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‘Free’ as a business model and how it might apply to newspapers

Started by brisbourne · 6 months ago

Techdirt has an interesting post this morning on Getting People to Pay for Investigative Reporting Directly. The idea, as reported more fully in the New York Times is that people club together to commission a piece on investigative reporting and pay in advance. Spot.us in San Francisco is offeri ... Continue reading »

10 comments

  • Ben Godfrey

    10 months ago

    TD's framework is a nice by numbers run through. It's fun to apply it to things like news media, music, film/TV, etc.

    I think there's a continuum from scarce to infinite, so at some point you have to draw a line and say everything on the left is free and everything on the right is increasingly valuable. I would think this line depends on your funding situation, the ease of adoption of your product, etc.
    reply
  • James Penman

    10 months ago

    Excellent post.
    reply
  • Digidave

    10 months ago

    Excellent post indeed.

    I'm David Cohn - the director of spot.us. We are still in the early stages and won't be ready until the fall, but wanted to thank you for interest in what we are doing. It certainly will be interesting to explore how we can pay for quality content with the model of "community funded reporting."

    After we launch in full in the fall - we will find out more. IT certainly is an issue that needs to be explored and figured out.

    Onward!!!!
    reply
  • Richard Morris

    10 months ago

    It might pay but journalism it ain't. For starters, I assume there must be at least a handful of bright-eyed hopefuls who think the whole business of gathering news a bit glamorous. Their perception of journalism is based largely on Sex and the City, Evelyn Waugh novels and The Daily Planet in Superman. They think the job will be one big free canapé, full of press passes and attractive people shouting “Scoop!” into phones and going to parties at the weekends with Stephen Fry. It would seem unfairly harsh to speculate that for the vast majority of journalists, most days are spent ringing people back to leave messages for people to ring you back because they rang you back and you were in the loo, and being surrounded by people who look mainly like Ian Hislop. So I won’t. The biggest question this sort of 'investigative' journalism raises (by the way isn't all journalism investigative) is people are in danger of being influenced by the person paying the most amount of money. In other words, we lose that vital independence that news reporting brings. Great blog by the way, Nic.
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  • nic

    10 months ago

    Richard - I agree the independence issue is not straightforward, but remember there has always been a paymaster. Furthermore, I hope, maybe naively, that if a group of investigative journalists can create a reputation for integrity then their work will have more impact and be worth more to the people who are paying for it - although admittedly this relies on the assumption that the people commissioning the work are after the truth rather than simply pursuing an agenda.
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  • Digidave

    10 months ago

    Yes - I want to echo the last comment: There is no such thing as clean money. We've all heard the horror story of a publisher who killed a story because it would threaten advertising.

    The idea for spot.us is that if the group of funders is diverse enough - then the journalist is not beholden to any one of them. Take our recently funded SF Election Truthiness Campaign: wiki.spot.us/election

    It was funded by 73 different people. I'm sure some of those people have their political bias' - but because it was a diverse group the reporter was literally commissioned by the public - and is responsible only to report in as straightforward a manner as possible.

    As for journalism being an unglamorous job. That might be true. Guess what - it's a job. All jobs can suck at times. Spot.Us isn't trying to turn journalism into a day at the park. We imagine that most of the pitches are going to come from recently laid-off journalists. These people know exactly how unglamorous journalism can be.
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  • James Penman

    10 months ago

    Richard - my six year old daughter is wandering around a Devon farmhouse at the mo taking hundreds of photos with a DSLR including rather a nice shot of my foot. Is it photography? I don't really care to be honest. It's how it is. It's up to an entrepreneuer or a VC or (gosh) a corporation to find new ways to unlock the revenue from this new reality.
    reply
  • Richard Morris

    10 months ago

    sorry David - I should have made it clear that I spent the grewater part of my working life on UK national newspapers. I was being ironic is saying the majority of people view journalism as glamorous, when (most times) it isn't.
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  • alan p

    10 months ago

    "Assuming issues of bias can be worked around then this will be a good example of how business models are evolving to deal with the economics of free in the newspaper world."

    Big ask - given the evidence of the past where this is dominated by special interest groups, I'm dubious that this will change much.

    The issue with Mike's hypothesis on Techdirt is he doesn't work through the implication of re-setting the overall market size if the infinite good is set to zero.
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  • nic

    10 months ago

    Hi Alan - tks for the comments. As I've written before in the context of music the implication of free may well be that the overall market is smaller. That doesn't mean it isn't going to happen though.
    reply

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