brewery33

With a little help from my friends

I have been at an odds with the @recordnet’s decision to paywall their content. My initial reaction was that they were basically slitting their throat. As the notion of charging for content has fermented in my mind a while, I think that the decision is not far from the solution. Definitely not anywhere close, but closer to solution than to total and utter failure.

Being in business myself, I respect the ideal that a business must make money. Profits are not the only reason a business must produce a black bottom line. For instance if an organization plans any sort of future, innovation and pushing limits is essential. In order to innovate and push limits the organization must employ some pretty talented staff. Talented staff costs money. I get it.

Rather than outline the history of the newspapers presence on the web, we will just assume that if you have made it this far in the essay that you understand the newspapers are charging for previously free content. If you are not aware of that, let me Google that for you.

Enter the paywall. A blogging colleague by geographic area, stated some pretty good criticism of the new fangled business plan that the Record was embarking upon. @slickDiaz noted that if we are supposed to pay for this content, make it worth our while by offering some dynamic content such as podcasts, video, and supporting documents, just to name a few. I have a whole long winded opinion that addresses this approach, but since people like to read 500ish words, I will practice brevity and speak on it another day.

What if we allowed people that are paying customers, to share the article with their friends by providing a link to the paying customer. This special link would end with a number that a script on the referenced page recognizes and allows the person who followed the link access. Influence by creating a social following. I am sure through scripting this could all be possible and traceable to analyze what type of content is popular, by digital word of mouth. Yes there will probably be some sort of hack that will generate scripts to allow common journalism thieves to view the documents without receiving a link from a subscriber, but I don’t think that I would worry so much about people pirating my writing, because at least they are receiving my news and have worked hard to get the news from my source. It is actually kind of flattering.

The notion of allowing people to share is not so crazy. Liken the concept to making a copy of an article to share with a group that you are working with, or to post on the bulletin board at work. Copyright laws are probably broken when people share writing this way, but you just reached an audience that would have otherwise never read your offering. It creates a sort of affiliance program that might encourage people that do not subscribe to the online version of the paper to realize the value of the product through a little taste, from a person that they trust. You could even leverage the power of suggestion by offering local influential bloggers a free account to offer to their readers a peek behind the paywall at the green pastures of dynamic content.

People such as myself and the rest of my generation, digest news a touch different than say our parents and grandparents. Through a completely un-scientific poll I conducted, found that the only people that have agreed to the new paywall model the Record has offered us, are the old people who probably use an aol email start their web surfing by reading the news at Yahoo!, and think that an email client is someone that I sell things to. In my opinion it is time to upgrade your news criers from the kid on the corner and the creepy guy that hangs out in front of the grocery store to the revolutionary idea of social sales.

If anything, the managing staff at the Record could allow this notion access onto the agenda of whatever meeting that whatever board of executives deal with the online subscription department. At that point they can realize that I don’t know what I am talking about and continue down the path of alienating their audience.