Meet Beacon, The 'Netflix For News'

Forbes reporting:
Would you pay $5 a month to support your favorite writer? What if doing so gave you access not only to that writer’s articles, but also to a large and growing body of exclusive work from like-minded journalists?
That’s the idea behind Beacon, a new startup that catchily describes itself as a sort of “Netflix NFLX +0.55% for news.”
Beacon was conceived in response to a problem and an opportunity, says Dan Fletcher, one of the company’s three co-founders. The problem is that an unbundled digital news environment encourages production of clickable journalism: celebrity reporting, buzzy scoops, cute animal slideshows and so on. 

“When the pageview model is the only model that supports journalism, that incentivizes certain things,” he says. “There are just stories that freelancers can’t sell, and it’s not because they’re bad stories.”
On the other hand, social media has made it possible for journalists to market their work directly to readers in a way they never could before. That’s the opportunity.
“Social media’s made it so that writers have stepped out from behind the byline,” Fletcher says. “They have their own personal brands. But no one’s really come up with a clever way to tap that in a way that makes them some money.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/17/meet-beacon-the-netflix-for-news/

Don't mistake news activity for the health of the news business

Mondaynotes reporting:
Digital media zealots are confused: they mistake news activity for the health of the news business. Unfortunately, the two are not correlated. What they promote as a new kind of journalism carries almost no economic value. As great as they are from a user standpoint, live blogging / tweeting, crowdsourcing and hosting “experts” blogs bring very little money – if any, to the news organization that operates them. Advertising-wise and on a per page basis, these services yield only a fraction of what a premium content fetches. On some markets, a blog page will carry a CPM (Cost per Thousand page views) of one, while premium content will get 10 or 15 (euros or dollars). In net terms, the value can even be negative, as many such contents consume manpower in order to manage, moderate, curate or edit them.
More realistically, these contents also carry some indirect but worthy value: in a powerful way, they connect the brand to the user. Therefore, I still believe news organization should do more, no less of such coverage. But we should not blind ourselves: the economic value isn’t there. It lies in the genuine and unique added value of original journalism deployed by organizations of varying size and scope, ranging from traditional media painfully switching to the new world, to pure online players — all abiding by proven standards.
...The business model will play an important role in solving this problem. Online organizations will soon realize there is little money to be made in “process-journalism”. But, as they find it is a formidable vector to drive traffic and to promote in-depth reporting, they will see it deserves careful strategizing....
http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/06/19/losing-value-in-the-process

The Washington Post is making money the new-fashioned way, by playing roulette

Poynter:
In the newspaper business, every year brings fresh buzzwords. Jockeying for the lead so far in 2011 are “new revenue streams” and its corollary “many small bets.” But what does that mean, in practice, for a given paper?
I heard an answer in a talk by The Washington Post’s Ken Babby at the International Newspaper Marketing Association World Congress in New York last month. Babby’s title picked up one of my favorite metaphors for the exercise: “Emerging Digital Media Platforms:  Past, Present and Future Roulette.”
Babby was the top advertising executive at The Washington Post before he turned 30. And, in the 18 months since I met him at a Poynter conference on the future of advertising, his title has morphed to “Chief Revenue Officer” — signaling that some of the best emerging opportunities are not advertising in a traditional sense.
Though I missed the conference, Babby brought me up to speed in a phone interview. He has both a theory of how to play the game so as to beat the odds, and a litany of unorthodox businesses the Post has launched.
Babby prefers the term “strategic bets” to small bets. Some, like mobile and tablet apps are likely to be expensive; some will have a payoff, if any, later rather than right now.
“The roulette wheel epitomizes how many choices we have,” he said, “Our resources are limited — not just dollars but also time.”
So the Post is going for a mix of “short-term cash and long-term value.” One of the successful new ventures is a non-digital one. “We have built a great conference/live events business,” Babby said.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/136088/the-washington-post-is-making-money-the-new-fashioned-way-by-playing-roulette