Fixing the Broken Print Media Business Model

I love my Google Reader. But it is precisely people like me who are the cause of so much angst within the media industry at the moment. What to do with people like me? With the click of a button I can tap into any major publication across the globe with an RSS feed and a regular stream of content. Every morning instead of stumbling outside to collect my newspaper from the heavily dew soaked grass, I can boot up my computer and there it is, every publication I could ever dream of – Time, Businessweek, Newsweek, the Utne Reader, The Economist, Wired and more – beautifully itemised and arranged so that I can filter through and select any articles that tickles my fancy. I used to subscribe to the paper based copy of most of these, but now there’s not point. No need to fiddle around with that impenetrable plastic wrapping. No need to pick up those annoying inserts which always spill on to the floor. All the information I could ever ask for is there, on the Internet, for free and thanks to my Google Reader even those distracting pop-up ads have been all but filtered out. Why would I pay for anything that I can get for free? And there in lies the problem for publishers. How do we make money out of this?

There has been movement lately. Many in the industry are starting to realise that the current model is unsustainable. Rupert Murdoch has recently announced that he will start charging consumers for access to online news content. Hulu.com, an ad supported online video download site which sources premium content from major networks and studios (also partially owned by Fox) has announced that they will soon start charging consumers for the right to screen video. Part of their strategy was to whet consumer’s appetites and then slowly migrate them across to a user-pays model. There has been talk of micropayments – payments so small and automatic that people will be barely noticed that they are being charged for content. However, I don’t think such a model will fly with consumers used to free content. Such a model will also ensure that daily traffic will turn into a dribble inevitably disrupting the ad-supported part of the business. What to do?

I think it all comes back to the core benefit that media services provide – news right? Well, yes, in a way. But the media has historically and will continue to offer a much greater value proposition than just news. News is ubiquitous and ephemeral. You cannot compete on solely on news. The media outlet is selling it’s banner as much as the news it proffers. It’s analysis and editorial slant is what consumers are looking for. I’m a Guardian reader or I’m a Times reader – your news service provider is part of who you are. Media execs need to remember this. People will be willing to pay for high quality commentary and insight, but consumers still need to be weened on to paying for it. What media firms need to realise is that people are willing to pay for good quality analysis, an agreeable editorial slant and high quality research. Nothing gives me greater joy than opening up to a well research, highly informed and insightful double page spread about a topic that particularly interests me. But I’m not going to pay for it when you are offering it to them for free. 

So how do we fix this broken model? What I propose is a windows of distribution strategy. Basic news items should be offered for free and immediate. News is now a commodity. There is little differentiation between news outlets (in fact, media vendors often source news from the same provider). It’s the editorial and analytical articles which create the real competitive advantage for news organisations. By providing these for free along with news, media outlets are giving away their core product for little return – they are replacing paper dollars with digital cents. What I suggest is that editorial and analytical articles, the meat of the operation, should only be immediately available to paying customers (either through print or online subscription or micropayments). However, after a week or two (after they become less relevant and therefore devalued) these articles and commentary could be offered to those consumers unwilling to pay for the time premium, on an ad supported basis. This ensures that the website maintains enough content (albeit somewhat out of date) to attractive a steady flow of regular traffic whilst also providing an incentive for value seeking customers to pay for it the right to have the content as soon as it becomes available. Right now the system is broken because there is no incentive for people to pay for the content. By leveraging those aspects of the media outlet that create enduring competitive advantages, the online media system doesn’t have to be broke. But until that time comes, I’m happy to have access to the world’s foremost publications and their news items, as soon as they are published, without ads, and without paying for it! Life is sweet.

Thymos

Aristotle argued that there were three parts to the human psyche: logos, eros and thymos – logos meaning the logical or rational part, eros meaning love and desire and thymos meaning spiritedness or recognition. Aristotle argued that logos should ultimately drive eros and thymos. Man not only desires material goods, baubles and other possessions but more importantly man fundamentally desires the desire of other men. In other words, man wants to be respected by other men. Thymos has two constituent parts: megalothymia and isothymia. Megalothymia is the need to be recognised as superior to others and isothymia is the need to be recognised as at least equal to others.

These ideas have been appropriated by a number of philosophers notably Hegel, Marx and more contemporarily Fukuyama. Hegel argued for a directionality of history and that the thrust of this directionality came from the underlying spirit of man. In the Middle Ages under a feudal structure man was delineated into two groups: the rulers and the ruled. The rulers were men of noble character who possessed one key quality – they were willing to risk their lives for their beliefs and security. The ruled on the other hand were men of weaker character. They were unwilling to risk their lives and in return for the security afforded to them by their lord, they sacrificed their freedom. Insomuch they also felt unrecognised. Lords, too, felt unrecognised because although they were superior to their serfs, they didn’t much care about what the serfs thought of them. They desired recognition from their equals.

Fukuyama argues that the liberal state accommodates the thymotic nature of man. Isothymia is accommodated because every man in said to be born equal, enfranchised with one vote and empowered to seek elected office. Megalothymia is thus, removed from the political machinations of the state. No man can be said to be superior to others because every man is, indeed equal. Nevertheless, the megalothymia of man still exists but other aspects of the liberal state accommodate these yearnings, particularly the economy but also sport, games and dare I say academia. There is a spirit within man that drives him to desire to be better than others. In a liberal state with a free market economy, megalothymia has an outlet. Indeed, the man who accumulates vast wealth replete with fast cars, large mansions and fabulous clothing is looked upon by others with jealous desire. This is what the man craves – that jealous gaze of others.

When it is said that a person in a modern liberal state lives in poverty, I can’t help but ask myself, “What is poverty?” Compared to those who live in an African state devoid of shelter, water, food and clothing, in fact an Australia who finds himself in so-called-poverty might actually be considered wealthy. There are few in Australia who lacks access to food, water and shelter – the three necessities of life. What must we do to remove people from poverty? Provide them with a plasma screen television? Give them Latina Fresh Pasta for dinners? How do we know someone to be out of poverty? In fact, poverty, I would argue is simply the absence of adequate food, water, shelter to live. Anything else provided on top of that is just masturbation.

As Adam Smith argued, the reason men seek riches and shun poverty has very little to do with physical necessity. In fact, much of the income even of poor people is spent on things that are, strictly speaking, conveniences which may be regarded as superfluities. Why then do men seek to better their position through the toil of economic life? The answer is:

To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity not the ease or the pleasure which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the word, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all the agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him…The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels it either places him out of sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have; however, scare any fellow feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers…

Poverty is not really the physical quality of being without objects; rather poverty is the psychological state of being without the recognition and regard of others. Fukuyama regards the liberal democracy as the end of History (not as in the end of events) but rather as the last rational stage of political development. He suggests that this form of government allows logos, eros and thymos to cohabitate peacefully whilst channelling the deleterious effects of megalothymia. Man can still actively seek to be superior to others and can the desirous gaze of other men but in economic, sporting or academic superiority not in acquiring the right to rule other men. Man can prove his dominance by earning more money, acquiring more Porsches, winning more games or receiving more citations than his fellow man.

Of course Nietzsche would disagree. Nietzsche rejects the idea of democracy and argues that it creates men without chests. It subjugates men’s megalothymic desires and in a sense men become nothing more than animals – willing to sit in the sun all day, doing not much, not particularly caring about other dogs. Nietzsche saw a society of bourgeois who aspired to nothing more than their own comfortable self-preservation. Nietzsche argued that the will to power was the single main driving force of man as seen in desire for achievement, ambition and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life. In fact, Nietzsche championed for a new kind of morality which would heighten social inequality, favour the strong over the weak and even promote a certain kind of cruelty. But we have to bear in mind the Nietzsche was a lunatic who eventually went mad.

The First Post

Ah, the first post. Perhaps the most important of all. I dislike blogs which lack an orientating first post. I often, upon finding a new blog, will travel all the way back to the first post to read about the inciting incident that set the blogger upon the blog journey. Usually I’m sorely disappointed and find that most bloggers launch into the random minutiae of their lives without an orientating first blog hoping that the 50 or 60 words in their “about me” section will satiate the viewer’s curiosity. I, on the other hand, demand a full exposition of the blog’s  raison d’être – which almost never occurs.  So here’s this blog’s raison d’être: “to document the process of attaining my MA as I grapple with the inner workings of academia and the outer workings of the documentary film industry.”

So what specifically is my MA about? Being a research degree there are a number of elements which my thesis must accomplish in order to be awarded as per the requirements of the Research Council of Australia:

- The research must have  a clearly established problem which drives the study usually formulated in the form of a research question (For example, even though I have a general idea of what I am doing or what I would like my research to do, my ideas are rather nebulous and amorphous at this stage. The act of condensing them into a well articulated statement is possibly the most challenging part of the research higher degree (RHD))

- That the process of research is expounded and justified – this is usually called a methodology. This is perhaps the funnest part – or at least the part I most enjoy. If you would permit me to use an analogy, the choosing of the methodology is like a golfer choosing which club to use. She faces the problem of getting the golf ball into the hole (or as near to it as possible) and to accomplish this she has a vast array of choices from woods, to irons, wedges and putters. Each club has a different loft and lie or shaft length or whatever. Choosing the correct club is paramount because an erroneous choice will only serve to send the ball further away and deep into the bunker or the rough. Researchers also have a dazzling arrays of instruments to choose from. For example, you’ve got your woods (positivist inspired research methods - the Big Bertha’s of the reserach world) which involves experiments under controlled conditions, statistical analyses, questionnaires etc. Then you’ve got your irons (postpositivist inspired research methods) wherein you’ve got your ethnographies, your interviews, your content analyses, your textual analyses inter alia. And then you’ve got your putters and sand-wedges which are the strange methods that sometimes get trotted out and strive for legitimacy but are usually laughed out of the halls of academia. Each individual method usually stems from a philosophical tradition for example interviews and phenomenology or textual analysis and hermeneutics which a researcher must be sure to consider these philosophical traditions. I have some ideas as to which method I’m going to use, but I haven’t fully decided yet. I’ll keep you posted.

- The next thing is that the research must be contained within a pre-exisitng field of enquiry. Some people talk of “conversations” in academia and that your work must perpetuate a pre-existing “conversation.” I personally see flaws in this idea and so do others especially Corbin and Strauss who came up with the idea of grounded theory and argue that you should pretty much throw out all the previous bullshit that academics have said and start from a tabula rasa thus starting your own conversation – not for the faint hearted. My research is obviously within the conversations that are occuring in the Film & TV discipline (as that’s where I’m situated) but I am also tapping into numerous conversations that have been occuring in Cultural Studies, but mostly Historiography. I, like Popper, have a bit of an issue with academic disciplines but I will expound that in a later blog entry.

- Finally, the research needs to be reported (i.e. bound and placed in a library whereupon nobody will read it – unless you become famous later and then it will be used against you by the media). Also it must possess some social, cultural, economic and/or environmental benefit – which is fair enough considering the government is practically paying for it.

So there’s the four requirements of a RHD. Pretty straight-forward. There are obviously many more intricacies that the researcher has to grapple with, which will become apparent as I progress further in my degree. In future posts I will begin to elucidate how my own research will comply with these parameters but I also envisage this blog as being a place where I can just test my understanding of ideas by putting them into my own words and discuss emergent ideas of my own.