A victim of the always-on, always-updating news cycle is the concept of a “fully baked” news product. Since it’s always changing, through updates, comments and reactions, the news is never done. Ostensibly, this makes it more difficult to charge for news, since it’s more a process than a product these days.
Pierre Omidyar, founder of the new Honolulu-based Civil Beat, doesn’t agree. The site launched yesterday and is very new media, with Twitter, blog-style reporting, topic pages and a goal of lots of engagement.
“We’re going to be sharing with the public what we’re working on as we’re working on it and the experience of working on it,” Civil Beat editor John Temple, formerly of the Rocky Mountain News, told NPR.
They are also going to be charging for it. A monthly subscription will run you $20 but you can get a 15-day trial for 99 cents right now. Omidyar founded eBay in the mid-1900s and made it turn a profit much sooner than most dot-coms and he’s bringing the same approach to this news experiment.
“If it’s valuable, they’ll pay,” Omidyar told NPR, “and if it’s not valuable, they won’t pay and we’ll learn from the fact that they’re not paying.”
With Omidyar’s deep pockets and tech background, some media watchers have been anxiously awaiting the unveiling of Civil Beat, originally called Peer News. But the secret sauce here is an ever-present PayPal link, not innovative code (paidContent has more on the pricing model here).
The website itself doesn’t have any super fantastic technology that’s revolutionary, that’s going to do any crazy things that people haven’t seen before,” Omidyar told NPR. “It’s really about engaging with citizens, engaging with our friends and neighbors here in the community in a different way.”