iTunes, iTimes

David Carr, in his column in the New York Times on Jan. 12, presents an interesting proposal: that newspapers take a page (actually the whole play book) out of Steve Jobs' concept for iTunes and develop a way to charge customers by the story. Carr draws parallels between today's newspaper and magazine industries and the precarious state of the music industry just before iTunes, after rampant online pirating had sapped the life out of the record business and sent CD sales into the tank.

Of course, he reminds us, Jobs wasn't exactly welcomed by the music industry, which initially saw him as perhaps the last straw. Jobs got the industry to accept his pricing scheme for their products -- 99 cents a song -- and helped create a new market niche with his iPod, fed by music purchased through iTunes and turned them into iCash for Apple and, to some degree, for the music companies. "He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraacation of their former size," wrote Carr. "But they are still in business." And a new chapter is coming now, now that Apple has announced a variable pricing scheme, whereby it will charge higher rates than the standard 99 cents for new material and less for old stuff.

Way back when (before the Web), record labels welcomed the opportunity to give away their content to radio stations in order to build sales for their songs and singers. The model survived the early rounds of "new media," such as tape recorders. But life changed when consumers were given the tools to easily steal the content, beginning with superior tape recorders that allowed the copying of material coming over the air. And when cheap digital recording equipment arrived on store shelves, the music industry was in trouble.

In the early days of the Web, a lot of newspapers were happy to have outside sites use their material, as long as they received credit, assuming that the publicity would encourage non-readers to subscribe. It didn't take long for many of the larger papers to figure out that the third-party sites were, if anything, costing them readers, not bringing them new ones. So, they invested in their own web operations.

After a number of bungled attempts at paid sites, most of the newspapers simply opened the gates to all comers, in the belief that they would be able to reap enough cash from online ads to help their bottom lines and offset revenue they would lose from their traditional print products. But online revenue "is no longer growing at many newspaper sites," Carr wrote, "so if the [revenue] lines cross, it will be because the print revenue is saying hello on its way to the basement."

In his column, "The Media Equation," Carr took to task Michael Hirschorn's piece in the January/Februay Atlantic, in which Hirschorn predicts the demise of the New York Times and tells readers they shouldn't worry, because new media volunteers would rush to the ramparts to replace the fallen old gray lady of the old journalism. "Mr. Hirschorn in a smart guy," Carr said, " ... and while there is nothing sacred about The New York Times, the experienced, and yes, expensive journalistic muscle it deploys on events big and small is not going to be replaced by a vanguard of unpaid content providers. It's not that journalism is impossibly difficult; it's just that it takes enormous amounts of time and a willingness to stay with the story."

"Free is not a business model," Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, told Carr in response to Hirschorn's claims. "It sounded good and everybody got excited about it, but when you look around, it is clear that is creating havoc and will not work in the long term."

Carr asked, "Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled by produced by professionals, should be free?" And he answered, "If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free."

What the news business may need, he said, is someone like Jobs, who viewed music not as end, but as a necessary product to make his primary interests -- iPods and iPhones -- work. In other words, perhaps the news business needs a techie savior who develops a device that allows their content to be viewed easily and in a more convenient format than ink on paper. While that might not be a flattering prospect to many news industry executives, like the music moguls before them, I suspect they'd learn to live with it. And once the device is on the market, Carr said, then "all we need is a business model to go with it."

New World/Old World

Ah, the brave new world of the new media. Jeffrey Toobin shows us some of the pitfalls of the internet age in this week's New Yorker, with a chilling tale of disappearing and disintegrating blogs apparently vandalized for the sport of it. (Hack Attack, Jan. 19, 2009, p. 23). More than a hundred blogs hosted by SoapBlox, a web site that specializes in administering blogs for political liberals, were damaged or erased by a Web 2.0 version of the kind of sport who in olden times would have perhaps poured rubber cement into newspaper coinboxes or stolen bundles of newspapers containing political views not in the favor of the vandal.

Bloggers found the damage when they tried to sign on earlier this month, and inundated SoapBlox with calls of alarm. "When I woke up on Wednesday" (Jan. 7), said Paul Preston, SoapBlox's sole employee, "I started checking my phone and e-mail and people were like, 'Oh, my God,' " Toobin wrote.

It seems that the site's founders had purposely kept the software simple in order to encourage non-techies to use it. And now they were paying the price. The damage to the websites was so extensive, that SoapBlox quickly ran up the white flag. By 8:15 that morning, Preston posted this announcement: "All those hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it. Consider this the 'We're Out of Business' post."

And that would have been the end of it, except that a number of volunteers rushed to Preston's aid and helped undo the damage and managed to get SoapBlox back up and running after one long day or labor. "We're not dead yet," Preston wrote on Thursday.

And so SoapBlox is back up and running, helping the more than a hundred bloggers get their messages out. And the only clue to the vandals is a post left behind on the group's site: "Hacked by Astalavista Team." Preston told the New Yorker, "I don't have a clue what that means."