A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

A wide distribution of subsidy has always been important to journalism’s
independence. If a news organization attracts enough advertisers, no single one should
be able to carry enough weight to influence coverage. As the number of advertisers
shrinks along with total overall ad revenue, increased payments from users and other
sources can provide a valuable antidote to the potential influence of the big spending
advertisers that remain. As Ken Auletta notes in his new book, Googled, over‐reliance on
advertising can deposit too much influence over the news in too few hands. 69
More Civil Comments—Plus a $1.99 Fee—on the iPhone App
Robert Picard, the media economist, points out that the value of what’s created in
new services around news “does not necessarily translate” into the revenue needed to
sustain journalism. But without something new that’s distinctive and compelling
enough to separate people from their cash, all the new paid content tools in the world
will leave journalism hopelessly underfunded. 70
News organizations are having some success in raising prices for existing products.
But framing the paid content issue, as Picard does, as the creation of new value is quite
different from simply imposing a fee today on content that yesterday was free.
Instead of installing a pay wall in front of its online coverage of the Miami Dolphins,
for example, The Miami Herald created a new iPhone app for Dolphins fans. By October
2009, the app had generated about 13,000 sales at $1.99 each. More significantly, it paved
the way for the paper to offer similar apps for college teams throughout Florida and to
develop a small but growing new revenue stream. 71
Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal said the Herald considered commissioning
an outside contractor to develop the app, but decided that the relatively modest time
investment of its own programmers in the project would pay off in the long run. As with
the Post‐Gazette’s Tuesday subscriber surge, the Herald is noticing trends with its iPhone
apps that it doesn’t quite get. Noting the nasty comments that the Dolphins’
unexceptional record has provoked on the Herald’s Web site, he said: “For some reason
that we don’t really understand, the comments attached to articles on the iPhone app are
a lot more elevated.”
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