going behind the wall

New York Magazine recently reported that The New York Times is ready to pull the trigger on a pay-to-play model. (Lauren brought up a similar discussion in class on Wednesday. Prescient?) The final decision may be announced within days, once the powers-that-be decide on the appropriate model:

The Times has considered three types of pay strategies. One option was a more traditional pay wall along the lines of The Wall Street Journal, in which some parts of the site are free and some subscription-only. For example, editors and business-side executives discussed a premium version of Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook section. Another option was the metered system. The third choice, an NPR-style membership model, was abandoned last fall, two sources explained. The thinking was that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to maintain because subscribers would have to receive privileges (think WNYC tote bags and travel mugs, access to Times events and seminars).

While the pay model will bring in badly needed revenue, one issue is whether the pay model will result in a drop-off in readership in what has become a global journalism soure. Some years back, the paper experimented with a partial-pay system, where some content was free, while premium content was only available to subscribers. As happened when salon.com tried a similar strat, it didn't work:

What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world. This fall, Keller told the Observer that at some point, the decision is a “gut call about what we think the audience will accept.” Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East. “As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

Of course, as Lauren and others brought up on Wednesday, the most important issue is this: somebody has to figure out a way to pay the reporters to do the work. bk

theory vs skills for the new millenium

Take a trip in the way-back machine to visit the debate about journalism education a few decades ago. According to the progressives, j-schools that focused too much on skills, rather than theory, were nothing more than trade schools, grooming students for entry level jobs. Those who hammered on basic skills in the classroom were considered the dinosaurs.

Then came the so-called crisis in journalism (looking back, that seems ridiculous) close to ten years ago when many thinkers got together and revisited the debate. Most all agreed that the progressives were on the right track. Sure, technique is important, but it's the mission and purpose of journalism that needs to be front and center in the classroom. The purpose -- beyond knowing how to craft a lede in snappy prose and figuring out what belongs in that sacred real estate between the quotation marks -- should be to interrogate the profession itself, to paraphrase Mitchell Stephens, to question all that journalism could and should be.

But now it appears from this piece in New York Magazine -- cleverly titled "Columbia J-School's Existential Crisis" -- the debate has been upended. Those who cling to the fundamentals of journalism that can translate, ultimately, to most any platform are considered the dinosaurs. (Why is it that when j-profs focus on journalism itself, they are assumed to be pied pipers leading students off the cliff we used to know as newspapers?)

Those considered on the cutting edge are the profs who emphasize technique, who teach students how to blog and twitter and learn multi-media skills.

The article itself is just the jump-off point. Go to the comments, especially from the Columbia J-School students, to get a handle on the debate and see how it rages from those on the front lines.

My two cents? If you can't do the reporting, and learn why it matters, sound slides and tweets and 90 second videos probably don't matter much more than deliciously clever 30-word ledes. Getting the story comes first. How you deliver it, that's the gravy.

And p.s., you really don't need a class to learn how to blog. bk