Sorry, Mr. Murdoch, But I Ain't Buyin'

Once upon a time, if you wanted to get the word out about something in your community, you had three choices: radio, television, and the newspaper.

Because of this stranglehold on information dissemination, these media entities were able to charge outrageous amounts for advertisements. Radio and television lived off this revenue alone, and for newspapers, the number of subscribers always counted for much more than actual subscription revenue. Ad revenue underwrote the entire industry, enabling absurdities such as, in the case of television, 40 percent profit margins.

You read that right. Forty percent.

In many cases, of course, the folks who actually gathered the news never got a very big slice of that pie.

Then along came the Internet. Suddenly there were many, many places to advertise, and no one was beholden to the newspapers or radio and television stations for getting the word out. People quit buying print newspapers, and they quit watching the local news.

Poof.

Now they want to get back to those 40 percent profit margins. You know, those yachts that the CEOs of these media conglomerates own? They use a lot of gas. Country club memberships don't come cheap either.

And since no one wants to pay a premium for ads anymore, they want to try to get it from you, the consumer. Maybe they'll charge per article, maybe they'll charge for subscription. They haven't decided yet, but they're just dying to charge, because they're convinced they have content everyone has to have, and thus the money will come rolling in.

But do you think a single news article is worth .99 cents?

Are you so addicted to washingtonpost.com, or foxnews.com, or nytimes.com, that you're going to pay a monthly subscription for it?

I'm not.

Many of these companies have been convinced before that people were going to pay for online content. They've always been proven wrong. Now they're going to try it again, this time in a recession.

We'll see.

I once subscribed to Salon. It was relatively new, different, they gave away print magazine subscriptions and books and the like, and I wanted them to survive. As time passed, and I started having kids, and money got tighter, I realized I could live without it. Then they switched to an ad model, and I'm back to reading, and they seem to be surviving.

A lot of journalists feel like they do hard work, and they perform a vital function in a democracy, and thus their work is worth something. I can appreciate that sentiment.

But the fact is, if I buy a song online for .99 cents, I might well listen to it over and over and over. You usually don't toss a good song. It becomes part of your collection. Maybe you'll only read a movie or book once, but still, you're talking hours of entertainment, and you might very well watch or read it again.

But a newspaper article? You read that once and you're done.

An entire newspaper? Too little content I'm actually interested in. Too much variance in quality. Sure, I might want to read a news article at The New York Times. But I want nothing to do with their fake trend pieces. I don't want the Michael Jackson coverage. I don't want The Package. The Package is old school. We're surfers. We want a piece here, a piece there. Or maybe it's not so much journalism, but news as a brand. As Clay Shirky says, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." The pay-based model is intended to preserve the old institutions, but the old institutions don't work for how we use the Internet.

You know what I'm going to do? Donate to PBS. Donate to NPR. I will frequent those sites that continue to offer free content. I will click on their ads. I may donate to them as well.

Is that hypocritical? I don't think so. I'm a fan of the donation model online. If I read a really good story or book online, I'm willing to send the writer a few bucks. For one thing, the money goes straight to the writer. You pay .99 cents for an article, and a penny of that may go to the writer, and the rest goes to pay to keep a bunch of executives in top hats and cigars. Sadly, the same is true for the .99 cents you pay for a song, but as I said, you'll want to keep a good song forever.

Traditional journalism, as defined by the news "brand" like CNN, the Los Angeles Times, or Channel 13, probably doesn't fit the donation model.

So are they going to change, or am I?

I know the answer to that one.