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The Texas Tribune has a good model for successful journalism, but I don't know how replicable it is. It's online only, and it got seeded from million-dollar donations from a number of people, and gets ongoing funding through donations from readers, foundations, and corporations. It seems like they employ a lot of fresh-out-of-J-school reporters, which obviously keeps overhead low, and I don't know how they structure benefits. One of the big issues at the legacy papers were huge real estate footprints for their staff and printing operations and generous pension plans that became untenable as healthcare costs went way up and advertising revenue went way down. Why I'm not confident that it's replicable is that the philanthropy-supported model is only going to have so much capacity. Texas is the second biggest state, with enough political business to warrant a full-time outlet dedicated to the statehouse. But the other big papers, the Houston Chronicle, SAEN, DMN, etc. are either consolidating state bureaus or cutting staff. I also think that relying on cheap, inexperienced labor is, as ever, going to have consequences at some point. It also came out at the same time the big papers were gutting bureaus so the Trib had a good combo of content, timing, and labor-availability. For local news, I think you're going to continue to see conglomerations of weekly and small daily town papers, both through traditional outlets - such as the Houston Chronicle buying up all the papers in the various towns surrounding Houston and running them centrally- and through private conglomerations like Community Impact, because you can centralize a lot of news production in these arenas. If a county has four papers and all of them send a reporter to the monthly Commissioner's Court meeting, you are going to have four people write the exact same story. Cheaper to have one guy write the story and run it in four papers. The future I think is going to be more of the same, I don't think there's a secret model to delivering quality journalism at low cost. I think part of the problem is the sub-or-nothing paradigm, more often than not I want to read just one article but don't want to mess with a subscription. Maybe a industry-recognized third-party wallet app where you can put some money in and you get charged a quarter or whatever per article, kind of like how you can just buy a single newspaper out of a kiosk without signing up for a full year of home delivery. Most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for a good product if you make it easy to do so. For myself, I pay for Wapo, NYT, The Atlantic, one or two substacks at any given time, DMN, Houston Chronicle and yes even the execrable Austin American Statesman, even though they never remember my login. But I am guided to these stories almost exclusively through twitter, I don't go to the Chronicle homepage everyday over a cup of coffee like it's 1988 again.
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Apr 26, 2023 17:47
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T Zero posted:This is why I think it's really important to preserve news outlets as institutions rather than aggregations of individual reporters. Editors protect reporters from their worst impulses and channel them toward their best. Recall that Hersh's My Lai and Abu Ghraib reporting came at the New Yorker. Institutions do bring their own biases, but those can be useful too. There was some chatter recently that NYT had an institutional line was hostile to tech and Silicon Valley, but I think it was a useful corrective to the fawning coverage in the rest of the media of Zuck, Elizabeth Holmes, Musk, etc. at the time. OTOH, Iraq. Well, I probably already pay way more than what people think is reasonable, but that's just an ethical consideration for me because I don't like sneaking around paywalls (though I confess, I do fail myself from time to time). For most people the amount is "zero" and that's the problem. If you look at any paywalled article, posted on twitter, the replies are full of people that are actually indignant that they might be asked to pay for it. This is not limited to news but any public service: people want comprehensive and robust programs and they are not wiling to pay a dime for them. The post-Ben Franklin-Era journalism model has always been reliant on ads, you won't go far off if you described every newspaper as an ad magazine that has news stories to entice people to read the ads. There's a reason the industry refers to the article-dedicated portions of page layouts as "the news hole". All our free- or low-cost entertainment is subsidized by companies through ads, and they always have been. That's why streaming is in such a crisis right now, there's a growing school of thought that there is no sub-based model that can be profitable at a price point people will accept. It's why WB is gutting their catalog and shunting their popular properties onto ad-supported streaming platforms. Now, David Zaslav might be wrong, but without the absurd largesse out of the endless pockets of US corporations - who are paying for something with a benefit that no one has ever been able to quantify - every previously ad-supported industry has struggled to switch to a different model. Whether that's platforms that started out as sub-supported burning through VC or platforms who had their ad space eaten up by Google and FB, we just don't have anything that can replicate the insane funds companies are willing to shovel into marketing. zoux fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 16:30
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https://twitter.com/YahooNews/status/1652390098166509572 I was kind of dismayed to see a bunch of people dogpiling this idea because it's another gently caress Elon feeding frenzy, but this is basically the idea I was talking about earlier, and Twitter would've been the ideal platform to test it on. Not anymore, now that Musk has completely destroyed the credibility of Twitter both in real terms by transferring verification from news organizations to literally the dumbest people on the planet, and in reputational terms. Also Elon has never successfully implemented anything he's promised for Twitter, so I don't expect outlets to sign on or for the feature to be offered at all. But if Twitter was run like a real company I think this would've been a good idea.
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May 2, 2023 16:58
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WarpedLichen posted:It would be interesting to see but I have to imagine that the population this would extract value from is minimal. At best it creates a psychological effect where people associate more value to a subscription as a result of individual article prices. Otherwise it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that news aggregators and sensationalist headlines have created. I mean like paying $0.25 to read the latest Chotiner throat cutting without having to sub to the New Yorker. I probably run into a "give us your email" or "you are out of free articles this month" a couple of times a day. I don't know if that's a viable revenue model or not, if Twitter was still a public company I think it'd be a good test of the concept, but under Elon's rule it will not be.
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May 2, 2023 17:46
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