Having recently regaled us with the flawed tale of a community newspaper that refuses to publish its content online,
New York Times media columnist David Carr is back — this time with a suggestion that what we need is "an iTunes for news."
Carr's
thesis is that news organizations can no longer afford to give away
their content. But, as he acknowledges in his lament about the arrested
state of online advertising, they're not giving it away — or, at least,
they don't mean to. Rather, they're failing to sell enough advertising
to pay for their journalism. That's a problem, but it's not the same
problem.
Carr knows as well as anyone that a good deal of what
you pay for when you buy a newspaper doesn't contribute anything to the
bottom line. You're paying for paper, presses, maintenance to those
presses, distribution and — yes — the salaries of some good,
hard-working people who won't be needed if and when we move into a
Web-only environment.
Given that, news organizations should
theoretically be able to come up with an online version that pays for
itself, or even turns a profit, without charging for access. That's
what national and local television newscasts do, and the model worked
even better some years ago, when those newscasts were deeper and
meatier than they are today. That's what National Public Radio and its
affiliate stations do, raising money directly from listeners in the
form of contributions and from corporations in the form of advertising
— uh, sorry, "underwriting."
The problem with online news today
is threefold: (1) sites like Craigslist and Monster.com have taken away
much of the advertising that news orgs might have been able to sell;
(2) the recession has halted the growth of online (and print)
advertising; and (3) newspaper companies are staggering under so much
debt that they need a rate of return that would be unrealistic even in
a more favorable economic environment.
"An iTunes for news"
Is it possible to reverse the notion that news & information must be free?