The conversation following in the wake of the Time article on saving newspapers has the feeling of a bad rerun to those of us who have been around – and around- this old block for a while. Poynter has a nice summary of some of the chatter, pegged to a post on an NYT blog. And LostRemote’s blogger emeritus Steve Safran is sharing some good info with his facebook posse that harken one of the last times we hashed this out (Rafat didn’t call it PaidContent for nothing when he picked the domain name back in 2002).
What always strikes me in these conversations is that publishers, GMs, and ad directors are noticeably absent. The conversations above are driven by journalists, online evangelists and converts, entrepreneurs, and even the readers themselves. Journalists are expenses, customers are audience, and advertisers are the clients of the publishers in our business. This is a money question, and the money people are not the voices that are standing out. If you have good sources where they’re talking, please round them up in the comments so we can benefit.
The deal is, not all content is the same, and not all news content is the same. “There’s a tornado heading for a neighborhood in the city, click the paypal micropayment button to find out if your house is in the path” does not fit with any definition of our mission, folks.