Now let’s combine the last two posts: What Google deal could mean for the Newspaper industry - Or my plan to rescue the news business
By Tom Teicholz at 29 October, 2008, 11:09 am
In today’s New York Times, David Carr’s Media column discusses the problems with the newspaper business along the lines I’ve mentioned in my earlier post — the problem being no that people don’t read the news — jsut that that they don’t do so in newspaper form, and don’t do so by buying a newspaper.
That being said, people read news in all sorts of ways, by having an article emailed to them, on aggregator sites, as referenced and linked to in blogs, on the front page of whatever homepage they use… and so on.
The question remains: how can newspapers monetize their content?
The Google Book deal offers one idea: create an organization that tracks and collects a fee everytime an article is read in any form. As part of this one would need to establish a “fair use” rule — something that allows aggegator to post the headline and a paragraph about the article for free, but that would monetize the click through to the actual article or the ability to download and pass along of the article. Maybe this is mere pennies and maybe the pennies don’t add up to enough (I-tunes is the model here of a system in which the aritists although making some money, don’t make enough — the one profiting here is Apple). But perhaps this will lead us to a future where the physical newspaper may be the loss leader but it remains the anchor tenant of the mall of content (and that’s as far as my retainling metaphor can go).
No comments yet.