Newsless.org

You might have noticed that I’ve said nary a word about the business model. I would love to be able to ignore the business side of this equation and focus all my attention on fixing the journalism, but the content model I’m proposing will certainly have implications for the business model online (positive ones, I think). And as segments of the economy crash around us, it might just be a good time to set up my thinking on that.

I’ll frame the discussion this way: The news product has lessened in value for each of our two key stakeholders — audiences and advertisers. Why? I’m sure you already know this part:

1. For audiences, an overabundance in the supply of information makes news less valuable. Much of the info news organizations publish — national and international news, recipes, opinions, gardening tips, movie reviews, etc. — can now be found in greater quality and greater supply elsewhere. And our main franchise, local news, isn’t valuable enough to support our large reporting, editing and production staffs.
2. For advertisers, meanwhile, our products are increasingly no longer the best gateway to an audience interested in their products. If you want to sell a car, you use Craigslist or list it on a car-shopping site.

This one-two punch seems like a hopeless situation for publishers. Reasonable people are asking, How are we ever going to fix the news if we can’t pay for it?

I’ve got few answers, but I do have a pair of assumptions to match my pair of stakeholders.

Assumption #1: “Where attention flows, money follows.”

Kevin Kelly’s contention that attention can always be monetized is the article of faith that keeps many a publisher in the business, I think. It’s certainly the reason Google acquired YouTube and Murdoch purchased MySpace. The cheaper information becomes, the more scarce and valuable attention becomes. That value can be converted into money.¹ Newspapers, for example, have always sold a portion of the attention we attract to advertisers.

Assumption #2: Not all attention is created equal.

People looking for products to buy compose some massive share of Google’s giant stockpile of attention. Many businesses will pay good money for a portion of that share. But much of the attention news websites attract is difficult to sell to advertisers. We’ve had trouble monetizing sports stories, for example, although they typically bring a large percentage of traffic on your standard metro daily newspaper site. And just try finding a (non-political) advertiser for your politics site.

Among the reasons news companies put out so much commodity content — the aforementioned recipes, gardening tips, and movie reviews — is that advertisers love the attention this content attracts. But it can be tough to find buyers for the attention garnered from “serious” journalism.

Of course, any amount of attention can be monetized to some degree, with remnant advertising or Google AdSense. But unless we’re talking huge amounts of traffic, publishers tend to find the returns on those forms of advertising insufficient to cover the cost of providing the content in the first place.

So when we talk about figuring out our business woes, I think we’re actually asking two questions:

1. How do we increase the amount or intensity of attention we draw?
2. How do we sustainably convert that attention into money?

Fair warning — most of my research is going to focus on the first question. But I’ll also be sniffing for insight on the latter.

1. For more on the attention economy, see Michael Goldhaber. [↩]

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