New Journalistic Business Model: Micro Pricing Articles

 There is an unmistakably growing trend in journalism from legacy media to blogging. That is subscription based content. Major outlets like the New York Times often allow you to view a number of articles a month before requiring a subscription to view more. Reading posts on blogs has mostly been free at platforms like Blogger and WordPress with options for making donations. The site, Patreon, offers a way for bloggers to accept subscription donations and offer exclusive content. Lately, a new site, Substack, has gained popularity allowing bloggers to charge subscriptions. Typically, a post will have a few summarizing or teaser paragraphs with the rest being available to paying subscribers.

One of the big complaints about modern media is that there is such a cornucopia of choices that readers get caught up in their own bubble. It is hard to see a subscription model being of any help. One of points of journalism and blogging is to get your ideas and work out to more people. This is bound to get harder with a growing number of writers competing for subscription dollars. I would like to offer a possible solution from the worlds of music and book publishing.

For a long time the music business sold songs on vinyl records with 45 rpm singles and collections on 33 rpm albums. They then moved on to CDs (compact disks) which were a good fit for albums, but not singles. Then a compressed digital format called MP3 came out and a company called Napster allowed people to share songs in a quasi legal fashion. It's detailed in the forgotten book, All the Rave: The Sudden Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster, by Joseph Menn. Music is now mostly sold as MP3s (or similar format) at iTunes or Amazon. Songs typically sell for about a dollar with albums going for around ten to twenty dollars. Books now also usually include digital versions, most notably on Amazon's Kindle. They usually sell for between ten and twenty dollars, sometimes being discounted for limited time prices of a few dollars.

How should digital articles or blog posts be priced? I would recommend nickels, dimes and quarters. Someone could literally charge for their two cents worth. An article or post should clearly not cost as much as a song, which can be put on a phone or ipod and played repeatedly forever. Articles have currency or timeliness. They do not have the shelf life of a song. Perhaps a time value could be applied. After some freshness period they could become free for people doing research, although with a low enough price (two cents worth?) this might not matter and offer small residuals for writers. The price could also include comment privileges or more precisely comment submission privileges. Of course, parts of an article can remain free such as teasers, summaries or even the whole article with the fee being for notes or links. This could also be applied to artwork or photography by offering higher resolution for a fee. Also, as someone who writes podcast reports for the blog Climate Scepticism, I would be remiss not to mention audio. The fee could include the right to download an MP3 of the article.

This does not mean there can't also be subscriptions. They could still give a volume discount or offer a way for readers to support their favorite writers. Right now I think digital subscriptions, which typically run in excess of $100 a year, are way too high. I don't think $10 to $20 for a book is too high and I sometimes pay that much for fare from writers I detest so that I can slam them in a review. But subscribing to a lot of writers can get pricey and, frankly, I feel that I'm grossly underpaying for a lot of the stuff that I get for free. There's lot's of paywalled articles I'd probably pay five, ten, maybe even fifty cents for. Right now, I only have one digital content subscription, John Ziegler's The Death of Journalism podcast (please check it out).

How would the logistics of this work? In this age of digital baloney slicing, I can't imagine this would require AI or bitcoin mining levels of computing power. This could be done with special accounts or even existing accounts. I usually buy music and Kindle books with Amazon gift cards. I always have what I suppose could be called an Amazon gift card debit balance at the ready and a tiny iTunes balance. Media companies could offer specialized accounts and charge for features such as privacy levels. I don't think the digital overhead for micro pricing would be that high and it could be charged for.

The main benefit to this model is that readers would likely get access to more writers with writers getting access to more readers. Writers would have another metric to evaluate their effort. New writers could take revenue from entrenched writers which may or may not be a bad thing. Quality and popularity would be given a premium. It would be harder for established writers to rest on their laurels. It should definitely benefit newer writers. I think it would have the potential to shake up the stale field with its dreary echo chambers. It might also wrestle some control away from the legacy media and big tech oligarchs. Perhaps a billionaire platform owner who's dissatisfied with the status quo, has ambitious plans for a new landscape and maybe even some experience in online payments might want to take a look. .. Elon, are you listening?

A Mannly Thing that Mann could do

I really detest Dr. Michael E Mann, mostly for what I consider to be an attack on the first amendment -- his defamation lawsuit against Mark Steyn, Rand Simberg, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He's an incredible intellectual narcissist and tireless self promoter. He's done some really shoddy science (his most notable work, the hockey stick, has been completely discredited at Climate Audit), yet he's managed to cultivate  a public persona as one of the worlds leading experts on climate. He's also very vindictive and likes to publicly trash opponents. He's kind of like the Donald Trump of Science. This doesn't mean everything about him is bad, just like with Donald Trump (whom I voted for and will probably vote for again).

What I would like to suggest for him is that, with his prominence, he could show some support for someone at a low point, who showed some for him, when he was at a low point. Former Penn State president, Graham Spanier is being scheduled for sentencing, and may be facing prison time for a bogus misdemeanor conviction related to crimes that didn't even happen!

Why the Penn State Scandal Matters

The Penn State, Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky scandal was a very special, perfect storm, situation. And to be sure, I am coming at it from the position that Jerry Sandusky is almost, with complete certainty, innocent of the things he was charged with. In this post, I want to explain why it matters in the big scheme of things. For those new to this point of view, I'll just have to say that there is a growing list of knowledgeable people who find it credible, including renowned science writer, Mark Pendergrast, former Federal Investigative Service agent, John Snedden, memory expert, Elizabeth Loftus, journalist, Ralph Cipriano, and mainly, journalist, John Ziegler, who's done the most extensive documentation at his site, framingpaterno.com. There are also a lot of journalist who interview him and come away impressed.

There is a lot of injustice in the world and nobody can focus on all of it. How many victims were there? There were three administrators and an aging, long retired coach. Another legendary head coach was also fired. These people had their hard earned reputations destroyed. This is not a lot of people in the big scheme. The university was scammed out of over $100 million. I suppose it could be argued, using the broken window fallacy, that it was paid for by the insurance company, and that it helped stimulate, among other sectors, the fancy sports car market. A charity that attempted to help at risk kids was also dissolved. Something that should also be recognized  is that a lot of people had emotional investments in these institutions.

My Assault on Reason

Late last Friday afternoon I thought I'd try implementing an idea on how to get the latest Penn State scandal revelations into the public discussion.  I thought I'd go to Reason's Hit and Run blog and post comments to most of their writers recent posts. So I commented on these posts and tried to make them at least tangentially related to the content covered:

How To Talk to People Who Think You're Evil and/or Insane: Podcast

The Hidden Legacy of Columbine: Ignorance About School Violence

Some California Cities Are Making It Harder to Quit Smoking

Southern Poverty Law Center Scraps Its Anti-Muslim Hate List

CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence That Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns

When I went back to look at them Saturday, I found that my comments had been deleted and that, while I was allowed to log in, I was not allowed to comment.

Ziegler's Amazon Review Gone -- Picture Remains

I recently read the book, Silent No More. My local library had it in a digital form that I could download to my computer, where it would remain on my computer until it expired on the due date. I also wrote an Amazon review. This is the book by victim number one in the case against Jerry Sandusky. While scrolling down the Amazon page for this book, I was happy to see a picture of John Ziegler waiting to assault the consciences of any of the principals of this case who happen to do the same. I even mentioned it in my review. But I couldn't find any way to click from this picture to the review.

What Kind of Guy is John Ziegler? Ask OJ

On the theme of canned facts (facts that are not reported), there are various reasons why relevant facts are canned, which include, being ignored, being suppressed or simply not being believed. Another reason is that they may have been forgotten. Since I've (to use the pejorative vernacular) bought into John Ziegler's narrative of the Penn State scandal, I thought I'd look into some of the other stuff that Ziegler's done in his journalistic career.

For a number of years, he did a radio talk show with a co-host named Leah Brandon. There's an archive here, where the episodes are easily downloadable (I like to listen to such things on an ipod). I've found a few of his shows, where he could be said to have achieved a bit of infamy. He was a very avid follower of the OJ Simpson case. He had dated Kim Goldman, sister of OJ victim, Ron Goldman. He interviews her here, in the second hour of his show. In the next hour, here, he gives a very entertaining description of how he disrupted a sports memorabilia event attended by OJ. The Goldmans won a civil judgment against OJ and these autograph signing events offered a way for OJ to get around paying cash to the Goldmans. Ziegler found out that there was going to be one of these things very close to where he was living, so he went and told the promoter, "over my dead body!" He successfully managed to prevent OJ from participating in this event and arguable forced him to have to deal with less reputable, sleazy characters, which eventually got him arrested and incarcerated for kidnapping. I highly recommend listening to these episodes.

Institutional Fact Canning at Penn State

Penn State has examples of the institutional ignoring of facts (or at least sources of facts) in both the Paterno/Sandusky scandal and their investigation of Michael Mann.

Now what most people would think of as ignoring facts in the Paterno/Sandusky case would be coach Joe Paterno, president Graham Spanier, vice president Gary Schultz, and athletic director Tim Curley ignoring sex crimes by Jerry Sandusky and trying to keep them under wraps. But Sandusky got indicted and convicted, Paterno got fired, and Spanier, Schultz and Curley  each got convicted of child endangerment. Then Penn State hired a former FBI director, Louis Freeh, to write a report to explain it all (for $8 million). For the public, the monster was caught and the institutional miscreants were punished. It all looks pretty tidy, unless you've been reading John Ziegler's site, Framing Paterno, or Mark Pendergrast's book, The Most Hated Man in America.