An American Lion

Media companies are going broke—allegedly. News providers can’t make any money off this thing called the Internet—allegedly.

In point of fact, they are going out of business because their profits have plummeted. There really are tough times ahead for news gathering organizations. Technology outran them. The people gave up on their nonsense. Business decisions—such as, eliminating content while leaving in place bloated managerial structures and dozens of non-producing employees—have killed their bottom line.

Now, they want to walk everything back, and start over, as if this were 1996 and we were all just suckers to begin with:

Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.

Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.

Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.

Who is accustomed to a world where the “web content” costs nothing? Getting to what little content there really is costs an arm and a leg. First, you have to find a place to live that supports or features broad band. Second, you have to navigate reams of providers that offer nothing. Third, you have to carefully weigh whether or not to read or link to a provider.

There are thousands of news sites but few with quality or credibility. There is, of course, the New York Times, which features the content above. In order to get to it, I had to navigate their poorly-designed “newsprint” world web site. Then I had to click on the article I thought might be worth blogging about. Then I had to read it and weigh whether my commentary could add something of value to the proceedings—as in, can I even think or write intelligently about this?

There are sites that simply take the article and say “whoa!” or “this is interesting” and then let you have it. I do that occasionally, and it’s called filler. I tell you when it’s filler (or I try to, in any event, because I think you’d know it right off the bat anyway).

In my case, sometimes, that’s all I want to do, is point a developed readership towards something. These sites, however, which add no content of their own get between me and you. You want some content. I want to add something of value to the article from the New York Times. This is so you can evaluate them, and myself, and then create something of your own or simply move on and forget the incident.

There’s no point in doing any of this, unless it’s to inform, and my information to you is this—they’re lying. They have little or no content worth paying for, except for a handful of articles. Their business model stinks because they don’t know how to fire the people who they’re paying to do, essentially, nothing, and that’s mismanage what little talent they have left. A newspaper should be editors and writers and support personnel. You have to have someone to sell ads—that’s easy. Just put great stuff in the paper and make it essential reading. The ads will sell themselves once you show people that you have readers. Instead, they cut writers and they keep the bureaucracy. They keep business people. They do try to do layoffs, but, really, content should be exempt from layoffs. When things get bad, put more into the newspaper, not less. Put more into the website, not less. Content is what they cut first, however. Their content is, by a rule, safe for the corporate environment, and, thus, watered down reporting. The rest, they’re buying up from pool reporting or from organizations like the Associated Press, or they’re buying off stringers and free lancers. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen in the New York Times was bought up off a free lancer. But it supposedly carried the Good Housekeeping seal of approval—except it was a scam.

Anyway, good luck to all of the news organizations that think people will pay them for the news, and the news, itself, is essentially free. It’s out there. It has to be sorted and culled through, and it isn’t free, but they’ve tricked you into feeling bad that it is.