Comment on ‘I already pay for Apple News+’

$10 per month all-you-can-eat from 300-plus publishers

Source: The danger of ‘I already pay for Apple News+’ | TechCrunch

Apple News+ sounds a lot more like Netflix in its early years to me. Over time, when publishers realize that “yes, this is indeed a losing proposition for us, in favor of the customer”, they’ll either launch their own similar services, or threaten to pull out of News+, or throw tantrums, which will mean a slowly increasing cost of News+ over time.

The problem here, that Netflix must respect and Apple won’t, is that news is not a single source thing for the most part. If there’s an in-depth report that people want, but only Bloomberg provides, then Apple will either need Bloomberg (just like Netflix needs Friends), or will have to provide à la carte options the way Hulu does. But for most other news, if I can’t get it from publisher A, then I’ll just read Newspaper B’s report. Apple is making it easier for customers to ignore who the source is, just like Facebook did and Google AMP does. Good for consumers, bad for brand recognition.

Yes, this will open up a new avenue for some, and will be great for customers, and will break niche storytellers (of the LongReads types) and also big newsrooms. But you can’t blame Apple on capitalizing on a broken market. They’ve had a long time to fix this. So many business models have come and gone, from Better Ads, to services that allowed people to pay a monthly fee for ad-free experiences on a set of participating sites, to stupid stuff like Adblocker Blocker. The industry has fumbled through everything but collaborating and making their own version of News+ where they wouldn’t have had to pay Apple fifty cents on the dollar.

Just like Netflix broke an already dying business, and reinvented the way we consume TV, News+ is poised to do the same. Thing is, the innovation cycle has sped up this time and you’ll be seeing News+ competitors as early as next year. First, it’ll be half-assed attempts by Samsung, Microsoft, or Google, and then publishers themselves, who will shoot themselves in the foot by giving customers limited options (one reason I’m not subscribed to online services like CBS). What’s worth seeing is if they’re able to band together and learn something from this experience.

Apple acquired the magazine industry’s self-distribution app Texture a year ago

I was looking at solutions around this some time ago (just idle browsing, mind you) and realized that Apple had bought Texture and done nothing with it. The News app is not a natural extension of what Texture did, but News+ is. Good for them.

More than anything, it seems that Apple wanted to build a product around magazines for iPad consumers, and news media was an afterthought that just happened to be in need. When Apple announced News+, I thought it was the opposite, but the Texture explanation makes sense.

That means those magazines are likely to absorb a ton of taps and engagement time before users even make it to the WSJ, which will then only score few cents per reader.

I don’t know how Netflix pays their sources, but this is how Spotify pays theirs. As a consumer of Indian music, I have to push Spotify’s constant prattle of American artists aside to get to the music I want to listen to. But thems the chops. If publishers want more engagement, they need to now build a better relationship with Apple. This means the smaller ones will absolutely suffer. They should keep out of News+

Word of the Day: Fungible

Fungibility, according to Wikipedia, is an economic term used to describe the property of a commodity whereby it is directly interchangeable with something else. For example, if you don’t care whether the rental car you get is a Mercedes or a BMW, then they are fungible. It was used by journalist Stijn Debrouwere in an awesome article about the future of newspapers and media companies in the age of the Internet, by calling his article –

A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead.

Source: Fungible

Continue reading →

Tech Bloggers should sell their articles

tl;dr – Tech bloggers should sell articles to News companies, much like Reuters and AP have done in the past.

GigaOm Pro is an interesting service. While most of the tech blogging industry is ad-supported, it has a subscription based model. It’s not unheard of, but surprises me that it works. I don’t have any numbers, but the fact that the industry pays good money to read and listen to GigaOm Pro analysts seems to point to a healthy business model. Why does GigaOm Pro work? Because it is attached to a name, that of Om Malik. That name carries weight in tech reporting circles. People care about what he has to say.

Why is this relevant? Because good writing is always rewarded. Newspapers around the world have always depended on wire services like Reuters, AP and BBC, to name a few, to fill their columns and inform their readers of news from around the globe. This makes sense for two reasons – it is cost-effective and companies such as Reuters and AP can be trusted to do the right reporting in a timely and impartial manner. I have seen news reports being replicated in different newspapers without any change simply because the headline was followed by a reporter’s name and a small (Reuters) mention.

Today, the Internet, in its goal to be an open sharing platform, has skewed this reporting standard. Companies such as ABC News and NYT often quote a blog post or a tweet and wrap their own story or analysis around that. This works so long as the original writer isn’t a paid professional writer, like when I write on this blog. But when the quoted links are tech blogs and independent writers who lose out on page views; and thus ad revenue, this becomes a lousy proposition for the bloggers.

I believe that tech blogs should become similar to Reuters and AP in their reporting. Traditional news companies cannot afford to send reporters to every tech event, nor are they invited to do so. Tech blogs have reached the level where if you’re not writing well or covering the latest topics, you’ll get laughed off the Internet quicker than it takes to set up a Tumblr blog. So, instead of keeping in-house writers, news outlets can take articles from tech blogs for a fixed price, along with deeper analyses and more contextual content. They could do this without compromising the quality of the writing. Not every tech blogger would qualify for a payout, but those who have proven their worth will be able to earn more than just page views on such a program.

Why would this work for news companies? Right now it’s a free-for-all. They can quote anyone, attach a link and bet that no average reader will click on it, all for free. The benefit of paying up? Syndication. Right now, tech news trickles down from everyone who was on the scene and this means that everything links back to the tech blogs. By offering to pay for their writing, media companies will be able to get their hands on exclusive content without having to link to any blogs and without having to worry about legal issues related to trackbacks.

The negatives for tech bloggers are not negligible. The first is that many companies will require bloggers to officially become journalists to protect them in case of First Amendment issues. This will require that the following question be addressed – is a blog post talking about a recent event a news report or an opinion? I myself believe that it is an opinion, since the writer does not necessarily have the required training to be impartial to the subject. This debate has often played out against bloggers. The other issue is that upon paying money, the company will require the blogger to not publish the article on their own blog, as this would duplicate the syndicated article. This hits the blogger exactly where it hurts. Tech bloggers write on their own platform for the single purpose of gaining popularity; which can then be converted into money using the traditional means of sponsored posts or advertisements. The work around would be for tech bloggers to either accept less money in exchange for permission to post the article on their blog after a fixed period of time or write a short article on their own blog while syndicating a longer, much more detailed version for the news media. The final problem is that this move would take us away from the open nature of the Internet where RSS feeds and pingbacks allow a level of sharing that doesn’t exist on any other media platform. I do not know how negatively this will affect the Internet, but it would not be a small change.

In conclusion, I believe that tech bloggers should strike deals with traditional news media to provide them with syndicated news feeds. This can mean that tech bloggers do not need to depend solely on advertisements on their own platform to earn a living. This will benefit news media outlets because they will get accurate, real-time news and analysis from people who are in the field and understand the context very well. There are still a lot of issues that need to be resolved before such a step can be taken, but the idea is worth looking into.

Interesting sub note – The Wikipedia page for Syndication lists print syndication as “where individual newspapers or magazines license news articles, columns, or comic strips” but web syndication as “where web feeds make a portion of a web site available to other sites or individual subscribers”. In web syndication, there is no mention of licensing, money or purchase of rights. This is what Riptide has concluded to be the problem with news reporting on the web.

Editor: Anna Tarkov [ADN|Twitter]
Note: I’d love to thank Anna for her help in editing this article. She provided me with invaluable help in getting the message across and pointing out some of my idiosyncrasies. Anna is a journalist from the Chicago area and she’s steeped in the digital life. She runs a personal blog here.

The Death of the Author

there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him-this someone being precisely the reader.

via The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes Full Text, Downloads, Cliff Notes, and Essays.

This text, pointed to me by Dan on ADN (which was in response to this article posted there by Matthew) reflects what I believe about writing today – that in as much as we want to give meaning to the text in terms of the context of the author, the real meaning can only be derived by the reader himself. The same is true, in my book, about any art – paintings, sculptures etc, where it is not the artist’s life, times, societal pressures or addictions, that define the true meaning of the work, but the impressions it makes upon the viewer that truly reflect the value of the art. Continue reading →