It isn’t newspapers that need saving. It’s journalism. To put it more exactly, what needs to be preserved is the public service journalists provide by using a particular set of ethical methodologies to gather, assess and report information people need to function effectively as human beings and citizens in a free society.

Journalism Ethics > Feature Articles > How can we save journalism?

Everyone’s fixating on the Times paywall and whether this means that “people won’t pay for journalism”. In the comments here, SK wrote:

I guess my question is: do you not think that there is a minimum price for quality content, and do you not think that it’s higher than can be supported by distribution-model pricing — that if you’re going to be able to produce content, people have to learn to pay for that content, not simply for distribution or access?

And though it’s cheating, I’m going to reject the premise. There’s no price for content other than what the market will bear. I don’t believe people will, or ever have, paid for content - in most markets, recorded music and DVD being maybe the exceptions, they’ve always paid part of the cost, with the remainder being met by advertising (newsprint), ancillaries (the cinema), and the like. It’s always been about multiple revenue streams.

The problem for the mass print media is that two ways they got paid, built around control over the advertising channel and the ability to extract extra revenue at the logistical interface created by having to ship huge piles of paper around the place, disappeared at the same time. So everyone fixates on trying to put one of these back. But there are a bunch of other variables you can tweak, and it seems to me that those are much more potentially interesting.

If you haven’t seen EPIC 2015…

… it’s kind of a totem for me.

Here’s the thing: the news space isn’t one-dimensional, it’s not “paid” vs “unpaid”: it’s way more complex than that. “The newspaper” is only one possible point in the space of information services we’re going to spend the rest of our lives navigating. Off the top of my head, here are some other axes:

• Facts vs. analysis: do you comment or report?
• Quantitative vs. descriptive: do you favour reportage or data?
• Generic vs. personalised: do you ship the same product to everyone, or a product shaped to an individual’s interests, friends and behaviour?
• Bundled vs unbundled: do you cover everything, some subjects in detail, or one subject in obsessive detail and let your readers assemble their news portfolio?
• Mass market vs. exclusive: as many readers as possible or make a virtue of aiming to a tight demographic?

On this, the Guardian mixes analysis and facts, is clearly bundled, and slants highbrow; but it’s also generic, rather than specific, and favours description over quantitative data. But its blogs - like the Data Blog - fill in niches. They’re unbundling themselves and turning themselves into a portfolio of sources, not a single source, which can be monetized by a portfolio of approaches.

That doesn’t make nearly as good a soundbite as “paywall good!” or “paywall bad!”, but it feels much more like the truth. I’m not making a moral argument here, because ultimately the morality of the situation isn’t here or there: what will happen is what we can make work financially and economically. If we’re blind to the flexibility we have and the true constraints we’re inventing within, though, we’re never going to get the outcome we’re all hoping for: a powerful, accurate, honest and free exchange of facts and opinion.

That doesn’t have to come from a newspaper. It just has to come from somewhere.