Difference between revisions of "Yale-payments-panel"

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(New page: Penny Abernathy: Penny Abernathy: When are you going to come up with The Model. He says there will be one national aggregator brand and it will be Google. The path to renewal: ...)
 
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==="Journalism and the New Media Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?"===
 +
=FRIDAY 5 P.M. PANEL: The quest for pay models=
 +
<big>What follows is an honest attempt to document a two-day conference at Yale Law School, "Journalism and the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the
  
 +
Messenger?" The reporter is Bill Densmore of the [http://www.rjionline.org Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute] at the Missouri School of Journalism.  As
  
Penny Abernathy:  
+
with a similar in-the-moment report from a gathering at [http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Shorenstein-newspay Harvard University] two weeks ago, I make
  
Penny Abernathy:
+
no warranty about the accuracy of direct quotes -- captured on the fly -- but make a promise to have supplied appropriate context as best as possible. The
  
When are you going to come up with The Model.  
+
sessions are being videotaped. Consult that source for the final history of this event.</big>
  
He says there will be one national aggregator brand and it will be Google.
 
  
The path to renewal:
+
<hr>
 +
<b>Related links:
 +
*[http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23kmedia FOLLOW TWITTER STREAM #kmedia]
 +
*[http://yaleisp.org/ Watch LIVE VIDEO STREAM (right side of page)]
 +
*[http://informationvalet.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/what-will-be-the-future-economic-supports-for-journalism/ What will support news?]
 +
*[http://wwww.newshare.com/wiki/index.php/Yale-payments-collaborative The collaborative idea]
 +
*[[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Yale-payments MORNING SESSION: The overview]
 +
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Yale-payments-public AFTERNOON SESSION: The public option]
 +
*[http://www.newshare.com/wiki/index.php?title=Yale-payments-local AFTERNOON SESSION: What is to be done locally?]
 +
<hr>
 +
<big>This panel, "The Quest for Pay Models," included Steven Brill, of Journalism Online LLC; Jim kennedy, vp-strategy, The Associated Press; Tom Glocer, CEO
  
*Shed legacy costs
+
of Thomson Reuters; Robert Picard, of JonKoping University, Sweden; and Penny Abernathy, of the University of North Carolina. You can
*Reestablish community
 
  
accomodation never works, what you need is this creativity.  
+
[http://newshare.typepad.com/mgpaudio/2009/11/audio-brill-content-panel-a-yale.html launch or download audio] of this session (1 hour, 40 minutes).  
  
"The likelihood that the structure of this medium will remain as before is nil."
+
Penny Abernathy opens with an overview of three books and an examination of the likely future of business models. Her key conclusion: Legacy newspaper
  
Strategy guy for The AP:
+
companies will not be able to cut their way out of their current dilemma.  She observes that one of the authors believes there will be one national
  
He has an idea for the New Model for News.
+
aggregator brand in journalism -- and that aggregator will be Google. The path to renewal for newspapers: Shed legacy costs and re-establish links with
  
Their view of the new model is how to harness the new forces of nature we now
+
community. Accomodation will never work "what you need is creativity . . . The likelihood that the structure of this medium will remain as before is nil."
  
epxiernece on the internet.
 
  
He puts of a search term in Google. And he put in first two paragraphs of an AP
+
Jim Kennedy outlines a "New Model for News," in a set of slides which describe the AP's strategy. His key point: Harness the new forces of nature, the new
  
story AP IMPACT on Child Porn and he got 32,900 responses on the web. "We don't
+
experience of the web and figure out how to build a new platform for news that allows everybody to win -- the producers, the entrepreneurs, the aggregators
  
have that many members. "THis is not a judgement about the blogs or that practice."
+
and others.  
  
+
====32,900 results from an AP story snippet?====
  
"What signal do you get from that search result?"  
+
Kennedy puts up a screen shot of a Google search he executed. He took the first two paragraphs of a unique AP story slugged: "AP IMACT on Child Porn" and he
  
Watertown Daily Times -- in a death match with NewszJunky.com
+
got 32,900 search responses. Kennedy said there are not that many websites with legitimate rights to AP content. He found that after the first few links to
Northern New York's 24/7 news source.  
 
  
"My point ot view is not to bemoan the rise of these new models, but how to make
+
legitimate sites, most of the rest appeared to be sites that had copied and pasted large chunks of the story without the copyright permission to to so. "This
  
this new news ecosystem work better. The old model has been upended and the peice
+
is not a judgement about the blogs or that practice," said Kennedy, but rather just an observation that the notion of copyright is broken on the web and  
  
sof news fall out.  
+
therefore broken for The AP. "What signal do you get from that search result?" he asks.  
  
Young consumers saw the news as facts, updates, back story and future story. The
+
He then cites the example of the Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times, a city he grew up near, which used to be 34,000 daily circulation and is now around 20,000
  
young consumers said they were overloaded with the facts and updates and weren't
+
daily and he called the paper "in a death matcH" with a local online website, NewszJunky.com, which does not original reporting, but only aggregates
  
getting any context or backstory. People aren't going to home pages, they are going
+
information from many sources in upstate New York. "My point ot view is not to bemoan the rise of these new models, but how to make this new news ecosystem
  
in through back doors.  
+
work better," says Kennedy. "The old model has been upended and the news piece has fallen out."
  
 +
Finally, Kennedy cites an [http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf AP ethnographic study] that shows that young consumers see news as facts, updates, back story and
  
"This pattern is not connected. We are mostly moving through this in a random
+
future story. But the young consumers say the are overloaded with the facts and updates and yearn for the context and backstory. People aren't going to home
  
fashion. People are going through these patterns through the front door, teh back
+
pages, they are going in through back doors. "This pattern is not connected ... we are mostly moving through this at random . . . it is not a good experience
  
door, it is not a good experience, and it doesn't really serve the stakeholders,
+
and it doesn't really serve the stakeholders ... principally the users."
  
principally the users."
+
====Kennedy: The packages don't work anymore====
  
"The old business model of the packages really doesn't work any more. We can't push
 
  
them out anymore, the user is in control."  
+
"The old business model of the packages really doesn't work any more," says The AP's Kennedy. "We can't push them out anymore, the user is in control." He
  
He illustrates the packages to atoms:
+
says the hold system was a package -- the newspapers. Then newspapers dropped the whole package online, where the aggregators then came along and atomized it
  
1) Old system was package -- the newspaper
+
into its pieces. What needs to happen now is to collect the atoms back into some form that serves the needs and interest of consumers, says Kennedy.
2) We put it all online
 
3) Google game along and broke it into atoms
 
4) What needs to happen is to get the atoms back into some format again
 
  
 +
He thinks there is a role for the AP in "helping to hard-wire the connections." The AP is doing this through creating a digital platform, starting a news
  
"WE are trying to hard-wire the connections."  
+
regisration, developing a search strategy (through AP "landing pages"), and coming up with a social-media model. "We hope we'll convince the search engines
  
Digital Platform
+
to take a look at this and use it," says Kennedy. "We would hope they will use information if we can show them an index of authoritative news."
News Registry
 
Search Strategy
 
Social Media Model
 
  
"WE hope we'll convince the search engines to take a look at this and use it. We
 
  
would hope that they will use information if we can show them an index of
+
====Brill: Journalism Online -- one account, password====
  
authoritative news."
+
Brill now discusses his Journalism Online LLC initiative which he describes as an effort not to create a new business model for news but create the facility
  
 +
for the re-emergence of an old model -- direct consumer payment for content.  The online model of using to advertising doesn't work because there are too
  
STEVE BRILL:
+
many websites competing to sell advertising -- it is a market of abundance, not scarcity. And that has cut prices for advertising.
  
Difficult to complain about everybody taking those 32,000 copies.  
+
With Journalism Online LLC, user will have a common account and a common password. He says he will help news organizations, not with a paywall but with a set
  
-------------
+
of dials that will enable a mix of circulation and advertising revenue and you will "gradually wean people off the idea that everything is free . . . a
  
What JO is trying to do very briefly is not create a new model. ... We're trying to  
+
gradual process, a flexible process that publishers can do and they will do . . . the reason they will do it is quite simple -- the stuff that they have to  
  
create an old model and the old model is if you produce journalism the readers pay
+
sell has real value."
  
for some portion of it and the advertisers pay for some portion of it.
+
Brill sees JO as "putting that kind of economic power" back in the hands of publishers, "correcting a hiccup" in the evolution of the web during which
  
the model by which you depend on adveritsing on a website is the broadcast model
+
publishers decided to put their content on the web without charging for it.  Brill said: "We have now signed up over 1,200 affiliates to do this."
  
except there are 2 million competitors.
 
  
 +
====Pickard: Focus on content, the money will follow====
  
"They each will have a common account and a common password."
+
Research academic Robert Picard at Jonkoping University, in Sweden, has been studying the economics of the news industry for decades. He notes that there are
  
"We are going to help them, not with a paywall but help them to set various dials,  
+
still lots of resources in the news industry, but they aren't being deployed on news. "It is not as simple as saying we are going to throw a paywall up there and make it work," he says. He sees a big push for paid content, grounded in the comfortable notion
  
turn various dails so they can once again have a mix of circulation and advertising
+
that people ought to pay for what news organizations are producing. But he says the conversation should be refocused on product, not money, on business
  
revenue."  ... "You gradually wean people off the idea that everything is free."
+
models and not on pricing -- overall focused on what consumers want. "You have a huge product problem -- if you solve that, the money will take care of that  
  
"What we are trying not to do is lay down some blanket paywall ... but a gradual
+
. . . "what are you offering people that is unique, valuable to them and gives them an incentive to pay for something?"
  
process, a flexible process that publishers can do and the way they will do, the
 
  
reason they will do it is quite simple -- the stuff that they have to sell has real
+
Paying for news is not the same as paying for music, video and other content, Picard says. The demand for entertainment is much higher than for news and can support much higher price points. And online news is not the same product as offline news. The online experience is not very good -- there is not enough personalization or navigation or service. The discussion has first to be about "what we are delivering online before we think about paying for it."
  
value."
+
====Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters====
  
"Putting that kind of economic power back into the
 
  
"We have now signed up over 1,200 affliates to do this so maybe we are on our way."
 
 
"It's about correcting a hickup, if you will when everyone said the Internet is
 
 
such a cool thing, let's just make everything free.
 
 
-----
 
 
Now Robert Picard is talking. His title: "Paid Content: Is it the Future of the
 
 
News Business?"
 
 
Robert Picard: "When people say there are not resources in the newspaper industry
 
 
that support news, they are wrong. There is a lot of resources that support other
 
 
than news.
 
 
He sees a big push for paid content. The arguments are grounded in comfortable
 
 
content. But the convesation should be focused on the product, not the money. "You
 
 
have a huge product problem; if you solve that, the money problem will take care of
 
 
that."
 
 
He keeps hearing newspaper people talking about pricing, not business models. What
 
 
are you offering people that is unique, valuable to them and gives them an
 
 
incentive to pay you something?
 
 
There are assumptiosn in the pay wall arguments.
 
 
Paying for news is the same as paying for music, video and other content.
 
 
*Online content is the sanme product as print content
 
 
*Online economic and marketing environment are similar excpet for printing and
 
 
distribution
 
 
*Online payment systems are efficient.
 
 
There is far more demand to pay for entertainment services than for news content.
 
 
For every dollar advertisres spend to support informaiton in the U.S., consuemrs
 
 
paythat much.  The price for non-news content is much higher than news because of
 
 
that willingness to pay. CD prices 10X higher than newspaper prices, DVD prices 15X
 
 
higher than newspaper prices.
 
 
The product is only partly the news, he says.
 
 
Is the online product the same as the offline product? Print news consumers payfor
 
 
may things.  Online navigation is harder than in print. The experience of online
 
 
news sites is not very pleasant. Not much personalization, not a lot of service
 
 
that goes with that experience.
 
 
Hae to start about what are we delivering online before we think about paying for
 
 
it.  Online the average costs don't delicne with increased readers. Problem:
 
 
Consumers don't know quality of content before purchase -- that's a problem.
 
 
Print readers are worth between $500 and $750 a year, double that because of the
 
 
advertising. It is taking between 50 and 100 readers online to replace that. And
 
 
you need 10-15 ads onine to get the same price as you get one ad online. So there
 
 
are huge challenges there.
 
 
If you are not paying for it offline, why are you going to pay for it online.
 
 
Online readers are characterized as monthly, not daily.
 
 
Have to look at consumers in diferent ways. "It is not as simple as saying we are
 
 
going to throw a paywall up there and make it work."
 
 
-----------
 
  
 
Tom Glocer also went to Yale Law School.  
 
Tom Glocer also went to Yale Law School.  
Line 344: Line 260:
  
  
Glocer: Maintains a public television service, if you go to opinion formers with a camera, they will speak to you and the smaller you are and the smaller impact you have the less you will get sources. In Steve's model, if you went to these same people and said I'm sorry I don't have a 100 million audience but I have 10,000 people of the same dmeographc, the entire US Senate and they pay me for it ... that''s not invented yet.
+
Glocer: Maintains a public television service, if you go to opinion formers with a camera, they will speak to you and the smaller you are and the smaller  
  
Brill: There are only about four papers who have put up a pay wall. They just started for everything at once. If you did everything we tell you do as a local publisher, you might lose about 10% of our page views.  
+
impact you have the less you will get sources. In Steve's model, if you went to these same people and said I'm sorry I don't have a 100 million audience but
 +
 
 +
I have 10,000 people of the same dmeographc, the entire US Senate and they pay me for it ... that''s not invented yet.
 +
 
 +
Brill: There are only about four papers who have put up a pay wall. They just started for everything at once. If you did everything we tell you do as a local  
 +
 
 +
publisher, you might lose about 10% of our page views.  
  
  
 
Glocer: He worries about subsidies.  
 
Glocer: He worries about subsidies.  
  
Picard: Subsidies decline over time.  The Scott Trust is now cutting and may stop publishing The Independent and may switch from a trust to a limited company.
+
Picard: Subsidies decline over time.  The Scott Trust is now cutting and may stop publishing The Independent and may switch from a trust to a limited  
 +
 
 +
company.

Revision as of 15:48, 14 November 2009

"Journalism and the New Media Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?"

FRIDAY 5 P.M. PANEL: The quest for pay models

What follows is an honest attempt to document a two-day conference at Yale Law School, "Journalism and the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the

Messenger?" The reporter is Bill Densmore of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. As

with a similar in-the-moment report from a gathering at Harvard University two weeks ago, I make

no warranty about the accuracy of direct quotes -- captured on the fly -- but make a promise to have supplied appropriate context as best as possible. The

sessions are being videotaped. Consult that source for the final history of this event.



Related links:


This panel, "The Quest for Pay Models," included Steven Brill, of Journalism Online LLC; Jim kennedy, vp-strategy, The Associated Press; Tom Glocer, CEO

of Thomson Reuters; Robert Picard, of JonKoping University, Sweden; and Penny Abernathy, of the University of North Carolina. You can

launch or download audio of this session (1 hour, 40 minutes).

Penny Abernathy opens with an overview of three books and an examination of the likely future of business models. Her key conclusion: Legacy newspaper

companies will not be able to cut their way out of their current dilemma. She observes that one of the authors believes there will be one national

aggregator brand in journalism -- and that aggregator will be Google. The path to renewal for newspapers: Shed legacy costs and re-establish links with

community. Accomodation will never work "what you need is creativity . . . The likelihood that the structure of this medium will remain as before is nil."


Jim Kennedy outlines a "New Model for News," in a set of slides which describe the AP's strategy. His key point: Harness the new forces of nature, the new

experience of the web and figure out how to build a new platform for news that allows everybody to win -- the producers, the entrepreneurs, the aggregators

and others.

32,900 results from an AP story snippet?

Kennedy puts up a screen shot of a Google search he executed. He took the first two paragraphs of a unique AP story slugged: "AP IMACT on Child Porn" and he

got 32,900 search responses. Kennedy said there are not that many websites with legitimate rights to AP content. He found that after the first few links to

legitimate sites, most of the rest appeared to be sites that had copied and pasted large chunks of the story without the copyright permission to to so. "This

is not a judgement about the blogs or that practice," said Kennedy, but rather just an observation that the notion of copyright is broken on the web and

therefore broken for The AP. "What signal do you get from that search result?" he asks.

He then cites the example of the Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times, a city he grew up near, which used to be 34,000 daily circulation and is now around 20,000

daily and he called the paper "in a death matcH" with a local online website, NewszJunky.com, which does not original reporting, but only aggregates

information from many sources in upstate New York. "My point ot view is not to bemoan the rise of these new models, but how to make this new news ecosystem

work better," says Kennedy. "The old model has been upended and the news piece has fallen out."

Finally, Kennedy cites an AP ethnographic study that shows that young consumers see news as facts, updates, back story and

future story. But the young consumers say the are overloaded with the facts and updates and yearn for the context and backstory. People aren't going to home

pages, they are going in through back doors. "This pattern is not connected ... we are mostly moving through this at random . . . it is not a good experience

and it doesn't really serve the stakeholders ... principally the users."

Kennedy: The packages don't work anymore

"The old business model of the packages really doesn't work any more," says The AP's Kennedy. "We can't push them out anymore, the user is in control." He

says the hold system was a package -- the newspapers. Then newspapers dropped the whole package online, where the aggregators then came along and atomized it

into its pieces. What needs to happen now is to collect the atoms back into some form that serves the needs and interest of consumers, says Kennedy.

He thinks there is a role for the AP in "helping to hard-wire the connections." The AP is doing this through creating a digital platform, starting a news

regisration, developing a search strategy (through AP "landing pages"), and coming up with a social-media model. "We hope we'll convince the search engines

to take a look at this and use it," says Kennedy. "We would hope they will use information if we can show them an index of authoritative news."


Brill: Journalism Online -- one account, password

Brill now discusses his Journalism Online LLC initiative which he describes as an effort not to create a new business model for news but create the facility

for the re-emergence of an old model -- direct consumer payment for content. The online model of using to advertising doesn't work because there are too

many websites competing to sell advertising -- it is a market of abundance, not scarcity. And that has cut prices for advertising.

With Journalism Online LLC, user will have a common account and a common password. He says he will help news organizations, not with a paywall but with a set

of dials that will enable a mix of circulation and advertising revenue and you will "gradually wean people off the idea that everything is free . . . a

gradual process, a flexible process that publishers can do and they will do . . . the reason they will do it is quite simple -- the stuff that they have to

sell has real value."

Brill sees JO as "putting that kind of economic power" back in the hands of publishers, "correcting a hiccup" in the evolution of the web during which

publishers decided to put their content on the web without charging for it. Brill said: "We have now signed up over 1,200 affiliates to do this."


Pickard: Focus on content, the money will follow

Research academic Robert Picard at Jonkoping University, in Sweden, has been studying the economics of the news industry for decades. He notes that there are

still lots of resources in the news industry, but they aren't being deployed on news. "It is not as simple as saying we are going to throw a paywall up there and make it work," he says. He sees a big push for paid content, grounded in the comfortable notion

that people ought to pay for what news organizations are producing. But he says the conversation should be refocused on product, not money, on business

models and not on pricing -- overall focused on what consumers want. "You have a huge product problem -- if you solve that, the money will take care of that

. . . "what are you offering people that is unique, valuable to them and gives them an incentive to pay for something?"


Paying for news is not the same as paying for music, video and other content, Picard says. The demand for entertainment is much higher than for news and can support much higher price points. And online news is not the same product as offline news. The online experience is not very good -- there is not enough personalization or navigation or service. The discussion has first to be about "what we are delivering online before we think about paying for it."

Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters

Tom Glocer also went to Yale Law School.

"What Steve's doing is I think brilliant because what he is giving back is control

and losing the controls and flexibility of the media back to the content providers

... and that's very creative."

Newspapers have lost touch with the balance between advertising and subscription.

"It's the mass suicide that Steve talks about."

Now you no which half of advertising isn't working.

Why is it so hard to build to POlitico, but so hard to come down from the

Washington Post.

Phyiscal paper: "We are obsessed with that as a media. I think we are going to look

back in a few years and think, what an amazingly stupid process."

"Why does the NYTimes have to do everything soup to nuts."

"I think there is a very, very bright future for journalism. We are a niche

publisher, our idea of niche is we get $13 billion a year on a subscription basis

from professionals, 90% electronic and we do it becuase we focus on what are the

real needs of those professional customers who don't want to be titilated or

entertained, they absolutely need that information."


QUESTOIN: Was it a mistake to give content away?

Kennedy: It made sense in the beginning. But when search took over, that's when the

industry should have switched gears. We should have innovate around that.

Brill: I think it was a mistake, and I'll give you an analogy from the print world:

He gives the example of

"The incremental revenue is tempting but it is really short sighted and it

continues to be really short sighted. ... we are not talking about a paywall. We

are talking about finding the 10 or 20% of most engaged readers

"It makes your point about micropayments completely irrelevant."

Brill: If you are giving away content stupidly.

"I will submit that it is better for the customer to get something for free than to

pay for it." But he thinks asking people to pay for it creates a much better

environment for journalism -- because it forces you to pay attention to your

readers instead of your advertiers. "That changes the culture of a newsroom. It

restores it."

"If the New York Times is going to charge $5 a month, it is concerned about its

readers. YOu know it is worring about its consumers because if it doesn't do

it,there isn't going to be a New York Times and there isn't going to be a

Huffington Post that exists off the New York Times."

PICK UP JIM'S CIRCULATE QUOTE RIGHT HERE.

Brill: "We see that for newspapers their model is they can get a small percentage

of their most avid readers to pay."

"Most newspapers who start with us in January, February or March ...."


Tom Glocer: Does a lot of work in news segmentation. They have gone from 1,500

journalists to 2,700 journalists in the last 10 years.

Robert Picard: Average U.S. newspaper is 38,000 circulation. About 90% of the ad

money going online is going to the top 10 sites. There is not a lot of ad money to

be made out there. He is creating some mechanisms where some of the local papers

can benefit.

For a small paper: If you go online, you've got to protect those 10 exclusive

stories.

Question: "The AP's vision is to do a command and control that will funnel me

around the Internet with an experience that will be useful to me .... we don't need

that."

Kennedy: "Our point of view is search doesn't produce results, it produces

discovery." "You'll get storis, but in some cases it won't match up with the

geography. How do you sort through that? Maybe you are good and finding the needle

in the haystack, but a lot of people are not. We are just trying to make it

possible to have a machine assisted soution.

As we develop the Internet further, the machines and the individuals can find that

information.

Brill: What does matter to cusomters is local news and local news if we just

redifine it as community news -- the state deparmtent, r people worriede about

Afghanistan, or the football game in WEst Texas. That is the news that people

really care about.

"Targeted publications are really giving up a lot when they don't ask people ina

community to pay something."

QUESTION: What about the loss of influence? People in newsrooms are worried.


Glocer: Maintains a public television service, if you go to opinion formers with a camera, they will speak to you and the smaller you are and the smaller

impact you have the less you will get sources. In Steve's model, if you went to these same people and said I'm sorry I don't have a 100 million audience but

I have 10,000 people of the same dmeographc, the entire US Senate and they pay me for it ... thats not invented yet.

Brill: There are only about four papers who have put up a pay wall. They just started for everything at once. If you did everything we tell you do as a local

publisher, you might lose about 10% of our page views.


Glocer: He worries about subsidies.

Picard: Subsidies decline over time. The Scott Trust is now cutting and may stop publishing The Independent and may switch from a trust to a limited

company.