iTunes For Papers

Jack Shafer can't help being old. But he can help being so obtuse.

Answering David Carr's call for a new publishing business model patterned after iTunes, all Shafer can do is complain about the Kindle (with good reason, I might add) and prattling on about the New York Times Reader, a tech non-starter the Times had the good sense to abandon.

Actually, a flawed iTunes for news already exists: It delivers content through Amazon's Kindle. The Kindle can download paid subscriptions to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and 12 other dailies via built-in EVDO reception. Newspaper subscriptions run between $5.99 and $13.99 a month.

As Shafer himself notes, Kindle presents issues for users...:

But my biggest gripe is that it was born crippled. Oh, you can browse the Web and send e-mail with it, but you won't do either because the experience is crap. It's a chore and a bore to display non-Kindle file formats on it, the keyboard is inspired by the Vtech learning laptop for tots, its graphics cause eye strain, it doesn't do video, it makes you pay (!!!!) for blog delivery, it doesn't have a touch screen, no Wi-Fi, and did I mention it looks like the front end to a dialysis device?

and publishers:

it's designed to turn their customers into Amazon customers just as the iTunes store was designed to turn the music labels' customers into Apple customers, and did. The music labels rue the day they gave Apple the extraordinary leverage they did over their content, so newspapers should beware.

But Shafer is missing the mountain for the trees (yeah, the whole damn mountain).

People use products that are some combination of right price and right situation (place, time--the old retail mantra). For news, that price is somewhere between free and $1.50 on the newsstand, the time is as soon as possible, but only when I want it, and at my fingertips.

Thus far, newspapers have tried getting readers to pay up-front for a whole year of news. Those efforts failed (with only a few exceptions--when the news is completely proprietary and vital, like the Wall Street Journal or Consumer Reports) because there's no incentive for readers to subsidize a publication for a year.

But what if you offered readers an iTunes option:

• give away news summaries or ledes (kind of like sampling)
• charge $0.99 for the whole story (a PDF that can't be copy-pasted)
• charge $1.99 for a story that can be copied or mailed to a friend.
• The Times tried that with its archive a few years back, but it didn't work for a number of reasons that are now obsolete. For starters, the concept of what was in the archive versus what was free was never very clear. It was a pain to buy the archived articles, and you felt like a sucker, especially since anyone with a Lexis/Nexis account could send you the article for free.
  Now there's iTunes, one-click shopping, and better, more flexible DRM solutions.
  
  Some might argue that it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. People are used to free.
  
  But that ain't necessarily so. ESPN has had its ups and downs with ESPN Insider, which offers premium, subscription-based content. After initially backing off, ESPN has added to its roster of Insider contributors and, by the looks of things, is succeeding.
  
  I remember the strategic leads of CMP and the WSJ at a conference many years ago, arguing that making content free was a way of cheapening it. Their antagonists retorted, "content wants to be free."
  
  At the time, I was for free content. I thought advertising was the business model. I think events have proven me wrong. And I always felt that was a stupid slogan. Content doesn't want anything. We in the publishing business, however, do want to get paid.
  
  Shafer makes a living being a curmudgeon. I'm glad for him. I read him often, and I think he's a smart guy, but I also think he hasn't tried very hard to think this through.