You’d Think They’d Learn
Published August 31st, 2009 | 
Word on the street — make that, the Wall Street Journal, is that a new Internet startup, Journalism Online, is attempting to succeed where so many others have failed. This company, co-founded by former WSJ publisher Gordon Crovitz and Media guru, Steven Brill, wants to sell online paid subscription solutions to newspapers and magazines seeking revenue for their online content.
Hmm…
Do ya think this will work? Granted, Crovitz is credited for the WSJ’s exceptional success at selling it’s own online content. However, as I pointed out in a paper I wrote in grad school on this very topic, this success was built largely on the fact that the content was timely, unique and extremely useful to investors. Most newspapers and magazines are not providing news and information that is significantly unique or useful enough to anyone that they’d want or need to pay for it. Or, as I’ve expressed it before, why pay for something you can read on someone’s blog for free?
Does that mean that it’s impossible for publishers to earn money from online subscriptions? No, but it does mean that it’s not as simple as setting a fee for accessing online content. It’s not a Field of Dreams scenario where if they build it readers will empty their pockets for the privilege of reading web content.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Notice how online porn businesses sell subscriptions. Yeah, okay . . . I’m sure no one reading this blog has ever visited a porn site, but if you have, I’m sure you’ve noticed that many of these porn companies own a bunch of different sites (dedicated to many different sexual interests) and when you buy a monthly subscription to one site, you gain access to the rest of them. It works for porn because they promise unique content that can’t be gotten elsewhere — content that appeals to different tastes. Say what you will about porn, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry (bigger than print news publishing and probably only second to the video game industry in annual revenues) and online porn makes up the biggest part of this economic sector.
So, for newspaper and magazine publishers to successfully earn from paid subscriptions, they’d have to offer something unique, useful and more valuable than anything online readers are currently getting for free. The problem is, newspapers and magazine content is significantly less valuable than it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Why? Because the decisions these publishers have made over that time period — first out of greed and then out of the need to survive, has significantly devalued their brand. Plus, there’s nothing being published in any of these venues that you can’t find for free elsewhere online.
I predict the following will happen: The news outlets that sign-up for this service will see a drop in traffic to their websites. As their visitors come to realize that they will have to pay for content, those visitors will mostly refuse and go elsewhere. That’s what I do. Anytime, I arrive at a website that won’t display it’s goodies unless you pay for a subscription, I click away and search for the info on another website. Envision millions of visitors clicking away and you can imagine how better-established free-content providers will provide some mean competitition, increasing their own traffic and ad revenues in the process.
The Wild, Wild Web
Published August 30th, 2009 | “Go West, Young man,” the distant voice cried, and they went forth — an electronic frontier open free range of expression. The last hope of democracy’s urgings.
Websites crude virtual homesteads popping-up overnight: megabytes and megabytes of shantytowns, free space for all, free online auctions, sex and gambling. Blinking banner exchanges. The big come-on.
domain carpetbaggers, ebook dime novelists, cowboy bloggers, citizen journalists looking for a home, home on the range.
New robber-barrons sucking-up bandwidth and most of the real estate. Hackers, identity thieves, and talking head idiots destroying the rest. Democracy’s lost opportunity. No more frontier.
Freelancers like mercenary gunslingers — hand-to-mouth existence. Have laptop, will travel. All’s left are the “$” signs.
Denise Gess
Published August 26th, 2009 | I’m sitting at my usual table in my favorite coffee house — my fingers resting comfortably on my laptop. Outside, the sun is fiery bright and the air humid and smelling faintly of garbage. Cars pass by at a leisurely pace. Denizens of my small town walk by the open door. The radio sitting just two tables away from me is tuned to NPR and they’ve just announced the death of Edward Kennedy from brain cancer. But I am not thinking about Senator Kennedy. No doubt he will get his share of tributes. No, I’m thinking about another person who succumbed after a long battle with cancer — a professor who taught in the writing department at my alma mater Rowan University. A few of you who read this blog probably know who I’m referring to. I suspect most of you do not. I am talking about Denise Gess, author of the novels Red Whiskey Blues and Good Deeds. A largely unknown writer, she was by all accounts, a “writer’s writer.” A passionate teacher of creative writing who practiced what she preached.
I must confess that I didn’t really know the woman. Truthfully, that’s why it’s taken me a couple of days to write about her on this blog. Whenever I read “personal” tributes to someone the author did not know, I always throw-up in my mouth a little bit because it always comes across as a bit self-serving and I didn’t want to sound like one of those people.
In my case, I didn’t have any classes with Denise Guess and had only read a couple of her essays prior to her death. I met Denise on exactly one occasion — the evening of my thesis defense. During the reception after the hard part was over, I recall we had a nice conversation about writing short stories. I found her to be charming, generous, knowledgeable and possessing a passion for the written word that rivaled my own. At the end of our brief encounter, before departing, she told me I had a “rare gift” and lamented that she didn’t have the opportunity to have me in any of her classes. I suspect that she was only being nice, that her sentiments were motivated more by the spirit of the occasion than anything else. Nonetheless, her words touched me and reinforced every nice thing I’d heard about her from my fellow students.
So I’ve been thinking about Denise Gess this morning. Partly because of my one encounter with her and partly because we shared a common battle with the Big C. Mostly I’ve been thinking about how even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant interactions with people matter. How a single death can leave such a huge hole in the world. How so many other rare talents will no longer have the opportunity to know such a rare teacher.
