Subscriptions: I’m Optimistic (for a Depressing Reason)

Another week, and more fitful signs of hope among papers planning to charge for access to news.

Again, it’s not the plans to charge that I regard as a hopeful sign — I still fear too many papers are deluding themselves that their online content and presentation are good enough and different enough to attract paying customers. For example, I recently picked up a Boston Globe while waiting for the shuttle at Logan and was sad to see what this once-great paper had become. I really doubt the online version of the Globe I read could survive as a subscription product.

So what gave me hope? It’s that papers seem to be forgoing flags-and-trumpets talk about their importance to democracy, what hard work journalism is, or what customers should do. I’m sympathetic to all three points, but none of them has anything to do with the task at hand.

As a co-founder of Journalism Online, you’d expect Steven Brill to be reassuring about paid content. But in Matthew Flamm’s Crain’s New York Business article, Brill notes that the paid model “puts the burden back on the editors to invest in and create content that’s really distinctive and not simply fungible.” That’s correct, and in line with Rupert Murdoch saying that his papers will stave off free competitors by “making our content better and differentiated from other people.” I’m not convinced The Sun can be a for-pay success story like The Wall Street Journal Online, just as I doubt the Globe could charge where I think the New York Times could. But at least the media barons no longer seem to think readers will simply get out their credit cards in obedience to some sort of moral imperative.

My EidosMedia colleague Steve Ball and I had a lively, friendly argument about subscriptions last week. Steve is more pessimistic than I am about papers being able to move from a free model to a for-pay model: I think the New York Times could definitely implement a pay wall (preferably of the “leaky” type — so dubbed by David Carr — that’s been so successful for WSJ.com) and believe the Washington Post could do it if they keep building on their general surefootedness (Hillary Clinton swipes aside) with online features, style and voice. Steve doesn’t. Moreover, he thinks the success of WSJ.com and the Financial Times reflect that their information can be used to make money — conventional wisdom I think is more convenient for other papers than it is true. (I think those success stories reflect a combination of quality journalism and the simple, self-reinforcing psychological message that “I pay for it, so it has value — and since it has value, I pay for it.”)

But what really struck me about our debate was that there is a considerable gap between the current media world and the one that will have to emerge for newspapers to succeed in charging for online content. To charge, newspapers will have to go truly digital-first, reorganizing their staffs around the Web, revamping their Web sites to create new context for different kinds of readers, and of course creating compelling, unique Web content. Today that’s still an afterthought for too many papers.

And even then, Steve wanted to know what would stop readers from heading elsewhere for content that might not be as good, but would be good enough — particularly if you weren’t looking for particularly high-quality content in the first place. My answer was that there’d be a lot less good-enough content: Papers would become aggregators instead of paying a lot of money for commoditized national and international content from the repurposing arm of the AP, and a lot of also-ran papers would no longer exist. The glut of “good enough” content — a legacy of the days in which geographic isolation insulated papers from competition — would be gone, and readers would be more willing to pay (sometimes grudgingly) for what remained.

Our disagreements about financial news aside, Steve was primarily talking about the world that is — and opining correctly that for most papers, subscriptions wouldn’t work. I was primarily talking about the world that could be — and opining hopefully that for some papers, subscriptions will work.

But that left me face to face with an unhappy truth: My world that could be includes a lot fewer papers, and a lot fewer journalists. It means the pitiless downsizing of the industry has only begun. It means a lot more journalists trying out second careers, as I and thousands of my peers have done.

I didn’t shrink from the thought — neither sorrow nor defiance will prevent the cycle of hopefully creative destruction from continuing — but all of a sudden my optimism seemed like the slightest hint of silver in an awfully dark cloud.

In Which Your Blogger Piles On the Associated Press

No sooner did I head off for San Diego and Maine than the Associated Press filled in the details of that something it was going to do about the supposed epidemic of sites stealing content. The AP’s plan is for its stories to carry an “informational wrapper” that will report back on where they go and how they’re used. The most-notable point about this “news registry” is the AP’s apparent philosophy about how it will be used: AP CEO Tom Curley said the company’s position was that simply offering a headline and link to an AP article — standard fare for innumerable aggregators, search sites and blogs — would require a licensing agreement.

Critics have blistered that idea as running counter to the tenets of the Web and fair use (here’s Jeff Jarvis), and there’s not a lot I can add. Except, perhaps, to suggest that a simple question is a good starting point for making things clear.

If the Associated Press didn’t exist, would anyone start it today?

The answer, to me, is an obvious and resounding “no.” At News Futurist, Jeff Sonderman is scorchingly on target in explaining why the AP has no place on the Internet. As Sonderman explains, the AP evolved to solve problems of the pre-Internet era. It’s a relic of a time in which newspapers’ reach was limited by geography and the only way to spotlight another paper’s reporting was to reprint or rework it. Today, neither condition applies: The whole apparatus of reprinting and reworking has been replaced by something simple, efficient and elegant: the hyperlink. (At reDesign, Rakesh Agrawal has takes on what the AP did wrong and what it ought to do now. And Marksonland’s Mike Markson explains why the AP is in a classic strategic investors’ trap.)

The real danger to the AP isn’t aggregators or blogs, but the lessons its customers are increasingly drawing from aggregators and blogs. As its customers evolve from print-centric to digital-centric publications, they will realize that links to original reporting are simpler and less expensive to create than paying for the same content in watered-down form. And contributors to the AP will realize that it’s far better to hoover in links to original stories and try and capture readers of those stories than it is to let them read reworked versions of those stories elsewhere. And then the AP — or, to be precise, its rewriter/aggregator arm — will be done, as much an anachronism as the physical wire across which its stories once moved.

Here’s Sonderman’s killing blow (emphasis his): “The AP is the ‘parasitic aggregator’ that it and others so often label other blogs and news sites.”

He’s right, and I suspect some form of that ironic judgment will be the AP’s epitaph.