#

“If the 1st Amendment is to mean anything, Congress has to suspend antitrust rules for the newspaper industry so publishers can determine as a group how much to charge for online content.”
Los Angeles Times #

A false dichotomy, perhaps? if newspapers cannot collude to stay competitive in the market, market forces will doom the First Amendment? #

If anything, the advent of the Internet and Web publishing has done greatly to advance the marketplace of ideas, evening out the landscape for great minds and crackpots alike. It also has seemingly increased the signal-to-noise ratio that can distract from rationality, and effectivly aids and emboldens those crackpots. #

But that’s a post for another time. #

After years of giving away free content, with a few failed experiments here and there, newspapers again are talking about erecting pay walls to isolate their product. With so many news outlets and aggregators, the competitive landscape takes on a more even slope. Newspapers not only have to compete with each other, but with other news media, online-only news media, official outlets and bloggers. #

And let’s face it, newspapers have a legitimate complaint here: They commit to the real costs of the news gathering process only to give away their product to not only readers who come to their site, but aggregators, spiders, search engines, and bloggers. Each of these spend far fewer resources to scrape news Web sites and repost those stories to their own site, sometimes adding their own perspective or analysis. Kind of like how I’m doing here. Newspapers now represent about seven percent of print media consumption, and grab about 14 percent of advertising expenditures. And in the current conditions of economy and changing reading habits, that share will decline. Regardless, news scrapers benefit from the work journalists are doing without having to invest nearly the time or expenditure. #

From the newspaper standpoint, the only way to tilt the competition back in their favor and recoup their expense is to require paid subscriptions. Mainstream newspapers thus far haven’t been able to effectively implement this strategy. They’ve cultivated an expectation by not only giving away the content freely on their Web sites but encouraging free use through RSS feeds, “share this” widgets. Then, they complained about proliferate use but declined to turn off their feeds or close their site to automated aggregators and search spiders. Google even explained how to deny access to their search spiders, if anyone were so inclined. I don’t know that anyone was. In fact, search engine optimization is a prioritized topic for newspaper Web teams. #

News Corp. pushing to create an online news consortium #

Some newspaper industry-types have been arguing for 15 years now for paid subscriptions over free access. What has evolved over those years is a marketing compromise — readers get free access to news sites in exchange for personal information to be used in targeted advertising campaigns. Newspapers have built the expecation of free content, and now they’ve had enough of that. News sites now say they need to protect their product, and if they cannot, not only is their industry threatened, but the First Amendment and the Constitution, as well. But really, it’s just that news sites can’t rake in the ad revenue to compare to the print edition. Not yet, anyway. #

Look at how the RIAA and MPAA defend their industries and intellectual property and you’ll quickly see how their cat-and-mouse game is consistently fouled by technological leap-frog. Newspapers have never been very good at implementing technology solutions or adapting to rapid-changing technology. The Internet operates on quantum time and newspapers consistently buy into last year’s new big thing. Solving bleeding revenues with a collaborative and collusive pay wall will predictably result in some readership decline, but also a quick response from the Netizans who will engineer a way to undermine that wall. And they will. After spending money on developing a paid solution, newspapers will find themselves spending money to defend that solution through the IT and legal teams that will be kept busy by technological go-arounds. The RIAA sues downloaders as an example to others, but never can recoup their costs. Newspapers could go that route as well. Media has hit a credibility low, and I get the feeling that the public no longer perceives their product as tangible or necessary as it once was. Start suing, and suffer the backlash just like the RIAA. I don’t know the solution just yet, but it’s a conversation to keep going. #

#

#