by Jason Preston on July 1, 2009
With the possible exception of a few kinds of products—maybe toilet paper, shoes, and haircuts—your market is nowhere near “everyone in the US,” and even farther from “everyone in the world.”
When you go into business, you ignore the people who are least likely to buy your product. The number of people you ignore is much, much larger than the number of people you have or work to earn as customers.
As we move forward, the news business is increasingly a business to serve the news-enthusiast subset of the general population. Social pressures and scarcity of information used to twist the newspaper and cable news company business into a more ubiquitous product, but the internet and small news entrepreneurs have changed that.
People seems to have gone nuts with this idea of all these millions of people who want stuff (like news) for free. Screw ‘em. You’re a business. You’re only interested in the people who want news for money.
by Jason Preston on June 30, 2009
I thought I’d keep the headline meme from Seth Godin’s post about Free. Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote an incredible intelligent review of Chris Anderson’s new book (and concept), Free, and Godin thinks he got it all wrong, that Free really is the future of business:
Free is the name of Chris’s new book, and it’s going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.
The first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?”
Who cares if we want it? It is.
The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”
Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.
Nevermind the fact that Gladwell didn’t raise either of these wishy-washy points. Nevermind the fact that there’s stunningly little evidence that we’re in an inevitable race towards a new business model of free.
The problem with Chris’s new idea is built into the concept itself: that costs will grow close enough to zero that you can round down.
Seth should know better. He runs a whole business based on the idea that you can take the exact same concept, and round up. 900,000 people making pages on Squidoo, handing 50% of their “couple of dollars” of ad revenue over ads up to a good $500,000 or so.
I have to read Chris’s book (Chris, can I have a free copy?) before I’ll feel qualified to really dig into it, but I think that he’s describing a fad. No product, not even an informational product, is free to produce. It is nearly free to copy it, but that is often theft.
Just because it’s easy to do doesn’t make it legal. Or right.
If we are to have a digital based economy (and this, I think, is the inevitable truth), then we need to have more digital goods that cost money, not more digital goods that are free.
Free is, ultimately, an impotent business model, because you cannot make money. Even in these scenarios where you “make money on the surrounding businesses,” those surrounding businesses are not based on Free. They are independent business models in their own right, and if they’re bringing in revenue, that is in fact your primary business. Everything else is marketing.
The truth in this case (however inconvenient) is that if you want to make money, someone has to give you money. And they have to give you more money per item than it cost you to create it. Even if your cost is 0.0000002 cents per article, you’d better make at least 0.0000003 on it, or you’re in trouble long term.
by Jason Preston on June 29, 2009
The internet makes it:
1. really, really easy to waste time
2. crucially important that you stay productive
Print cycles meant that you had a rotating deadline. At a daily you had to push something out the door by the end of every day. At a weekly you had a big crunch once a week.
The internet has no print cycle. It’s just now.
The luxury of non-productive time is disappearing. If you’re not producing something right now, somebody else is, and they’re going to earn the attention of all those online eyeballs. It sucks because it means you can’t get a cushy career in journalism anymore.
But it’s awesome because there’s so much opportunity out there for someone who’s willing to work hard.
by Jason Preston on June 25, 2009
Over the next few days, I think we’ll see a lot of people claiming that “old media” is irrelevant because it took over half an hour for them to confirm Michael Jackson’s death after it was posted on TMZ. These people are wrong.
The fact that Twitter was filled with tweets like this:
no one other than TMZ is claiming to have evidence that he’s dead. so either they’ve got a source no one else does, or… something. 42 minutes ago from web Bill Palmer
Goes to show how much credibility TMZ has. The public on Twitter, and I’ll wager the public at large, have learned to approach early breaking stories from non-established brands with skepticism. TMZ is well known, yes, but it’s not well known for careful fact-checking.
If anything, what this incident proves is that credibility is a very valuable quality. TMZ bet on the accuracy of their story, and they won that bet. Why make the bet? They want to earn a reputation for credibility.
And you know what “old media” has in droves right now? Credibility. Michael Jackson wasn’t, as far as I could tell, widely considered dead until the LA Times independently reported that doctors had pronounced him dead.
It’s not true until I say it’s true. That’s power.
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by Jason Preston on June 25, 2009
Don’t worry about what everybody else is doing. Pack mentality works great when the pack is thriving, but it’s a terrible idea if you’re a lemming (yes, I know the cliff thing is a myth).
If you go your own route, you get to define your own niche, your own audience, and you get to be the best news product in the world for them. Politico rocks the national political scene, and they’re thriving because of it.
The best thing you can do right now is something nobody else is doing.
by Jason Preston on June 24, 2009
As usual, we had a great turnout and a lively discussion at The Pitch last night. Lucid Jazz Club was as generous as ever with their space and let us hang out for a good hour after the event, chatting and sipping the last of our drinks.
Thanks to everyone who came out and made it an interesting event!
The topic of last night’s discussion was, somewhat simplistically, “Is Photojournalism Necessary?” (The answer from the audience was a resounding: Yes!)
As I pointed out near the beginning, the question is meant to address multiple facets of the problem facing professional photojournalists (and professional photographers): practically everyone is taking photos. How do you justify your salary when, in most cases, grabbing a photo from the pro-sumer crowd is just as easy, and cheaper.
One answer that seemed to surface throughout the night was: you have to add value to your work. You can add value through a knowledge specialty (”I know everything about golf, so if you want someone to shoot golf, I’m your photog”), or through a technical specialty (”If you want someone to shoot with a Holga, I’m your photog”).
The fact is that “the crowd” is going to keep taking, and distributing, news photos (spot photos). Rather than fighting that fact, the future of photojournalism is in doing what the crowd can’t do well. In other words, it’s about making photography a profession again.
It was a really smart conversation with a really interested and passionate group of people. I’m looking forward to watching photojournalism develop with new imaging and distribution technology, and seeing how the craft changes as more photographers learn to work for the web.
by Jason Preston on June 23, 2009
Yesterday this image was floating around in news rooms (click to enlarge).
Criticism is easy. Action is hard. Humor is often a great tool for pointing out flaws, inconsistencies, and dangerous imbalances that are hard to communicate without offending people. But in the end, you don’t matter unless you do something about it.
If you think the internet has trashed journalism, go fix it.
If you think there are too many ads on your news pages, go fix it.
If you think the commenters on your articles are f*cktards, engage with them.
If you think social bookmarking tools are killing journalism, go kill them.
If you think Top Ten articles are killing journalism, go look through the TIME magazine archives.
by Jason Preston on June 22, 2009
In WordPress (the blogging software I use), it’s fairly easy to find and install plugins that suggest “related content” to readers after they finish a post. It’s pretty common in other blogging software, too.
The point is, though, that “related content” refers to other blog posts that are about similar topics.
Anything that is part of telling your story but is not text (so, videos, pictures, audio clips) is not “related content.” It’s part of your article. Would you print your front page without the photos?
Getting something rough up quickly and following up with more information is one thing, but thinking you’re done when you’re not is something else.
by Jason Preston on June 19, 2009
Have you read your own newspaper recently? Do you subscribe to it at home? Do you get your news from your own newspaper’s web site?
How much news do you get from other web sites? How much news do you get from blogs? What kind of news do you get from other web sites? Why don’t you get it at your site?
How much time do you spend reading news every day? Do you read news at work or at home, or both? What’s hard to find on your own news web site?
If you’re not satisfied with your own product, why should anyone else buy it?
by Jason Preston on June 18, 2009
Do you still get junk mail?
I do. Every day I get a few full-color fliers and nondescript envelopes promoting a particular deal, event, clothing store, or charity. Why do you think they send those out? Probably because they work.
One of the reasons (I’d argue the main reason) newspaper web sites have such big online footprints is that they advertise them every day to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, by delivering a selection of their content to the doorstep.
It’s a powerful medium for advertising because there’s a cost involved in delivery. People notice snail mail more than they notice e-mail.
When you shut down your printing presses, think about snail mail. Why not offer a free, or nearly free, “subscription” to digest news via snail mail? It’ll cost you bulk-rate USPS postage to ship a daily advertisement to your potential web audience.
You could even sell one or two ads on this marketing material (how may other businesses can do that?). Maybe you’d even make a profit, since you don’t have to pay for a fleet of drivers to make regular early-morning deliveries.
by Jason Preston on June 17, 2009
Don’t forget that The Pitch is scheduled for next Tuesday, from 7:30 to 9:30pm at Lucid Jazz Club. It’s an awesome venue (they’re now offering food as well as drinks) that has hosted this event twice before.
The topic for this pitch: “Is photojournalism necessary?”
The key word, of course, is “necessary.” How much to photojournalists contribute to the bottom line in a news site. Can you count on freely available images online to cover your stories? How do you fairly protect image copyrights online?
It’s not a requirement, but if you’re planning to go you should RSVP on the official guest list at Upcoming. There is a capacity limit, and if push comes to shove, who gets in and who doesn’t will be determined by who signed up.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 