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:

Share this article Follow this blog

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.

Share this article Follow this blog

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.

Share this article Follow this blog

For several years, I have been building a personal, private list of venture capital funds that invest in the UK technology space. Please note that this is a list of active VC funds, sorted by vintage date, not of VC firms. My private list dates back to 2000 and has over 300 funds on it.

Recently, I started recording all this information in an easy to use online database. The database lists all VC funds relevant to the UK market that have been launched since March 2007 (that I can find/know of). It can be found here. I haven’t had the time to backfill all funds launched since 2000, but it is a start:

http://creator.zoho.com/jenslapinski/list-of-vc-funds#

I think this could be very useful to all entrepreneurs raising capital. If you help me build the list, then I think this could become a great tool for the community. Enjoy.

Share this article Follow this blog

I was just trying to use our marketing software to send a message to our beta users and found that the website was down. No idea what is going on. Because the website is down I can’t even look at the company’s blog to see what is happening. So I went to search.twitter.com and immediately saw that other people experienced the same problem. But nobody from the company was there to let us know what was happening…

Lesson learned: when your server goes down, your team should post a brief explanation in various places to let people know what is happening. Twitter is a good place for spreading your ad hoc news, particularly when you website is down. Very fast. Very easy. Potentially big impact. Good stuff.

UPDATE

The company I was referring to is Vertical Response. As soon as they woke up in California, they started keeping people up to date on Twitter. See a screen shot of their messages below. Well done guys!

UPDATE 2

And when you are doing it really well, then you replace your homepage with something like this and simply redirect people to Twitter for more updates. Loving it:

Share this article Follow this blog

When Facebook recently changed the design of the homepage that users see when they log in, hundreds of thousands (or dare I say millions) of users protested. Very strongly.

What was the problem? Poor design choices? Or poor communication? I personally think the design changes were great, many other people agree, Mike Arrington is just one of them.

The problem is not what the design actually looks like. The problem is that Facebook changed anything at all. I think that Facebook has become so integral people’s lives, that they see their homepage on facebook as literally being part of their lives.

Imagine it like the room that you had in your parents’ house. Remember? Your space. ‘Don’t Enter’ sign at the door. Your domain.

Facebook just walked into their users’ room and then they just changed the layout. The bed is in a different place, so are the desk and chair, and the wardrobe. It doesn’t matter whether the new layout is better or worse than before. They just went in there and changed it! How dare they: “I hate you!!!”

Solution: Give people the ability to design (and keep!) their own layout of their homepage. Let them put stuff where they want it. Help them design their ‘room’ in their taste. Empower them to get it their way.

Don’t be an invasive parent. Everybody hates that, regardless of your good intentions.

Share this article Follow this blog

Update: Discussions with friends have caused me to further refine my thinking around Twitter.

Twitter benefits are:
1) Twitter allows you immerse yourself in the stream of consciousness of other people. That is interesting and useful.
2) Commercially, I think Twitter could enable companies to see and track that flow, understand what is going on and why, learn from what is happening and enable them to embed themselves better in the stream of consciousness. If they manage that, then this is potentially very valuable.

Twitter better than Facebook because:
1) It concentrates just on the flow and does away with everything else
2) I can access everyone, not just my ‘friends’
3) Most importantly, there are no privacy issues here. Twitter is all public. You have no privacy rights in terms of what you you publish. Contrast this with Facebook which is ‘private’. Remember the Beacon debacle? Twitter is unlikely to have that kind of problem.

Update 2:
Facebook has now updated their homepage. When you log in, it looks very much like Twitter. It essentially is a live stream of what your friends are up to. This is very good and useful. It fills a different needs from what Twitter does. Facebook is your news stream of what some of your friends are up to. Twitter is stream of consciousness of the general public. Big difference. Nonetheless, Facebook just became useful to me for the first time since I started using it. Love the re-design!

Update 3:
This is getting better by the day. Facebook just announced that they are enabling users to open up their status updates.

Update 4:
Brilliant article on O’Reilly on how Twitter can add value

Original article:
I think that Twitter is the better Facebook. It is like a thin version of it that only focuses on the essence and does away with everything unnecessary. But it does the essence better than Facebook.

The essence of Facebook is that enables people to connect and communicate with each other in a group format. I can see what other people that I am connected to are doing. But I can’t see what other people are doing. I am only privy to discussions of people that I know. And even most of that is hidden.

Twitter by comparison enables me to listen to what people that I am interested in have to say. I can also talk back to people who care about what I might have to say. In addition, I can scan what everybody in general is talking about. And Twitter focuses them to keep it short and brief. So there is actually little noise here. Beyond this, there is no functionality. Twitter has discarded the add-ons and all the bulk. This functionality is not INSIDE Twitter, it is OUTSIDE and linked by Tiny URLs. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

What this means is that Twitter has taken the core of Facebook, the ’social flow of communication’, and perfected it. It has gotten rid of everything else. There is just the core. And it is great.

My guess is that this core is actually where the value of both Facebook and Twitter lies. The value is in the flow of communication between participants. The commercial value probably lies in observing and learning from that flow as well as being able to respond to it in a meaningful way. Twitter’s core works better (for me) than Facebook’s, this might mean that Twitter might end up being far more useful and valuable than Facebook. Facebook knows this. This is why they tried to buy Twitter for $500m.

But why would you sell when you are in that kind of position?

Share this article Follow this blog

For those of you who are thinking about how to tackle the current economic situation, I have got two pieces of analysis. A serious one and then a rather crazy, but still serious one (although serious in a different way).

The first one is by Mike ‘Mish’ Shedlock of Sitka Pacific Capital Management (found via Big Picture). This is probably the best piece of investment analysis I have ever read. But then I don’t read many of them and am easily impressed. The Analysis is entitled: “Peter Schiff Was Wrong”:

There are numerous YouTube videos, articles, and references to Peter Schiff being “right” rapidly circulating the globe. While Schiff was indeed correct about the US imploding, most of the praise heaped on Schiff is simply unwarranted, and I can prove it.

First, let’s start with a look at the claim being made. Peter Schiff concludes many of his articles, books, etc. with the following statement.

Mr. Schiff is one of the few non-biased investment advisors (not committed solely to the short side of the market) to have correctly called the current bear market before it began and to have positioned his clients accordingly.

I would like to see some proof of that statement. Specifically I would like to see the average returns posted by EuroPacific clients for 2008.

I have talked with many who claim they have invested with Schiff and are down anywhere from 40% to 70% in 2008. There are many other such claims on the internet. They are entirely believable for the simple reason Schiff’s investment thesis was flat out wrong.

Read the whole, fascinating article here…

The next analysis is this YouTube video. You have to watch this. Very serious stuff.

Found via Mitch’s blog, by the way. Unbelievable.

Share this article Follow this blog

Related articles by Zemanta

• Peter Schiff: Right On The Crisis, Wrong On Investing? (usnews.com)
• Peter Schiff: Oh, he saw it coming (money.cnn.com)
• And Also Peter Schiff May Want to Run For Senate . . . (usnews.com)
• Peter Schiff was Right^H^H^H^H^HWrong (paul.kedrosky.com)

As the CEO of a tech start-up, it is part of my job to think about how the current macro climate affects our business going forward. One of the things that worries me is that the current generation of managers and advisers have never really managed anything in anything resembling a real recession. I think that is a very dangerous situation.

What makes me think this way is the chart below. It shows the year-on-year development of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from the first trading day of each year to the first trading day of the subsequent year.

What the chart shows is that the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s have been great times to be in business. You may notice that the ’stock market crash’ of the late 1980s doesn’t even register. What people think of as ‘bad’ has only really been somewhat uncomfortable. I think that even if you have been in business for 30 years, you have actually not seen really bad times. The last time it was bad was in the 1960s/1970s. Everything since then has been smooth sailing, including the burst of the dot.com bubble.

What confirms my thinking are statements like the one by the CEO of Deutsche Post (the world’s third largest logistics company): “I am expecting a sharp recession that will be over very quickly. [...] “

Really? Amazing. Could be famous last words. How does he know?

Looking at the chart, I am preparing for anything. In 1930 the stock market fell some 35%. It fell by an additional 55% the next year. And an additional 20% the year thereafter. There were 15 (that is fifteen) years of literally no value growth in the 1960s/1970s. Fifteen years. That is a very long time.

Hope for the best, be prepared for the worst. I hope it is going to become better soon. But I am preparing myself for the worst. And the worst could easily be ten very tough years being ahead of us.

Share this article Follow this blog

There are some things that you gotta love. Recently saw this 60% discount add for a Monopoly cardboard game. Brilliant!

Share this article Follow this blog