figuring out how to adjust to the economy of the Web:

You blew it.

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of – as you call them, Mr. Murdoch – net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.…

…You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little. I by all means include myself in that indictment because I spent my career in our industry: Guilty. I didn’t raise loud enough alarms (it felt as if they were too loud already) or accomplish enough change (not nearly enough). I blew it, too. But no last-minute hail-Mary passes will make up for our failings. Having not taken advantage of the last two decades to reinvent the news business, you’re not going to manage a rescue in two months, before the creditors come calling. That was your worst hail Mary: stoking up on debt and hoping to milk these cows for years to come. …

The AP is mad as hell

It’s true. AP Chairman Dean Singleton said so in his remarks at the AP Annual Meeting, held yesterday in San Diego:

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, Glenn Beck has now found a kindred spirit.

Peter Kafka, while sympathizing with the AP, doubts the nascent crusade’s effectiveness:

The thing is, even if the news guys somehow stopped people from using Google to find information they need, it wouldn’t do anything to solve the essential problems plaguing their business. Such as:

Ten newspapers worth buying

At Business Insider, an anonymous investor lists 10 newspapers that will survive the apocalypse. Papers including the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Palm Beach Post and Orlando Sentinel make the list.

However, what struck me was this business model recommendation:

What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.

I’m not buying it. Locking up premium content for niche readers (like investors) is one thing. But putting local news behind a pay wall seems foolish. Especially when another news outlet opens up shop and offers basically the same content for free.

A paid content idea from Poynter

Roy Peter Clark, senior faculty member at Poynter Institute, offers his two cents for yet another way newspapers can earn revenue — by devoting a corner of the paper to poems:

It will cost the poet –- or a patron — $100 to have the work published before thousands and thousands of readers, many, many more than reads the typical poetry journal. …
… Perhaps a bookseller or wealthy patron of the arts could be persuaded to sponsor the space in the paper, attaching a good name to the work of community poets. But wait, there’s more!

I especially like this part:

Cable model for news site access

A commenter on Michael Miner’s Chicago Reader article about pay models for online newspapers proposes a model in which sites would get revenue via licensing fees from Internet service providers:

Different packages (a la cable) could be offered (imagine, for $9.95/month, access to every major paper in America) at different prices. …

… Sites will have to bite the bullet, go behind the wall, then hit up service providers to shoot some $ their way (heck, they can even charge AT&T by the behind-the-wall click, since it actively measures usage; those less-used are dropped in favor of more promising/proven ones) so they don’t require each user to pay up individually, since, as a subscriber to the access, they already have.

Yelvington’s history of paid content

Steve Yelvington hops in the wayback machine and offers a concise history of attempts by newspapers to charge for access to their online content.

His post jogged my memory about the good old days of crawling across the World Wide Web with a Lynx text browser on my Mac Classic II circa 1994.  Looked a lot this: