Oh good grief: Paywalls return

By Michael Fraase

Wednesday, 03 June 2009 09:00PM CDT

Section: Publishing

Notebook and keyboardThe American Press Institute (API) provided a white paper (.pdf; 2.3Mb) to newspaper executives who recently—and almost secretly—assembled outside of Chicago to discuss the future of the news business. The consensus seems to be to build paywalls around corporate news content—walling off that content from being linked to on the internet, thereby tremendously reducing its value. Of course, the newspaper executives can’t come out and say this because any such coordination would be illegal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The API’s paper outlines models and recommendations for charging for content online, insisting that news organizations “establish a true value for news content online by charging for it.” What is this, 1999? I thought we were discussing the future of the news business. Scott Rosenberg plays along anyway, writing, “News flash: Pricing a product does not establish its value. What you have to do is find a price that people will pay.”

Rosenberg tried this—many variations of it, actually—when he was at Salon. I tried it when I was at Utne Reader. Rosenberg sums it up quite nicely: “We are grizzled veterans of this argument. We have Been There and Done That. We aren’t grave-dancing; we’re saying, ‘Maybe you don’t want to fall into that grave that almost swallowed us.’” Rosenberg and I learned a hard lesson. If you remove yourself from the internet in any way, two things happen: you become immediately irrelevant and the financial picture is even worse.

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Merck and Elsevier publish fake medical journal

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 03 May 2009 10:51AM CDT

Section: Publishing

Medical moneyThe Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine sounds legit doesn’t it? Of course it does. But it’s a total and complete sham intended to simultaneously:

  1. Make money (lots of it) for the publishers
  2. Provide an “authoritative” voice for big pharma that it completely and covertly controlled that was trussed up to look like any other authentic peer-reviewed medical journal

Merck, the pharmaceutical giant developed the periodical that looked like a real live peer-reviewed medical journal. Within its pages, Merck published “data” that exhibited the company’s products in a favorable light. The pharmaceutical giant then paid Elsevier, the largest corporate publisher of medical journals, to publish the thing. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine has no editor, doesn’t appear in MEDLINE, nor has a website, but who’s counting.

The story was first broken by Milanda Rout writing for The Australian, and Bob Grant at The Scientist has the most substantial coverage. “Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles—most of which presented data favorable to Merck products—that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship,” wrote Grant in his lede.

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How much does independent journalism cost?

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 20 January 2009 08:05PM CDT

Section: Publishing

Reporter's notebookMitch Ratcliffe says the answer is about US$180,000 per year per journalist.

That assumes, according to Ratcliffe, that good, solid, original reporting is “worth the same as a senior mid-level manager in a corporation, such as Microsoft or Google.” And Ratcliffe points out that amount could be split among members of a team, say US$10,000 each for a team of 13.

Here’s how Ratcliffe’s numbers break down:

US$130,000 annual salary and benefits
US$4,800 annual subscriptions and other information sources
US$2,500 monthly in travel
US$1,250 monthly in legal and insurance

Advertising is not going to pay for this kind of journalism. Get over it already. Innovative journalism will have to be supported by the users of news. How much would you pay for solid, current information on a topic that’s important to you—green energy, for example? What would it be worth to get enough information from a self-supporting reliable journalist to be considered generally well informed on an issue? Would you pay US$1 per month?

“What isn’t necessary for the news to flow effortlessly these days is a big company to distribute articles and programming,” writes Ratcliffe. Amen. He suggests a distributed non-profit or cooperative organization that would handle collecting subscription fees and distributing compensation. “This is critical,” writes Ratcliffe, “since it is most likely that supporters of reporting will want a collection of sources, not just one source. So, there might be a ‘Collective Press’ feed on US government, on the state of California, the auto industry, green energy, and so forth, the fees for which are split between many contributors.”

 

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