How to Get Paid: Decrease Wallet Friction, Think Apps

So late last week I read Dave McClure’s slightly unhinged rant about subscriptions, and within a couple of paragraphs I started laughing. Not in that “Gee, anyone with an opposable thumb can now publish” way, but in that “This is beyond awesome” way. Posts like McClure’s remind me of why I love the Web, particularly the way it constantly brings new ideas and voices to my door that change the way I think. When I wasn’t laughing, I was nodding my head. First once, then twice, then lots of times.

McClure would benefit from an editor, he loves to swear, and his post reads a bit like it was composed while jumping on a trampoline, but don’t let that put you off: His thoughts on subscriptions, Web ads, transactions and passwords make for smart, bracing reading. I highly recommend getting your McClure direct and full-octane at the link above, but here’s my gloss anyway:

Web 2.0 companies have foolishly tried to follow Google and Yahoo’s lead in emulating ad-driven business models, wasting a decade trying out inefficient revenue models. McClure thinks that will change, in a rather dramatic way: “The default startup business model for 2010 and beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods).” He adds that “gradually we are discovering that the default revenue model on the internet should probably be the simplest one — that is: basic transactions for physical or digital goods, and recurring transactions (aka subscriptions) for repeat usage.” Or, as he then puts it more pungently, “Get Dem Bitches to *PAY* You, G.”

So what’s the problem with that? McClure isn’t interested in the ideology of free vs. paid or the link economy or Googlejuice. He does mention the problem of the penny gap (i.e. the hardest part of charging isn’t getting readers to pay you a certain price, but getting them to pay you anything at all), but then moves on — a bit too quickly, I thought — to “wallet friction.”

Here, he looks back to his time at PayPal, where the biggest customer-service problem by far was users not remembering their passwords. “Bingo, way to create the biggest HateStorm in Internet History: make it super simple for people to make their payment method unusable by simply forgetting their password,” he writes, adding that “PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And I’m guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.”

So what passwords do people remember? The ones for services they use all the time — such as social networks, email and instant messaging, and sites for buying games, music and entertainment. From there, he reaches his conclusion: “In 2015, the default login and payment method(s) on the Web will be Facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes.”

As I said, I would have liked to hear more from McClure on how we get across the penny gap. But I like that his examination of the problem focuses on consumer behavior, industry trends and practical issues, rather than supposedly immutable laws of the digital world. News organizations face a lot of problems that won’t be solved quickly or easily: There is a glut of commoditized content on many subjects, much of the content we produce isn’t good enough to ask anyone to pay for, and we have surrendered or drifted from our central place in our communities. Working through those issues will involve a lot more pain than what we’ve already experienced. But I don’t believe that it’s impossible for us to get paid for content that works for our readers, or to be rewarded if we can win back a valued place in our communities.

* * *

For another take on how we get paid, MTV Networks product manager Maya Baratz advises old-media companies to start thinking of themselves as apps.

Baratz characterizes apps as “not only allowing, but thriving off of, having your content live elsewhere” as opposed to platforms, which fuel their growth by attracting an audience to a destination. As an example of the former, take social games that don’t try to draw in users to a new site, but exist where the users already are, such as on Facebook. Her advice to news organizations is to turn the paywall argument on its head and get revenue through bits of content as they spread.

This gets at one of the central dilemmas of charging for content: By and large, news organizations seem to agree that paywalls need to be leaky to let content spread and be discovered through sharing and search. For instance, the New York Times has indicated that when its paywall arrives sometime this global epoch, articles found through sharing and search won’t count against readers’ monthly counts. (More on this here.) That seems wise, but the more we find content this way, the less paywalls will contribute to news organizations’ bottom lines. Combine Baratz’s approach with McClure’s decreased wallet friction and perhaps there’s a way forward that will remain viable as social media becomes more and more important.

Provided we can hurtle the penny gap, of course.

* * *

On a rather different note, my latest column for Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center looks at the growing use of social media by athletes, and explores how it may change sportswriting as “digital natives” become star athletes. As is often the case with my NSJC columns, I think these questions are relevant to more than sportswriters. Sports, as part of the Web’s old-growth forest, is an excellent place to track changes that will soon impact the rest of journalism.

Oh, and my fervent wish for a New Orleans Saints win came true! Now if only something could be done about the Mets….

Back to Basics on Public Notices

Yesterday at Nieman Journalism Lab, Mac Slocum offered a roundup of the arguments for requiring governments to continue printing public notices in newspapers instead of doing so online, summarizing the case as made by newspaper-industry lobbyist Tonda Rush. I commented quickly (and a bit viscerally) — and then found myself coming back to why, exactly, I’d gotten so upset.

Granted, the pro-printing arguments seemed pretty weak, and sleeping on them hasn’t exactly changed my mind.

The first pro-print argument is that there would be startup costs associated with moving public notices to the Web, and the cost-savings wouldn’t be very much — 1% to 2% of county and municipal budgets at best, Rush says. The startup costs seem like a red herring. According to Slocum, 40 states have proposed letting local governments opt for the Web, only to be opposed furiously by newspaper lobbyists. I have a certain reflexive cynicism about government efficiency, but I doubt that local governments would be clamoring to put public notices online if the startup costs were self-defeatingly high. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear that my county had figured out a relatively painless way to save 1% to 2% of its budget.

The second argument is that print has a permanence online doesn’t. It’s at least interesting to hear this claim unaccompanied by rhapsodies about the crinkle of paper and the clink of spoons at the breakfast table, but beyond that I’m unmoved. By this measure, why not record public records on stone tablets, as a safeguard against some world-wide conflagration that would turn our archived paper and microfilm to drifts of ash and sad little curls of plastic? A secondary argument is that litigation favors iron-clad documentation, and the print model is better for those purposes. That’s a better case, but I’m rarely persuaded when the reason to keep something boils down to an inefficient model that hasn’t kept up with the times. Change the model!

The third argument is that you can’t trust the government to publish and maintain official records. Frankly, here either somebody’s tin-foil hat has fallen off or people are being awfully disingenuous. If you subscribe to this paranoid mindset, does the idea of newspapers as watchdogs make things any better?

But let’s back up. Let’s go back to the question that should always be asked when adapting to the Web: If we were starting today, would we do this? This time, though, let’s not think about it from a newspaper-revenue point of view. Rather, let’s think about it from a public-records point of view.

We want public records to be official, to be visible and to be discoverable later on. And we want accessing them to be as easy as possible for as many people as possible.

OK, so what’s the best way to accomplish this? We might say, “I think the best way is to pay newspaper publishers to run these notices in extremely small type to the right of this week’s listings of acoustic guitar players appearing in coffee shops and below the syndicated parenting advice.” But it seems more likely that we’d say, “Let’s put these public notices in a database so they’re searchable and publish them to the Web, so interested citizens can find them whenever they like with a couple of mouse clicks and a bit of typing.” (And while we’re on the subject, why on earth aren’t news organizations making use of their head start to create these databases and Web sites themselves? Did we really learn nothing from Craigslist and Monster.com?)

And now we get to what made me mad.

Newspapers’ champions often tout the press as an engine of a healthy democracy, and papers as having a civic mission. And I mostly agree with that stuff. (Minus the “paper” part of it, anyway.) But if you’re going to talk the talk, walk the walk. Doesn’t making public records as visible and searchable as possible improve the health of democracy too? Newspapers rarely look better than when they’re taking powerful industry groups to task for letting their own bottom lines obstruct the public good. How is that not exactly what’s happening here?

I believe in news organizations having a sense of civic mission. I don’t think that’s naïve or corny or out of date. But if your sense of civic mission only extends as far as the boundaries of your own parochial interests, it’s not worth very much.

Conversation Is Free-Range — Quit Building Corrals

By now news organizations know they have to be aggressive about social media — it’s a vehicle for distributing their content, commenting, criticizing and otherwise discussing it, and reusing it in various ways. And social media is a chance to rebuild ties with an audience that’s now so busy talking back and creating content of its own that the word hardly seems to fit.

But as is often the case with big opportunities, the question of how to dive in can be paralyzing. And I think that paralysis causes too many news organizations to choose the wrong social-media starting point. Social media is seen as another channel for disseminating news. It’s viewed as a mutation of discussions or article comments. It’s eyed as a new promotional vehicle. And none of those approaches is wrong, for social media can be any or all of those things. But thinking about social media in such narrow ways misses the bigger picture, and starting one’s social-media efforts from such points of view helps ensure that discussions will continue to be about trees, and not the forest.

Social media can seem new and complicated, but at its heart it’s old and simple. Before too long, it will be so woven into our daily lives that it will be invisible and the term will be generally meaningless. Which is as it should be: The underlying technologies and individual platforms aren’t nearly as important as what we do with them. And what is that? Interesting new things, to be sure, but mostly what we’ve always done: We talk. We ask questions and give advice and gossip and trade interesting stories and argue and try to sell each other stuff and be inspiring and be petty and self-promote and help each other and fall in love and pick fights and discover new ideas and seek refuge in old ones. And by doing all that, we create new bonds between people and reinforce existing ones. Whether we’re talking about fan pages or Twitter, it comes down to talking and listening.

Conversation doesn’t just happen in specific places, but everywhere. Yet in approaching social media, news organizations tend to see their role as starting conversations, or providing settings for them. On the surface, this seems logical: News organizations already host discussions. Playing host to conversations reinforces news organizations’ sense of self-worth, and seems to promise greater control over them. And starting conversations feels like a fit for news organizations’ desire to serve their communities.

All of these are logical or laudable impulses. But that playbook stopped working a generation ago, as newspapers ceded their place as community centers and connectors. The conversation doesn’t need to be restarted, for it never stopped — it just needs to be joined. The community doesn’t need to be built — it’s already there. Instead of thinking of themselves as the potential seeds or centers of communities, news organizations need to see themselves as parts of larger communities that already exist, and find roles within them.

How can we do this? For starters, consider Twitter lists. It’s great to have a Twitter list of staffers, but it’s much more powerful to have a Twitter list of leaders in various communities of interest, and then integrate those lists within your site as low-maintenance, real-time news feeds. For examples, check out the Texas Tribune’s Tweetwire, or the ideas in this Mashable post. Now, think how many such communities your average metro paper could dip into and display. Every local sports franchise can have a feed that includes the news organization’s own sportswriters, other news organizations’ writers, smart bloggers, players and club officials. By putting together a feed that includes music writers and members of local bands who tweet, you’ve created a nightlife guide and an interesting collective musicians’ diary. Politicians and civic leaders should have their own feed, of course — joined by City Hall reporters and spiced up by the tweets of community gadflies. And so on.

Such feeds are fundamentally out of control? That’s OK — so’s conversation itself. Readers are increasingly sophisticated consumers of content — they’ll understand. (And you can always remove any truly bad actors from your feeds.) These feeds could direct readers to your rivals? So what — you’ll get more credit as a gatekeeper than you will by pretending your rivals don’t exist.

Such efforts are just the beginning, and only one way of joining conversations and communities. They’re early experiments — but experiments that begin with the right starting point, and so will lead to much more. Conversations and the communities engaged in them are free-range — we need to resist the impulse to create corrals.

Three New Ideas

Like any blogger, I have no shortage of opinions. But here are three thoughts I haven’t written about yet because I still need to think about them a lot more, turning them over and over in my head until something clicks and I know how they’ve changed things.

First off, here’s Robin Sloan on stock and flow. The idea is borrowed from economics, but Sloan has rather adroitly repurposed it as “the mas­ter metaphor for media today.” Like so:

• Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind peo­ple that you exist.
• Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the con­tent you pro­duce that’s as inter­est­ing in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what peo­ple dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, build­ing fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascen­dant these days, for obvi­ous reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audi­ence and, like, the health of a soul.

Everybody who works with ideas in front of any kind of audience read that and immediately nodded. Too little flow and your traffic stats (an admittedly imperfect but useful way of thinking about not just visitors but conversations generated and opportunities to learn) will look like a kid’s drawing of a mountain range, with a few peaks rearing off a flat line. People come and then they leave, and that’s it. Too little stock and you’re meandering along in terms of both traffic and ideas, not really growing, not bringing in new readers, not challenging yourself and being challenged to think differently about things.

Sloan’s post has been caroming around the blogosphere for weeks; it’s one of those ways of seeing the world that feels so immediately right that you risk falling into the trap of seeing everything through its lens. Which brings up the old Robert Benchley quip that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. But it’s a fascinating and tremendously useful way of thinking about writing, and ideas, and audiences.

Second, here’s a simple but compelling observation about social media, from Henrik Werdelin: “People don’t just share messages to be nice to their friends. Take a look at Facebook or Twitter, for instance – often status messages are equally about saying something about the sender, so the important question you should ask yourself is: ‘How will the message I want spread make my audience look cool or clever to their friends, colleagues or customers?’ “

That post is new, but I know I’m going to need a little time to sort through the idea it brings. I do know that it speaks to one of the biggest mistakes news organizations (and, really, most every other kind) make in thinking about social media. The default mindset is to think of social media as a way of attracting or keeping audiences, or harnessing or corraling conversation for the good of the organization. But conversation isn’t like that — it’s an ubiquitous activity that permeates all the organizations readers interact with. To be successful, conversation has to work for readers, by letting their thoughts and personalities be an equal part of the process of sharing and commenting and reusing. Thinking about that with Werdelin’s observation in mind would help.

Finally, there’s this from Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine, looking back at the conversation surrounding the State of the Union address and the iPad unveiling:

Most remarkable about last Wednesday, though, was how much of our collective conversation preceded, rather than followed, these events. If you’d graphed the online chatter about Apple’s keynote unveiling, it would have started climbing months ago and peaked about the time Steve Jobs took the stage. The State of the Union prompted all the usual postgame analysis—but that was teed up by weeks of speculation, predictions, and what-if forecasting. In the age of social media, the analysis cycle has been reversed: We spend more time talking about what we think we’ll think than what we thought.

That feels exactly right. But what does it mean? I don’t know yet. Ask me in a day. Or a week. Or a month.

The IPad and Its Real Audience

Like most everybody else in digital-pundit circles, I watched every bit of Steve Jobs’s iPad introduction while in typical ADD multi-tasking mode: CNBC on TV, Engadget on one tab, audio of the event streaming (as well as buffering and stuttering) on another, Twitter reactions volleying in on a third. Like many other people, my first reaction was one of vague disappointment: This is kinda cool, but it sure feels like the Earth is still spinning on its old familiar axis. And where’s the WPA For Laid-Off Journalists app?

But a couple of hours later, I found myself thinking about Apple’s new device differently. What the geekerati are missing is the same thing I missed at first: We are not the intended audience for this device, at least not at first.

No multitasking! No Flash! No phone! No HDMI out! Got it. Understood. I thought variants of the same thing. But instead of thinking about what the iPad doesn’t do, think about what it does do. And instead of thinking about technology, think about activities. It does at least three things I can think of a lot better than current devices.

• Video: Watching a movie on a plane/bus/the subway/etc. remains one of those dancing-bear dog-walking-on-hind-legs experiences — its relative novelty causes us to focus on the fact that it’s being done at all and to ignore the fact that it’s not being done well. Watching a movie on a laptop stinks. You worry about the battery life, envision the guy in front of you violently reclining his seat and snapping your screen, and find yourself leaning forward, like an office worker on vague furlough. Watching a movie on an iPhone or iTouch also kind of stinks — the screen’s nice, but movies aren’t made to be watched on screens the size of playing cards.  The iPad offers a much better experience — good battery life, decent-sized screen, and a device you can lean back and cradle.

• Books: The iPad has received the best reactions for the introduction of iBooks, and deservedly so. I’d of course want this impression confirmed firsthand, but it looks like a much lusher, immersive experience than the Kindle or the Nook, and one that’s closer to sitting down with a physical book. Meanwhile, the bigger screen holds promise for adapting magazines to a new format, and possibly the same will be true of newspapers. More on them in a bit.

• Casual Web Surfing: I doubt I’d want to use the iPad for frenetically beavering away for information over multiple sites, but it’s great for unwinding with some time on Facebook, sorting through emails that aren’t mission-critical, goofing around reading blogs, or looking for stats while watching a ballgame. Here, again, no existing device has been a great fit. I’ve never liked sitting in bed or on the couch with a laptop — they’re heavy, radiate heat and you tend to scrunch yourself forward to engage with them. And surfing on the iPhone is a messy tango of picking windows and pinching and zooming in on a small chunk of a page — I’m glad I can do it, but I try not to. The iPad offers the first real chance that this kind of casual surfing could actually be pleasurable.

For geeks (and I’m a card-carrying member) this kind of stuff is a recreational sidelight to the real business of a device, but not everybody is like us. Lots and lots of folks are happy to spend time watching something, and then settling in with a book, and then casually surfing some favorite sites, and now they have a device that improves on current ways to do all three of those things. It finally makes the digital version of all three a “lean-back” experience with a normal-sized screen. That’s new, and I bet it will be welcomed.

And the iPad will prove reassuring in other ways, too. As with the iPhone, the complexity of setup is largely submerged, which is the way computers should work in the first place: If you can hook up a cable, drag and drop things and remember your password, you’re good to go. The iPad will handle photos and music just fine. It doesn’t demand a year’s commitment to a wireless carrier. And it comes with the usual Apple cool factor. For a lot of people, that’s a pretty great combination.

Am I going to rush out and get an iPad? Probably not — I generally opt for Version 2 of devices, when the kinks are out and new capabilities have been introduced. I thought the least-convincing part of today’s presentation was the attempt to portray the iPad as a productivity tool: Hooking an iPad up to an external keyboard and making a spreadsheet with it seems more like proving a point than taking advantage of its best features. Besides, I’m used to leaning forward and dorking around with settings and drivers. But I think I’ll get there eventually — and I won’t be surprised if my opinions have changed by the time I do.

Which brings us to newspapers. No, there was no walk-on-the-water moment for publishers. But I think the fervent hope for one says more about publishers’ dire straits than it does about reality. This is a transitional device for publishers, but let’s not overlook the potential importance of that. Getting consumers of news and information to lean back in a digital setting may be more important in revitalizing our industry and rebuilding our bonds with readers than we initially think.

When the New York Times appeared on the iPad’s screen, my first reaction was disappointment. Oh goody, it’s print. It was elegant and pretty, but it also looked static and antique. But you know what? It was easy to read. The layout did invite you to linger. And the video was there, as I presume slideshows and other goodies would be too. (Not to mention it’s Version 1.)

And then I realized for a lot of people this was comfortable and familiar, and remembered the lesson I’d drawn elsewhere: I’m not the audience. At least not yet.

(Hat tip to my EidosMedia pal David Baker for remembering Johnson’s original quote was about a dog, not a bear. This is another reason bloggers need editors: They not only find your mistakes but can also help you with that reference you suspect you don’t have quite right.)

Alan Rusbridger and the Way Forward

Yesterday Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, delivered the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at the London College of Communication. The text of his speech is available here from the Guardian, and it’s worth reading, thinking about, and then re-reading. It’s one of the best surveys of modern journalism I’ve read. Rusbridger turns a discerning eye on admirable stories and successful investigations undertaken in print and on the Web and through blogs and via Twitter. He does so with generous praise for a range of news organizations’ journalists, not just his own. And his delight in the results is wonderfully evident. That last part makes his speech also one of the most stirring invocations of what journalism can do today, and the new ways in which journalists can do it. Fledgling journalists wondering if they should really commit to this somewhat-battered profession ought to read it — they’ll find their faith renewed.

But having said all that, I was least convinced by the part of the speech that’s getting the most attention. Rusbridger’s discussion of paywalls struck me as lacking much of the nuance that made the rest of his speech so compelling. As articulated here, his vision of paywalls feels like a straw man (albeit a very elegantly constructed one) — one borrowed from mid-Aughts ruminations that I doubt anyone is still seriously considering. Rusbridger spends a lot of time jabbing (in a courtly yet deadly way) at Rupert Murdoch, but seems to take Murdoch’s rhetoric at face value when he knows better. (I know there’s a certain amount of U.K. press-baron soap opera here that’s going over my head, context-wise.)

Rusbridger begins with an aversion to talking about business models, then says he’s going to focus on one that “radically affects some of the most stimulating ideas of what journalism is becoming, or could become.” That model, he says, is the one “that one that says we must charge for all content online. It’s the argument that says the age of free is over: we must now extract direct monetary return from the content we create in all digital forms.”

He means Murdoch’s call for universal paywalls, but c’mon. That’s saber-rattling by Murdoch, aimed in various measures at Google, Microsoft and Murdoch’s own competitors. This is, of course, standard operating procedure for Murdoch — his Journal tenure (which briefly overlapped mine) began with the same kind of bluff charge, except back then the word from on high was that everything would be free. Murdoch’s Sky News is free, and will undoubtedly stay that way. So are other properties of his, such as Harper Collins’ BookArmy. Rusbridger mentions both by way of catching Murdoch in his own contradictions, but he could have avoided all that heavy lifting by simply not professing to believe his rival in the first place.

Here’s Rusbridger’s elegantly stated defense of the link economy: “If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.”

Beautifully said, but is anyone still seriously proposing such a thing? The New York Times isn’t, not with its metered paywall that’s arriving at the approximate speed of continental drift. (Social-media links won’t count against the monthly allotment.) The Journal opened up its own walled garden years ago — an innovation sometimes credited to Murdoch, but which actually predates him. Even if Murdoch were to revisit previous fulminations and pull his content from Google, that content would still spread via social media, which I bet will soon rival or eclipse industrial search in importance.

Rusbridger goes on to say that “there is probably general agreement that we may all want to charge for specialist, highly-targeted, hard-to-replicate content. It’s the ‘universal’ bit that is uncertain. … Isn’t there, in any case, more to be learned at this stage of the revolution, by different people trying different models – maybe different models within their own businesses – than all stampeding to one model?”

Again, beautifully said: This should be an age of experimentation, albeit one with a sense of urgency. Absolutely, there is more to be learned. But who disagrees? I don’t see everybody stampeding to one model — I think most everybody agrees that the universal bit is too uncertain to be seriously entertained. And I don’t see anyone stampeding to the absolutist model Rusbridger has described. It no longer exists as a viable candidate.

Rusbridger notes that in 1921, legendary Guardian editor CP Scott surveyed how the telegraph and telephone were shrinking the world and exulted, “What a change for the world! What a chance for the newspaper!” In a similar spirit, he notes that the Guardian grew its audience by 40% in a year, and is now read by more Americans than read the Los Angeles Times. (Not the greatest example these days, but I get his point.) But while I admire the spirit, this ignores a rather substantial elephant in the room: The telegraph and the telephone gave the Guardian and other newspapers a chance to extend their reach and their authority in unprecedented ways, but they didn’t destroy its business model without ushering in a replacement. The Web and its associated digital services are doing just that. CP Scott would have of course concerned himself with that rather uneasy bargain, and asked how the Guardian planned to translate its growth and newfound American audience into making money.

This isn’t an argument for retreating to print or erecting impenetrable paywalls. We need to decouple journalism from its longtime business model before that old model drags it under, even though no new business model is in place — the industry is, to quote a rock star, a fish trying to learn to breathe air. It’s not the way anyone would choose to make such a transition, but here we are nonetheless. Rusbridger is right that “if you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis,” but you can also paralyze yourself by not thinking about business models at all — which is how the industry got so deeply mired in its current mess. Like it or not, we have to think about business models — and not about caricatures of them. I wish his speech had considered this part of the puzzle as eloquently as it covered journalism’s very real new opportunities.

A Lesson in Newspaper Economics — From a Rock Star

In the summer of 2006, the band OK Go unveiled a video for their single “Here It Goes Again.” Even if you don’t know OK Go, you’ve seen this video — it’s the one with the band dancing on treadmills. The video for “Here It Goes Again” became a phenomenon — it’s been viewed on YouTube more than 49 million times — dramatically raising both the band’s profile and that of “viral marketing.” (It’s also catchy as hell, and name-checks the Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa.”)

You could learn a lot from a rock star.

Given that success story, this next part will seem insane. OK Go just released a new album and another endearingly DIY video, for the song “This Too Shall Pass.” Obviously, the band hopes its new video also becomes a viral hit. But a big weapon in its social-media arsenal isn’t available: EMI, OK Go’s record label, won’t let the video be embedded on Web sites and blogs. And in some countries, it can’t be viewed at all.

“We wish there was something we could do,” lead singer Damian Kulash writes in an open letter on the band’s Web site. “Believe us, we want you to pass our videos around more than you do, but, crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago.”

Kulash adds that despite the band’s success leveraging blogs and social media to spread its videos and make EMI a profit, “we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.”

The problem, as Kulash explains it, is that EMI gets a bit of money when an OK Go video is viewed on YouTube’s site, but nothing when that video is embedded. And so the label won’t allow embeds.

While obviously frustrated, Kulash isn’t completely unsympathetic to his label’s plight: “We’ve argued with them a lot about it, but we also understand why they’re doing it. They’re aware that their rules make it harder for people to watch and share our videos, but, while our duty is to our music and our fans, theirs is to their shareholders, and they believe they’re doing the right thing.”

And Kulash offers a clear-eyed assessment of the economics of the music industry that ought to make journalists and newspaper executives prick up their ears.

“What we’re really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music,” he writes. “We’re stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discrete little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who’d want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breathe air.”

Kulash is no veal calf — he understands the realities of the business he’s in. And he sees that while things are changing, that change involves a pretty profound dislocation, with attendant difficulties, losses and ridiculousness.

You could learn a lot from a rock star.

Time Waits for No One — Not Even the Times

So yesterday, reviewing two early reactions to the unofficial news about the New York Times adopting a metered pay model, I wrote that such posts “reassure me there’s plenty of experimentation out there, at least for paywalls. Will one of those paths yield an answer that ’saves’ journalism? I doubt it — but at this early stage, salvation isn’t a realistic goal. It’s enough that we all learn things for the next iteration of experiments, and move quickly to put them in place.”

Today, the Times has officially announced its plans. (Here’s the staff memo.) Bully for the experiment, as said yesterday. But where’s the quickly part? This would have been a great memo if it had been dated January 20, 2009. Since it’s dated today and discussing what will happen in 2011, it looks oddly timid even when it’s being smart.

2011? Seriously?

For example, Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson write that “our strategy is to build the metered model while we remain focused on making NYTimes.com more compelling, interactive and entertaining, providing many more reasons for online audiences to visit our site and stay longer. In the weeks ahead, we will be adding resources to achieve these critically important goals.”

My principal objection to most papers’ plans (however vague) to charge for their content isn’t religious, but practical: Too many papers I read have made such slashing cuts and do so little with the Web that they aren’t worth paying for. But I don’t feel that way about the Times. It’s not perfect — like many other news organizations, it’s weighed down by traditions that have curdled into dead weight. But its core coverage remains robust, and it’s become the leading Web innovator in digital journalism, with ambitious Web offerings that are deep and broad. The New York Times is already worth paying for — it doesn’t need a yearlong Manhattan Project to become so. Sulzberger and Robinson say they believe Times readers are willing to pay for it online. I think they’re right — in January 2010.

Things get more curious further down.

“Our metered model decision is a product of months of vigorous analysis and debate,” Sulzberger and Robinson write. “There was much we wanted to learn and know. We wanted to get a far better sense of NYTimes.com’s potential over the next decade. We also wanted to understand where the Web may be heading and how new technologies will affect customer online usage. We believed that only by carefully pursuing these and other important issues could we arrive at the best possible answer.”

Vigorous analysis and debate is good — particularly if it began with that magical starting question of “If we were starting today, would we do this?” Understanding where you’re going is good too — you fire the arrow at where the target’s going, not where it is now. But again: 2011? All those months of vigorous analysis and debate yielded nothing more than a vague decision about deploying a metered model in a year or so? It’s like the scene in The Two Towers where Treebeard tells the impatient hobbits that the Ents have reached a decision … Merry and Pippin aren’t orcs.

One thing folks who write blogs like mine have to guard against is confusing the needs of an industry with the responsibilities of a single company in that industry. Whatever the New York Times does will be closely watched and imitated by those who think they can follow suit, but the New York Times’ mission isn’t to save journalism — it’s to do what’s best for the New York Times. As someone who thinks about the overall industry, I have to be careful not to forget this.

But still … 2011? I can’t help but be disappointed. I’m disappointed for the overall industry, which desperately needs feedback on paywall experiments so that new experiments can be run. But I’m also disappointed for the Times itself. It’s better — and readier — than it seems to think.

Tuesday Reads: Paywall Plans at the New York Times, and More

The meta-news gods provide: While we all wait eagerly to see what the Apple tablet will look like, we get a debate over the New York Times’ apparent plans to institute some sort of paywall. (I believe Gabriel Sherman was first with the news, in New York Magazine.) But what kind of paywall? That question is taken up in smart posts by Reuters’ Felix Salmon and by Steve Outing.

I liked both posts in part because they didn’t waste my time rehashing religious wars about paid vs. free, choosing instead to take an experimental approach to the question of what kind of paywall makes sense. Salmon does all publishers a valuable service by advising them not to worry overmuch about readers who exploit loopholes. Some old-media types seem borderline obsessed with this, but Salmon sensibly notes that news organizations don’t fret overmuch about how easy it is to steal copies of the physical paper, which cost a lot more to produce and distribute. Salmon also suggests that the Times never actually lock out a reader — rather, hit them with increasing number of interstitials or some other way of encouraging payment without slamming the door completely shut.

Outing begins from the same point — both men dislike the Financial Times’s metered system — but moves from there to an excellent survey of possible ways to create revenue, from various subscription lengths to Kachingle. It’s a great starting point or reality check for news organizations pondering how to move forward.

No matter what their position on paid content, digital-news pundits all agree on the need for news organizations to experiment; these two posts reassure me there’s plenty of experimentation out there, at least for paywalls. Will one of those paths yield an answer that “saves” journalism? I doubt it — but at this early stage, salvation isn’t a realistic goal. It’s enough that we all learn things for the next iteration of experiments, and move quickly to put them in place.

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My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center proposes that news organizations stop forbidding or substantially restricting outside blogs by their writers, and instead encourage such pursuits. Why? Because, as I’ve often said, the smartest thing I ever did as a professional writer was start my own blog. The experience made me realize how important it is to think of what I do as a business, and taught me to edit myself, turning me into a columnist who was more entrepreneurial, open-minded, and wrote stronger, cleaner stuff. Properly supervised, outside blogs can channel young writers’ ambitions and help them train themselves as better journalists. In a time of shrinking budgets and business-model woes, that’s a benefit to any news organization.

Transparency Isn’t Just for Journalists

Over the weekend the New York Times’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, reviewed several recent articles in which the Times didn’t do enough to ask about or disclose people’s interest in events they were commenting about as expert sources. Former Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff advocated full-body scans in airports but didn’t volunteer that he’s a consultant to a company that makes scanners. Former diplomat Peter Galbraith wrote op-eds advocating for a strong and independent Kurdistan, but didn’t mention that he stands to make gobs of money from his ties to a Norwegian oil company operating there. And so forth.

“The cases raised timeless issues for journalists and sources about what readers have a right to know and whose responsibility it is to find it out or disclose it,” Hoyt writes, adding that “the ideal expert source is entirely independent, with no stake in an outcome. But in reality, the most informed sources often have involvements, which is why they know what they know. Readers are entitled to disclosure so they can decide if there is a conflict that would affect the credibility of the information.”

Yes, obviously — and from there, Hoyt explores where the fault lies for not making that information plain. Were the reporters negligent in not ferreting out those interests? Or were the sources deficient in not volunteering such information?

Hoyt decides the burden falls on both, which is both common sense and good journalistic practice, and I was amused to learn that reporter Eric Lipton has posted a reminder on his computer: “Ask if hired gun.” (I think we can assume he phrases the question differently.) But while reporters should of course doubt, and inquire, and inquire again, I think this is one case where the emerging standards of transparency actually help journalists.

The most interesting response to Hoyt’s questioning came from Chertoff. Asked about not volunteering his interest in full-body scanners, Chertoff said it was no secret that his risk-management firm, the Chertoff Group, had corporate clients and that it was up to the reporters who interviewed him to ask whether he had ties to the industry. “I always answer when I’m asked,” he told Hoyt. “But I don’t think it is my obligation to put myself in the head of a reporter.” Chertoff added that when he’s “affirmatively getting out there” — such as when he wrote a New Year’s Day op-ed for the Washington Post — he makes it his business to disclose such interests.

This always would have seemed disingenuous, but it strikes me as out-and-out dishonest according to the emerging standards of the online world.

The Web is changing the rules of journalism, and one of the biggest arguments is about objectivity and transparency for journalists. As I’ve explored before, social media is changing the way we interact with each other: We now expect to know far more about casual acquaintances and even strangers than we once would have, and — as is always the case in such situations — the objections of those who think the greater privacy of the past is worth preserving aren’t being rejected so much as technological change is rendering them irrelevant.

Journalists, believe it or not, are people too, and so this mammoth social change is forcing them to re-evaluate their traditional role as ostensibly neutral observers. Journalists can no longer dwell in a cloister, holding themselves aloof from discussion and revealing nothing about their personal lives — again, not because journalistic rules are changing, but because social rules are. That’s put a strain on the ideal of objectivity, and led to the enshrinement of transparency instead: Tell us who you are, what your interests are and what you believe, so that we can assess the information you’ve brought us accordingly and begin the process of dialogue and debate. (My take on transparency’s limits is here.)

Sources are affected by this change too. The two-way nature of the Web has blurred the lines between journalists, sources and the audience, and this sea change is generally seen as empowering sources and the audience while diminishing the importance of journalists. Which is basically correct, but doesn’t tell the whole story.

Sources can now break their own news, post their own versions of stories, and publish their own accounts of their dealings with journalists, complete with interview transcripts and even recordings. But they don’t get to have it both ways — with those opportunities comes the demand that they play by the same rules of transparency governing everybody else. (To borrow Cody Brown’s model, expert sources whose interests aren’t disclosed are part of the old, opaque magic box of news.) Which is where Chertoff’s “you didn’t ask” defense breaks down, and makes him look like a weasel. Transparency is the new black for Michael Chertoff, too.