To quote the owner of a popular sports fan discussion forum (emphasis mine):

The problem is several of the provisions in SOPA will force ISPs hosting websites (ie: the company that hosts our servers) to potentially disconnect us from the Internet if there’s a claim – unsubstantiated or not – that we’re infringing against copyright, regardless of if it has not been fully proved in court. The argument is that this would make it easy for someone to make false or weak claims against the site to take a us offline until we went to court.

That’s a headache I’m not prepared to deal with. The number of threats I get each year via e-mail from angry members from other teams we remove are pretty unreal and obviously you guys don’t see them, so giving any additional ammunition backed up by a law like this would be a potentially huge issue. I’ve been talking with other sites and it’s a very real concern that we’re all potentially going to be faced with if this goes through, unless it’s rewritten to better target the sites that are really the ones they’re looking to address.

And that’s just from the passions of sports fandom. The passions of the politics — or the commercial interests of those being criticized — are of even greater concern.

Indeed, SOPA-like legislation creates an easy way to take down any forum, blog, or other site that allows user-generated content: flood it with copyrighted content, then run to the regulators. We must never, ever, ever accept a legal regime in which publishers may be censored before they are PROVED to be guilty of wrongdoing.

the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle

and mentor/investor/board member Mike Arrington simply called

to be the paper of record for Silicon Valley

That, I believe, is in the form a journalistic mission statement should take:

• “We (will) offer the best X about Y”, where …
• … “X” is something like news or analysis or opinion and …
• … “Y” is a particular subject area.

But there’s a problem with that template. One would ideally wish a mission statement of the form “We do the best A” to be followed up by “and, obviously, people will pay lots of money for A”. Journalistic mission statements don’t have that nice property.

Fortunately, at least in the case of tech blogging, they do tend to have a nice substitute. Let me explain.

TechCrunch and Pando Daily seem to have the same business plan:

• Create a popular and respected blog.
• Use the access provided by that popularity and respect to populate great conferences.
• Use the readership provided by that blog to promote the conferences.
• Ka-ching.

I have an analogous plan for DBMS 2:

• Create a popular and respected blog.
• Use the access provided by that popularity and respect to inform great consulting.
• Use the readership provided by that blog to promote the consulting.
• Ka-ching.

Other business models, such as GigaOm’s, would seem to be a hybrid of our two. All are what could be called “freemium” models, even if the other guys (and gals) sell a few ads as well. All seem to work.

Here’s what I think is the non-obvious part of our models:

Different parts of our readership are important for different reasons.

To a first approximation:

• Everybody who reads our work and benefits from it makes us feel good, and motivates us to do more.
• Everybody who reads our work and is influenced by it makes tech vendors want to be on our good side, talk to us, give us insight, please us by speaking at our events, and so on.
• A moderate fraction of our readers help us expand our readership by word-of-mouth.
• Only a small fraction of our readers chip in with helpful blog comments, insightful/tip-off e-mail, and the like, or by publicly throwing us links/tweets.
• Only a small fraction of our readers are likely to ever give us money.

I think a lot of successful journalistic (or quasi-journalistic) business models will be similarly layered.

• TechCrunch got sold, GigaOm raised money, and VentureBeat/MediaBeat provided a good starting link for both those stories and more.  Since TechCrunch and GigaOm are/were both private, financial details are murky, but:
  • TechCrunch is variously reported as having revenue in the $6-10 million range, probably mainly from events. (If you believe that they sell ~3000 total tickets at ~$2000 each to two annual versions of TechCrunch Disrupt, that makes sense.)
  • GigaOm reports >10,000 subscribers to market research sevice (sort of) GigaOm Pro, at $199, apparently concentrated on the vendor side.
• John Gruber straightforwardly posts both ad rates and circulation for his blog. It’s a simple $5000/week for readership that exceeds mine by >1 order of magnitude.
• The New Yorker points out Gawker Media may not yet have crossed $20 million in revenue.
• An “ASCAP for news” seems to finally be on the way.
• Business Week/Bloomberg notices a trend that social-media/Voice of the Customer/Voice of the Market text analytics firms are getting acquired by bigger marketing-oriented firms. Seth Grimes, however, argues that the same trend is already passe’.
• TechCrunch accused the Wall Street Journal of killing a story about sister company MySpace, then quickly running it after TechCrunch caught them.
• LinkedIn has a really cool-looking tech blog. One recent post describes LinkedIn’s approach to socially-informed search. I read about it in a thoughtful post on Daniel Tunkelang’s blog.
• Bill Simmons took 3843 words to explain the story of a two-word tweet — “moss Vikings.” Somewhere in there are a few interesting ruminations about media in the current age.
• Some notes and links that actually belong here instead went up on DBMS 2 a few weeks ago.
• About half of what I write about liberty and privacy is highly relevant to the subjects of this blog, including almost all of today’s post.

In particular, he argues:

• The value of journalism can only be assessed in connection with how people use it …
• … and their lack of enthusiasm about New Media news is a warning sign.
• Technology and form factor matter; imitating old media is likely not the best way to go.
• Personalization and targeting need to be a lot better. In particular:
  • What’s most important is getting stories to the people who are likely to want to act on what’s in them. The true value of journalism lies in informing people’s choices and actions. (By contrast, he seems to denigrate the other main benefits of news, which are pure entertainment and/or the facilitation of social interaction.)
  • It’s OK and natural that the people inclined to act — on  a given story or indeed at all — are only a small fraction of the overall population.

I am in vehement agreement with much of what Stray has to say, although I think he understates the importance of general knowledge and the often serendipitous benefits of pursuing same. For example:

• I tend to assume that what we write affects people’s choices by supporting their informed judgments.
• I think it is neither necessary nor acceptable to let investigative reporting wane.
• I have witheringly negative opinions about vacuous “news.”

And I indeed try to practice what Stray preaches. Most of my own posts — especially when you weight them by length and/or time spent researching and writing them — are designed to help at least some people make on-the-job decisions.

• I do just mean “help,” the assumption being that people read my work as part of a general research process.
• That lots of you read more for general interest or education is great. I suspect you still like the standard of quality to which I aspire, namely that what I write should in most cases actually be informative even to people who have reason to be well-informed in the area already.

There are still some things we need to do to preserve and extend the societal benefits of investigative reporting. But they are straightforward and very likely to happen.

Specifically, I recommend: 

• Public-spirited law-oriented types should do a better job of popularizing tips for how to get information out of government (Freedom of Information Act and all that). And back it up with more pro bono or charitably-funded legal assistance – not just for specific causes, but for general corruption investigations as well.
  • I’m sure quite a bit of that is happening, but it should be much more visible and active.
• Domain-specific websites should be created and promoted that seek out and call attention to negative stories in their particular areas, especially for specific industries or geographical regions.
  • A lot of those exist targeted at specific large companies people have grudges against, but otherwise they’re much too hard to find.
• Reporters need to be in the habit of seeking out stories first uncovered by other people.
  • They do this already, but they need to get better.

Below, at considerable length, is why I think those developments are both necessary and sufficient to carry the tradition of investigative journalism forward into the new media era.

For there to be public benefit from reporting, three things generally need to occur:

• Disclosure or discovery of the raw facts. Without that, you don’t have reporting or news.
• Analysis or interpretation. This stage can be optional when the purpose of news is entertainment, societal bonding, or whatever. But it’s pretty central to investigative journalism.
• Distribution and popularization. It doesn’t do much good to uncover an important story unless people notice and care about it. Old media, with its emphases on writing, curation, and physical distribution, almost defines itself by this stage. (E.g., “paper” is part of the word “newspaper.”)

Disclosure and discovery come in two main forms:

• Serendipity.
• Spadework.

The serendipity part often seems to work well in the new media. Let’s go to some examples.

• Wikileaks is a hugely successful case – people send Wikileaks documents or other files (a process that only makes sense with modern technology), and Wikileaks posts them.
  • Note: There was an  article yesterday about “internal strife” at Wikileaks – but the gist turned out to be that Wikileaks, already highly influential, could be doing even more than it already is.
• Michael Arrington found out about a meeting of major angel investors – perhaps originally via a tweet – and kicked off a major technology industry news story now known as “Angelgate”.
• An anonymous tipster spent 2 ½ hours IMing with me to reveal the true cause of the JP Morgan Chase site outages.
  • Motivation: Because s/he felt Chase’s technology organization was being unfairly maligned by prior coverage.
  • Why me: Because my previous speculative post about the JP Morgan Chase outages had shown up in the search engines and looked pretty credible.)
  • Result: Enough accurate tech details of a major consumer embarrassment to create a “teachable moment,” even though the concerned parties were trying to cover them up.
• An assisted living/nursing home in Dublin, Ohio called Friendship Village misbehaved toward my parents and me. I blogged about the problem, and it’s in the search engines now. If this turns out to be a pattern of behavior rather than an isolated incident, they’ll have some deserved trouble.

The story on the spadework side is more mixed. For example, there’s evidence I did as good a job on the JP Morgan Chase story as conventional media could today – Computerworld ran a story based on my post, without being able to uncover a single detail I hadn’t already found. But perhaps in the old-media-economics days, perhaps Computerworld would have had the resources to try harder and find something I didn’t. (E.g., I screwed up and didn’t actually get the details of the specific Oracle bug.) A bigger problem is outlined in this story on the uncovering of massive corruption in the California town of Bell. To wit (emphasis mine):

The new media ecosystem, in which citizen bloggers, small news outlets and big old-school media outlets effectively draw upon one another’s work to collaborate, didn’t quite work out in this case.

One blogger actually has anonymously and exhaustively alleged corruption in Bell for years …

The paper’s reporters say the blogger gave them tips. Though he’s a bit frustrated not to get more credit, he says the newspaper’s reporting muscle and much bigger audience gave life to the story in a way his website simply couldn’t. He counts his readers in the scores; The L.A. Times has hundreds of thousands of subscribers …

… some residents said they had gone to city hall to get their own answers. In essence, they were trying to do their own reporting on why their tax bills were so high and on rumors city officials were making a ton of money.

They got nowhere. …

“As a common citizen, I don’t know what my rights are with the city. I don’t know really how to attack them,” Sanchez said. “The Times, they have their legal departments. Of course, they’re able to get it more than a regular Joe like me.”

The citizens of Bell needed some place to turn for help, other than the overworked LA Times reporters who eventually uncovered the story on their own. Hence my first recommendation near the top of this post.

In many ways, analysis and interpretation work well in the new media era already. After all, there’s a whole world wide-web of self-appointed volunteer analysts on any issue you’d care to name! Yes, there are legitimate concerns about fragmentation and echo chambers, in which people only listen to the analysis of those folks who shared their biases to begin with. But those are hardly a barrier to muckraking – if anything, quite the contrary, as illustrated by the bogus ACORN prostitute/pimp advice scandal. (If your politics lean to the conservative side, think instead of something like a Michael Moore film.)

Or returning to the examples above:

• Wikileaks’ biggest leaks are widely analyzed by all sorts of commentators, including top-flight mainstream media people and a broad variety of online commentators alike. I’ll confess I didn’t find any analysis of Wikileaks’ revelations about, say, Iceland or the Turks & Caicos Islands, but I’ll also confess to not looking very hard.
• For the technology news uncovered respectively by Arrington and me, pretty much the ideal people to analyze it were, respectively – well, they were Arrington and me.
  • In the case of Angelgate, much other analysis (and news) ensued.
  • Analysis of the JP Morgan Chase outage details hasn’t yet gone all that far past me – but I already turned it into a “don’t make the same mistake JP Morgan Chase did” lesson.
• The Friendship Village case is being used as a cornerstone of my slowly-unfolding analysis of the general problem with medical records.

And that brings us to distribution and popularization. The most brilliant sleuthing in the world doesn’t help people very much if they – or their lawmakers/regulators/advisers/whatever – don’t find out about it.

• Wikileaks has that problem solved for its biggest leaks, but perhaps not for the others.
• Arrington’s TechCrunch is a top news outlet in his area, so the problem was automatically solved for him.
• DBMS 2 is a fairly serious outlet for database-related news. But in any case the JP Morgan Chase story was picked up by general trade press and financial-industry-specific press alike.
• As noted in the story on Bell, CA, nobody was paying attention to a blogger who apparently had worked quite a bit of it out.
• And if there’s anything you found lacking in my list of analysis/interpretation examples – well, if a story were picked up more broadly, then analysis/interpretation might also be stronger as well.

Almost nobody would ever see my Friendship Village story if I didn’t happen to own some websites with strong search engine authority. And how high it stays in the rankings as it ages still remains to be seen.

Possible answers take two main forms:

• Aggregation and curation,* in which various contributions are bundled together at go-to websites or the like.
• A reporting feeding chain, in which journalists with broader reach:
  • Steal/borrow/take ideas from more specialized contributors.
  • Repackage them.
  • Perhaps add additional value in reporting, analysis, or presentation. (Several examples of this may be found in the links above.)

Investigative reporting needs more of each.

*The latter is the more high-falutin’ version of the former.

Consider my story about Friendship Village. Standing alone, it’s not going to influence much of anybody, except insofar as I can personally influence the course of medical database design or privacy law. But suppose one person each reported similar things at 20 different institutions. A journalist who wrote a story based on those reports could carry a lot of sway, perhaps:

• Influencing the course of medical information exchange in the United States, or at least
• Alerting people to the lengths they have to go to get proper information about and before their sick relatives.

Similarly, suppose there were a go-to website for complaints about assisted living facilities. Well, people considering moving into Friendship Village would have a little concern to address. Even better, the very existence of that site might help motivate people to share more stories. Bad institutions would need to reform, and bad practices might be reformed under the spotlight of public scrutiny.

If this isn’t my longest blog post ever, it’s surely close. So while I have much more to say on these subjects, I’ll stop here. Comments and examples are warmly encouraged.

The embeds of the future will work for the company, and be paid by the company to provide news about the company in a multitude of formats. Print, newsletter, video, blog, podcast, moving billboards, tattoos — whatever it takes. Because the bits and pieces of Corporate America that have a story to tell will still have their stories – just no ready outlets.

How is this different than what you have today? Surely there are corporate PR departments and external agencies already doing these things, right?

No.

What is required is an internal producer who writes in external voice — like the neutral point-of-view so often described by Wikipedia. People can smell marketing and propaganda coming around the corner, and they know when the pitches and puff pieces are missing that edge of neutrality. An accurate and fair piece is accurate and fair, no matter who writes it.

It’s an interesting theory, but it seems to presuppose dual marketing communication efforts, with separate departments of “Straightforwardness” and “Hype”. That may work at some companies, but in most cases I think it will be more practical to try to infuse straightforwardness through multiple parts of the marcom effort.

My more specific quick responses include:

• That sure sounds a lot like Robert Scoble in his Microsoft days.
• It also sounds like “community managers” at MMO game companies. (Both of the MMOs I’ve played have had great ones.) They often only use one or two channels (forums and the associated general website), but otherwise they fit the bill.
• Ike’s views fit very well with mine on the future of the information ecosystem.
• I’m getting ever more sympathetic to the idea that you need people whose main job is external communication of a straightforward kind. Reasons include:
  • Senior executives who write great blogs commonly don’t keep them up. And even when they’re active, the blogging is pretty sparse. E.g., among companies I follow closely, Vertica, Aster Data, and Netezza have all done some outstanding blogging in the past, but do very little of it now. Only Dave Kellogg at Mark Logic really keeps going.
  • It’s not obvious that senior executives are wrong to spend their time at something other than blogging. One of the greatest vendor blogs ever was Jonathan Schwartz’s at Sun.  Umm — how sure are we that he actually did much good for his company with that effort?
  • I frequently tell vendors “If you tell Story X in your own words, I’ll gladly point to it or post it for you.” They usually agree this is a wonderful idea — but then usually don’t free up the rather limited resources that would be required to take me up on it.
• That said, the kinds of people who provide customer support (pre- or post-sales) are often very well suited to fill the role Ike is describing. At least, that’s the case in enterprise tech companies.
• The media mix isn’t really as complex as Ike was suggesting. It basically falls into two groups: Text, and audio/video.
• That said, text/graphics and audio/video media people are increasingly the same. (Just think of sports media, where the newspaper folks make their big bucks on radio or TV. That’s a harbinger of the future. Or think again of Scoble.)
• One flaw of Ike’s idea is that in its pure form it only makes sense for companies large enough to have multi-person PR staffs. Other firms would have to use part-timers, or outsource.  And if you’re going to do that, might it not make more sense to pay part of the cost of sponsoring, you guessed it, an independent blog?
• I know that’s text/graphics-only, or at least text/graphics-mainly, but I happen to think audio/visual business news/PR is minor anyway. People may give enough attention to, for example, listen to audio from a company if it purports to teach them something. But news ABOUT a company? Who’s so interested in that to sit still for audio/video, unless they happen to be employees, or investors in its stock?

Bottom line: I think he’s wrong about some of his detailed views, but Ike Pigott is directionally very right in suggesting that newsmakers will increasingly become content creators for news about themselves.

And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

That’s a remarkable offer to make, one that is very rare for traditional media to match. As such, it’s a strong (albeit very partial) answer to the ongoing handwringing about the future of investigative journalism.

By the way, I once got an analogous offer — but it was from a company, not a media outlet. In 1994, I broke the news that Sybase’s development efforts were a train wreck.  Gartner Group accelerated its research on the same issue, and went out with the same story*. Sybase faxed libel threats to Gartner and me. I quickly reached out to Sybase competitors for help.  Oracle’s and CA’s general counsels walked me through the legal issues (without overstepping the bounds that would have led them to be “acting as my lawyer”). Larry Ellison promised by email to pay my legal expenses if any. Charles Wang of CA was too cheap to match the offer — but he sat in personally on my call with his lawyer.

*Tony Percy admitted the causality to me a few years later, after he’d left Gartner.

So fortified — and with PR maven Simone Otus doing her best to talk sense into her Sybase clients — I faxed back a pair of two-page letters.  One explained the basis for my written opinions, demonstrating there was NFW I was guilty of libel. The other outlined a proposal for reducing hostilities.  The whole thing simmmered down. Sybase’s sales and earning fell apart a couple quarters later, exactly when I predicted. Management was replaced by people much more friendly to me (Mitchell Kertzman, Dennis McEvoy, et al.). Some outstanding folks got involved in analyst relations (at various times Rob Cooley, Dave Taber, and Merv Adrian, which is pretty much a Hall of Fame class right there).  And all was cool.  But I digress …

Anyhow, my main point is that the new information ecosystem is constantly evolving new ways to fill the roles that traditional media are, at least in part, vacating. TechCrunch’s bold act of investigatory journalistic commitment is just one example.

And while it’s now almost 15 years old, my Sybase story shows another way this can work. I’m a self-employed analyst and writer now, just as I was then. But even so, I can afford to research and write contentious things, without concern for legal intimidation.

But community can’t be copied. Even if you mirrored all of this blog’s content and put someone else’s name on it, the comment threads would still live here. You could copy those too, but only the readers who came here could participate in the conversation, and I believe that would still draw most of you.

Frankly, I don’t think that would work. Good blog commenters are precious, generously donating their own time and thought to build up your content. Could one charge people to read that? Maybe. But charging people to write great content for you seems like one barrier too many, and I’m not sure how to charge them to read without also charging them to write. That said, various forums (i.e., message boards) offer premium forums, so at least for some lifestyle business owners the approach seems to be worth pursuing.

Other strategies to consider include:

1. Charging more money to fewer customers for the core printed product. Apparently, that’s what Newsweek and many European publications are doing.

Speaking to the New York Times, Newsweek’s CEO Tom Acheim said: “For us, mass is a business that doesn’t work. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. We did it for a long time, successfully, but we can’t anymore”.

The idea is that, unless you have sufficiently high ad rates, you lose money on each copy or subscription anyway. So you should shrink your circulation to the point that your average reader is a high-value advertising target. Makes sense to me. But I feel I don’t know enough about advertising business models to comment further right now.

2. The premium/freemium of general enhanced access to actual New York Times reporting or opinion. When this is done just with published opinion/analysis, the results seem to be so-so. Most relevantly, the NYT’s own effort in that vein — Times Select — was shut down. ESPN Insider seems fairly successful, but sports news has the advantage that it’s used directly for a couple different kinds of decision making (wagering and fantasy sports). But then, opinions are hardly a scarce commodity! Unless a published opinion serves as a vehicle for communicating valuable knowledge — e.g., a product review based on direct experience and testing, or detailed reporting on a key football player’s availability for the next game, or the experience to judge which publicly-known time series trends are likely to continue and which are likely to reverse — that opinion usually has little or no cash value.

Hence the best opportunities for this strategy probably lie in actually providing more information. Potential premium forms of — or avenues for — information include:

• Longer versions of a story than were put in the main product
• Observations – perhaps in blog form — that never made it into actual stories
• More photos than made it into a story (although I don’t think of photos as a “Grey Lady” strength)
• Some kind of direct communication with reporters.

3. Topic-specific premium information subscriptions. Rupert Murdoch evidently favors this approach for the Wall Street Journal, and I heartily endorse it. It is reasonable to expect people to pay for the “best” information on a particular subject. And a respected newspaper like the New York Times could usefully partner with specialized organizations as need be, potentially adding value on both the content and business sides — both in its native region, where it’s obviously a leading brand, and (inter)nationally, where it might be an interloper competing with local newspapers and other providers.

There are many possible subject areas to consider, such as:

• Sports (national sports news with a strong local bias)
• Theater
• Art (museums and commercial galleries both)
• Film
• Fine dining
• Food (home-prepared)
• Hyperlocal politics and business

A number of the opportunities do seem quite small (just how much better can one do in any one of them than 10-50,000 subscribers?). Even so, this opportunity should have been pursued more aggressively in the past, and it absolutely should be pursued with full force now.

4. One-off ancillary products. Possibilities include:

• Online or offline events — chats, lectures, whatever.
• Books, etc. – it is already common for major news publications to pursue this strategy to the best extent they can figure out.
• T-shirts/tote bags/coffee mugs — probably not a large revenue line in itself, or a large incentive for a subscription to some more general premium service. But hey, it’s some revenue, which amounts to people paying you for the privilege of advertising their fondness for your product.

Again, each of these opportunities seems, on its own, to be fairly small. But the day of mass-produced-only news is rapidly waning. The news providers that thrive in the internet-centric era will be the ones that successfully exploit a variety of customer clusters, market niches, and revenue-stream opportunities.

• “Freemium” models, in which one gives away some good information but charges for the best stuff, can succeed. I do that, in a way. So does ESPN.com. Rupert Murdoch, so far as I can tell, proposes to make WSJ.com more like ESPN.
• Charging by some kind of usage metric doesn’t make sense. This seems to be what the New York Times is thinking about. It may also be what Murdoch is suggesting for some of his other properties.
• Grand cosmic all-you-can-consume-of-all-but-the-most-highly-valuable-information subscriptions — e.g., an “ASCAP for news” — could be marketable. And I don’t even think they’d require the antitrust exemptions the newspaper industry is whining for.

Those conclusions, in turn, are based on the theory that the the best selling proposition for decision-supporting information and information technologies is:

Keeps you fully and conveniently informed about subject area X, where X is important to you.

Here’s some background as to why I think that.  So far as I can tell, why one consumes information almost always boils down to one or more of four reasons:

• To be entertained. This is, obviously, the main purpose of entertainment. It is also a major purpose of “frivolous” news — e.g., about sports, celebrities, or cute cats. What’s more, serious news sources and advice-givers are often judged in part based on how pleasant or unpleasant it is to listen to them.
• To aid in decision-making. Service providers such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and (at least in principle) stockbrokers help you make decisions. So do general consultants. So, hopefully, do business intelligence tools. Technology news is, in principle, focused on helping with practical decision-making. So are the only categories of consumer newsletter that ever thrived in the dead-tree subscription era (health and investment). I could list many more examples.
• To be sufficiently well-informed. Reasons one might wish to be well-informed include:
  • To make better practical decisions. One of the biggest fears when making a decision is that there’s something you don’t know about that will make the decision a bad one. You hire experts in large part to keep you out of trouble. You use analytic technology in large part to warn you of trouble. And a huge part of investing is looking for and hopefully ruling reasons for a company and stock to suddenly fall apart. Many other decision processes are similarly guided by fear, especially of risks yet unknown.
  • To make better voting decisions. If one does a strict cost-benefit analysis, based on the value and likelihood of affecting the outcome of an election, it isn’t even worth the trouble to go to the polls, let alone to inform oneself well enough to make a careful decision. People vote out of a laudable desire to do their part in society (conscious version) or because it’s expected of them (unconscious version). But by extension, this analysis means that the cash value of news that’s useful just for voting decisions is very low, unless your engagement with politics goes beyond mere dutiful poll-going.
  • To facilitate social interaction (whether “water-cooler” and other business-related socializing, or purely social) or, similarly, to avoid the embarrassment of not knowing. Incidentally, this can be a reason for watching a popular TV show or keeping up with sports just as it is for reading the “hard” news.
  • To be educated for future benefit, or just because. People like knowing things. Students are obligated to know things, at least until their final exams are over.
• To flatter (or avoid irritating) the speaker (or somebody the speaker represents). Polite listening plays a huge role in family relationships, classroom behavior and, dare I say it, religious observances. I further suspect that it underlies certain consulting engagements for analysts such as myself.

So what kinds of business models suit these purposes?

• Polite listening is an essentially personal form of interaction. As such, it plays little role in most publishing organization’s business models, and I will not consider it further in this post.
• Educational publishing is a special subject that I also won’t deal with right now.
• Entertainment has traditionally been paid for in connection with a specific item or event, e.g. a concert, book, CD, DVD set, movie showing, or just an individual song. There are plenty of subscription examples too, from humor magazines to pornography services to, of course, cable television itself. Finally, ancillary and/or licensed merchandise is an ever increasing source of revenue, from overpriced food and parking at event venues to the huge business in t-shirts and sports team jerseys.
• Staying well-informed mainly for social purposes is what you do by consuming the same news (and perhaps entertainment) everybody else does. The entertainment side of this can be a unique property — probably a television broadcast — monetized in the usual ways. But the news side is increasingly a commodity, due to internet-based competition.
• General political news is a hard-to-profit-from commodity too. This is the source of much recent angst, in part because it raises the possibility that it may be hard to find a good way to fund much-needed investigative reporting. On the other hand, with all the interested and even passionate parties involved, other sorts of political reporting and analysis are likely to thrive in the new-era information ecosystem.
• Quick-hit advice is delivered via quite a few different business models, from professional services to self-help books and seminars. Or it can arrive for free, via friendly chitchat — which can occur via communication media as new as Twitter or as old as the dinner table.*

*And yes, there are definitely some opportunities to aggregate into a critical mass and then monetize electronically-delivered free advice. But that’s a special case of the topic of the next paragraph …

Finally, with all that underbrush cleared away, we arrive at the main points:

• In a large fraction of cases, information purchases and consumers are looking for the most comprehensive and reliable source(s) of information and informed advice on a particular topic area.
• If the two goals are in conflict, comprehensive is the more important criterion.
• If the main goals are met, convenience is a crucial second criterion.
  • Pre-internet, “convenience” commonly equated to physical delivery of newspapers, television news broadcasts, etc.
  • Now, convenience commonly equates to interface and analysis technology, in areas such as search and business intelligence.

Cases where this seems true include:

• Stock quote terminals and the like, which are a multi-billion dollar industry, with almost all the revenue going to convenient, all-in-one box suppliers. Reuters beat Quotron on technology. Bloomberg beat Reuters on both information and technology.
• The success of search engines vs. more structured web portals.
• Earlier, the success of the general Web vs. “walled gardens” such as AOL.
• The success of Wikipedia vs. more carefully managed (but narrower) information sites.
• Pre-Web, the daily newspaper.
• The ascendancy of the Web over the (now suddenly limited-seeming) daily newspaper.
• Pre-Web, the multi-billion dollar industry of newsletters, most of which simply aggregated hard-to-get news.
• The failure of what are now many generations of limited enterprise dashboard products, even as dashboards succeed in contexts where they indeed provide more comprehensive information.

If you believe all that, then it follows reasonably that a top selling proposition for information is keeps you fully and conveniently informed about subject area X, where X is important to you. And that, in turn, leads to the business model comments I put at the top of this post.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”