Much has been written over the past week about journalists’ favorite topic: the future of journalism. For once, it’s been about the business side of things, coming on the heels of Andrew Sullivan’s decision to strike out on his own with a subscription model and BuzzFeed’s most recent funding haul.
It’s useful to add to this discussion these pieces by Lewis DVorkin, chief product officer at Forbes, and Henry Blodget, CEO of Business Insider. Both men describe a future where the analog-dollars-to-digital-dimes equation is cemented. The idea of that gap closing, in a world of 4 trillion ad impressions, has moved beyond wishful thinking to pure fantasy. The question now for news publishers is what to do about it.
Paywalls, meters and subscriptions are one route. And yet in many cases, they’re treating the symptom and not the cause. I recently did an interview with Blodget on why he’s excited for the future of news. The main reason, as he outlines in his presentation, is algorithms can’t make stories — yet. Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that Business Insider has a vastly different cost base than a publication like Forbes. Out of Blodget’s 91 slides, this is the most instructive.
During our interview, I summed up his position as: Everyone’s screwed, but some are less screwed. The less screwed are publications that have gotten their cost structures in line with the new economics of digital media. Blodget likes his hand because he isn’t crating around enormous legacy costs like an old-school media company.
This isn’t lost on DVorkin. He’s engaged in restructuring Forbes, root and branch, from a lofty magazine for globe-trotting execs to something more like The Huffington Post for business. He calls this “entrepreneurial journalism,” where Forbes rents space out to dozens of contributors. Some of the content from these contributors is quite good. Much of it is dreck. That’s the price you pay nowadays, however, in a world where pageviews are king.
The pageview game is brutal. Once on that treadmill, it’s quite hard to get off.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/medias-brave-new-digital-world/
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