"You pay peanuts, you get monkeys" is a phrase I've heard many times and mainly when someone has been on the receiving end of bad workmanship they thought they could get on the cheap.
In a week where many newspapers and publication houses are scratching their heads on how to keep themselves afloat, this phrase comes to mind once again. The issue lies with how newspapers can charge for what they spend a lot of time producing, but that nobody (at least not the younger generation) is willing to pay for.
Earlier this week the Economist joined the ranks of the Times and Sunday Times in coming up with a subcription model aimed at upping their revenues. While it's too early to say whether such schemes will work, the honest truth is that most people just aren't prepared to for something they can get for free elsewhere. Citizen journalism fuelled by social networking means that people are happy to get their information from any source as long as it's free and even if it is of sub-standard quality.
On some level it is worrying. If we are not going to pay for our news, what kind of information will we end up with to form our decisions?
David Gilbertson, EMAP CEO makes a good point from #aop3c (posted on twitter by Joanna Geary of the TimesOnline):
"While news is urgent it may not be important and people pay for important."
It seems that unless newspapers find a way of charging for quality content, many consumers will end up with the news equivalent of monkeys having not even paid peanuts.
Interesting piece. A couple of comments - first off is an experiment in citizen journalism by a Czech investment firm who opened up their first coffee shop-cum-newsroom. This bold initiative is supposed to bridge the gap between newspapers and the people to whom hyper-local news matters the most - you and i. Read a NY Times report below:
http://tinyurl.com/yzazrq4
Another nice initiative I twittered about recently is this fancy little website by San Francisco-based Bitcents. It looks like a nice step forward on micropayment services for newspapers.
www.bitcents.com
My question is this - if there is so much readily available news digged, delicioused and aggregated, are newspapers and publishers not simply patching a holey hull? Is the ship not going down anyway? Appreciate your feedback.
Brendan Donnellan, Prague
Posted by: Brendan Donnellan | October 14, 2009 at 02:12 PM