(From the Rocky Mountain News. Images link to original Twitter feed, and story via journalism.co.uk)
There’s been a slew of interesting predictions for the newspaper and magazine industries in the last couple of days. Gawker sci-fi hub io9, obviously considering the future as a whole their territory, reported on ex-Conde Nast James Truman’s predictions for the future of magazines.
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Here’s what he decided about print magazines: they’re becoming obsolete, but the final stage along that path is to become luxury items. Look at horses, which became obsolete as a form of transportation after the car came along. The upkeep and gear for a horse used to be affordable to the average family, but now it’s a luxury bestowed on Muffy in the Hamptons on her sixteenth birthday.
So it is with print magazines, which have been superseded by improved technology. They won’t go away, but there will be fewer of them and they’ll be more expensive. They’ll be more like books, in fact. The magazine publishing business is being transformed by super-ninjas like Armani and Karl Lagerfeld. Although, Truman felt constrained to point out, Karl Lagerfeld is not actually a real ninja.
As magazines get to be more of a luxury item, they’ll become more fetishistic and less connected to utility.
Now, I’ve used the word fetishistic in connection with the internet a lot, as part of an argument against the theory that the absolute reader empowerment of the web browser is inherently radicalising, making people reactionary and dependent on being told what they want to hear. I prefer to say that the internet is inherently fetishizing: no matter how deep you get into a subject, there’s always someone deeper, and it sucks you in. io9 may be too hip to admit how long they spend following obscure trends to produce their magazine-style sci-fi digest. Their content skims along to top of some of the deepest wells of geekdom on the internet, and their service is based on aggregating the most interesting stuff for you.
And it’s aggregation, being a ‘connector’, that people are talking about in terms of how news will be marketed and sold in years to come. How much power will lie with the connectors, and how much with the traditional source of news authority, the multimillion pound international newsrooms.
When you’re a large news house, your brand and your content used to be the same thing: your reputation came from authority or from quality (that is, fulfilling the needs of the customer, whoever they be). Marketing has always been taken out of the editors’ hands: whether people talk about you or use you as a reference determined your authority. And so the experience of operating online, where marketing is almost completely democratised, your readers’ caprice thoroughly empowered, should not be too terrifying. But it’s the relationship of big, professional information-gatherers with the nonjournalists and unprofessionals, the “news-porn” peddlers on whom they rely to make the connections, that has come under strain and scrutiny.
The right to charge, the right to distinguish between career man and rolodex amateur, is what is at stake.
So, in the spirit of some of the wiser and more perceptive speculators I’m going to provide a service almost as valuable as information gathering itself: aggregating material together for comment and comparison. One major question raised by these bloggers and executives is whether I, or anyone else providing aggregation service, would be better off by charging people for access to my aggregation site but linking for free, or negotiating a cut of the money made by each site I link to based on the amount of traffic I send their way. After all, either way, I’m doing them a favour.
This last option is in theory a more clear-eyed engagement with the “link economy” everyone’s always talking about. It would work best if there was a ubiquitous, Paypal-like service which integrated link analysis with a compensation system between Bloggers and corporations, say a branch of Google Analytics.
That plan has an obvious down side (or dark side, depending on how you look at it, even aside from making Google even more the Kleenex of the Internet). If bloggers are paid for their links to profit-making websites, then every blog is potentially profit-making. Just as you can’t describe any media outlet dependent on advertising as 100% bias-proof, so too would you be forced to wonder about the motive behind every link that a blogger served you. And just as Dickens got paid by the line and Rubens by the square inch, you’d probably find even the most respectable blogs posting bloated, uncritical linksplashes on a daily basis. The blog as labour-of-love would be forever suspect.
Another downside, as we all know, is that there’s already plenty of attention-money to be made not by endorsing products but by wildly whaling on them. And who wants more of… this?
Perhaps I’ve already taken this too far. Jeff Jarvis argues newspapers could find their place in a paid news economy by doing what they do best and linking to the rest, say by maintaining Baghdad station but linking to another agency for sports, for a consideration based on the amount of traffic you direct. But inevitably, this means arguing for a link-as-currency exchange only between professional news houses, not between big houses and the bloggers who link to them.
After all, a news house which relies on its “brand consistency” for income is hardly going to relinquish editorial control, develop a permanent link relationship or otherwise associate itself with, say, some yahoo who blogs on both sports and the imminence of the Rapture.
Linking is NOT endorsing, but telling your readers “We get our sports news from Dan the Waterboy, and so should you!” is something no self-respecting agency is going to publish.
And this is, after all, about self-respect. Proposing such a backscratcher model looks unfortunately like a knee-jerk attempt to maintain an old business model in a new economy, one which benefits those in the loop, and keeps everyone else out. Newspapers internationally can agree on the basis of mutual professionalism to, say, cover up the presence of a member of the British royal family in a fighting role in Afghanistan. But that professional climate extends only to those within the old institutions, and there’s nothing but bad form stopping just anyone with a laptop and no shame from busting the story open.
As On Demand Media points out, this is business, and you can’t expect people to be nice. Even if the big houses come to an agreement on the link-as-currency among their brothers in the professional trade, they would merely be rafting themselves together while the Huffingtons of this world continue to circle about them.
Instead of forming an open monetary relationship with anyone who links to their material, papers which want to see link economy only among the rarefied international network of professional newsrooms would be attempting to maintain authority by professionalism, in a world of authority by consent.
Links are a commodity, that’s for sure; to be bought and sold. I’d stop at the brink of saying that links can be the content, or can be the reporting. But I wonder if I’m not cynical enough to agree with another model proposed by Nico Flores of On Demand Media: allowing access to your articles for free, so people can “deep-link” to you at will, but making your homepage and your content-listing and internal navigation subscriber-only.
It’s a model similar to the FT’s, whereby a ‘casual’ level of reading is free, but more than 30 articles a month and you hit the subscriber barrier. Here you’re welcoming the serendipitous reader, while charging your regular or dedicated reader, and thus recognising the differences in demand and in willingness to pay between your casual and regular users. At this point you’re encouraging people to use you as a reference while still getting paid to be trustworthy- or, to put it another way, you’re charging people for their trust in you. It’s a move which reflected the role of the FT as an expert reference in a wide range of professions (though I’m reliably informed that City types read it largely to study what people were thinking yesterday).
Adopted by more broad news agencies, either of these subscription models would professionalise the connectors, the aggregators, “those who have the power to link”, by charging them for the resources needed to carry out their self-appointed jobs. Which might deliver a guaranteed minimum of quality and competence among the connector class, or might result in connectors being perpetually under suspicion of corporate involvement.
Now, when the business philosophy speeches made by newspaper execs seem to match up with the blue-sky imagery of bloggers, I’m inclined to think it’s because they want the philosophical waters thoroughly warmed within the industry before they dive in. After all, innovation is only valuable if you’re nimble enough to use it. Peter Grimshaw of FT.com may be making noise about new paradigms because none of the papers want to be the first to start charging for content you can get elsewhere. And FT at least knows it has a unique, expert appeal.
Perhaps some editors envision all the major players making the leap at once in a coordinated subscriber strike, free one day, restricted the next, and the professionals’ code preserved. The worst thing in the world is trying to make it over a crevasse in two jumps. But plenty of nimbler people have made plenty of money charging for things that with a little effort can be got elsewhere, iTunes foremost among them, and with no regard for its brothers in the trade.
There is a Go proverb: When you want to test the depths of a stream, don’t use both feet.
There is definite merit still in the notion of a code of understanding among journalists worldwide. But when they traded silence for a package of soundbites and a unique front-page shot for every paper of Prince Harry on patrol, editors knew they were preparing for the moment somebody broke the story. And they must have known, or suspected, when they made the deal that such an arrangement would never be possible again.
Edit: Google’s saturnine response to the request by the Tribune group that it exclude one of their newspaper sites from Google News’s coverage. Wired point out the similarities with a case a year ago, akin to the more recent AP legal action, of news agencies not getting it. A Belgian media company argued successfully in European courts that their copyright was infringed by Google providing abstracts and links to their content. The Tribune asked to be excluded not for copyright reasons but because of “problems with Googlebots” (the crawler software Google News uses to sample hundreds of publications and randomly aggregate them on its homepage). However, Google’s response was the same in both cases. “We really make it easy for publishers who don’t want their websites to appear in a search index. We have really easy tools for them to use to tell us not to crawl them.” These tools involve the implementation of a code called robots.txt in a site’s source code, which tells Google to exclude it from GNews’s crawler and from Google searches. And who in their right minds is going to want to sentence themselves to obscurity?
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