So here goes.
The newspaper industry is dead. We all know that.
I lament this because I have several friends who work in the print and television news business. I don't like to see people lose their jobs.
Newspapers have several audiences. So they must perform several functions. And some of these functions subsidize others. The classifieds and the sudoku games subsidize the stories up front.
The issues are these: declining readership and declining ad revenue. You will eventually move exclusively online, so you must operate within that sphere.
The solution: Choose an audience. Pick only one. Do you want to be in the picture game business (and there's nothing wrong with that,) or do you want to be in the news business? In the future, content providers will provide either picture games or they will provide news. They will not do both.
I suspect that in the future, writers will be primarily freelance. They will sell their content to an agency. For this purpose, I suspect that a sort of writer co-op may be formed, to handle the selling of content.
The world is full of the shuffling undead. They think that everything is free. Stop giving it away. A larger audience is not necessarily better.
Properly executed, there would be no news on the internet except for that which is encrypted, which employs some form of digital rights management scheme. If I want to watch Quincy, it is not (for the most part) just available for free somewhere. I have to pay Netflix to watch it. Netflix employs a digital rights management scheme.
If the shuffling undead want news, let them pay for it. Joe Blow writer is a member of Journalists R Us. Journalists R Us handles selling his content. Joe Blow is an expert in intelligence matters. He has a following who trust his judgment. Journalists R Us contracts with One Stop News Co. One Stop News Co has a website that delivers all sorts of stuff: sports, politics, fashion, whatever. The shuffling undead may not view this content without paying for it. With a subscription, the paying user is permitted to view the content. It can't even be copied and pasted. (There ought to be a feature in the news-reader software that permits the excerpting of a certain number of words for fair-use purposes, for the use of bloggers. But the clicker can't view the full article without being a paying subscriber of One Stop News Co.)
The technical solution is easy.
The newspaper WILL go out of business. ...unless it turns itself into One Stop News Co and employs digital rights management to protect its content.
Though the newspaper will go out of business, the journalist will forever have a job; the world needs information. Information and analysis has economic value because the economic actor will forever need it in order to make economic (and political) decisions. Stop giving the information away.
I purchased a subscription to the New York Times a year or two ago. They had protected some of their content. Good. Smart. I ponied up my thirty bucks or whatever. I bought the subscription solely for the purpose of reading that Red Shoed Maureen Dowd and that Theater Guy Turned Political Commentarist Frank Rich. (Being conversant in the methods of theater, he understands politics perfectly. It is economically useful that I read him. It is not economically useful that I read the tripe up front about what the Government Man said.)
But now the Times is giving it away again.
So:
If you are a journalist or a columnist, do this:
- Pick a specialty. Become an expert in that field and concern yourself with nothing else. An intelligence analyst will never trouble himself to write an article on food. In the future, you will not be tasked with a project. You will produce what you think is economically useful within your field of expertise and you will sell it.
- All you journalists band together and form your clearinghouse. This clearinghouse contracts with news sites.
- Or you journalists can hire software guys to create for you a news website called One Stop News Co, complete with digital rights management. And if some other news organization wishes to use the news they find on One Stop News Co, their commercial subscription to One Stop News Co permits them to reference it.
There's your solution. Do not play to the shuffling undead. Allow them to fully realize the cost of being uninformed.
The newsreader software that the subscriber uses should treat the information not as text, but as video, say. You need a computer expert to help you figure out a way to apply digital rights management to your content. Because as it stands right now, things are too easily copied and pasted and forwarded and linked.
Now let's say that One Stop News Co has an agreement with a competitor by the name of News Land. If a News Land subscriber comes across a link to a story, a story that is owned by One Stop News Co, that News Land subscriber can read it because his computer has a cookie on it or whatever that tells the One Stop News Co server that he is a subscriber in good standing with News Land, an outfit with which One Stop News Co has a content sharing agreement.
The point is, a Gold Level subscriber --and a Gold Level news subscriber like me should expect to pay several hundred dollars per year for news-- will be able to view all or most of what he clicks through to. And the Bronze Level news subscriber --who pays fifty bucks a year-- gets the cucka news. The garbage. Transcripts of what the Government Man said today.
Smart people know what things are worth and they are willing to pay for them. Make them pay for it. They will pay for it.
The shuffling undead are not relevant. Ignore them. So what if they can't read your story? All they can do is grunt and smear fecal coliform all over the place anyway.