Every year more than hundred graduated students in journalism enter the labor market looking for a job. These are bad times to find a job in newspaper journalism. Newspapers loose every year around 1-2% of their subscribers; advertising is going down, and finally they are giving away their content for free on their website. Why bother to buy an newspaper or subscribe? Published on Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2010/06/saving-journalism-by-paying-for-impressions-not-words/
Rotary phone
It is clear: newspapers are going the way of the rotary phone and they are desperate in need of a new business model. The consequences of the end of the traditional business model, based on 80% advertisement and 20% of subscriptions, are showing up everywhere in the business. Massive lay offs , mergers between newspapers hoping to survive, changing formats from broadsheet to tabloid hoping to attract more readers. The good news for these students entering the market is that there are lot’s of new opportunities. Students generally enter the market as free lancers, and the demand for their stories is high. The decreasing number of reporters and editors in the newsroom, force newspapers to buy more stories from free lancers. However in the long run, when the supply on the market of free lancers is growing, because more journalists are entering, and demand from newspapers stays the same or drops, prices will go down. Getting published will become a rat race.
So it is time to turn around the classical print newspaper business model. Large newsrooms are too expensive, a multi million printing press is a too heavy burden, and shoveling your content to the reader on trees smeared with ink is not working. Readers want something else, so put your money where your readers are.
And we know where the readers are and what they want. Thanks to modern technology on the web we know how many people are clicking on an article to read, and we know what they are looking for from search engine queries. In the first case you could pay a writer according to the number of clicks and give him or her a percentage of the adds published together with the story. The second one starts with finding topics for stories from search engines queries, publish the story and of course see to it that it ends up high in search engine output using optimization. Again the fee for the writer is related to clicks and advertisement. I can hear the screaming in the newsroom: that is not journalism! Perhaps; but that is where money is, and it works.
Upstarts
Here are a few interesting examples. Sam Apple started last year with less than 20.000$, The Faster Times (http://thefastertimes.com/) , a new newspaper, published on-line using open source software. Contributors are paid 75% of the revenues of the advertisements placed next to their articles. True/Slant (http://trueslant.com/) is another upstart, created by Lewis Dvorkin, using the same business model. The interesting thing is that an advertiser could ask to publish the add next to an article that has an estimated number of readers. Associated Content (http://www.associatedcontent.com/)and Demand Media (http://www.demandmedia.com/) are really turning the business model upside down because they base their stories on search engines queries and optimization; they are feeding Google’s appetite. These new newspapers are all working with a small staff in a simple newsroom, and the contributors are free lancers. They don’t get rich. The Faster Times paid between 5-75 $ per story, and Demand’s free lancers can make around 15-20 $ per item. So you have to attract millions of page views to get decent income.
In fact we don’t go to the other side of the pond to watch new experiments, because Memeburn (http://memeburn.com) resembles these business models. And watching the development of stories and click rates, I would conclude, this is a nice start up! With the dropping Euro of less than 10 Rand , I was just wondering: He Matthew Buckland, when are you going to sent that cheque?
