CrowdNe.ws Blog

A la carte pricing might also radically alter readers’ habits.

Jeff Kidd's article,  News websites begin to tinker with per-click, iTunes-style story access, raises some interesting points. Here's one in which I totally agree:

A la carte pricing might also radically alter readers’ habits.

As CrowdNe.ws offers journalists a new marketplace for their work, a new manner of distribution, and a different footprint for their work, we also gladly offer our audience a place to radically alter their habits.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how our audience will interact with their news on CrowdNe.ws differently than on the legacy news models they’re used to.

Will the audience prefer long-form journalism or short-form? Will they want audio, video, or infographics? 

Will they want Tweets, or Timelines, or a pages of text?

We think they will want all of that. And why not? Our journalists certainly won’t be corralled into one style or format or voice. That’s yesterday’s news. A CrowdNe.ws Journalist is in charge of his or her own work.

And our audience will be their own publisher, deciding what news is important to them. They might want to watch breaking news from a CrowdNe.ws Journalist’s cell phone held high. Or follow an evolving story that winds its way to conclusion over three months. Or to listen to the sounds of the jungle at night from a journalist following the tracks of a story.

Yes, news habits will definitely change because the very nature of how news is reported and consumed is changing.

And here’s an interesting statement in Kidd's article to which I totally disagree:

Just as iTunes was no friend to album sales or deep cuts, per-article news sales might spell the end of dry-but-important dispatches from the City Council Finance Committee.

Note the “dry-but-important dispatches.” If it's important then it has value. The City Council Finance Committee dispatches have already disappeared from most news outlets because those outlets can’t sell the advertising to support that kind of local and hyperlocal coverage anymore.

But those dispatches are still important and per-article news sales is their savior because if those dry-but-important dispatches truly are important, then they are valuable to someone.

So let's imagine a high school journalism student, who’s interested in covering national politics someday, and is now cutting her reporter’s teeth covering her own local government. She knows her reporting is valuable to her local community and she uses CrowdNe.ws as her marketplace. Her reporting addresses a real local need: what's going on in their City Council, local government, and politics. Her local community finds value in her reporting and buys her stories,.

And maybe, another City Council Member, in another city council across the country, notes our high school student’s articles on CrowdNe.ws. He sees value  in them for his  City Council. And then there’s another per-article sale of the dry-but-important.

When the audience defines what news is valuable, be it local politics or international arms agreements, their news habits will definitely be altered. 

Press: A la carte pricing: Less prevalent — more intriguing!

Jeff Kidd wrote an insightful article  exploring new payment models for the news industry. 

Some newspapers have installed hard paywalls on their sites, requiring users to pay a fee the first time they attempt to view a story or other piece of content. Others, such as The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette, have adopted metered access, in which a subscription after a pre-determined threshold of page views is reached.

Less prevalent — but perhaps more intriguing — is “a la carte” journalism, in which readers pay a fee per story (or photo gallery or video) viewed, rather than a blanket subscription that applies whether they read 12 stories or 12,000. To put this in terms of online music, one might think of subscriptions as a Spotify model for content and a la carte as the iTunes model.

 And CrowdNe.ws figures prominently in Kidd’s discussion.

There are  a couple of other interesting statements Kidd makes that I  address in this next post:

A la carte pricing might also radically alter readers’ habits.

Just as iTunes was no friend to album sales or deep cuts, per-article news sales might spell the end of dry-but-important dispatches from the City Council Finance Committee. Just as conceivably, readers might reach the point of diminishing returns on celebrity news much faster if they have to pay for every click in a paparazzi gallery.

Kidd's full article is available at News websites begin to tinker with per-click, iTunes-style story access.

For Journalism: Data Journalism for All

Journalists who need to code: here's a resourse that I just came upon. It's called For Journalism and their goal is to update your tech skills. 

We have a pipeline problem for people with data and programming skills for journalism. There are great organizations and institutions making tremendous headway, but we need an industry-wide solution for educating the next generation of journalists.

For Journalism is an effort to equip every student, mid-career journalist, professor, graduate student with the knowledge they need to learn technical skills for doing journalism.

 

Press: A la carte journalism: can CrowdNe.ws be the iTunes of articles?

Susan Johnston has written a terrific article about CrowdNe.ws in Ebyline’s The News Hook. Johnston writes: 

The startup approach

One experiment in a la carte journalism wants to be just that, the iTunes of news. Salem, Mass.-based CrowdNe.ws is now in beta and offers a marketplace for journalists to sell directly to readers on a per-article basis. “We are flooded with so much information that we don’t really want or need,” says CrowdNe.ws founder and CEO J. Michael Wheeler. “I spend a lot of time on my RSS feeds saying ‘No, I don’t want to read that.’ People do that in traditional media. You open up The New York Times and thumb through 5-6 pages before you pick a story to read.”

Wheeler is a serial entrepreneur who taught the first multimedia course at Parsons Paris School of Art and Design in the mid-1990s. The fledgling site’s prototype includes an essay written by current freelancer and former Inc. magazine contributor Alessandra Bianchi and is available for whatever readers want to pay via PayPal.

The term a la carte journalism is a great descriptor. Our model empowers our news audience to buy just the news they want directly from the journalists they support. 

Does that mean that news should be thought of as isolated bits of content? Not at all. News itself isn’t a la carte, to be seen in isolation, but is in fact part of a stream of news, an ecosystem of news. 

That’s what we’re building at CrowdNe.ws.

Johnston's full article is available at A la carte journalism: can CrowdNe.ws be the iTunes of articles? Ebyline’s The News Hook, Conversation about the future of media.

The Distance to Mars

One of the exciting things I've explored over the last 20 years is how technology changes the way we tell Story. That's story with a capital S.

In the 90's there was tremendous excitement about telling stories with multimedia and the web and CD ROMs. Interactive storytelling, collaborative storytelling, multimedia storytelling, interactive literature. The ideas were great and they just kept coming.

But unfortunately, the technology wasn't there yet.

And then the bubble burst.

By the time the technology was robust enough for all of those ideas, the internet and web sites had be pretty much been corproratized. They became sales & marketing tools. The excitement of actually telling stories differently with this exciting new medium kind of slinked off into a corner.

But I see signs that the exploration is back! 

What's the distance to Mars? Here's an exciting new way to tell that story.

Journalists, writers, storytellers: it's time to EXPLORE again! 

From Tower to Table: Tower Garden Redefines Concept of Eating Locally

Alessandra Bianchi writes on the CrowdNe.ws Prototype:

This story looks at an innovative new gardening concept that is a modern-day twist on ancient technology supposedly used in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It's called Vertical Gardening, and produces fruits and vegetables that grow in half the time, requiring just 10% of the water, nutrients, and real estate used by conventional soil gardening. Even better: no dirt, weeds, tilling, kneeling, or weeding required!

From Tower to Table: Tower Garden Redefines Concept of Eating Locally

As a journalist, my role is to learn things and then share them with you, the audience. The digital age we're now in demands a new way of doing that and traditional media is having a difficult time figuring out how. Traditional journalism is in trouble.

But journalism is important, and so I'm participating in a private beta test with a startup called CrowdNe.ws. CrowdNe.ws is working on a new way for me to report the news, and for you to get it. We're testing out a small prototype now. I'm publishing some stories on CrowdNe.ws and I hope you'll take a look at them and participate in our beta test too.