-
News, publishers, print and digital: an update
A couple of weeks ago I had a little rant about the three things I think publishers need to do if they want to thrive in a beyond-print era. The survival of news media is a big issue right now, and so it should be — the quality reportage of news is critical to the health of our society.
In the time since posting my argument, I’ve spotted a few new developments I think are worth sharing. Unsurprisingly, they all have a lot to do with content and the contradiction of digital content: expensive to produce (or at least, the good stuff often is) but more often than not, free to consume. Highly valuable, then, but cursed with a changeable value.
Revisioning an economy around forces like these isn’t going to be easy, but I believe it can be done. Here’s what’s happening, and why I think it matters.
-
Somewhere over the paywall: 3 predictions for news media
Two weeks ago, some colleagues and I attended a Frontline Club talk on apps, paywalls and the future of journalism (for a recap, see William Owen’s excellent post). I found the experience very interesting but also very frustrating. I should say up front that this post is deliberately provocative: I am heartsick at the state of the news industry (one I respect and value to no end) and I want to do something about it — or at least start a discussion that does.
Publishers are erecting paywalls all over the place — The Times last week, The New York Times next year — but to what end? By throwing their content behind paywalls, publishers are indulging themselves in a knee-jerk reaction that — I think — will decimate their market share and brand value, ultimately to fatal consequences.
Publishers should be rethinking digital as a universe of potential profit. They should be embracing change and changing with it, but instead they’re freaking out and locking up the content. This just won’t work.
The internet has irrevocably — and nearly globally — democratised information. Content as content is free, and content producers cannot ask consumers to change their behaviour or expectations to meet a bottom line. That’s just not how it works. There is so much good content out there, people will simply decline to pay and move on to a free content source — and there are many.
In order to survive, publishers must change the way they approach the business of content, newspapers, and digital news platforms. Here are my three predictions for the industry.
-
Three fallacies of newspaper thinking (and how paywalls cracked at the Frontline Club)
My first trip to the Frontline Club last night (thanks, @saradotdub) was rewarded with a lively and contentious debate on the future of newspapers featuring The Times digital director, Gurtej Sandhu, enduring a severe cross-examination on Murdoch’s paywall strategy. It came from all sides: the Chair (the subtle and persistent Steve Hewlett) fellow panel members and the floor.
My takeaway was that the discussion highlighted three fallacies that still govern much newspaper thinking.
Fallacy Number One is that the internet is free because of a mix of habit and a spurious moral right, and that if you can change habits and challenge morality we’ll go back to paying for content.
This is confusing newspapers with content. We used to pay for newspapers because they had a monopoly of the means of production, and to get the content we had to pay for paper, printworkers, printing machines and trucks. The internet reduces the cost of material production and distribution to virtually nil and reveals that whatever we used to pay for content was a fraction of the total newstand price, and we paid for that because we couldn’t get it elsewhere, which brings us to…
Fallacy Number Two: that a newspaper’s competition is other newspapers.
Panel member Doublas McCabe suggested that if every newspaper went behind a paywall we might start to pay again. This misses the point that we can now get the news from a myriad sources, not just ‘newspapers’: specialist blogs, tv websites, Google, twitter, etc. ad infinitum. The monopoly no longer exists and everybody can be a media owner (picture me waving my iphone in the air) and for this reason alone content is worth much less than it used to be – sometimes actually nothing – unless it occupies a privileged niche, as does the Financial Times (represented last night by product manager Marybeth Christie with a lively account of experimentation and research in different ways of paying and consuming).
Fallacy Number Three is that nothing else changes, content is still just the end product of the publishing process.
Steve Hewlett made the point that, even when we paid for newspapers, our secondary consumption (eg. in a library archive) and conversation was free. It was, and its a good point, but the network in which that conversation occured was comparatively stunted – just people we knew. Now the network of secondary consumption and conversation is gigantic and accounts for much of the value created by content in terms of comment, correction, re-use and aggregation. The relationship between journalist and audience has changed from one that’s indirect and mediated by truck and newsagent to one that’s direct and continuous, a service relationship with two-way interactions where publication is often the beginning rather than the end of content production.
The internet creates the potential to make a fundamental change in journalistic practice and enables publishers to shift from product to service, whereby content is the means of introducing other sources of value such as real world products, information or services. This means, simply, that advertising and subscription are no longer the only revenue sources and might become secondary. This is Murdoch’s error, not realising that a newspaper isn’t a newspaper any more.
When asked why the New York Times tried a paywall and went back to free, Gurtej Sandhu said they blinked. We wonder if The Times will be blinking, sometime in the next six months or so, when it sees the light.
Stop press: you can watch/read about the full debate here:
http://frontlineclub.com/blogs/theforum/2010/05/apple-and-paywalls.html
-
I love words: manopause, faffage, hellacious
I learned to read a long time ago, but I can still remember the sheer amazingness of the discovery — like I’d found the keys to the universe and all of a sudden, EVERYTHING made sense. Words were everywhere and I was powering through them like a mad thing (and mispronouncing a fair few, I ought to add).
Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.
The thing that really makes my head spin is the way language evolves. Even as I type this, old words are morphing and merging to send nifty little neologisms strutting out of our cultural soup of signifiers, all a-dazzle with tasty wordiness. Perhaps my favourite of these is the portmanteau, a linguistic mashup of two words and their meanings.
For some time, I’ve been meaning to make a list of the niftiest new (or new to me) words I come across in daily parlance. Here are three I have enjoyed this week, with more to come as I encounter them.
Manopause
Noun: a break from dating, flirting, and all forms of sexual interaction with men
“He is totally giving you the eye, go for it!”
“I can’t, I’m on a manopause. He’s fit though — get in there, Shaz.”Faffage
Collective noun: timewasting, to-ing and fro-ing and general faffing
“You’re right — there is a direct correlation between the number of children a person has and the degree of faffage involved in their getting from A to B. Thank God we chose art over ankle-biters.”
Hellacious
Adjective: really awful with a sort of visceral twinge; a combination of hellish and atrocious
“During the coldest night that winter in Siberia, Ferdinand was forced to rise every hour to stoke the fire with priceless Louis XIV furniture. For an antiques dealer it was a truly hellacious experience.”
Photo courtesy of New York Public Library, used under a Creative Commons licence
-
Pictory – A beautiful example of online editorial design
I’ve talked before about exploring different ways of navigating and consuming content online.
I first came across Pictory a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. But as it starts to fill with stories and topics I feel provides some beautiful and elegant ways to gorge yourself on content and is really forging a path into new areas of content layout and navigation online.
Their line ‘Your best photo stories’ explains what it is nicely.
Let’s look at the evidence.
Lovely, big images. Navigation via a keyboard which allows me to skip from piece to piece simply by pressing the left/right arrow keys. A balanced mix of captioned images and short stories pulled together to create a rich textured viewing / reading experience. Real-life stories which often cause an emotional stir in the reader. And the designer in me loves the use of Typekit fonts.
I think it’s an example of crowdsourcing at it’s absolute best. A nice tightly worded brief but open enough for interpretation by the viewer. (Aren’t all the best briefs like this?)
Being ultra picky. A full-screen view would be nice.
Anyway, I think it’s best if you go there now and lose the next hour of your day.
-
Tear down this wall! Crowdsourcing comes of age
Hello. I’m Sara and I joined Made by Many last month. My forte is content, so it seems appropriate that my first post should be all about conversation… specifically the two conversations that go with just about every digital project.
Never simple, is it?
The first of these is all about the customers, the people for whom we’re building this product or service. This conversation is pretty user-centric: essentially, what do they need? What are their problems, and how can we help solve — or at least minimise — them?
Then there’s a second conversation — the behind-the-scenes, creative-type stuff about how things actually work. What functionality do we offer? Do our user stories tell the whole story, and does it have a happy ending? What about typeface and layout? And finally, how the hell do we iterate this beast? Read full post
Archive for the ‘content’ Category
You are currently browsing the archives for the content category.
Our latest tweets
- @chrbutler thanks! glad you like it :) RT @chrbutler @madebymany Your blog is great! It's a never-skip for me. 2 days ago
- @chrbutler mentioned our blog in his post on designing for attention, here: http://bit.ly/aTo8eY 2 days ago
- @apophenia in Technology Review says that people will simply carve out a space for privacy as they think best: http://bit.ly/cbbNdy 2 days ago
- More updates...
Most commented
People
Categories
- advertising (9)
- agile (9)
- Clients (29)
- code (1)
- Conferences (41)
- content (6)
- design (17)
- Games (2)
- Great Stuff (13)
- innovation (25)
- interview (3)
- jobs (1)
- Labs (9)
- Made by Many (142)
- mobile (4)
- New connections (2)
- opinion (50)
- play (1)
- publishing (8)
- Social Web (132)
- technology (2)
- Transmedia (1)
Archives
Sites we like
- Aaron Koblin
- Barbarian Group
- BBH Labs
- Big Spaceship
- Big Spaceship – Think
- Bud Caddell – What Consumes Me
- Creative Applications
- David Armano
- Edward Boches
- Faris Yakob
- Ffffound
- Gareth Kay
- Howard Rheingold
- Iain Tait – Crack Unit
- idsgn
- Manuel Lima
- Mike Arauz
- Neil Perkin – Only Dead Fish
- Noah Brier
- Not For Paper
- Paul Davis – Our illustrator
- TED Blog
- Undercurrent
- We Are Social