1. How scalable is the pivot to subscriptions and how does it effect democracy?
2. Can the news-media organizations continue with the kind of pre-internet organization that they continue to do? What are the changes required?
3. What does a news-media organization look like in the age of hyper connectivity and real time information exchange? How is it different from the pre-internet news organization?
What is the new model that you're proposing?
So just to take on some of this -- the big problem with the old media model is that old media made its money on distribution. When you bought a newspaper you were mostly buying the expense and time they put in to making and delivering the news to you (the trucks, the paperboys, the newsstands, etc). Or you were advertising on a local TV station that had a quasi-monopoly with one of the few FCC licenses in an area. With the internet media firms no longer were really controlling distribution. Today 75% of the news comes from two distributors, Google and Facebook. So media has to figure out a new way to survive. People in the business have pored over this problem for decades. I don't see any way that it works without subscriptions. Any ad-based model is going to result in denuded clickbait-style coverage. The advantage the modern system has is that basically anyone can garner a large audience overnight, provided they're good at what they do. There's no middlemen, which means reduced costs, which means an opportunity for more independent reporting. We'll see. I'm guardedly optimistic and hope that companies like Substack will take off.
1. We think it's very scalable. The value of attention has flipped - you used to get bored and need to fill your time, now your time is the last scarce resource, so it makes sense to pay to use it more wisely. We see early adopters doing this happily now, but we think it will become the norm.
We also think it will be good for democracy. The incentives of ad supported social media encourage clickbait, cheap outrage, and hyper-partisanship. Subscriptions reward thoughtfulness and deep value.
The one thing I worry about is too much exclusivity. If we landed in a place with really high subscription prices and only the privileged few getting access to good information that wouldn't be ideal, but that is avoidable.
2. Mostly they will have to change. Some will be successful.
3. The new model is readers paying writers directly. The difference at internet scale is that you can reach everybody in the world, and therefore you can be more successful with a much more specific topic/audience. Also because of software, you can start doing it as an individual writer in an afternoon.
Can't readers just unsubscribe if they disagree with whatever the writer is saying? This just changes who pays the bills.
Ultimately, I think the writer will cater to their audience with subscriptions being a far stronger signal than clicks. I don't see how this is better for Democracy, but I'd love to be proved wrong. We need better access to better news, not more paywalls.
