give the 'net credit

I know I have a lot of them, but Chris Connelly used to be one of my idols. He seemed like he had the best job: watching movies, listening to great music, writing for Rolling Stone, editing Premiere, appearing on MTV. But what I liked more than anything is the way he approached his job. Connelly and Kurt Loder didn’t seem to get caught up in the fandom. They could interview all the biggest stars of stage, screen and CD without fawning all over them. They gave me, a budding journalist, the sense you could cover an industry you loved without overlooking all the warts and buying into all the public relations baloney.

I listened with rapt attention when he broke down the top pop culture trends of the last decade with Bill Simmons on his weekly podcast and found myself nodding in agreement with most of his points. However, I was kind of stunned at one of his last responses. When Bill Simmons asks at the podcast’s end if there’s a story of the decade he and Chris missed, Chris replies:

I never would have thought that magazines, newspapers too, but magazines would be in such dire straights as we head into 2010. That’s the saddest thing for me. We grew up loving magazines, reading magazines, dreaming of writing for them, and imagining the life we would lead if we were around a bunch of guys who were writing. I can’t believe now that it’s going to be so hard for the next generation to do something like that.

This quote really stuck in my head yesterday as I had the students in my newswriting class introduce themselves and tell me in which sequence they were enrolled. I’d say one quarter to one half all said magazines. (Honestly, I don’t think I had any who said newspapers, and only one that said online.) I had to ask myself if Connelly, a guy I trust and who I had just agreed with for more than an hour, was right.

His big beef wasn’t that everything was moving online. He lauded the emergence of  multiple voices and the first-person singular online. However, he lamented the fact that most of the people writing on the Web would not be able to make a living out of it.

The difference is those guys who wrote the sports sections of the newspapers … because of their jobs, they got to buy homes. They got to have families. They got to send their kids to college. I don’t feel like the people who are doing that on the Web now are going to be able to do that the same way. They are not going to be able to have full lives the way the other guys did. I would have never expected in this boom of information that we’ve experienced that those things would be the casualties.

I know we are still trying to figure out how to make the Web pay. I know traditional news organizations are struggling to pay the bills, and they are stiffing staff writers and freelancers. The LA Times reports today that freelance fees are lower than ever. But I have to maintain the optimism, for my sanity and my students, that someone will figure out the business model. We know readers still want good stories. We’re pretty sure they’ll pay for them, but the question is how much.

Interesting, Simmons at the end of the podcast might offer a backhanded solution. He predicts we’ll become an on-demand society, paying just for what we want on our Apple tablets or 50″ TV screens. I think he’s right, and I wonder what would happen if a news organization embraced this idea. Apply this to magazines. For $25 a year, you get 25 credits a month at NewYorker.com. Stories by Malcolm Gladwell, for example, are 10 credits each because, we’ll he’s Malcom Gladwell. Visiting the Cartoon Lounge might cost you 5 credits, while Profiles are 7. Other regular features and columnists would be 3 points each, while Talk of the Town is always free. I’m just spitballing here because I don’t know the New Yorker that well (besides Gladwell, obviously) but I still think it could work.

What I should have done is applied the idea to a local newspaper, which is what I know. Same price, same credits, but different scales. Breaking news is free, while archived stories are 5 credits each. The first two photos from the county fair are free, but it costs 5 credits to open the 40-shot gallery. The treasured local columnist is 3 credits to read, and he or she is paid in relation to the number of credits people shell out to read them.

Sorry. It’s kind of a half-baked idea, but it’s the first thing to come to me as I nodded my head to Simmon’s description of our on-demand society. I’d love to see other industries, especially cable and satellite TV implement this system too.

PhotoCredit: Jason Salas via Creative Commons License on Flickr

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