I picture a micro-funding model, where content is paid by small donations from lots of people. These afford a journalist the ability to investigate issues important to the collective: Think Digg meets eBay for journalists.
With the issue of money aside – advertising isn’t needed and the content itself is licensed under the Creative Commons and given away for free. It’s similar to Leonard Witt’s Representative Journalism or Michale Stoll’s Public Press.
Pro-Publica is not the future of journalisms business model – that’s just the future of one rich-ass family’s endowment. Journalism belongs to the people.
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Right now, I’m blogging because I have something to say. I don’t expect to get any financial remuneration for it any time soon, and if I never do, that’s okay too.
OTOH, there’s nothing wrong with using the blog to sell books, e-books, recordings, and the like that are in keeping with the blog’s message. IMO, the way to do that is to build up a big audience for the blog to begin with, always making sure that most of your stuff is free. Doling out little scraps of information in the hopes of making people shell out to get more… that turns people off, and well it should.
1389 – thanks for the comments.
Actually – I imagine most bloggers wouldn’t want to participate in what I envision. Let’s face it – most blogging is a part-time hobby. At best people are happy to put up some adsense and do some tic-for-tac type of fundraising.
What I envision is a process where hardcore investigative pitches are organized via a Craiglist like search: So being in S.F. I would check out the S.F. pitches. If one caught my eye “how earthquake prepared is S.F.” – I would fund it $5-10. If enough people funded the journalist – they would start their research – but it wouldn’t be a hobby. At that moment – they are freelance professional journalists.
Dave, your micropayment proposal is intriguing and one of the better ideas that I’ve read of late. Would people be supporting the story in general or the combination of journalist and story? Would there be a threshold to hit for the journalist to start work?
Also, how would the funds be doled out? Presumably most of the funds would be held until the story was complete and published.
Could also apply for columnists, op-ed, etc. Sort of a “Hire a guru” thing?
Except that, if you read all of Anderson’s essay, it explicitly discusses how the “free” model killed the possibility of micropayments.
Fail.
Mims
I think you are talking about this phrase:
“The huge psychological gap between “almost zero” and “zero” is why micropayments failed. It’s why Google doesn’t show up on your credit card. It’s why modern Web companies don’t charge their users anything. And it’s why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.”
I should say: Anderson’s piece isn’t looking at media content, more like software and hardware. If I understand it, he’s saying if Google did micro-payments for gmail it would fail – and it would. But that’s because the price of the storage for Google to create gmail is near zero – so they pick up the rest of the check.
But there is no automation for good quality journalism. Somebody does need to pick up the check. Right now, it’s advertisers. But online that doesn’t scale (in 3 years of blogging Google Adsense still hasn’t paid me anything substantial).
I guess my point is: It’s a bit of apples and oranges. Because for some things (SellaBand, Prosper.com, Kiva.org and others) people are willing to do micro-payments.
All the micropayment schemes you mention are essentially charity. They don’t exactly leverage market efficiencies.
The problem with micropayments for media is that the same information will always be available elsewhere for free (at a big site with more clout an ad-sales staff, for instance). Even among the big dogs, you have to be incredibly good, with an incredibly strong brand, to charge — not even the Times could make it happen. Only WSJ.
Besides, that horse is already out of the barn. Even if it were possible once, it’s not now. Recently I had a conversation with Jaron Lanier (who is surprisingly sophisticated about money-making, for an academic) about the original nature of Hypertext — apparently it allowed for a monetization structure that is unavailable to the modern incarnation of the web because it is a bastardization of the original concept.
I strongly believe that all this content will still best be monetized through advertising. And here’s how it’s going to happen:
1) You’re right that only the big sites have the clout (read: ad-sales staff) to get deals that allow them to be profitable.
2) You’re wrong that this kind of ad sales muscle is inaccessible to the little guys. The future is ad networks that roll up as many little sites as possible and sell those directly to advertisers. BlogAds won’t be it, neither will the Glam network. But something like it. Once the audience splinters enough ad buyers will have no choice. There are a number of institutional barriers that have prevented this from happening already. More on that here:
http://slipr.com/2008/01/24/why-ad-rates-on-the-web-suck-and-what-you-can-and-cant-do-about-it/
3) The fact that you haven’t made much on Google Adwords doesn’t prove much — this site isn’t optimized for making money, nor should we expect that just because everyone can put up a blog that has ads, the explosion of content that will result will all be monetizable. It’s supply and demand.
And for the record – that’s why I love blogs.
I appreciate Mim’s comments (he is both a rad dude in general and somebody whose opinions I respect).
I think you are right: It is charity. That’s the great unknown – will people give charity to journalism investigations????