Kathlyn Clore

Are you a provider of online news content bending over backward to find new business models? Consider Yoga Journal.

I found the brand while living in the Netherlands because my Dutch is not very good. I have a basic understanding of the language and of yoga, but when I took a weekly local Iyengar class I really had to focus hard on the language to understand the teacher’s instructions.

Side note: Doing yoga in a foreign language is a great way to practice body-part words, verbs and directions. As well as relaxing words… I will never forget my teacher’s instructions during Savasana … “Ademhalen… Laanger… Zachter… Dieper… Ahhhhdemhalen” (But remember: words like “Savasana” don’t translate. So don’t stand there like an idiot wracking your brain trying to figure out what your teacher is saying in Dutch when she’s in fact using yoga words!)

Anyway, I would do Yoga Journal videos at home in between classes to practice and also enjoy the chilled-out yoga vibes which are easier to find when following a course in your native language.

They’re free, as is all of the content on the site.

I liked it so much that I recently subscribed to the magazine. That’s right: I PAID to receive content at my home.

But I still use the free videos.

I’m also considering purchasing yoga videos or attending yoga seminars, other products Yoga Journal produces.

Don’t tell me mass media providers couldn’t replicate this model. First off, that raises the point that few newspapers truly are “mass” anymore: If they’re newspapers at all worth their ink, they’re producing local content and not much else. And that makes them niche.

This dynamic brand would be is good inspiration for local news content creators. The model shows that some content can be free, and some content not free. Also, it’s possible to sell “side” products. Many newspapers produce Newcomer’s Guides or Christmas Gift Guides. Maybe they should further expand this kind of product range and thus support their newsgathering operations.

Right now, the overwhelming majority of online journalism is free.

A lot of publishers, journalists, bloggers and editors would greatly prefer that news content not be free. For a lot of reasons, the most important one being that these people like to eat. And sometimes - contrary to popular belief - they even like to eat food other than Maruchan Ramen noodles.

The need to eat unites all people. As does the need to drink (water, not beer, although the need to drink beer also unites many people).

Tim Windsor of Nieman Journalism Lab recently wondered if news content online could be monetized in the same way water has been monetized. After all, water is a commodity people once could access for free (and still can, in some instances… depending on tax situations and how you consider environmental impact).

According to Wikipedia, though, the global rate of consumption of bottled water “more than doubled between 1997 and 2005″. In the United States alone, consumers purchase “8.6 billion gallons for 28.9 percent of the U.S. liquid refreshment beverage market, exceeding sales of all other beverages except carbonated soft drinks, followed by fruit juices and sports drinks.”

Clearly, this is a big business.

Windsor wonders “Why is it that consumers cheerfully pay more for thirst-quenchers than we do for the fuel that moves our vehicles and our economy?”

I also wonder about this. And also must point out that many young adults, after consuming so much Green living propaganda, are loathe to buy bottled water. My boyfriend and I, for example, each purchased bottles of juice a few months ago when we first visited the local grocery store in our new hometown. We chose carefully, selecting juices we would each enjoy. But the ultimate factor in our decision of which juice to buy was about the bottle size: Would it be useful to reuse as a water bottle at the gym? Size of the mouthpiece was the most important - when you’re on the treadmill and you need to pick up your water bottle, you want something that’s easy to drink out of.

Regardless of our thriftiness, I agree with Gina Chen’s assessment that the reason people buy bottled water is convenience.

She concludes:

“If people are paying for convenience when they buy bottled water, charging for news content will only work if readers feel they are getting something else — not just news. Something they want desperately. Something that makes their lives easier the way grabbing a bottled water from the fridge does.”

I agree. And I think this is becoming an argument for a subscription model. After all - I don’t pay for YogaJournal videos (which I highly recommend) online, but I do pay to have the magazine come to my house. That way I can read it whenever and wherever I want. In short, I’ve bought into a trusted brand whose offerings I can experience in several ways.

Lately I have been starting to do some work for a local newspaper in California. The editor who is working with me told me that the paper is currently pulling back from its practice of just “throwing everything online” and is waiting until they figure out how to make money with the web to use it.

Can’t say I agree with this logic - why not participate and build up the brand until such time as there is a way it can be successfully monetized?

To me that’s sort of like saying “I won’t go to the gym until I know I have the perfect bottle of water to take along.” Or some other lame excuse people (I) make when they don’t quite want to exert the effort it takes to go to the gym.

Just get on the treadmill already!

Perhaps considering the treadmill is more useful than considering bottled water when thinking about business models for journalism.

We get on the treadmill because we think it is good for health (or how we look), right? And we pay for that treadmill, either to have it in our home or to have it at a gym we are allowed to access.

Obviously, we could run outside. Man has been doing so for thousands of years… (women maybe for fewer years But now we go to the gym, acting like gerbils on a running wheel as we pursue health and beauty.

We read stories because they’re also good for our (mental, social and sometimes economic) health. Same thing.

BONUS: “The Ramen King and I” podcast on Ramen noodle wisdoms.
Iconic Noodle Celebrates 50th Anniversary, from NPR

No new ideas were introduced during this month’s U.S. Senate hearings on the future of journalism.

But I did find a few with which I disagree.

This vanilla bit of insight from Arianna Huffington, first off, characterizes the essays on the Senate’s website:

“We stand on the threshold of a very challenging but very exciting future. Indeed, I am convinced that journalism’s best days lie ahead — just so long as we embrace and support innovation and don’t try to pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”

This is not a new line of thinking.

Of course journalism has to change. The newsgathering industry must find a way out of the perfect storm Huffington aptly describes, the blizzard created by a lack of advertising revenue and the simultaneous proliferation of the Internet. For many years (15, Huffington says) this storm went largely unaddressed by rigid newsrooms (and the universities that produced their staff) that failed to adapt their approach to content creation.

Huffington lavishes praise on non-profit initiatives like her Investigative Fund, The Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. These foundations exist to endow the serious investigative work of freelance journalists “many of whom have lost their jobs”.

She also thinks highly of citizen journalism initiatives and says more of them will come on the scene. Citizen journalists are, according to Huffington, “engaged readers can, among other things, recommend stories, produce raw data for original reported stories, write original stories themselves, record exclusive in-the-field video, search through large amounts of data or documents for hidden gems and trends, and much more.”

Plus 10 points for a nice definition, Arianna. Minus 50 points for failing to address a major problem with citizen journalists: They are not paid for their work.

And that means that they’re basically free labor. The addition of more citizen journalism sites to the online publishing landscape means the addition of sites that don’t pay content creators. Or maybe they pay writers, say, $7 an article. Or, maybe a penny a word. Or how about a tiny percentage share of advertising revenue, which writers receive after they publish their first 15 articles?

Such pithy offerings may be the free market price of some content online, but these offerings do not represent a livable wage. These wages don’t fund content that was written after interviews, research or beat reporting. They don’t fund writing that adheres to a journalistic style guide. These prices don’t pay for reporting that includes FOI requests, travel or well-edited multimedia production.

Huffington also says she doesn’t think the government should subsidize “what exists now.” I agree.
She misses the mark, though, when she fails to delve into the problems of “what exists now”.
Part of “what exists now” are business conglomerates that include many kinds of businesses within their portfolio. Consider Sam Zell, for example, who bought The Chicago Tribune and The L.A. Times in 2007.

He has a big portfolio of holdings, as described here. The Tribune and Times are just two of many holdings within his big company.

When he mismanaged his entire portfolio by taking on more debt than he should have, he put the Tribune’s operations in jeopardy.

Perhaps regulations should be written to prevent newspapers from being part of large portfolios managed by people who are more interested in real estate than newspapers.

That idea brings me to David Simon’s testimony.

He presented a engaging essay, but it goes awry with this graf:

“Similarly, there can be no serious consideration of public funding for newspapers. High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper – for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of

every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper. As love-hate relationships go, this is a pretty intricate one. An exchange of public money would pull both sides from their comfort zone and prove unacceptable to all.”

I don’t understand why Simon takes issue with journalism that takes public money while failing to mention the similar pitfalls of accepting private money.

Everything I have read about sustainable media development says the key to long-term success is a diversity of funding sources. Every freelance writer will tell you this is true: a diverse revenue stream is important for long-term survival.

Why rule out the government as one of those funding sources? A government’s job is to collect taxes from its citizens and use the resulting tax revenue to improve the lives of its citizens.

Journalism done with money collected from the citizens would be, by nature, accountable to those citizens. And it is in the government’s interest to fund a free press (which I mean in a platform-neutral sense), because the press is useful for distributing all kinds of information to citizens.

Giant private companies (and, to a lesser extent, publicly traded companies) don’t always have that interest. And they are given extreme leeway (as compared to the government, at least the U.S. government) when it comes to transparency about their budgets. A look at today’s unemployment rolls tells us what a good idea it is for businesses to be intransparent.

It’s easily riskier to take money from private companies – which can stonewall and intimidate journalists to a greater extent than public companies - than it is to take money from the government.

That point addressed, I find it hard to understand why Simons can simultaneously think:

“But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued.”

and

“Lastly, I would urge Congress to consider relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions with regard to the newspaper industry, so that the Washington Post, the New York Times and various other newspapers can sit down and openly discuss protecting their copyright from aggregators and plan an industry wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base. Whatever money comes will prove essential to the task of hiring back some of the talent, commitment, and institutional memory that has been squandered.”

Right on. I hope the Senate strongly considered these thoughts. But I fail to see how a non-profit model funded entirely by private money is a good idea.

I just saw the banner headline on the Huffington Post: HELP IS ON THE WAY

I can’t wait to tune into C-Span on 6 May to watch the Senate Hearings. Who knows if U.S. lawmakers are the best people to help the newspaper industry, but at least we’re going to have a discussion. They’re doing the same thing across the pond, by the way.

On the docket: A Maryland senator’s plan to allow newspapers to be nonprofits.

Hey, it works for The Guardian!

I read today that The New York Times is considering putting its content again behind a wall. Nearly all content at NYT.com has been free for nearly two years.

I’d be disappointed for sure to see this happen. But would I go so far as to buy a subscription? Who are the people who would take out a subscription?

Maybe they’re the same kind of people who religiously pay for music on iTunes. Check out this cool graphic Vanity Fair created a few weeks ago, imagining a micropayment plan of sorts for news content.

I think someone should try this…