If iTunes is the salvation of music, why can't the same model save news? This is an easy one. In fact, we've done this one before.
Media has exploded. Digital exploded music, with albums fragmenting into tracks and the old gateways - albums, and HMV - rapidly cut out of the equation. P2P exploded film and TV, with channels fragmenting into on-demand and BitTorrent, the smartest distributors now selling content on-demand or embedding commercial upsides (unskippable ads, better yet product placements) right into the narrative and the old gateways (channels, HMV again) likewise disintermediated.
News originators have tried to learn precisely the wrong lesson from the analogy and the experience of the music, film and TV industries - that news must also explode, the fragments (articles, headlines, photos) being made available everywhere.
The right lesson is that for fragmentation of content to work as a business model, there has to be some inherent commercial value in the fragment. iTunes isn't just a distribution platform, a facility for giving music away - it sells fragments (tracks) to buyers. On-demand isn't giving TV and film away but selling it. Even p2p offers opportunities, perhaps the most robust opportunities, for smart TV and film makers who can get product placement into the distributed fragments, measure exposure and charge "advertisers" commensurately.
There is, as yet, no commercial upside to the distributed news. Sure, use it as a hook to get people back to the originating site and serve ads to eyeballs. (You can't knock a strategy that will now pay for the Los Angeles Times' (drastically reduced) newsroom.) But the analogy with iTunes is desperate, misleading, unhelpful, simply false. iTunes is a business model for distributed content, a way of monetising the fragment itself. Until every news article, every photo, every headline costs something (even a fraction of a fraction of a penny) to read or includes a paid-for ad we do not and will not have an iTunes for news.
13 January 2009
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