After the New York Times’ announced yesterday that it would charge frequent readers of NYTimes.com starting in 2011, many have been discussing this move’s implications for the rest of the newspaper industry, an industry that is also representative of traditional media as a whole. In contrast, what is it about the model of new media that makes it more successful today?
- It can be done by in a decentralized fashion. With the web connecting everyone, the difference between working from across the globe versus from across the room has become smaller and smaller.
- Digital media can easily be shared and re-shared, getting content in front of lots and lots of eyeballs, with 99% of the distribution being done by the readers themselves. Online newspapers have been catching on as they start RSS feeds for different sections of their sites, sign up for Twitter accounts, and make it easier for readers to Digg articles.
- It has a more sustainable cost structure. The cost of providing content to the marginal online reader is practically nil, not to mention that the creation of content and marketing also become cheaper. (Points 1 and 2)
- New media is not constrained by daily printing or discrete updates from your local news at 10 PM. Updates are continuous, often updated in real time, giving consumers information when they need it.
The New York Times’ effort to monetize their content can be seen as a result of still being stuck in the world of traditional media even though they entered world of new media years before. Perhaps this move is only addressing a symptom and not the underlying problem. While the NYT does have “real time” and blog elements on its site (leading to more readers and ad revenue), and also avoid printing actual newspapers with NYTimes.com (lower costs), the bottom line is that “journalism is an extremely costly process when sending reporters to every corner of the globe.” (Points 1 and 3 from above).
But as Mashable’s Pete Cashmore asks, “Why maintain that expense when citizen reporters on the ground can gather the source materials with their camera phones and laptops, sending it back to experienced editors to be curated and contextualized?” Obviously, an approach like this will have to be fine-tuned, but at the end of the day, when you look at the quality of content created in Web 2.0 fashion, you do wonder about the sustainability of the old way of doing things.
Sure, this pay wall may have marginal benefit to the Times (although the end result is debatable), but ultimately it seems that old media has to go through some growing pains to reach long-term sustainability.
Please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts.
Jan. 22 Update: Aol’s Seed, whose goal is to redefine journalism for the Internet age, is “essentially a way for Aol to assign articles to anyone on the Web beyond the 3,500 [journalists] it employs directly.” Sounds pretty similar to the idea of “citizen reporters.” No Pulitzers just yet, but we’ll see how it goes!
