Comments on: When Consumers Are Not Clients

By: Michael Wagner

Michael Wagner — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:37:02 +0000

I’d like to believe that bloggers could make a difference. I guess mostly because I am one. Maybe I’m biased.

I think some stuff coming out of the blogosphere makes an impact. HuffPo for one. Although sometimes they seem sensationalized too. I guess it’s too early to tell if they find their sea legs or are swept away.

But much of the blogosphere is merely new-tech low-price vanity press. While it may be cheaper than therapy, it’s not really reporting or journalism or even particularly unbiased. Whether it can “grow up” and become a real replacement for current news outlets is unclear

By: Bill Maher: New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit | A Blog with No Name

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:21:28 +0000

[...] what can we do about it? Byron Alley says that charging a premium for some parts of the news or other services might be a workable [...]

By: Byron Alley

Byron Alley — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:48:23 +0000

Good points. But I think there’s one point you made in particular that I’d expand on. You said that the $50 that you paid to Scientific American, small though it was, was enough to keep you “on the radar” as a consumer of the magazine.

But I’d say that it was your eyeballs that kept you on the radar. Since these media are paid for by advertisers, they need readers (or viewers) in order to attract enough advertising revenue.

I think that the missing link here is that this is often not enough. We can talk about users “voting with their feet” to use their influence as potential eyeballs for ads, but they have to be aware that they’re missing something in the first place. But again, I think that this is improving overall with the web because of all the independent bloggers. One of the easiest ways for bloggers to get noticed is by creating controversy or disagreeing with influential people.

By: Michael Wagner

Michael Wagner — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:59:02 +0000

I’m not sure I was voting for a classical “paid model” for news. Certainly not all costs paid. I don’t recall any time in recent history that any reasonable sized news outlet had an all costs paid model.

Even when I used to subscribe to the print edition of Time Magazine, say, or Scientific American, I can’t imagine my $50 or so a year covered more than about 10% of their costs. But … it meant that the editors had to acknowledge two customer groups. Most reputable news outlets published a statement of editorial independence from the advertisers. Seeming violations of that independence would be cause for a letter to the editor, something that was taken seriously.

Now, with only one customer group (and it isn’t us), there’s no reason for editorial independence (and we’re seeing that there really is none for a lot of media).

Perhaps freemium is a solution. I sort of doubt it, though. It seems to work well for certain sections of coverage (the stock market, perhaps, or expensive cars, or real estate) and not others. So perhaps those areas will exert some editorial independence. If freemium income is under 1% of total income, there’s no reason for the editors to even feign independence from advertisers. And so it won’t work, at least not in the sense I want it to.

I don’t know what the solution is. I just know this isn’t working for me.