The future of journalism

I got thinking recently about what the future holds for journalism and journalists. Partly, this was brought on by the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times are soon going behind pay-walls, partly by the fact that one of the sites I was working on, nosmag.com (content in Irish, but I'm sure Google translate would do a job on it for you if necessary) seems to have become rather more than just a bit quiet of late.

There are many reasons nós* has been struggling, and not all that many of them are down to "the way journalism's going", but the fact that nós* is struggling has made me wonder about stepping on my editor's toes, so to speak, and going out on my own with the concept of an Irish language lifestyle blog/magazine type thing. Now if you're reading this Tomaí, I'd rather keep writing for nós*, but the fact is that there hasn't been any real content there since Christmas, and you're pretty much ignoring my e-mails, so...

Anyway, this train of thought obviously led me to wonder what I'd need to do to make a site like nós* had succeed. A lot of stuff, I can more or less steal as is from Tomaí's work - the content is mostly pretty good, and there's a pretty good range of stuff. The tone is generally nicely pitched too - there are serious bits, but mostly it's a fun-loving, light hearted kinda production, and I always liked that. The design's good too, particularly the print edition (all available here, if you'd like to see what I mean). And there are other things too, which I might get to in a future post.

The problems, however, are pretty clear too, especially the big ones. The site was never effectively monetised, and this meant that even while (relatively) huge money was going into producing a very nice glossy magazine, nobody was getting paid. There were ads, but seemingly not enough, and the cover price of the magazine (a not-for-nothing €3-80, I think) went straight back into production costs. People who aren't being paid are generally not terribly reliable workers, at least not long-term, and even while I did my best to keep my submissions timely and of high quality I kinda knew that Tomaí was having difficulties getting enough good content to justify bothering to publish the thing. And content wasn't the only thing causing problems - the way the finances were structured meant that new subscribers were constantly needed to keep producing the magazines that the old subscribers had paid for. (For the record, even though I think this was never a particularly good business practice, I don't think there was ever anything really dishonest going on - it wasn't a case of money being siphoned off to pay for fancy offices or champagne receptions or anything. That's not going to be much consolation for those who are out of pocket after paying for magazines that may or may not be produced, but I think it's important to make the point that as far as I'm concerned there wasn't anything too shady happening).

So what's the biggest lesson to learn from nós*? Well there are quite a few big ones, but for me the biggest thing that the next nós* (if there ever is a successor) needs to do is monetise the site before even thinking about paper publishing. My theory for this is a pretty simple concept, but one I'm seriously considering taking a punt on. Essentially, if a pay wall is the most lucrative way of monetising a site then that's the road that needs to be gone down, but a pay wall will obviously put people off before they even start, so you need a pay wall which allows people to peep over and see what they're missing. One option would be to offer a free trial - maybe 7 days or a month, depending on how often content is posted. This is imperfect too though, in that you're going to lose readers who would have generated a little extra revenue from ads but who won't pay to read (not to mention that having more or readers is, in general terms, always a good thing). So you adopt the Radiohead model (it was Radiohead, wasn't it?). Pay what you like, but you have to renew annually, or maybe every six months or every quarter if you don't pay anything. I'm willing to bet that there are enough people out there who will like the model that you could generate pretty serious revenue this way (serious relative to ads, at any rate), and the recurrent nature of the subscription would mean that even people who don't pay the first time they subscribe might come around to the idea of paying for content if they've been regularly enjoying the site for some time. Now this isn't a perfect system, and I still haven't got the technical details worked out (how will RSS feeds work from behind a pay wall, for example? And how difficult is a pay wall to implement, anyway?), but I think that it could very well prove a workable model for a site which can produce good enough content to justify charging for it.

Content, of course, is king, and no matter what site you're talking about, if the content isn't right it simply won't be effectively monetised by even the Richard Bransons and Seth Godins of this world. If the content is right though - who knows? What everyone knows, however, is that the first person to figure out the whole "monetising a site" thing will be in some serious demand from the big guys (or at the very least the big guys will want to steal their ideas).

I've got some more flesh to add to this idea, but I think that offers a reasonable starting point for anyone who wants to steal my ideas. If you do make your fortune off them, I think that a pint or two might be in order?