Steve Brill, entrepreneur, law writer, founder of Court TV and recently defunct CLEAR is trying to save journalism by reversing the trend of free news online. He gave a briefing today and while I did not hear it, @NeimanLab posted the slides here.

Let me say that I LOVE the idea of a kind of iTunes for news. It is my fondest wish that I not have a separate login and password for every friggin’ site. I’d also love to be able to pay some reasonable rate to support good journalism. Like the App Store, a unified easy payment system might free up news sites to experiment with more granular payment models. I hope they do, and I hope that they understand that the results need to be consumer-friendly and mindful of the information-firehose context of content online.

I’m not a producer of news, but as a heavy consumer, the future of journalism in the face collapse is of great interest to me. As a periodic entrepreneur, I like playing with numbers. Let’s take a look at Steve’s.

Slide 4

I had NO IDEA that my time and attention was so valuable. And all this time I’ve been GIVING it away to newspapers and magazines. Heck, I’ve been PAYING some of them for the privilege. (Hey advertisers, call me! Let’s work out something where you give me the $500 directly.) But hey, look at those online numbers. Pretty grim, huh?

Taking these figures from the Boston Globe, there are only about 20 times as many online readers as as print readers, where one needs 100 unique visitors for every lost print subscriber.

Slide 5

This is where Steve comes to the rescue. There’s an untapped demand for paying for the news! 92% of us would be willing to pay $300/yr (on average)! That sounds pretty good.

Pay close attention to the chart on the right. Steve is confusing us by playing around with medians and means. The chart tells us that 21% of us are ready to pay pay up to $600, 24% would pay that “average” $300, and 45% of us will pay NO MORE than $120. (There’s an unlabelled 10%. Presumably, they are ready to pay INFINITY dollars.)

Using a mean here is disingenuous. If we charge $25/mo. for online news, we will not see 92% of visitors subscribing. We’ll see 55%. The ones willing to pay more? We’ll have to work out some kind of premium scheme, I suppose. So let’s word it another way. 55% of consumers are willing to pay $25/mo or more. 45% are willing to pay $10/mo or less. That begins to look like a lot less money.

Why this matters comes into sharp focus when we look at…

Slide 12 & Slide 13

You’re going to want to click on those and look at the fine print. The subscription models Steve has up here assume $7-8/month per subscriber, along with some per-article users who are reading only 6 stories every month. Let me be the first to say that if you are a newspaper publisher and you imagine a world where people only want to read 6 of your articles per month, YOU ARE A BAD NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER. I recognize that the idea is that these will be longtail micropayments intended to capture revenue from drive-by readership or whatever, so let’s retreat back to the monthly subscriptions (presumably, all-you-can-eat).

Steve’s numbers in Slide 5 don’t specify whether the amount people were willing to pay was intended to be per-site-they-love or overall. Given that most households only subscribe to a single newspaper and a few magazines, I think we can assume that it’s a monthly budget for online news in general.

At $7.50 a month, we’ve wiped out the budget of 45% of our online readership. They can’t afford a second subscription. Even our 24% ‘average’ readers are subscribing to only three things. Heaven help them if they want to sample from a lot of sites. At $0.25 a story, they get to read 100 stories per month across the entire Internet.

According to Google’s RSS reader, I receive 300-400 items, scan through about 30-100 of them, and read some subset of those PER DAY, not counting links from friends/Facebook/Twitter. The Globe and Mail RSS feed alone sends me 180 stories daily (note to Globe and Mail: Guys! That’s too many!). The flood is so bad that I don’t even subscribe to other newspaper feeds. It’s easier and better to click on curated links to the best articles, as picked out by friends and trusted blogs. Steve wants me to rely on a few trusted all-I-can-eat subscriptions or limit myself to 3 articles a day (assuming I’m ‘average’).

Moving from numbers to a boring annecdote: Last week a friend sent me a link to a Financial Times article. I’d gone over my article limit for the month. I went and read something else. (the end) The brutal reality of online news and opinion is that we are inundated with ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more things to read and watch than we have time to read and watch them.

I’m sympathetic with the need to fund excellent journalism and writing, but schemes that are tone deaf to the state of online news are doomed to fail. Hoping that consumers will be willing to limit themselves to a few subscriptions per month while asking them to pay (for magazines at least) 10 times as much as they used to just isn’t reasonable.

Unless the briefing contained a lot of context and nuance that were not captured by the slides, this does not look like the solution. If Brill &co. are going to convince consumers that their new service is a good value proposition, they’ve go an uphill battle.

1. The Photography of Chris Jordan.

   Chris Jordan takes very, very big numbers and represents them in photographs. Here’s one that he made with folded prison uniforms standing in for Americans in prison. More on his official site.

2. The 30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century.

   I found this page by accident several years ago. I end up going back to it when discussions about who’s the worst mass murdered in history come up. The section at the end with the pattern in per-capita killings? Chilling.

3. The Slow Rise of the Oceans.

   Apparently, even if all of the polar ice were to melt today, it would take up to 50 years for that water circulate throughout the world. The planet is so big, and the ocean currents are so powerful, that the water will remain trapped in a kind of slowly dispersing bulge of fluid.

4. The Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste.

   This is something that I want to come back to in some detail as a design problem. For now, take a look at this proposed monument to warn people away from the waste site (wherever it ends up). The waste is going to be dangerous for at least 10,000 years. This is the approximate length of recorded human history. How do you communicate a warning forward to people who will be at least as different from us as we are from the Babylonians?

5. That We’re Currently in an Ice Age.

   This is an interglacial period, a time of relative warmth in the midst of an ice age which is 2-3 million years old. During the past 400,000 years, warm periods like ours have tended to last 10,000 to 30,000 years. The cold has tended to last much longer. Our current (geologically brief) warm period has been happening for about 11,000 years – again, roughly the length of human history.

6. This Video.

   Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

This post exemplifies everything that I think is important about political argument. It displays memory (bringing up an issue that is more than a week old), data (actual information upon which to base a judgement) and context (puts the data in relation to other information). Also it overthrows some pretty appalling common wisdom.

Also, also, even if you bought the old “10% of the votes came from blacks and 70% of blacks voted in favour” story: YOU IDIOTS. WHERE DID YOU THINK THE OTHER VOTES THAT KNOCKED IT OVER 50% CAME FROM?

There are people in my business who took to the highest hills to decry the betrayal of black Californians, and to this day, are giddily noting that blacks sunk marriage equality in California, who foist the failure of marriage equality on seven percent of the electorate . I will not speculate on their motives. But let’s see how loudly they address this study. Let’s see how much ink we see spilled revisiting those assumptions. Or will it be on to the next calamity, where the blacks–or the Arabs, or the Latinos–can be trotted out and blamed for the failings of others. For the failings of us all.

photo credit: Peter Davis

Oh man, this is pretty much everything that this blog is about in one place.

This is a piece of brilliant design, for an excellent presentation about a critical problem, backed up by a raft of interesting statistics relating to the impact and efficacy of helping girls vs helping other groups.

(via Presentation Zen)

photo credit: litmuse

I’m one of those types of people who signs up for online survey panels. Sometimes it gets me free food, sometimes it gets me sneak previews of ads or a chance to critique bottle designs (not kidding). Tonight it got me a chance to see a survey written with a pretty clear intent in the questioning.

The survey opened with some questions about the kinds of things I liked to do in Toronto, moved into asking me how much I liked going to the ROM and asking me if I was interested in a seeing an exhibit on the dead seal scrolls that will be coming in 2009. Then we moved into pricing.

Right now, it costs $22 for an adult to go. It is a rare thing for a group of friends and I to get together and decide that we want to spend $22 each to walk around the museum. Bear in mind that I count among my friends a group who ran a monthly event called “science club” where people did presentations on science topics for each other. If there is a target market for the ROM it’s us and school busses.

The questions went like this:
Do you think $22 is good value for your money? (No)
What if we raised it to $25? (No)
How about if $25 got you to see the special exhibit as well? (No)
Running a museum is expensive, how about $25 now? (Still not coming to your museum)
Shouldn’t the government be paying for this?

At no point did they ask about lower prices or offer any of the usual variety of questions that I’ve seen that would indicate that they were trying to find the sweet spot that would maximize income.

If you see stories in the paper about how 75% of Canadians support increased government funding for museums, you’ll know why.