Jonathan Stark

I came across some posts about the decline of the newspaper industry that excellently articulate my thoughts on the topic. Thought I’d share:

Sorry, Wrong Number: McCloud Abandons Micropayments

The conclusion I drew in 2003 (and which I still believe) was that the vanishingly low cost of making unlimited perfect copies would put creators in the position of having to decide between going for audience size (fame) or restricting and charging for access (fortune), and that the desire for fame, no longer tempered by reproduction costs, would generally win out.

Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers

The other key piece of background isn’t about small payments themselves, but about the conversation. Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want. As a result, conversations about small payments take place entirely among content providers, never involving us, the people who will ostensibly be funding these transactions.

Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business

The first characteristic concerns music itself: people like to hear the same song more than once. There are dozens of songs you’d be happy to hear hundreds of times and hundreds of songs you’d be happy to hear dozens of times, but there are not many newspaper articles you’d read twice…

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.