Great idea -- lousy timing. That's my assessment of Journalism Online, the new venture that aims to wring some revenue for traditional media out of Internet users accustomed to getting free access.
It's a noble goal, but it's woefully late. Internet users are WAAY past being willing to pay for stuff they've gotten used to accessing for free. Journalism Online, with its heavy-hitter founders and its lawyers, may eke out some new revenue streams that didn't exist before, but they will, in my opinion, be unable to change the fundamental reality of the Internet, which is that people will just work around having to pay for media stories.
Journalism Online wants to create subscriptions and micro-payment systems to get Internet users to pay for journalist-created content. Versions of this have already been tried, and have failed, and I see no reason why this project -- even with Steven Brill (American Lawyer), Leo Hindery (AT&T Cable) and Gordon Crovitz (WSJ) at the helm -- will succeed. Users might have been trained to pay for some quality media content back in the 90s, but the MSM was too dumb to set up the system back then. It's too late now.
But there are many other potential revenue streams for content creators and providers. For starters, web-based publishers need to think creatively about the role of content creation and dissemination, and about which of the old ways of doing things need to be discarded to make money in the new media reality. For instance, why aren't MSM media sports pages really just portals for buying home team souvenirs? Because there's a 'conflict of interest?' Gimme a break.
The saddest part is that MSM media web sites are some of the most visible and popular on the Internet precisely because of their quality content and name recognition, but the people who run them are so stuck in their old media mindsets that they appear incapable of the kind of creative thinking it takes to really succeed on the Net. And Journalism Online is a classic example of old-think.
Not sure if there's a PR lesson here, except that we PR pros need to know about these issues because we aspire to be experts on media.
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