In March, I joined the chorus, on the side of the “consumers have never paid full freight for news”: http://wiredpen.com/2009/03/08/no-more-free-content/

It was only later that I learned other people had been making this argument as well!

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s all start talking about the rather enormous inefficiencies that exist in today’s news organizations, let’s start talking about how paper is not news — news is news. By that logic, any proposed government bailout would actually just be government-funded tree-killing which has zero impact on the public’s ability to get at what they actually demand: news — not paper.

If paper is dead, it’s because the “huge audience” has moved away from paper. They haven’t moved away from news. NYT and others should be leading in the direction that their audiences are already moving in instead of trying to prop up business models that are clearly no longer valid.

Stop printing. You’ll save probably 80% of more of your expenses. You’ll take some charge downs over the coming year or two, but you’ll wind up ahead because it’ll only cost you a small fraction of what you used to spend paying lots of labor to operate huge mechanical things to spit some goop onto some dead trees. Imagine what you could do with all of that money if you weren’t paying for labor, goop, dead trees, and huge machines (and the real estate that goes with it)!

There are a billion ideas for how news organizations can make money. I think of new ones all the time. I listed ten of them off the top of my head in a blog post several days ago. If everyone will just move past micropayments and on to the real question of how, generally, can newspapers make more money, I think the creative minds will find much better solutions than this weird group-think thing that’s happening around the walled-garden idea.

And now that’s all changing and it’s very hard for some people (not all) to make the switch to thinking about the business side.

I agree: The fantasy that some “sugar daddy” (here in Seattle it’s always Paul Allen or Bill Gates) will wave a magic wand and make it all like it was just gets in the way of innovation and building a new journalism model. As I’ve been telling the people I work with: The days of fat newsrooms with unlimited budgets are over. Get used to the new reality.

Funny how journalists can be so sharp on so many subjects but not on their own industry.

I’ve been following these exchanges with interest, and sent many of them out through my Twitter feed. While the focus has been on, “would micropayments work?” and “is endowing newspapers really a feasible idea?” I’m just as interested in the psychological part. What do micropayments represent for the people who promote them? What’s the appeal of the idea? What are some of the wishes behind it? What’s the neurotic part in all this?

For example, it’s clear that people like Issacson and especially Stu Bykofsy in his museum-quality curmudegon call, feel that users have been getting away with a kind of crime, “stealing” valuable content without paying. (Sort of like Google is alleged to do in another great curmudgeon call). Micropayments therefore redress a moral wrong. It’s a small crime so a small payment is just. The good that proponents feel they are doing by settling the Internet user’s moral balance sheet sometimes makes them feel that they have a better idea than they do. I would also direct your attention to the phrase “original sin,” which has come up repeatedly in discussing the decision not to charge. That’s a tip off phrase.

You also need the psychological side to explain why so many who think, “we need to charge, that was dumb not to charge…” don’t make a more plausible argument: we should make our stuff valuable enough, unique enough so people will be willing to pay for it. (Which of course is way harder.) There is somewhere in the payments roar a quest for validation of the value of what we’ve been doing all along, of our worth as the real journalists in this chaotic scene… before its too late to ever return that verdict!

In a survival crisis like this one, it is highly impractical for journalists to be walking around blissfully unaware that subscriber revenue never covered the cost of print distribution. It hurts. It doesn’t help them get a handle on the economics of their craft. It isn’t rational ignorance, either (where the cost of acquiring the information is higher than its marginal utility.) Nor is finding these facts out particularly hard. So when we confront again and again newspaper journalists who don’t know where the money ever came from, but seem to be really worried now about where the money is going to come from (but not so worried that they’d spent 15 minutes updating their understanding of newspaper economics…) I think you have to go to psychological factors for an explanation. They’ve been infantalized and breaking out of that is hard. They were told all these years that they didn’t have to worry about “the business side.” The “make them pay” impulse is really a way of insisting that this still be the case.

Similarly, in the endowment discussion there is a strong element of fantasy: the sugar daddy who will show up and make everything right–so we can keep doing what we’ve been doing so brilliantly–was a major character in Steve Coll’s musings on the $2 billion endowment the Washington Post deserves. Emphasis on “deserves.” (Those freeloaders not paying for news do not, obviously, deserve the daily riches they are getting.)

Notice, as well, that if anyone ever did have the cojones to pop the question to Warren Buffet: would he pony up the $2 billion and save our Post? the fantasy part is that he would see how valuable, how amazing that newspaper is and part with the cash without asking to see the plan. The wish is not to save the newspaper, but specifically to save it without being required to transform it. That wish has no referent in the real world of newspaper economics, but it does point to something in the psychological world of newsroom denial.

–josh
@jny2cornell