Variations on Theme
At the risk of beating the musician-journalist analogy to death, here’s one more example, from Wired.com. Jonathan Coulton combined a “name your own price” strategy with quirky music to build up a very loyal fanbase. Would a name your own price work in journalism?
Categories: Music Industry, journalism
Coulton, journalism, Music, wired
Nope. Journalism is valuable today but fish wrap tomorrow. There residual value to anyone other than an archivalist or key-word generator is little to nothing. An album however, can improve with time and familiarity, like a comfortable pair of jeans.
That’s why journalism is seen as a SERVICE rather than a PRODUCT. You buy a subscription to a news service (paper, magazine, AP feed, whatever) realizing that it is not the value of any particular story that you’re paying for, but the value of a stream of services.
But even if you could get over that (somehow) you couldn’t sell a story site unseen. The thing about a news story is that the sheer act of previewing it extracts 80% of the value. Consider how iTunes or Amazon’s Music store let you preview a song. You get 30 seconds. That’s generally enough for you to determine if you’d like to buy the song or album. What’s the analog in journalism? Give people the headline and the first graf and hope they click through a credit card session to get the rest? Nah! The solution is to go to some other news source that’s free, albeit at 60% of the quality, and get the gist of what’s going on from that site. Once a story is known, it’s value drops off significantly.