Your first day on Twitter can be rough. Twittering's still a brand new thing to a lot of people, and a lot of people have Twitterfails. Nobody on Twitter on Friday, though, got as much attention as Oprah, who tweeted for the first time.
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Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Technology & Journalism, Pt 3
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There are good and bad futures of journalism, and we’ll likely see a mix. Going the bad route first, let’s talk about ownership. Only three out of the top ten media giants in the world own newspapers – Cox Enterprises, Bertelsmann, and News Corp.
They own papers outside the United States, where the death of print isn’t quite so forthcoming. The majority are entertainment companies and may not understand the public interest to which newspapers serve. All ten companies are publicly owned and have a business-oriented bottom line, and the criticism is drawn that they may allow newspapers to die.
So what does lay in store for print? Time Inc. is unveiling a new publication called mine. The magazine tries to mimic a personalized news feed, drawing content from eight publications. It is a five-issue, ten-week experiment limited to 31,000 print copies and 200,000 online editions, featuring 36 total pages and four full pages of personalized ads for the Lexus 2010 RX sport utility vehicle.
“A sample ad tag line for a respondent named Dave, who lives in Los Angeles and eats sushi, might read: ‘Hey Dave, your friends will be really impressed when you drive down Van Ness Avenue on your way to get sushi.’” The cost of the personalized ads in mine doesn’t cost more than regular ads, but may be worth the effort if it means greater action from the consumer, said David Nordstrom, Lexus' vice president of marketing.
But who says journalism’s future lies in print? The Daily News in LA, put out by MediaNews Group, will be a personalized, newspaper look-a-like PDF file available for download on computers and mobile phones where readers can choose specific stories, authors, keywords, or subjects to read about. The News features personalized advertisements like Time’s mine.
Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab is skeptical that print media can keep up with the Internet in terms of customization, but that they are worth trying out. He likened the MediaNews innovation to a radio gadget that sent out a facsimile newspaper in 1939…and flopped.
E-readers are also pegged as the potential future. These devices have been around for nearly a decade, says Josh Quittner, but nobody really took notice until Amazon released its Kindle over a year ago. The devices need a high-speed network to download text of any kind – print, magazine and the like. The Kindle 2, priced at $359, is still not as good as cheap paper. But just as the automobile replaced the horse and the PC replaced the typewriter, Quittner says nobody got it right on the first try and that these updates took time.
“Any new technology must be ten times as good as the thing it seeks to replace.” He says everybody wants the iPod of e-readers, saying that Apple has done well with their MP3 player and its symbiotic relationship with iTunes, as well as its iPhone App Store.
Isaacson would agree with this, saying that he thinks micropayments should be what people use to purchase content, like they were when the Web was new the to the public. He says a simple interface would allow impromptu purchases, with the revenue helping out traditional newspapers and struggling citizen journalists and bloggers.
Currently, e-readers (specifically the Kindle) aren’t being adopted well. Benton says as a technology guy who loves books, he hasn’t seen a Kindle in the flesh, so to speak, in its fifteen months of existence.
Spending time at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, hosting technology-geared people who sought to learn the fundamentals of e-publishing, only 1 in 8 of those he surveyed had a Kindle. One in two had an iPhone, and maybe 1 in 3 had a Twitter account. No sales numbers for the Kindle have been announced.
Certainly, journalism and technology have meshed in places and clashed in others. This presentation seemed easy enough at the start, but was a real eye-opener to me in terms of depth when I think about the fact that gobs of people write about this kind of stuff everyday, information and sources that I didn’t want to include because of the proverbial bag of worms it would open.
Journalism has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess as one can’t predict the future. But it has a lot of creativity to include facets from several areas discussed here and coming down the pipe in the future. Journalism survived radio, and it survived television, and will find a way to survive amidst the technology presently reaching for its affection.
They own papers outside the United States, where the death of print isn’t quite so forthcoming. The majority are entertainment companies and may not understand the public interest to which newspapers serve. All ten companies are publicly owned and have a business-oriented bottom line, and the criticism is drawn that they may allow newspapers to die.
So what does lay in store for print? Time Inc. is unveiling a new publication called mine. The magazine tries to mimic a personalized news feed, drawing content from eight publications. It is a five-issue, ten-week experiment limited to 31,000 print copies and 200,000 online editions, featuring 36 total pages and four full pages of personalized ads for the Lexus 2010 RX sport utility vehicle.
“A sample ad tag line for a respondent named Dave, who lives in Los Angeles and eats sushi, might read: ‘Hey Dave, your friends will be really impressed when you drive down Van Ness Avenue on your way to get sushi.’” The cost of the personalized ads in mine doesn’t cost more than regular ads, but may be worth the effort if it means greater action from the consumer, said David Nordstrom, Lexus' vice president of marketing.
But who says journalism’s future lies in print? The Daily News in LA, put out by MediaNews Group, will be a personalized, newspaper look-a-like PDF file available for download on computers and mobile phones where readers can choose specific stories, authors, keywords, or subjects to read about. The News features personalized advertisements like Time’s mine.
Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab is skeptical that print media can keep up with the Internet in terms of customization, but that they are worth trying out. He likened the MediaNews innovation to a radio gadget that sent out a facsimile newspaper in 1939…and flopped.
E-readers are also pegged as the potential future. These devices have been around for nearly a decade, says Josh Quittner, but nobody really took notice until Amazon released its Kindle over a year ago. The devices need a high-speed network to download text of any kind – print, magazine and the like. The Kindle 2, priced at $359, is still not as good as cheap paper. But just as the automobile replaced the horse and the PC replaced the typewriter, Quittner says nobody got it right on the first try and that these updates took time.
“Any new technology must be ten times as good as the thing it seeks to replace.” He says everybody wants the iPod of e-readers, saying that Apple has done well with their MP3 player and its symbiotic relationship with iTunes, as well as its iPhone App Store.
Isaacson would agree with this, saying that he thinks micropayments should be what people use to purchase content, like they were when the Web was new the to the public. He says a simple interface would allow impromptu purchases, with the revenue helping out traditional newspapers and struggling citizen journalists and bloggers.
Currently, e-readers (specifically the Kindle) aren’t being adopted well. Benton says as a technology guy who loves books, he hasn’t seen a Kindle in the flesh, so to speak, in its fifteen months of existence.
Spending time at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, hosting technology-geared people who sought to learn the fundamentals of e-publishing, only 1 in 8 of those he surveyed had a Kindle. One in two had an iPhone, and maybe 1 in 3 had a Twitter account. No sales numbers for the Kindle have been announced.
Certainly, journalism and technology have meshed in places and clashed in others. This presentation seemed easy enough at the start, but was a real eye-opener to me in terms of depth when I think about the fact that gobs of people write about this kind of stuff everyday, information and sources that I didn’t want to include because of the proverbial bag of worms it would open.
Journalism has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess as one can’t predict the future. But it has a lot of creativity to include facets from several areas discussed here and coming down the pipe in the future. Journalism survived radio, and it survived television, and will find a way to survive amidst the technology presently reaching for its affection.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Technology & Journalism, Pt 2
Labels:
portfolio
So what is technology currently doing with, for, or to journalism? It depends on how you look at it. Some think print’s death is inevitable, and others think that old and new media should work together. This first topic of citizen journalism could be and probably already is the topic of a plethora of books. Citizen journalism can be a multitude of things, but for this presentation I will mainly refer to it as blogs – a Weblog – where people essentially write down whatever they want, fact or fiction.
Andrew Keen describes his problems with the advent of Web 2.0 and its use of amateur voices throughout his book, The Cult of the Amateur. Specifically, Keen calls citizen journalism “journalism by nonjournalists” because of its creators’ lack of formal education and expertise. “The simple ownership of a computer and an Internet connection doesn't transform one into a serious journalist any more than having access to a kitchen makes one into a serious cook,” he says.
Besides that, we can’t be sure if what we see or read on a blog (among other things) is the truth. When Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, initial reports came through on blogs and helped spread rumors. Keen argues that citizen journalists don’t have the resources professionals do.
On the flipside, he quotes Dan Gillmor, a champion of citizen journalism, who says that if a blogger reports the wrong info, other users will jump to comment telling him or her that the information is incorrect. Cori Faklaris of the Indianapolis Star provided very useful starting points for this entire project. Of blogs, she said:
“People complain quite rightly that most blogs are partisan, poorly sourced and unprofessional. Really though, it's not any different from what journalism was back in the 1700s… Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin were publishing rags so full of innuendo and non-truths that the New York Post and the National Enquirer would have been horrified, if they had existed at the same time.”
Keen quoted a Pew study, saying that 34% of bloggers – over four million people – considered their work a form of journalism. He argues that website owners aren’t held liable for their content like newspaper editors are. “In America, bloggers don't go to jail for their work. That's the difference between professionals and amateurs. It's as if libel law has taken a brief vacation so that citizen journalists can get their feet wet,” said Al Saracevic, deputy business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview with Keen.
Henry Jenkins, MIT professor and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, is behind blogs. Jenkins likes the fact that content producers can pool information and grassroots expertise. People can debate evidence and challenge one another’s assumptions. Jenkins also argues that bloggers make no claim to objectivity and that some are even “unapologetically partisan,” an argument Keen leaves out.
Bloggers say mainstream journalism is unreliable because it trivializes politics and makes issues sound easier than they really are. Jenkins credits both traditional media and new media with a trade of information – the professionals get ideas from bloggers, and bloggers link to professional reports. But why? “The old media are becoming faster, more transparent, more interactive - not because they want to be, but because they have to be,” says Jenkins.
Blogs aren’t the only trend sweeping through journalism today. Twitter is a microblogging system, allowing users to “tweet” a thought or idea for 140 characters or less. Often times, Twitter users post a link to another site for users to visit. When people ask me what Twitter is, I tell them it is essentially Facebook’s status feature. One might ask, “well, how can a journalist use Twitter?”
A site called ReadWriteWeb talked about the positives and the hurdles Twitter has to offer. First, Twitter is fast. With the aid of a laptop or mobile phone, reporters can tweet in near real-time to what is happening at the scene. Twitter was the first place users posted about the earthquakes in Japan and China, and users tweeted about one in Mexico even before the USGS registered it.
Like blogs, Twitter allows for two-way communication. In the scope of time, Twitter updates can occur in minutes or seconds because of its character limit. Blogs, a little more thought out, can take hours. And traditional media, like TV and newspapers, can take a whole day.
Twitter also has played host to interviews – a form of reporting called a Twitterview or a Twinterview. ABC’s George Stephanpoulos conducted an interview with John McCain solely through Twitter on Tuesday, March 17. The exchanges weren’t as long-winded as they were in front of a live audience on the campaign trail because of Twitter’s 140-character limit, but McCain got his points across in an easy-to-read format. On March 19, the Chicago Tribune changed its masthead names to Twitter usernames. For example, @twhunter was listed as the publisher, @GerryKern was the editor, and so on.
Twitter is not without its faults. Anybody following more than a few users can see how many tweets come in at once. Third-party software filters these a little better, but I have yet to experiment with one. So many tweets at once can become muddled and out of context as there are no threads.
Plus, it’s just plain hard to find people. There is no unified search method like there is on MySpace and Facebook. A lot has been talked about with a Twitter search, but nothing has come about as of this writing. In the last week or so, there has been some buzz about Twitter adding paid accounts, but there is no official word on that either.
The focus here is on blogs and Twitter instead of general news websites because not everybody has adopted them yet. But totally leaving news sites out of this presentation is hiding part of the story. The American Journalism Review at one time had reported nearly 5,000 newspaper sites, a number that has surely risen. In 2002 almost half of the top 20 news sites were newspaper sites. By going online, newspaper sites found themselves in direct competition for the first time with broadcast and cable news. But, newspapers now have the opportunity for their website to scoop their print edition. In 1999, 58% of papers said they wouldn’t let this happen. As of a few years ago, only 45% said they wouldn’t.
Those who start a news site have reduced the amount of capital in starting a newspaper – no printing press, no distribution, no real estate, and so on. While the cost is low to start, Pavlik and McIntosh make sure to note that the cost of producing quality content is still high. And many online media outlets have a backer, like MSNBC. Regardless, the online audience is much more active and has many more choices for content than in previous years.
Andrew Keen describes his problems with the advent of Web 2.0 and its use of amateur voices throughout his book, The Cult of the Amateur. Specifically, Keen calls citizen journalism “journalism by nonjournalists” because of its creators’ lack of formal education and expertise. “The simple ownership of a computer and an Internet connection doesn't transform one into a serious journalist any more than having access to a kitchen makes one into a serious cook,” he says.
Besides that, we can’t be sure if what we see or read on a blog (among other things) is the truth. When Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, initial reports came through on blogs and helped spread rumors. Keen argues that citizen journalists don’t have the resources professionals do.
On the flipside, he quotes Dan Gillmor, a champion of citizen journalism, who says that if a blogger reports the wrong info, other users will jump to comment telling him or her that the information is incorrect. Cori Faklaris of the Indianapolis Star provided very useful starting points for this entire project. Of blogs, she said:
“People complain quite rightly that most blogs are partisan, poorly sourced and unprofessional. Really though, it's not any different from what journalism was back in the 1700s… Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin were publishing rags so full of innuendo and non-truths that the New York Post and the National Enquirer would have been horrified, if they had existed at the same time.”
Keen quoted a Pew study, saying that 34% of bloggers – over four million people – considered their work a form of journalism. He argues that website owners aren’t held liable for their content like newspaper editors are. “In America, bloggers don't go to jail for their work. That's the difference between professionals and amateurs. It's as if libel law has taken a brief vacation so that citizen journalists can get their feet wet,” said Al Saracevic, deputy business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview with Keen.
Henry Jenkins, MIT professor and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, is behind blogs. Jenkins likes the fact that content producers can pool information and grassroots expertise. People can debate evidence and challenge one another’s assumptions. Jenkins also argues that bloggers make no claim to objectivity and that some are even “unapologetically partisan,” an argument Keen leaves out.
Bloggers say mainstream journalism is unreliable because it trivializes politics and makes issues sound easier than they really are. Jenkins credits both traditional media and new media with a trade of information – the professionals get ideas from bloggers, and bloggers link to professional reports. But why? “The old media are becoming faster, more transparent, more interactive - not because they want to be, but because they have to be,” says Jenkins.
Blogs aren’t the only trend sweeping through journalism today. Twitter is a microblogging system, allowing users to “tweet” a thought or idea for 140 characters or less. Often times, Twitter users post a link to another site for users to visit. When people ask me what Twitter is, I tell them it is essentially Facebook’s status feature. One might ask, “well, how can a journalist use Twitter?”
A site called ReadWriteWeb talked about the positives and the hurdles Twitter has to offer. First, Twitter is fast. With the aid of a laptop or mobile phone, reporters can tweet in near real-time to what is happening at the scene. Twitter was the first place users posted about the earthquakes in Japan and China, and users tweeted about one in Mexico even before the USGS registered it.
Like blogs, Twitter allows for two-way communication. In the scope of time, Twitter updates can occur in minutes or seconds because of its character limit. Blogs, a little more thought out, can take hours. And traditional media, like TV and newspapers, can take a whole day.
Twitter also has played host to interviews – a form of reporting called a Twitterview or a Twinterview. ABC’s George Stephanpoulos conducted an interview with John McCain solely through Twitter on Tuesday, March 17. The exchanges weren’t as long-winded as they were in front of a live audience on the campaign trail because of Twitter’s 140-character limit, but McCain got his points across in an easy-to-read format. On March 19, the Chicago Tribune changed its masthead names to Twitter usernames. For example, @twhunter was listed as the publisher, @GerryKern was the editor, and so on.
Twitter is not without its faults. Anybody following more than a few users can see how many tweets come in at once. Third-party software filters these a little better, but I have yet to experiment with one. So many tweets at once can become muddled and out of context as there are no threads.
Plus, it’s just plain hard to find people. There is no unified search method like there is on MySpace and Facebook. A lot has been talked about with a Twitter search, but nothing has come about as of this writing. In the last week or so, there has been some buzz about Twitter adding paid accounts, but there is no official word on that either.
The focus here is on blogs and Twitter instead of general news websites because not everybody has adopted them yet. But totally leaving news sites out of this presentation is hiding part of the story. The American Journalism Review at one time had reported nearly 5,000 newspaper sites, a number that has surely risen. In 2002 almost half of the top 20 news sites were newspaper sites. By going online, newspaper sites found themselves in direct competition for the first time with broadcast and cable news. But, newspapers now have the opportunity for their website to scoop their print edition. In 1999, 58% of papers said they wouldn’t let this happen. As of a few years ago, only 45% said they wouldn’t.
Those who start a news site have reduced the amount of capital in starting a newspaper – no printing press, no distribution, no real estate, and so on. While the cost is low to start, Pavlik and McIntosh make sure to note that the cost of producing quality content is still high. And many online media outlets have a backer, like MSNBC. Regardless, the online audience is much more active and has many more choices for content than in previous years.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Technology & Journalism, Pt 1
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portfolio
I wrote this paper for my journalistic writing class. I actually had fun doing it and am proud of my work. I will post in three installments.
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and yes, it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is nothing but wires and lights in a box.” Edward R. Murrow said this of the television, but as pointed out in Bradley’s Communication 101 textbook, it can just as easily be used for the computer today. Journalism is in the midst of a metamorphosis, with old media colliding head to head with new media. Technology is proving once again that the craft needs to stay on its toes and not fall behind. Throughout this presentation, I hope to create an accurate sense of what technology has done, is doing, and may continue to do to journalism in the future. It has been a rocky road to get to today, but even rockier times may be ahead.
What we now consider old or traditional media was at one time new media. Radio became a form of mass communication in the 1920s. It was free, and it could scoop the newspaper. As Bradley audio engineer Dave Lennie put it in his production class I took last fall, radio survives largely because of cars. Television came along in the 1940s and 1950s, causing a steep decline in newspapers. It could scoop the newspaper, like the radio, but had the distinct advantage over radio in that you could actually see what was happening.
One of my favorite examples of radio versus television is the 1960 election, pitting Richard Nixon versus John F. Kennedy. During the debates, those that listened to the radio thought Nixon performed better. But those who actually watched on television saw Nixon didn’t look too great in front of a screen, as opposed to the tanned, handsome senator from Massachusetts. Since then, television has dominated culture here in the United States.
Neither radio nor television killed print journalism. But now, newspapers are threatened once again by emerging new media technology, this time in the form of blogs, Twitter, e-readers, and personalized news, all largely due to the ubiquity of the Internet.
This notion of newspapers going online isn’t an entirely new occurrence. As early as the 1970s, the Toronto Globe and Mail allowed public access to its news database. The idea was close to a generation ahead of its time because it didn’t adapt well. In 2001, the New York Times launched its first online edition. It was an exact replica of the print version. Its cost: 65 cents.
Wait, content online hasn’t always been free? Contrary to what one might believe, it hasn’t. In fact, free content wasn’t the intended goal at all. Newspapers and magazines were charging for their content in paper, so why buck tradition?
Web sites originally charged micropayments to consumers in the early 1990s by how many minutes they spent online. The longer content providers could keep a user on the page, the more money they made. This was the original goal of hypertext. Walter Isaacson, a former Time editor, helped invent banner advertisements to bring magazine content online for Wired and Time. The ads generated so much money that they allowed users to view content for free.
Newspapers have more readers than ever, but few of these readers are paying. According to a study from the Pew Foundation, more people in the US get their news for free online rather than paying for it. Traditionally, newspapers have had three modes of revenue – newsstand sales, subscription, and advertising. The web technically produces two of those, but Isaacson only recognizes advertising. “This makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong,” says Isaacson. But it’s not as strong as it once was. In the fourth quarter of 2008, ad revenue took a dip. The stool just got a bit wobblier.
Similarly, there are three main revenue models for online media. The first is advertising. It seems like a good idea. Banner ads can reach a more vast audience – potentially worldwide – than classified ads that exist in just a particular region where a newspaper is distributed. According to the Pavlik and McIntosh text, this is a disappointing revenue for all but the largest portal sites. Start factoring in sites like Craigslist, eBay, and more, and the slump in advertising makes sense.
Next is subscription, which is used by The Wall Street Journal Interactive and Consumer Reports Online. The latter, as of the last update to Pavlik and McIntosh’s COM 101 text, was charging upwards of $50 per year and gained $30 million in revenue. Currently, subscriptions for Consumer Reports Online cost about $26 per year, but no revenue data was found for that. Both companies use partial subscription methods in order to find out what content people will pay for.
The last revenue model is syndication, in which content providers license their material to content distributors. In 2005, this brought in $6 billion. Pavlik and McIntosh believe this will be a fundamental component in the future.
A reasonable argument would be that content providers should never have stopped charging for their material in the first place. But then again, hindsight is always 20/20 and things were looking good for an ad-supported Web.
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and yes, it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is nothing but wires and lights in a box.” Edward R. Murrow said this of the television, but as pointed out in Bradley’s Communication 101 textbook, it can just as easily be used for the computer today. Journalism is in the midst of a metamorphosis, with old media colliding head to head with new media. Technology is proving once again that the craft needs to stay on its toes and not fall behind. Throughout this presentation, I hope to create an accurate sense of what technology has done, is doing, and may continue to do to journalism in the future. It has been a rocky road to get to today, but even rockier times may be ahead.
What we now consider old or traditional media was at one time new media. Radio became a form of mass communication in the 1920s. It was free, and it could scoop the newspaper. As Bradley audio engineer Dave Lennie put it in his production class I took last fall, radio survives largely because of cars. Television came along in the 1940s and 1950s, causing a steep decline in newspapers. It could scoop the newspaper, like the radio, but had the distinct advantage over radio in that you could actually see what was happening.
One of my favorite examples of radio versus television is the 1960 election, pitting Richard Nixon versus John F. Kennedy. During the debates, those that listened to the radio thought Nixon performed better. But those who actually watched on television saw Nixon didn’t look too great in front of a screen, as opposed to the tanned, handsome senator from Massachusetts. Since then, television has dominated culture here in the United States.
Neither radio nor television killed print journalism. But now, newspapers are threatened once again by emerging new media technology, this time in the form of blogs, Twitter, e-readers, and personalized news, all largely due to the ubiquity of the Internet.
This notion of newspapers going online isn’t an entirely new occurrence. As early as the 1970s, the Toronto Globe and Mail allowed public access to its news database. The idea was close to a generation ahead of its time because it didn’t adapt well. In 2001, the New York Times launched its first online edition. It was an exact replica of the print version. Its cost: 65 cents.
Wait, content online hasn’t always been free? Contrary to what one might believe, it hasn’t. In fact, free content wasn’t the intended goal at all. Newspapers and magazines were charging for their content in paper, so why buck tradition?
Web sites originally charged micropayments to consumers in the early 1990s by how many minutes they spent online. The longer content providers could keep a user on the page, the more money they made. This was the original goal of hypertext. Walter Isaacson, a former Time editor, helped invent banner advertisements to bring magazine content online for Wired and Time. The ads generated so much money that they allowed users to view content for free.
Newspapers have more readers than ever, but few of these readers are paying. According to a study from the Pew Foundation, more people in the US get their news for free online rather than paying for it. Traditionally, newspapers have had three modes of revenue – newsstand sales, subscription, and advertising. The web technically produces two of those, but Isaacson only recognizes advertising. “This makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong,” says Isaacson. But it’s not as strong as it once was. In the fourth quarter of 2008, ad revenue took a dip. The stool just got a bit wobblier.
Similarly, there are three main revenue models for online media. The first is advertising. It seems like a good idea. Banner ads can reach a more vast audience – potentially worldwide – than classified ads that exist in just a particular region where a newspaper is distributed. According to the Pavlik and McIntosh text, this is a disappointing revenue for all but the largest portal sites. Start factoring in sites like Craigslist, eBay, and more, and the slump in advertising makes sense.
Next is subscription, which is used by The Wall Street Journal Interactive and Consumer Reports Online. The latter, as of the last update to Pavlik and McIntosh’s COM 101 text, was charging upwards of $50 per year and gained $30 million in revenue. Currently, subscriptions for Consumer Reports Online cost about $26 per year, but no revenue data was found for that. Both companies use partial subscription methods in order to find out what content people will pay for.
The last revenue model is syndication, in which content providers license their material to content distributors. In 2005, this brought in $6 billion. Pavlik and McIntosh believe this will be a fundamental component in the future.
A reasonable argument would be that content providers should never have stopped charging for their material in the first place. But then again, hindsight is always 20/20 and things were looking good for an ad-supported Web.
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