fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Michael Higdon | 03.02.2009

Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and several others have made the point that Micropayments (uNews) ideaists do not think of readers. Technically I think they are wrong while also being right.

The basic proposition brought forth is:

“it seems foolish to take attention off of the needs of the readers and focus on how journalists can do their jobs more effectively. After All, isn’t journalism supposed to be a “public calling?” Why not serve the people, listen to them?”

Let’s turn that into a syllogism to make it easier to understand.

• If journalists do public good/public service
• And micropayments make journalists more effective at their jobs
• Therefore, micropayments help journalists do better public service

 Then,

• If public service is good for readers
• And journalists are doing more effective public service when getting paid through micropayments
• Therefore micropayments are good for readers

That also feeds into the idea of competition.

Secondarily, check out this video of The Daily Show with Walter Isaacson about his Time magazine article:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

There are a few points here I want to talk about.

One, the idea that you can save music in iTunes but who wants to save news in uNews? Shirky makes the same point. But that doesn’t make sense. Does it matter if you can save the articles? Do you save all of your newspapers that you buy at the store (assuming anyone still does that). Do you save everything you buy and consume? No.So that point doesn’t make sense. In uNews, you are not paying to keep content, you are paying to consume content.

We need to be careful comparing iTunes and uNews so directly.

The second point brought about by Jon Stewart discusses licensing content through uNews. This is what I would agree with. Aggregators should have a bulk subscription fee that allows them to post about other. It’s just like an Associated Press subscription model for the public.

Content within uNews should still have advertisements too and other business models in play as Isaacson said.

The most important point of this blog post, however, is a question brought up by Emily Kostic in her blog about micropayments:

“In Walter Isaacson’s article in Time, he does not offer any reasons as to why a reader will go to site where they will have to pay. He just assumes they will.”

This is a good point.

If news is to make uNews, why would anyone want to download it?Even if all of the news sites take their content off and don’t offer it anywhere else but on uNews, how self-righteous would we look? Or less about how we’d look, but just how presumptuous would we be?

Readers would look at us and scoff. They’d likely go on strike for a while until they realized they couldn’t find news anywhere else. But still, is that the kind of ungrateful relationship we want with our readers?

No.

So instead, news needs to find a way to create something that doesn’t only help the journalist, but helps thousands of other unpaid creative people.

uNews must be for more than news. It must be for all creative endeavours.It must be for InnoCentive.com, it must be for people who want to make money off of their own videos, images news, games, information and other content. uNews can’t actually be called “uNews.”

uNews needs to be for everyone AND news. And it has to be as fun and interesting to be a part of as all of your awesome Apple products. uNews must be a paradigm shift on how we operate on the Web. It must serve as a focusing point for all communications.Otherwise, it will fail like the other micropayment systems did.

Other systems segregated content away from the Web instead of integrating people into each other. That is the key. uNews must CENTALIZE the web instead of further DECENTRALIZING it.

But wouldn’t it be great if a news company made it?