News without Editors

I am happy to pay for news. I am not happy to pay for a newspaper. Why won’t anybody take my money?

Some good articles on the future of selling access to news have got me thinking. What is the future business model of news reporting? What is broken right now?

The Past:

The distribution was via paper. Editors bundled a lot of stories together, printed them and sold access to the printed edition. Later came broadcast radio and television, using similar principles. Advertising plays a critical role, too. We, the consumers, paid for a combination of editing, the content, and the delivery.

Now:

Bundling is dead. Digital publishing, search, RSS readers, hyperlinks across platforms, suggestion tools (Memes, Google News etc), news pointing tools (Twitter, Facebook, etc) and so forth mean that I pick the individual articles that I read. I don’t care whether it is written on a blog, the NY Times, the WSJ, or somewhere else. I select what I read. I still read the content though, it is still just as valuable. Distribution has become much cheaper due to online publishing. No more expensive printing presses and paper needed.

The graphic below summarizes this:

What this means:

I DO care about reading a PARTICULAR type of news item at a time when I decide. I DON’T care about reading a particular NEWSPAPER. I bundle my own news now. I am the editor. The job of editing for others is becoming less important. It is becoming obsolete. This is true for both print and broadcast.

In the past, we paid editors to pick the content, package it and deliver it to us. But now, we don’t have to anymore. And we don’t want to. I will not pay an editor to select my news. This is a dying part of the value chain. I also don’t have to pay for paper anymore.

However, I am more than happy to pay for the content. No problem. But publishers still insist on selling me editorial services…

Suggestion:

I am happy to pay $100+ per year to an industry organization for a subscription to all content that currently resides on newspapers. This organization could pay their members dependent on the amount of traffic that comes to their sites via the subscribers of the scheme. This would mean large and small publishers could benefit proportionally to their contribution in terms of what people actually read.

But I won’t pay for editors anymore. Not in news print, not in television. I consume on demand now. I am the editor and I decide the composition of my own, personalized news flow. My ‘newspaper’ comes for dozens of sources each day, some of which I didn’t even knew existed the minute before I read them.

When can I start paying?

Update
This video doesn’t fit the article 100%, but it is still pretty funny:

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Connect via Interviews

A great way to get in contact with people is by asking them for an interview. Who doesn’t like getting interviewed? Makes you feel important, valued, and you think you are in the limelight.

I recently got interviewed by the Pakistani Spectator. They are running a series of interviews with various bloggers which you can find here.

Good approach to connect with other bloggers. Or customers. Or connectors. Or anybody that you care to get to know. Also great for the Google juice due to all the back links that you will get from the interviewed bloggers.

And once you have worked your way up, you might even get to interview some of the heavy hitters.

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Dow Jones < NASDAQ < China

Fred Wilson has an interesting article here, where he shows this picture:

His conclusion is the the DOW is the ‘old’ companies and that the NASDAQ representing ‘new’ companies will always outperform the DOW. I think he is right.

But he is not taking his thinking far enough. The ‘new’ companies these days are not in the US. They are in China. Drawing a similar graph as above, but including a NYSE listed ETF (NYSE:FXI) tracking Chinese companies shows you how much better they perform:

In the year to date, the DOW is down 8.5%, the NASDAQ is up 3.2% and the FXI is up 13.8%. This results is consistent over different periods of time. It means that NASDAQ is growing faster than the DOW and that FXI is growing faster than NASDAQ.

The principle is correct. Young, hungry companies are growing faster than older, more established companies. And China has a lot of young, hungry, fast growing companies.

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