June 19, 2010

Google’s Newspass: Will News Orgs Live to Fight Another Day?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/4165388795/">...trialsanderrors/Flickr</a>

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The media revels in pondering over its woes—let’s call it journalism-ism. And while fingers point and doomsayers predict the apocolypse, some organizations are working toward viable solutions. Surprisingly, one of the most proactive is a company largely blamed for catalyzing the problem to begin with: Google.

Google News, a content aggregator that pools articles from over 25,000 publications around the world, has come under heavy criticism from news orgs over its 8-year history for stealing content. Recognizing the importance of creating symbiotic relationships with news establishments rather than working at odds with them, Google is brainstorming a wide range of models that just might save the industry. In a widely-read piece in the June 2010 issue of the Atlantic, James Fallows outlined many of them, including the use of paywalls to charge readers online, though details by and large remained under wrap…until now!

Italian newspaper La Repubblica published a piece yesterday discussing Newspass, Google’s much-anticipated (yet highly secretive) meta-paywall model for online news content, cites PaidContent.org:

  La Repubblica says that, with Newspass, people will be able to log-in to the sites of participating news publishers using a single login. Publishers will be able to designate what type of payment they want to accept, including subscriptions and micropayments. People who find content from participating publishers in Google search will see a paywall icon next to that content and be able to purchase access directly from there using Checkout.

So the details have only been partially unwrapped. But if what La Repubblica says is true, then it seems that Google is developing real solutions to the problem of monetizing online news content (though this magazine proudly offers its content online free of charge). The implications of such a model remain to be seen (if only some sites join on board with Newspass, will readers tend toward sites offering free content? Can paywalls recoup the cost lost to decreased advertising in print?). But reporters need to believe that a successful business model for media orgs will soon be developed. As goes the old adage of academia: Publish, or perish.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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