Newspaper Dons Collude to Charge for Content
James Warren’s recent post in the Atlantic about a hush-hush gathering of newspaper executives goes to show just how stubborn the industry is, and how much it doesn’t understand it’s own business. Some people question whether the discussions were legal, and contend that the industry is resorting to collusion to preserve their paychecks at the expense of the American public. Or maybe they’ll just talk about their love of baseball.
The meeting was entitled, “Models to Lawfully Monetize Content” and was sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) to “discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of newsgathering that will serve the American public,” but as noted by Nieman Journalism Lab, the industry is “treading carefully on antitrust laws.”
As its fortunes waver, the industry has stepped closer and closer to illegal collusion (if it isn’t already happening); their running assumption seems to be that charging for content will only work if everyone is in on it. Legally, the industry can’t act in concert to set subscription fees or micropayment prices for the news, but it’s not hard to imagine some private head-bashing going on if certain media chains aren’t getting with the fucking program.
However, as Clay Shirky points out, newspapers can’t establish a monopoly on the news, even if every single one of them acts in collusion:
The main source of value for newspapers is reporting on events in the real world, and since those events can’t be copyrighted, and can be reported on by radio stations and television programs and non-profits and webloggers and twitterers and and and, news online will always be a competitive business in a way music is not.
Nevertheless, the industry continues its march towards oblivion, ironically oblivious to the answers that are staring them in the face. The Internet, in particular, seems to be this big scary dragon threatening their village, and many of their top representatives seem utterly flabbergasted by tools like Twitter, as evidenced in a recent Better Know a Lobby interview on the Steven Colbert show.
On the opposite side of the Funny spectrum, AP CEO Tom Curley recently proved that he has not partaken of the Googlenomics Kool Aid in a debate with Arianna Huffington on the Charlie Rose show, muddling like an angry old man about how his industry needs to get pizz-aid for their content.
For Curley, as is was for Big Worm, “playing with my money is like playing with my emotions,” and Curley isn’t afraid to bust a cap to prove his point. But his rap battle with Huffdog also reveals an underlying generational gap that is reflective of the larger battle between old farts who don’t understand what newsprint is really for, and those twitter-twatter youngsters who want everything for free and whine about getting ink on their fingers.
Curley, like Larry and Mo, also exemplifies an industry that doesn’t understand its own business. Newspaper companies sell newspapers, not news events. One could also say that newspapers sell ads, but the point–as Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and many others have recited–is that no one owns events that occur in the material world. In a connected world, information is abundant, not scarce, and people will find a way to get the latest news with, or without, the newspaper industry.
AP is grasping for straws at a time when it could seize upon the opportunity to position itself as the most trusted source (unlike Twitter) for up-the-minute (unlike Google) news. Instead, AP has been pointing its finger in the general direction of Google and Huffington Post, which both pay AP a lot of money, after years of riding on a tide of free exposure and link referrals on news aggregators and search result pages. Curley’s consiliatory remarks on the Charlie Rose program were a thin veil covering an atmosphere of resentment coming from an industry that has relied on mergers and acquisitions, regional monopolies, and on legally-sanctioned price-fixing on ads and subscriptions for their profit margins and revenue growth.
Now that the Internet has broken down their barrier of artificial scarcity, they have to actually compete on fair terms for our business, and our attention–a scary prospect, indeed. But AP doesn’t seem to get it–at least, not yet. Meanwhile, the conglomerate is missing out on the opportunity to leverage new models such as reverse-syndication, which competitors like Reuters have taken up with relative zeal. If AP doesn’t wake up and smell the coffee, they are likely to be outmanuevered by competitors while they spend all their time whining about complimenters.
