There are days when I’m disgusted by my fellow journalists, and the whole journalism business.
This is one of those days.
While elite journalists bemoan the right-wing propaganda machine, seeing it as an existential threat to democracy and liberty, they’re defending an industry rapidly going behind paywalls. Nearly all daily newspapers are already there. Now the news services are doing. The latest is Reuters, which erected theirs this weekend.
The criticism is apt. The refusal to do anything about it is criminal.
There are things that can be done. I have been flogging the idea of “day passes” for some time.
Instead of demanding the commitment of a subscription, newspapers can offer day passes that let people behind the paywall for 24 hours or even less. When I tweeted this idea, however, a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review specializing in digital journalism instantly dismissed it, calling it unworkable. (I felt like throttling the bastard.)
Amazon can make this work. Google can make this work. So could Microsoft or Apple. Heck, Facebook could make this work.
You write an API that handles the permissions. You build an app that handles the purchases. You run it through a batch process on the back-end so there’s just one charge each month, although that’s monitored on the app.
Say you’re charging $25/month for access. That’s what Reuters wants. Call that $1/day. You can even set a limit on stories if you like. We have the technology for it. It’s not that damned hard.
Newspapers that subscribe to the scheme get more than the cash. They also get registration data, the right to do a follow-up and collect feedback.
You don’t have to just charge cash. Anything whose loyalty can be monetized as points or miles could be used, at a rate set by the app. Papers can offer free tastes, or specials like Amazon does on books. Free days can be sponsored, and the names of those who respond to the offers can be shared with the relevant advertisers.
A news story that’s not read doesn’t exist. Every reporter knows that, yet we stand idly by while our bosses leave readers with nothing but propaganda to read. During my first lecture at Northwestern’s Medill School, in 1977, our teacher suggested we might prefer the nearby Kellogg School of Business. I should have taken him up on it.
Without a functioning business model that puts readers first, journalism doesn’t exist. Medill is now an “integrated marketing” program. I should throw my MSJ into the nearest garbage can.
