Pay to publish, not to read
How do you get your news? Jyri Engestrom gets his from Twitter, Facebook, and shared links, from people whose opinions he trusts.
These new ways of sharing content in social media create a challenge for news organizations. In order to compete, they have to publish stories that are interesting enough not only to be read, but also share.
Engestrom, Google Product Manager and co-founder for the microblogging service Jaiku, predicts that the business model for the news industry will change radically. In the future, he predicts, you won’t pay for subscribing to the newspaper, but for rights to publish the content produced by a news organization. You will have to pay to share.
If Jyri’s prediction comes true, the news industry will face another challenge: how to make content that people are willing to pay to publish, not only to read, as the case has been so far. But also, this is an opportunity for struggling news industry to monetize journalism – or said in a better way, monetize the ways the content is used.
This posting is the first one in my research project about future of journalism. More about the research project here. Feel free to share your comments on the topic!
This is interesting, the idea that people will pay to republish news in the future. But also hard to believe that private individuals would actually do that. The reason there is so much sharing now is because it’s simple, and for free.
And there is also a pitfall with the whole idea to let somebody else decide which news source one should trust. How can you know that your friends are making the right decisions. Why outsource the decision making of your own news intake? I guess because of lack of time. But that just means that an elite, who has the time to browse the web more carefully, will be in charge of what people are reading. Like a node that the large information flow passes through. Or like what editors are doing today already. Evaluating news. I guess in that light it would be just like choosing your own editors. After all, today most of us don’t know who are making these choices for us, in mainstream media.
by Hanna Sistek
on 04. Aug, 2009
But isn’t this already the case? If you want to copy and republish an article in its original state, it means you will have to pay the copyrights (in most countries, that is). So most people (and organisations like Google News) don’t republish and just link to the article. Or just quote parts of it. If what Jyri says will happen, then that still would be the way to react, I guess…
by Bart Brouwers
on 18. Aug, 2009