Who Knew?

Newspocalypse - The Opinions

Please reblog this or email me if you know of any other well-written and unique proposals by influential publications or blogs. I’ll be updating this post throughout the day with additional links.

The New York Times

‘I can’t imagine what civil society would be like,’ said Buzz Woolley, a wealthy San Diego businessman who has been a vocal critic of the paper there, The Union-Tribune, and the primary backer of an Internet news site, VoiceofSanDiego.org. ‘I don’t want to imagine it. A huge amount of information would just never get out.’

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

The ecosystem of technology news… is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

What would happen if some top English language journalism organizations simply merged and started charging for their breaking news and commentary about policy, economics and and other national/international topics. That is, what if they were to combine for critical mass and keep most of their journalism off the public Internet for a few days after publication but then make the archives freely available?

Our Plan To Fix The New York Times: cut costs 40% by 2010, continue to raise print subscription prices and explore charging an online subscription fee.We are NOT proposing that the NYT put 100% of its content behind a firewall and sacrifice traffic from search engines, third-party sites, and other web distribution sources. On the contrary: We are proposing that the New York Times do what the Wall Street Journal does, which is run a hybrid subscription-free business… ALL of the WSJ’s content is indexed by, and available through, Google and other search engines. Most people don’t understand this, but it is critically important. The WSJ’s paid content is NOT hidden behind a firewall. It is available for free, all over the web, on a story by story basis.

The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.

On March 21, the undersigned will gather in Washington, DC to start creating the new revenue models everyone agrees are needed, but no one has yet delivered. We will begin with these tasks: 1) Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone. 2) Create a better CraigsList. 3) Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses. 4) Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.