Beyond advertising revenue

UPDATE: USA Today regrets not charging for its iPhone app.

Paul Bradshaw, who writes for Online Journalism Blog, says forget about making money from online content (which is what USA Today recently announced it will be doing with its digital edition) and focus instead on value-added services:

Bradshaw’s points about newspapers needing to build new revenue streams is echoed in this post from John Temple, former editor and publisher for the Rocky Mountain News:

I don’t think the industry can get there if all it does is try to hold on to its legacy revenue streams and its legacy business. One thing that concerns me is that newspapers don’t seem to be working with local businesses to help them find their own foothold on the Internet and at the same time possibly place themselves in the middle of transactions. This might enable them to find a new revenue stream they couldn’t have tapped before.

And here’s just one example, provided by the Center for Strategic and International studies, of a news outlet that is going beyond advertising for its income:

European companies have also been finding creative ways to thrive in a changing media environment. Norway’s VG Nett, which is affiliated with the popular Norwegian tabloid, Verdens Gang, rivals Google in Norway and has a profit margin of nearly 30 percent. It does this through charging for services such as a $90-a-year weight-loss club, a pay-for-upgrade social networking site and streaming soccer games.

Bring on the unpaid contributors

UPDATE at the bottom

UPDATE II (June 8, 2009) — enabling the entrepreneurial journalist

Jeffrey Seglin, a professor who has written for the New York Times, makes the case that when writers write for free, they not only devalue their own work, they make it harder for others to receive compensation:

Your work has value. If you start giving it away for free, then it diminishes that value and makes it harder for others to charge for their work as well.

I think this is true. One need only spend a few moments perusing freelance writing job sites or surveying the payments correspondents are receiving from local pubs (online and print) to know just how little contributors are compensated.

Now, do I think it’s wrong for writers to contribute their work for free?

No.

But do I agree that anyone other than a new writer looking to build a portfolio is — to use Seglin’s term — a “blockhead” if he or she writes for free?

How Google Wave, wikis and the Web could reshape the news

Jeff Jarvis often encourages his readers to think about news in the Web ecosystem as a “process,” rather than as a product. Commenting on the preview of Google Wave, Jarvis expands on that idea:

In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.

Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.

Jarvis’ point about the collaborative nature of future news is echoed by Paul Gillin, writing for Newspaper Death Watch:

The danger of comparing print to online

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to Martin Langeveld’s assertion that only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. Dan Thornton counters with a compelling argument that the comparison between print and online readers isn’t very useful. And that the numbers Langeveld uses as the basis for his calculation may be way off:

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

The AP is mad as hell

It’s true. AP Chairman Dean Singleton said so in his remarks at the AP Annual Meeting, held yesterday in San Diego:

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, Glenn Beck has now found a kindred spirit.

Peter Kafka, while sympathizing with the AP, doubts the nascent crusade’s effectiveness:

The thing is, even if the news guys somehow stopped people from using Google to find information they need, it wouldn’t do anything to solve the essential problems plaguing their business. Such as: