I hate to be a downer on the news industry. Especially because I have a lot of friends who work in it. But when people start suggesting that a new technology is going to help the news industry out of the slump, I gotta throw in my two cents. Worse when my point is proved by the people being the New York Times. I’m sure I have some screwups in here so please feel free to correct me via the comments below.

New technology won’t change the inherent flaw in the business models and/or value propositions offered by news organizations today. New technology isn’t eating newspapers’ lunch. It’s new attitudes held about the value of news sources, the ability of “ordinary” people to publish, the loss of stigma to self-publishing and maybe some skepticism about journalism itself. These are all people problems.

Perhaps every publisher today should consider this question: Are your customers the readership or the advertisers? How should your business change to reflect this? Any organization with a response along the lines “our customers are advertisers and we’re selling the readers to our advertisers” should repeat that to themselves a few times. Sounds pretty ugly doesn’t it?

The Old Model in New Technology Terms

It’s true that newspapers were “saddled” with a business model that had been working well for them for quite some time. It was a model which, if we translated it into web analytics terms, worked something like this:

1. Generate lots of pageviews (increase distribution/readership)
2. Verify the pageviews via a panel-based information source (i.e. get someone like Nielsen to give a best estimate)
3. Charge advertisers more money if the panel-based information source reports that you have a lot of pageviews.

For most publications this was the bread and butter.

Then there was a side business. Since there were few competitors in any geographical or topic-based market, they could charge a nominal subscription fee to each person who bought the paper. This was great because they were collecting money on both sides of the content: collect money for granting the privilege of viewing the content and collect money for the privilege of putting an ad in the proximity of the content. Nice gig while it lasted.

News organizations may have liked to believe that they could charge that subscription based on their authority or quality journalism or some other attribute that was based in the personal skills/intuitions/talents of their editorial departments. That might have been true. But it gets less true every day. Especially as senior journalism staff are let go and replaced by less expensive, newer staff.

In the online media landscape there is admittedly a lot of rough between diamonds. But when everyone you know and trust is pointing towards the diamonds, you find something shiny sooner or later. Those people you know and trust are pointing at the product of news organizations less frequently, perhaps. Instead we’re getting blog posts by true domain experts or people who were on the scene first and so on. This skips the middleman of a journalist to compile quotations (for better and for worse).

Perhaps if the news industry finally settles down whether they want to charge advertisers to be associated with the content or if they want to charge their audience for access to the content, they can come out of their slump.

David Lynch iPhone Parody.

Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy watching Mad Max on my iPod Touch this week. But still funny.

Two excellent industry call-outs allow me to re-suspend my disbelief. One that I can’t find anymore (regarding the whole NBC dustup) and another about the EFF whom I love completely but the call-out is best for the lovers because the EFF is living in a bubble in terms of what the average consumer does to get some ringtones (and, yeah, that’s why I love the EFF).

Aside

FSJ, I nominate you to succeed His Steveness in the unfortunate event that His Steveness is called back to Jupiter before I leave this world myself. But let’s get back on topic. Topic is:

Cell Phone Ringtones and paying for them

Let’s start out by sifting out the techno-elite.If you can solder your iPhone, install crap-ass GUI-devoid whatever applications, don’t mind doing it all every time that Apple adds some truly functional software via software-upade and/or don’t mind spending an hour sifting through garbage-torrents for your content then you are techno-elite and should read no further because it won’t make you happy, you have more spare time than me and your advice might not be good for others lackingt your l33+ sk1llz or 5w33+ p4+13nC3.

If the above doesn’t describe you (or is unintelligible), then you are a consumer; the sort of person who pays other people for the convenience/joy of just getting stuff that works and getting back to living your life with your family, friends and so on (where “and so on” may equal re-playing all those StarCraft episodes so you’re ready for the upcoming release of StarCraft 2–you can be a dorkbot and/or technology-literate and still be a consumer).

Mea Culpuh, Let’s Get it Ovuh

I know, I know… “Consumer” is a crass and ugly term. But it doesn’t have to be so. “Consumer” could mean “the sort of folks that value their time enough that they pay the 2 dollar shareware fee so they don’t have to bother figuring out how to pirate the g00dz.” Consumers might be people who pay the rent for people who make 5w33+ g00dz.

The meat of this post is much less than the preamble

You don’t use and iPhone and you are a consumer. You pay more than 2 bucks to turn a song snippet into a ringtone and you have to work with a very poor user interface.

Apple charges you one dollar for a seamless way to turn songs into ringtones (I know, I know you wanted it for free because you were planning on using that dollar to buy a Dr. Pepper then drink said Dr. Pepper then pee and forget you ever drank said Dr. Pepper… you’re a Pepper). Outrage. Bring on the outrage folks. Somone is going to charge you a dollar to give you software that allows you to edit audio and load it into your phone for use as a ringtone. Get OUTRAGED! I prefer you do it in Peoria though.

En Summa:

Get worked up about paying a buck for song-editing software so you can make ringtones all you want and point fingers and call people names. Then, when you’re done, show me your free alternative.

Small fact zone:

I believe that His Steveness is a peskatarian, not a vegan. He knows where the movement really happens. But I’m just bloggin’ so do your own fact-checkin’ please.

Also, what’s so fucking crazy about the FSJ link I’ve posted, is how great the Pshop on His Steveness is to the cat thing from the “Austin Powers Does the parody of “Casino Royale” (not to be confused with the contemporary-in-relation-to-this-post-and-best-Bond-flick-in-ages “Casino Royale”) is… That shot is perfect. Whoever did the photoshop work on that rocked it. You’ve seen a Stevenote. You know what His Steveness wears. You are probably visually inclined. The supporting image for this particular post should stand as a model for other fakrs out there. It’s friggin great. Motherfucker. Nuff said.