More paywalls won't save journalists' jobs

Gannett's announcement that it will establish paywalls at its 80 community newspapers  is the latest sign that the newspaper industry believes it has found practical technology to charge for its content. 

But these are not really solutions so much as experiments. Every newspaper will have to test reader response to the various subscription offers and adjust over time. Paying for digital editions is new for subscribers as well as publishers.

How a newsroom is like a hit comedy

If you are running a news organization, you have much in common with the coach of a sports team, the director of a ballet or the producer of a hit comedy. The issues are the same. 

• Motivating people.
• Encouraging creativity.
• Developing people's talent to its highest level.
• Maintaining the discipline to meet deadlines and stay within a budget.
• Continually surprising fans.

So I found the book "Bossypants" by Tina Fey rich with lessons for people whose success depends on organizing and harnessing the talent of creative people. She is famous for her work as a writer and performer on "Saturday Night Live" (Weekend Update, Sarah Palin impression) and as writer, producer and performer on the hit comedy "30 Rock."

Using "Mad Men" advertising model for the web

Here in China, one of my guilty pleasures is watching DVDs of old episodes of "Mad Men," the cable television hit about the glory days of advertising and mass media in the 1960s.

In one episode, when Don Draper's advertising firm loses the multimillion-dollar Lucky Strike cigarette account, he takes out a full-page ad in the New York Times to announce that the firm will no longer accept tobacco advertising, supposedly because tobacco endangers the public health.

The power of display advertising

Draper has no doubt about the importance of announcing this to the public at large even though the target audience for the ad is very small, perhaps 1% of the audience of the Times -- other advertising executives, the CEOs of tobacco firms and other major advertisers, the firm's own clients.

6,000 paid subs support digital news site in Nova Scotia

At first it seems an unlikely place for an expensive paywall business model to work -- Nova Scotia. 

Nearly 6,000 subscribers are paying $360 a year for access to the AllNovaScotia.com website, according to Tim Currie's story in Nieman Lab. 

That's about $2 million and represents 80 percent of the revenue of the site. 

How are they doing it? One of the key elements is focusing on basic public-records searches and document-based reporting.

IBM chief gives advice that entrepreneurs should heed

Samuel Palmisano, I.B.M.'s outgoing boss, used four questions to guide his company's strategy over the past decade, according to an interview in the New York Times.

All of them are questions that digital media entrepreneurs should be asking themselves every day:

• “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?”
• “Why would somebody work for you?”
• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”
• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

Archives have great potential for traffic, debate, manipulation

A news story from the 2005 archives in which a psychology professor called homosexuality a disease recently rocketed to the top of the most-read list of El Pais, one of Spain's leading newspapers.

The strange incident demonstrated several things: what you produce on the Internet never goes away; in social networks the readers, not the editors, choose what's interesting; ruthless political operatives can manipulate these popularity measures for their own use; and newspapers themselves should more actively control and promote archived stories.

Reloading an old business model for new media

Veteran journalist Tom Stites writes on the Nieman Blog that new digital media might be overlooking a venerable method of sustaining themselves -- the cooperative.

The cooperative is defined as a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit. Today we might call it crowd-funding.

When the market fails

Stites says that people form cooperatives when the normal for-profit market forces fail to supply a service or product that their community needs.

There are many examples of user-owned news cooperatives in other countries but none in the U.S.
Stites is trying to launch one here.

Stites reviews recent studies of attempts to establish sustainable business models and concludes that many of the media currently held up as models depend too much on foundation support, which rarely is maintained over the long haul. In addition many of these operations depend on volunteer work, and volunteers burn out. There is thus an urgency to find a new model.

A hybrid model for local news

What is appealing about the cooperative model is that there are many news organizations already functioning. They can be replicated. They mix characteristics of for-profit and non-profit businesses and they can be tailored to the needs of the local community.

More than any other type of news, local community coverage has suffered in the recent downturn of the news industry. The co-op might help give it life again.


Related:
Robert Niles: How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online
How much to charge advertisers? As much as possible
More paywalls won't save journalists' jobs
Google takes magic out of advertising sales process
How I ran my newspaper monopoly
Language barrier helps publisher paywalls
How to tailor news for 4 different platforms? 'Responsive design'