The Blog

The flaw in comparing news to music, is that most news stories don't have one specific origin. For instance, if I want the latest Kanye West song, the genesis of that is Kanye recording it, then releasing it -- usually through a music label. If I want the news on Blago's latest insane antics, there are numerous sources to provide it. In fact, anyone with access and a laptop can. It's folly to think that these sources will agree to some sort of forced aggregation when -- for the sake of argument -- they all provide a similar product.

News stories do have a specific origin--the reporters who report and write them. What you're paying for--or should be--is their skill at ordering and interpreting information.

Two words, provided I think by Jeff Jarvis: "Times Select." (Which was, for those who were not paying attention, the NYTimes' for-pay internet service which was stopped maybe two years ago.)

I wonder what Marge thinks about this?

The thing about iTunes is, I don't have to buy the whole album. I can pick out the songs I want. That's not the same as the model you're talking about. And a quick run through any paper's site stats will show that very few stories would ever cover the costs of the reporter's time.

As a former newspaper reporter at STNG, I've put too much thought into this while sitting on the deck waiting for the Titanic to sink. The future of the business is mouse clicks. I think all papers should collaborate under one host Web site where readers enter a credit card number that gains access to any newspaper/magazine in the country/world. Every time a reader clicks a story, they pay a penny or maybe a fraction of a penny, most of which goes to the paper with a slight cut going to the collaboration. Every month the reader gets billed. Online ads sold by the publisher are just a cherry on top of their revenues. The readers only pay for what they read (about 5 to 10 cents a day for most and 25 to 30 cents a day for news junkies). The reader will save money, and the publishers will make more money because they won’t have to produce and distribute a paper product. Throw in inventions like the Kindle and Wi-Fi, that will give commuters and couch surfers easy access, and newspapers will be back in business.

Times Select didn't really founder. It had lots of subscribers, but the Times decided that it made more money making those same pieces available through ads. And the Trib is making money. Just not enough money to pay off the enormous debt load incurred by Zell "paying" more than it was worth (and putting the costs on other parties). Meanwhile, some guy in Springfield is making a fortune generating news about the Blagojevich scandal and selling it to his paid subscribers, spinning off more information through his freebie blog that he uses to tease the inside info than you'd get from the Trib in a year of their statehouse coverage. Some cop on the southside has hundreds of frothing cop readers for his inside information about the CPD, and the people paid to cover the department mostly report what the department tells them to (along with the occasional 'scoop' they've lifted from the blogger. Meaning the blogger is a better reporter than the pros. If he quit his job, I think he'd find enough advertisers and subscribers to meet his goals -- I mean, if you were a late-night restaurant, would you think about helping support every street-cop's favorite source of news about their department? Likewise, John Hilkevitch gets a salary from the Trib for turning over far less news than CTATattler. I'm not clear on the Tattler guy's story. He may have signed on as a CTA employee of some sort now. But he still provides a forum for more factual criticism (ie, reporting of how it works and how it should work) of the CTA than either of the papers have offered in my lifetime. Huff Post and DKos-style aggregators mostly work because there's a tremendous redundancy of national news. Nobody can skim it, so they go to aggregators to help make sense of it all. It's mostly organized through regional providers and it's "objective" (which makes it even more redundant), and people don't trust it. The shakeout exemplified in the Trib's outsourcing of national news will end in a situation in which a small number of organizations differentiate their national news on liberal v. conservative, deep v. quickread and focused v. general axes. Meanwhile, and mostly unremarked, sites like DKos and TalkingPointsMemo are developing significant stables of paid reporters specializing in topics and knowledgeable about what they're covering. Is it really a net loss if the Trib and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Twin Cities Star-Tribune all give up the national reporters who hvae mostly been generating the same story from different chairs, and in their place, 50 new paid reporters are providing reporting and credible critiques from different perspectives that were not being offered?