Business models versus editorial models: the online content dilemma

 – posted February 16th, 2010 by Randall Snare     One comment

print-vs-online

Last month, the New York Times made an announcement, the same announcement that Rupert Murdoch made six months earlier:

They are (somehow) going to start charging for their online content. How exactly they are charging (the somehow) plagues the new media industry.

The problem

For years ad revenue has slid downward. But the decrease in money doesn’t correlate with a decrease in audience. Hence the discord over what, if anything, should be done about it.

The opinions are many and varied:

The two sides of the fence in this argument have business people on one side and journalists and online analysts on the other. That in itself, I think, should guide us towards some consensus.

Me and Conde Nast

I used to work as a web producer at Gourmet magazine, which went kaput last October, to much dismayed hubbub.

When I joined Gourmet in 2007, they were just planning their first website. Previously, their web presence was limited to a collection of recipes alongside Bon Appetit, a ‘rival’ food magazine (although both owned by Conde Nast) on epicurious.com.

What was interesting about the project was that every call to action was a subscription to Gourmet in print. In fact, all Conde Nast online magazine ad spaces had to point to a Conde Nast print publication.

Indeed, print advertising earns more money than online advertising; most online papers and magazines exist to serve their paper cousins.

While print news readership is melting away as digital readership skyrockets, a paper edition still makes an average of 10 times more ad revenue per user than online news does.

The crisis

Conde Nast axed Gourmet along with three other magazines because the ad revenue wasn’t there – even though the audience was.

At the time, Conde Nast said they “hope to announce initiatives to develop digital versions of our brands that will make use of new devices and distribution channels.”

The battle scene

The device loyalty offers a more realistic pay model than a ‘traditional’ pay wall does. A device is a one stop shop for all of your content consumption. That means devices are designed for convenience — and the first step in extracting money from people is removing inconvenient barriers to entry.

But the obstacle now is getting people to use one device, and getting all news supplied to that preferred technology. Considering the amount and breadth of news, that obstacle may not be surmountable.

Now, I don’t know how to solve the problem. But I do know that no matter what Rupert Murdoch says, a pay wall is a bad idea.

It places an editorial model within a business model that is at odds with it. It’s like trying to squeeze content into a poorly planned wireframe (a content editor’s biggest peeve).

The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger says that journalism is now a network, with journalists and consumers working together to create a new kind of output:

Sometimes “our readers know more than we do,” as seen in the case of the Barclays investigation by David Leigh, which was followed by “participation and analysis by people who really understood the finance world” — a collaborative but competitive approach has proven to get to the truth of things, faster.

Grasping at solutions

Pushing content into a misshaped business model is the wrong approach.

Business people would say that fewer paying readers are better than millions of non paying ones. But even content held behind a wall isn’t insular; therefore, that comparison doesn’t hold any water.

All content online is a story, and the sooner we understand that, the quicker we can properly monetize it.

We must start examining the content we produce and the story we’ve constructed, whether that story is a customer’s journey to purchasing your product or service online, or the story is an interlinked network of news stories on 3 different websites and 500 tweets. Both are stories, both have shape.

The maybe happy ending

This is somewhat comforting to me amid the doomsday attitude of the media. A story can be understood, broken down, studied and recorded, and reused, retweeted, reconstituted.

Even if there are many platforms for that content, we are not incapable of mapping it and creating a new best practice. Aiming for that is much better than applying an aggressive business model to the rebellious editorial one.

Denouement

I’ll be talking more about this and all things content with Elizabeth at the Content Strategy Forum in Paris this April. Check out our talk, The Evolution of Content, and if you fancy, register.

Thanks to John and Lar for providing great resources.

Categories Blogs and Blogging, Writing for the web

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