Summary: No deed goes unpunished.

Some points:

1. Each article (or content item) has a different economic value, but the cost of a sale remains significant per article.
2. So, in a collective, more profitable content will need to subsidize less profitable content.
3. Pre-paid accounts for customers would be the most efficient way to make microsales, and one-off price articles would need to be in the $2 – $10 range to be “worth the effort.”
4. Newspapers will need to figure out in advance how to price an article (which means more staff) according to its expected value, price it by the cost of producing it, or figure out the average cost of producing all the articles and price according to that. Yep, each method has its problems.
5. And what exactly is in this for the consumer? If they don’t pay for news in print, or online, then what will they be offered to make them consider doing so now? On a per-transaction basis?

I believe the media world is shifting away from creating destination stories that attempt to capture audiences. This is connected to the cultural shifts underway due to our new, Internet-bred ability to acquire in-depth information on just about anything anytime we want it.

We are moving toward becoming a even more largely freelance, information service industry, with various presentations of stories as one product on a spectrum. The core value to be pursued, more than ever before, is original information; additional value is derived from it when it is used to create other information products that provide value to someone else. Endless game of dominoes.

In the past, whenever I thought of diving into any kind of media business, I looked only to offer an audience-capturing experience (a typical story). Now I am required to ask: What other information producers will my information serve and how? Can I sell that? I am a node in a network in addition to being an endpoint.

For example, would I open a shoe store today? Create this giant location, fill it with a variety of shoes, some more valuable then others, and hope enough people show up to exceed my costs?

Probably not. First I would think about what business I’m really in. Protecting people’s feet? Providing a fashionable selection? Giving them the chance to physically handle products?

Because if you think about it, a shoe store is in a lot of businesses:

1. It’s in the storage business (jamming all those shoes into a space);
2. it’s in the opinion business (employees providing feedback on shoes);
3. it’s in the information filtering business (selling some shoes, but not others);
4. it’s in the marketing business (all those shoes advertise their makers);
5. it’s in the distribution business (a store is a node on a manufacturer’s distribution network);
6. it’s in the health business (the wrong shoes can kill your feet);
7. it’s in the fashion business (want to look good for that big meeting?);
8. it’s in just about every business you can imagine, if you get out your magnifying lens.

What the Internet does is potentially separate the value of the “physical-ness” of any business from the intangible, information-only value of that business.

Previously, information was a product enhancer; it is now the product itself, but business models haven’t caught up. Or have they? iTunes? Trade publications?

Another example: movie theaters. What are you paying for when you buy a ticket? For me, it’s a bundle of experiences: a big, dark room, good sound, massive screen, a chance to go out, a story to get lost in. I cannot perfectly replicate these values in my apartment. What a moviemaker has to decide is if she/he is in the business of providing entertainment products that can play a part in certain cultural experiences, or in the business of trying to ensnare an audience. Or both.

Because people just don’t pay for stories, they pay for the experience the story is an important part of. Your story could be valuable in the creation of many experiences, if you make an effort to identify and market to them. But how valuable? I don’t think it will be valuable enough to consistently support monolithic organizations. The value of a story is just not that consistently stable or predictable.

Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it’s all about harnessing supply and demand. ‘What’s ubiquitous and cheap?’ Varian asks. ‘Data.’ And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data.”

Providing information analysis is a task that is related to but much different than providing information gathering and presentation. It requires a precise understanding of a customer’s problem in order to be useful. Sounds like another business on top of the news business. Aren’t high-end consultants already doing this? Should/do media companies compete in this space?

Inspiration: A CNN story about Riversimple, a company from the U.K. that has come up with a hydrogen-powered, less-poluting city car. Sebastien Piëch, a partner in the company, said this:

We don’t believe that making money on IP (intellectual property) is really what’s actually happening even now. We believe that service and providing the solution for customers will be where we make money.”

Does this mean news organizations need to understand customers’ problems that are created when they interact with stories? And provide solutions to those problems?

I’ve written previously about possible journalistic services.

1. Forming groups of like interest / coordinate connections
2. Being in the know / personal topic guidance
3. Creating self-identity / ascribe values to information choices
4. Forming opinions / critiquing service
5. Sharing information (conversation, e-mail, clippings, recordings, etc.) to create social bonds / facilitate simplification and effectiveness of networking
6. Commenting upon information and expressing oneself /package user-generated content into media product that can be published, shared, found, marketed, jointly monetized

II. Research and information creation: Finding and making answers.

1. Make new information / writing and editing services
2. Answer questions / how to create good questions
3. Learn ways to allot limited resources (time, money, attention, energy) / lifestyle analysis and achieving information goal service

III. Entertainment: Please get me the hell out of my reality.

1. Distraction
2. Avoid work
3. Relax
4. Satisfy curiosity
5. Explore reality
6. ///// One service for all of these activities: Information health; know when you need to alter information activity to maintain health.

At every step, the information user needs to have the option of altering the type of experience they want with your information: click here and you can access deep information suited to a research task; click there and you can go into scanning (distraction) mode.

It’s a bit like having a pair of shoes that changes according to the weather; the pair of shoes is your story (from sandals for a hot day to galoshes for a downpour); the weather is the intent your customer brings to the information. The feet…are just hairy.

I can sense your RSS overload; you need to change your information activity ASAP. Here’s a free distraction service compliments of YouTube, m0serious and newsroomnext:

It’s called Duke City Fix , and even though Perry enjoys the group blog about Albuquerque, he says it can’t supply news like the other three traditional news sites he visits.

That has him worried as the news industry faces declining revenues and staff cuts.

“Bloggers, we get a lot of information from the media ourselves,” he said. “If the news media is not really reporting that, how are we going to find out? There are a lot of interesting stories I’ve only gotten from The Tribune and nowhere else.”

The closing of The Tribune is the Albuquerque example of a news industry that’s in turmoil nationwide. Local news junkies, independent online journalists and bloggers say they’re concerned about a growing information void, even as some of them are taking steps to fill it.

“We’re going from newspapers to the Internet, and we’re not there yet,” said Heath Haussamen, an independent journalist who reports on and analyzes New Mexico politics at nmpolitics.net.

“Newspapers are hurting, and Internet sites, on local levels, aren’t quite making it yet. Some are, but it’s not common.”

Haussamen, who also wrote a column for The Tribune, began his site in March 2006 while a reporter at the Las Cruces Sun-News. Advertisers began contacting him, and he quit his job with the newspaper two months later to work full time on the Internet. His site’s daily traffic has increased tenfold since launch to around 800 unique visitors a day, and he estimated $1,700 worth of monthlong ads are running on the site now.

“In a small state like this, I don’t think this kind of site can make the kind of money to support a family,” he said. “That’s one of the difficulties.”

But money isn’t the main appeal for Haussamen. It’s the freedom to do the in-depth work he enjoys.

“One of my big frustrations was that hard news or investigative stories weren’t getting done,” he said. “I was told, ‘There’s no time for this.’ ”

But there was time for lighter stories like covering popular ice cream flavors during the summer, he said.

“I thought,” he said. “it was a waste of my time to be doing stories like that.”

Those are the kind of stories Perry, who runs a blog focusing on Albuquerque mass transit big-abq-things.blogspot.com, expects that newspaper or newspaper Web site readers might see more of as journalism organizations shrink.

“It’s essentially just stuff to make ratings,” he said. “Car crashes, a murder. It’s not really stuff I’m interested in like, say, city government — kind of smaller things, which are admittedly less interesting to most people.”

A news world full of popular-ice-cream-flavor or car-crash stories might sound harmless, but with less investment in difficult, investigative, time-consuming journalism, Chantal Foster, the founder of Duke City Fix, sees serious threats.

“The deep work, the deep thinking, data analysis — that’s one of the things I particularly see as the greatest loss for civilization,” she said. “Our best work as humans comes from the times in which we’ve objectively looked at what’s going on around us.”

It’s the kind of work she and other Duke City Fix users, who volunteer their contributions to the site, typically don’t have the time to perform, she said.

Paying people to do that type of work for Duke City Fix is a possibility but not a goal, she said. It would only happen if it helped accomplish the site’s core mission: creating a socially constructive online community that expresses Albuquerque’s identity.

“It would be a means to an end,” she said.

Foster said she has received requests to sell ad space on the site, but she has not done any serious estimation of potential revenues, nor does she plan to any time soon. She recently began accepting a small number of Google ads to help pay for the cost of running Duke City Fix.

Looking to the future, she sees online newspapers evolving into a mix of the hyper-personal, opinionated approach of blogs and journalism that strives — but can’t, she notes — to be objective and opinion-neutral.

“It will be some compromise between that hyper-personal and obviously biased voice we’re used to from bloggers and what I call the false screen of journalistic distance,” she said. “It will be a shift, but it will be a welcome shift.”

Joe Monahan, the man behind New Mexico Politics With Joe Monahan, doesn’t see objective news going out of business, but he does see it getting smaller and becoming one of many niche information products on the Web.

“That top-down model — here’s your newspaper; here’s what you get — is coming to an end,” he said. “That doesn’t mean professional journalism is coming to an end. It’s just going to be transformed.”

He guesses readers might see an evolution of the model seen now: A traditional news organization, along with others, provides the initial information, while journalists — or bloggers — provide analysis, reaction and additional, original reporting.

“I do see people like me doing it full time and making a living off it,” he said. “I’ve had a successful financial model. It’s just a question of how many people want to do it. It’s a tremendous amount of work.”

Monahan described his site as “significantly profitable” but said the money is still less than what people will want to make.

Still, with the affordability and ease of Web publication, he sees many opportunities for young journalists willing to strike out on their own.

“As this new generation takes over, they’ll find the model that fits,” he said. “The key is to have the freedom to publish.”

Why this is important: To make long-term, effective decisions about serving information customers, I need to understand changes beyond the myriad superficial ways of gathering and presenting information. That means tracking down changes in the existential value of information, the individual and group creation of meaning, and the construction of predictions from information.

It’s also important because it’s far easier to adapt proactively if you have concepts that describe the ground rules for a new information world instead of concepts describing superficial, discrete expressions of those ground rules.

Despite the petri-dish intimations, I added the “micro” modifier to communicate the narrowness of my definition. I am referring not to culture in general, but to a culture, or a cultural experience, defined by the experience of humans engaging information. If I were to do the same thing for a sport, it would be, for example, “Basketball game experience micro-culture,” and it would only analyze the experiences involving a basketball game.

The 3 changes in information experience micro-culture:

1. The rate of the transformation and repurposing of ideas has sped up to appear almost constant

With information becoming digital, it is far more easily, affordably and quickly transformed into other forms. This has always occurred, but far more slowly. But it’s not just an acceleration of one’s ability to read one text and create more text in reaction to it. Now we can transform ideas gleaned from one media type (text) into numerous media types (photos, video, audio or a combination). This idea occurred to me after reading about Photo2canvas in Ready Made magazine.

Implications of this:

• Attempting to imprison an audience in your one information type or one interpretation of information will fade as a means to make money.
• Information will become more like a river, not a stack of bricks. Information customers will shape their info into whatever format fits their needs at that moment. Using the metaphor, information customers will take that water and pour it into ice cube trays, glasses, dog dishes, plants or whatever makes sense at that moment.

2. Engaging with information is becoming less of an active, ritualistic event and more of a passive behavior, like breathing

This idea is nothing new, but here’s an example for clarity: The days of driving to the movie theater to watch a movie are fading. Or going to the theater to watch a play. Or sitting down with a Sunday newspaper. Or going to the library to perform research. Or going to a specific Web site and mucking around in somebody else’s navigation system. What’s holding up the abandonment of these rituals is the quality of the information experience. For example, regarding the movie example, it’s hard to beat a screen the size of your house with sound like a live orchestra.

Implications of this:

• Eventually, and depending on how privacy concerns play out, information will find us and quality will no longer be an issue.
• Physically (and this includes the physical nature of being forced to click through a Web site arranged by someone’s else preferences) exerting oneself to gather information will be inefficient and an inferior way to get the information one wants (unless you’re a gatherer of original information, such as a reporter).

3. The information world is moving toward a real-time representation of life. Yes, I mean a virtual world paralleling the real one.

The example of this is to watch TV news cover a disaster. It’s as close to real-time coverage as you can get. However, a human still remains to interpret, collate and communicate facts about that event, but the collation and communication tasks, I’m guessing, will be taken over by machines.

Implications of this:

• Value will move away from those who can supply basic data, and shift more to those who can supply the most useful interpretation of information to the correct customer at the correct time.
• Concepts that assign moral, ethical and decision-making values to interpretations will proliferate.

Building a network hub means you provide content filtering services in addition to your own researching and reporting:

1. Provide well-described links to other news, opinion and information sources relevant to your story; this description includes a summary of the linked-to information, and a clear reason why your customers should visit the site;
2. Provide a custom search engine that scours high-quality news, opinion and information sources relevant to your story; results need to show up on your story/hub/site;
3. Allow your customers to contribute content and incorporate that content;
4. Syndicate content updates and additions to this story/hub/site;
5. Allow your customers to remix your content; for example, make your story/hub/site function like mash.yahoo.com, which will allow users to edit each other’s pages; each alteration creates a new version of the story/hub/site that has all of the functionality of the original story/hub/site and can be visited separately from other versions;
6. Provide a for-sale space for advertisers to contribute valuable content; this could be company X hiring blogger A to post useful content to this story/hub/site with a “sponsored by” message following each post; I’ll write about this more in a separate post;
7. Make components of the story/hub/site independently embeddable.

Thank you to these folks for inspiring this post:

1. Publish2 on news organizations becoming hubs of distribution; interesting because Scott Karp poses the idea of rich, digital packages that have the same information-product power as a newspaper in its entirety;
2. Readership Institute on network building; interesting because Rich Gordon explains the disadvantages of building a destination site in an era of networking; or is a network hub just another destination?
3. The Networked Journalism Summit; this sentence gets me drooling: “The last third of the day will be devoted to what’s next, with participants meeting to come up with new collaborations.”

1. Every piece of content should function as an independent business that can be embedded in whatever Web site wishes to host it;
2. Advertising needs to integrate with every piece of content and go wherever it goes;
3. Journalism organizations should think of themselves as wire services providing content for any interested Web site; let people who intimately know their audience aggregate and present the content (after finding it with search);
4. Geographic areas are losing a means by which to form a common identity;
5. Human connections are being driven by shared interests, not proximity, but relationships without a physical component lack accountability;
6. A journalism organization’s value will be measured by, for example, “content views” or “time spent on content” instead of page views or time spent on page.