The notion that customers pay for the medium itself and not the content contained therein is not a new idea, but programmer Paul Graham has posted a nice essay that lays the whole idea out for us in one tidy package.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
He uses the example of hard cover books, which cost roughly the same, no matter the quality of the content inside the book.
If audiences were willing to pay for better content, why wasn’t anyone already selling it to them? There was no reason you couldn’t have done that in the era of physical media. So were the print media and the music labels simply overlooking this opportunity? Or is it, rather, nonexistent?
Graham’s ideas point to a simple fact: If publishers want to continue selling paper products, they are going to have to start putting in a lot more effort because making money from those old media isn’t a given anymore.
This is especially hard for newspapers. Long years of deep habit have made it seem like the newspaper is vital to democracy, like a little bit of America you can hold in your hand. It’s not. The journalism on the paper is what’s important.
Still, as Justin McLaughlin writes, many people see the newspaper itself as a symbol. That’s how older people (including publishers) see it, but that is the way that up-and-coming generations feel, McLaughlin says.
My generation and those after me don’t harbor those feelings. We have no nostalgia for a newspaper. We don’t view it as an icon. That doesn’t mean we don’t like news or that we don’t like stories, it just means that we won’t revere the medium as much we will the content.
Like I said before, there is room for all of us in this field. But if we don’t start viewing newspapers as a platform for our product, instead of the product, the Newseum might be the only place to find newspapers in a few years.
Neither McLaughlin nor Graham rule out a future in which printed paper news can coexist with digital versions, but it’s clear from reading both essays that unless newspapers divorce themselves from the notion that it’s the paper that matters, it’s the paper that’s going to drag them into obsolescence.
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Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
Paul Graham and ‘post-medium’ publishing
The notion that customers pay for the medium itself and not the content contained therein is not a new idea, but programmer Paul Graham has posted a nice essay that lays the whole idea out for us in one tidy package.
He uses the example of hard cover books, which cost roughly the same, no matter the quality of the content inside the book.
Graham’s ideas point to a simple fact: If publishers want to continue selling paper products, they are going to have to start putting in a lot more effort because making money from those old media isn’t a given anymore.
This is especially hard for newspapers. Long years of deep habit have made it seem like the newspaper is vital to democracy, like a little bit of America you can hold in your hand. It’s not. The journalism on the paper is what’s important.
Still, as Justin McLaughlin writes, many people see the newspaper itself as a symbol. That’s how older people (including publishers) see it, but that is the way that up-and-coming generations feel, McLaughlin says.
Neither McLaughlin nor Graham rule out a future in which printed paper news can coexist with digital versions, but it’s clear from reading both essays that unless newspapers divorce themselves from the notion that it’s the paper that matters, it’s the paper that’s going to drag them into obsolescence.
Related posts: