Two headlines from yesterday got a lot of tweets and RTs among my Twitter universe. Something about the two versions of this story made me glad the world still has independent-thinking journalists who want to dig into a story and not just pile on to the version of a story that pop us up and matches their own point of view.
This Wednesday evening I’ll be at the Pen & Pencil club for a Q&A session the club bills as part of its “off the record” series. I don’t want anyone to think the evolving plans for the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network are a secret that can only be discussed off the record. So let me share here some of what I’ll be discussing for those who can’t attend or who want to prepare questions.
The nation’s oldest press club will meet the city’s newest publisher next week. In an off-the-record session at the Pen & Pencil Club, I’ll be sharing my thoughts after two months in Philadelphia and talking about how the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network can help foster more and better public interest news and information and civic engagement.
Join us at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 9, at 1522 Latimer St.
Today marks an important day in my transition to Philly. My subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer began. Yes, a printed newspaper arriving every morning at my doorstep is now part of my media mix.
For the past few months (even as I was still in talks to come to Philly as CEO of PPIIN), I undertook an experiment to test different ways of keeping up with Philly news. At first I wanted to try primarily digital methods.
I’m writing this post (and others that will follow soon) here on my personal website and on the site of the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple because the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network still doesn’t have its own, full “web presence.”
One reason is that we don’t yet have a final name or domain name, which I’ll address later in this post.
Official release is going out tomorrow morning, but I see it’s already out via Twitter. Glad to see Philadelphia news folks love to break a story. Here’s the release:
Originally published on Newstogram.com blog on March 24, 2011
I travel a lot. I’m in a lot of airports (some good, some bad). So flying analogies usually work for me. But a recent trip that ended at Miami’s beautifully redone American Airlines terminal made me realize why one analogy I hear too often is misguided.
You’ve probably heard someone say, “We’re trying to rebuild the airplane while we’re flying it.” Sound familiar? It’s usually uttered when you need to justify why all work has to stop on anything except today’s mega-project.
It seems that Google is falling prey to the ugly sort of herd mentality that can give journalism a bad name when it happens among the press pool covering a candidate or those chasing after the latest octomom rumors. In this case, journalists are doing it in defense of our profession and the benefits it brings to society, but that still doesn’t make it defensible.
Unfortunately, this requires getting out a calculator (for those journalists who don’t have one, see if your cellphone offers the capability). This is, after all, just a math problem.
Everyone in the news industry seems to be talking about charging for news content – again. It seems so 2001 (remember when economy last tanked and the online ad market swooned).
Of course, whenever such discussion starts, people inevitably start to assess the experience of The Wall Street Journal’s subscription model, regardless of their level of knowledge or depth of understanding. Quite a few of my former Journal colleagues have weighed in on the subject, but I think even they’re still missing some key elements.
I wanted to offer one addendum to the post above about the WSJ.com subscription model:
One point Bill Grueskin tried to make in his “The case for charging to read WSJ.com” post on Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur blog deserves some elaboration: He dismisses the marketing challenges of getting people to pay and technical complexities of managing subscription accounts. He says: “Most of the acquisition cost amounted to some cheap advertising and a couple of percentage points to the credit-card company.” This seems to suggest that “cheap advertising” is all it takes to convince someone of the value of a subscription. If that were the case, I’d imagine the Journal would be buying a whole lot more of that cheap advertising and boosting the subscriptions even faster. It’s pretty simple math: Is the cost to acquire an incremental subscriber less than the net value of an incremental subscriber? If a subscriber is so valuable and it only takes “cheap advertising” to get more, then why doesn’t WSJ.com have 2 million subscribers?
The truth is that the considerable time and energy goes into finding creative ways to convince people that something they haven’t yet experienced will be worth putting down their credit card on a registration form, even if they get a free trial period. It also overlooks the fact that Dow Jones probably spent at least $5 million over the early life of WSJ.com building, licensing software, rebuilding and rebuilding the subscription management systems. No doubt the marketing department still has a huge laundry list of features it would like in the third-generation system now in use.
I remember when Netscape abandoned the business of producing server software to support online subscriptions because the market for such software never developed. The landscape is only marginally better today.