Governments have resorted to spending hundreds of billions in a bid to recover the economy. The spending frenzy has attracted a lot of industries that were under pressure anyway: why not get a bailout as well?
One of the industries under attack are newspapers. What is the business model to survive in the Internet age where news is no longer the exclusive domain of journalists?
The wrong answer is proposed in the WaPo by 2 lawyers. Create crazy laws like:
Change copyright law so that “the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement.”
One commenter describes their proposal as the “Dinosaur Recovery Act”.
But if they have the wrong answer, what is the right answer?
Recently the former chairman of Nokia has given a speech to newspaper companies about their future. His message was simple: ”Become Free or Fantastic”.
I agree. I will pay for extra information, good background research and so on, not for fleeting “news”. But why do I have to pay for a large organization, overhead and so on, and for journalists that do not add value for me?
I see a future where we pay individual journalists/bloggers (or maybe a small group of journalists) directly for their contributions. Does it add up? Lets assume a contribution of one (1) euro per month per subscriber. With 10.000 subscribers or more you are in business.
How could you introduce such a model and garantuee payments? Use a modified form of RSS and create a billing/aggregation intermediary role (the new “newspaper”?). Lets call the intermediary “Newspal”. Independent journalists/bloggers establish a relationship with Newspal and define their business model/prices. Newspal publishes through open RSS excerpts of their work As a reader you subscribe at Newspal for the journalists/bloggers you value, Newspal feeds you through a special RSS feed their pieces. Newspal pays the journalists according to the amount and price of the subscriptions.
Simple.
Lets start this company.
