Abstract
Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn ask a lot of questions—Should newspapers give up print and go digital-only? Will micropayments ever catch on for news content?—without claiming to have the answer.
Kaye, a former writer for the Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News, and Quinn, a journalism professor at Deakin University in Australia, instead detail the challenges managers have been living with as advertising revenues and newsroom staffs have shrunk over the past decade.
Industry denizens would not find much that was not already on Poynter Online or blogs that follow the business, but the authors do a nice job of sweeping the issues into 177 pages plus index. So, while Funding Journalism does not propose new solutions, Kaye, who died in February 2012 at age 57, and Quinn created a good primer for students new to the issues.
A lot of big thinkers and doers appear—Rob Curley, Arianna Huffington, Jeff Jarvis, Alan Mutter, Craig Newmark, Jay Rosen, and Clay Shirky to name a few—as do the concepts involved: attracting eyeballs, aggregation, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, dayparting, distributed media, hyperlocal, micropayments, paywalls, pro-am, and so on.
The authors open by stating the problem that it is hard to compete with free and that incumbent news organizations did too little to retrench until the money stopped flowing, when classifieds ads left for Craigslist and Monster.com and retail ads slumped with the economy.
They also trace the digital history, including before-their-time attempts like Knight Ridder’s abortive experiments with ViewTron (1983–1986) and Roger Fidler’s tablet vision (plug pulled in 1995).
But mostly the book focuses on the dance between putting downward pressure on costs—such as when editors at Ohio’s eight biggest newspapers, frustrated with annual Associated Press bills that reached seven figures, began sharing stories in 2008—and launching projects that actually generate new revenue.
In a chapter on charging for “niche and passion content,” the authors quote Wall Street Journal Online executive editor Alan Murray’s advice that you do not charge for “the story that most people want to read” because for those you can get high traffic and sell ads. The key is to look for narrow audiences with intense interest, who might pay to get something special.
But as the authors note, charging for premium content has not always worked, pointing to The New York Times’ 2007 decision to cancel its TimesSelect service after just 2 years. The company said plenty of people were willing to pay $7.95 per month to read its op-ed columnists, but freeing the content and selling ads promised better revenues, thanks in part to traffic from search engines.
The book routinely pulls off from U.S. cases to discuss international examples of advertiser-supported media, usually from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Rupert Murdoch appears in the book more than any other person, particularly for his 2005 declaration before the American Society of Newspaper Editors that young people today are “digital natives,” with different expectations about how and where they will get their news.
The comparisons with overseas media sometimes add to the global picture, but you do not have to be a xenophobe to struggle to engage with some of the details, with sentences explaining such things as how “Blommenholm Industrier owns 26.1 percent of Schibsted ASA shares and is the group’s largest shareholder.”
At its heart, though, Funding Journalism summarizes the current situation for news media managers, providing a useful starting point for those just joining the field. One chapter specifically encourages them to study microeconomic models and the dynamics of consumers and markets—without tearing down the firewall between the advertisers and content.
“Everyone in journalism must become more commercially minded and more entrepreneurial,” the authors wrote. “The dilution of the separation of church and state in news organizations . . . will sound like heresy to some traditionalists. But combining the skills and knowledge of all departments could prove essential in developing new ways to fund journalism.”