Wanted: New Models in Media

Follow-up from the Clay Shirky "Newspapers are Done..." piece posted a few days ago: the NYTimes reports today on GlobalPost, a new venture for global journalism utilizing an online "freemium" business model.

Will it work? Who knows. More important than any given venture, this is an example of the multitude of approaches people are experimenting with to separate the useful role of journalism from the increasingly obsolete business of publishing newspapers.

I've been having a lot of discussions recently about way the internet is changing the various media industries -- newspapers, music, film, etc. One thing people seem to have trouble with is understanding the difference between the value of the Content and the value of the Business Model.

In all of these industries, the content is still valuable to people, whether it's a song, a movie or a piece of reporting. In fact, it's probably more valuable than ever before, because more people are accessing it and enjoying it. The problem is that the industries built up around the content have all evolved around a particular Business Model that makes money by solving the distribution problem. And as Clay Shirky pointed out, that problem just ceased to exist.

What needs to happen is for new business models to come into existence so the content creators can make money in the new environment (perhaps this is something like GlobalPost in journalism or Live Nation in the music industry). Unfortunately, there are a lot of people and a lot of capital tied up in the old business models, and transition ing to the new ones means their jobs disappear and institutions they've built need to be taken down. That's a painful change, so the people and companies threatened by it are fighting tooth and nail to preserve the old environment through copyright litigation and other strategies.