Why most publisher paywalls are destined to fail

Picard: News organizations need to focus on creating value for users

Picard: Your content has to be exclusive and specialized.

Now that Google, Facebook, and other tech platforms have taken away most of their ad revenue, news publishers are realizing they need to get revenues from users to stay afloat.

Well, good luck with that. Most of the paywalls or freemium products they have created are doomed to disappointment.

Publishers will have trouble breaking their bad habits. They have been so busy delivering mass audiences to advertisers with increasingly frivolous or sensationalistic content, or delivering profits to investors by cutting key editorial staff, that they may not have the know-how or talent to produce content valuable enough that people will pay for it.

Cultural publication 'flirts with the Dark Side' in Spain

El Pais announces the alliance on its website.

(Updated Aug. 22, 2015; versión en español)

The iconoclastic Spanish culture magazine Jot Down is a strange creature in many ways. At a time when people supposedly read little and do it rapidly, it publishes long interviews and essays.

In an age of minute-by-minute updates and clickbait, Jot Down makes its money by charging about US$16.75 for each copy of its massive 320-page quarterly, which carries only two or three pages of advertising.

Another oddity: its target market is not the famous millennials so sought after by many media but rather more-mature folks in their 40s and 50s. It is an edgy publication that attracts people “who think of themselves as young,” says publisher Angel Fernandez, 44, who co-founded it four years ago.

Marriage of convenience

Surprisingly, it is viable, profitable, and growing. But possibly strangest of all, it has just reached agreement to share its content with one of the media icons of Spain, in fact a symbol of much of what Jot Down criticizes about traditional media, namely El Pais. Ironically, several of the magazine’s contributors were laid off by El Pais during the long economic downturn and have not hesitated to bash their former employer.

Time's Asia editor says it's OK to spin the news

Time magazine has transformed itself to compete in the world of digital journalism. It publishes multiple editions on multiple platforms, and the most important one is no longer the print edition.

In addition, “You never hear the word objectivity in the newsroom at Time,” says Zoher Abdoolcarim, Asia editor for the publication. “We talk about fairness and balance, yes.”

With so much news available online instantaneously, Time could no longer continue as just a weekly digest of news. It had to tell people what the news means, Abdoolcarim told an audience recently at Tsinghua University's School of Journalism and Communication in Beijing.

Publisher Q: Never give up, never surrender

Versión en español aquí.

The new digital media entrepreneurs who are struggling to survive can take some inspiration from the story of Q*,  an independent newspaper publisher in a country of the former Soviet Union. (* Name withheld to protect him from further government repression.)

In 1990, Q was among many journalists who founded newspapers independent of the official media. The scent of freedom was in the air after the liberation from the Soviet Union.But as time went on these newspapers also became uncomfortable with the successor government, which despite providing certain freedoms remained an authoritarian regime.

Tech, intermediaries leave newspapers far behind

I came away from reading the State of the News Media in 2011 with the sense that newspapers in particular are being left farther behind by all of the advances in technology and payment systems.

One example is Apple. Although it is selling subscriptions to publications on its iTunes platform, it is taking 30% of the revenue and keeping the all-important customer data and credit card information to itself.