Anyone who’s met Kerry knows that she is a huge fan of The Daily Show, hosted by silver-haired satirist and TV funnyman (and star of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) Jon Stewart.
During a bit of a catch-up session, Kerry caught Stewart’s chinwag with Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and former managing editor of Time Magazine. Isaacson has recently written a Time cover story entitled ‘How to save your newspaper’, and appeared on The Daily Show to talk micropayments with Stewart.
You can view the segement at The Daily Show’s website.
On top of suggesting that newspaper ink, notorious for rubbing off and staining the reader’s fingers, be made in the future with a “highly addictive narcotic”, Stewart makes two very valid points.
Firstly, he argues that micropayments for music (the product most commonly associated with online micropayments) is different, because we buy a song. We can keep it, listen to it as much as we like and use it for mixtapes etc. Secondly, he points out that it’s very difficult to charge for anything which has been given away for as long as online news has.
Luckily, he presented a business model which has been added to my mental list of solutions to the so-called Death of the Newspaper. Stewart calls it a cable TV or radio model. I’m calling it something else, and here it is:
The Jon Stewart Model
So, how would it work?
- Newspapers become content houses with no distribution process. These stripped-down operations can concentrate, hopefully, on quality news without directly considering circulation numbers
- The news produced by those outlets is distributed, wire-style and licensed, to aggregators. The example given is The Huffington Post. The licensed content is, of course, paid for by the aggregators
- The other money exchange in this process is not between the aggregators and their readers, but between advertisers and aggregators. Stewart says that HuffPo et al hold all the cards when it comes to advertising at the moment. This enables content to be consumed for free, because the aggregators a) do not have to (fully) fund professional-quality journalism and b) attract readerships large enough to provide value to advertisers
I’m not going to bang on about this because I’ll be boring, but I must say I kinda like this idea. But what do you think?
Cross-posted from Silent In Flames
Huffington Post, newspapers
I see the opportunity for newspaper industry to go back to the days before mass communications. Unlearn all the conventional behaviors and models and go back to the conversations that occurred between storekeepers and the people in that community. In other words, get smaller and go hyper local. Tools exist now that allow for true engagement with the community … let them (community members) help you run it … pro-am papers, if you will.
It’s a nice idea for a model but misses the basic fact that so many good stories come from individuals and not agencies/organisations and while they are there as content creators, dealing with one-off payments is a very time consuming process. The above model really looks like a rip of the (admittedly, not my cup of tea) Huffington Post model.
Thank you both for your comments.
Craig, it is very much a HuffPo model. I believe Stewart acknowledges as much. I actually hadn’t thought about the time cost of processing the licensing of such a model.
[...] Post Dabbles with Journalism A while ago Chris outlined what he termed the Jon Stewart Model, which is fair enough as it was actually Stewart’s idea. The model is based on the current [...]