how to save newspapers
START WITH THE ITUNES GIFT CARD MODEL

With 14 years in the Web world and 14 years in the world of daily journalism, I love picking up my newspaper in the driveway every morning. I also know I may not be able to do that forever.

Considering my deep knowledge in both fields, I always figured it was inevitable I'd wind up on newspaper website. Hasn't worked out that way, and there's a reason for that, but I'll save that for the very end.

Giving content away for free online and charging for it at 7-11 is not a business model. Newspapers got blinded by the rise in online ad revenue even when it wasn't nearly enough to offset losses on the print side. The subscription model largely hasn't worked either; it's hard to make people pay for something they used to get for free.

So what's left? Well, people smarter than me (ala Jakob Nielsen) proposed micro-payments more than a decade ago, with the idea being you make the payments so small people don't even notice. Say, for newspapers, two cents per story.

So how do you get used to people signing up -- and paying for -- micropayment systems? By initially having it limited in terms of the scope of content, and by establishing micropayment accounts for free. The idea is to get the user totally used to the system before they actually have to pay for it.

To turn a necessity into a virtue the micropayment should provide

an extra benefit. Consider how Progressive Insurance commercials take a virtual product (online insurance) into a concrete realm by way of software-style boxes and a retail store. It's always good when you can give customers a physical manifestation of a virtual product, and there's no better example of this than the iTunes gift card.

The idea would be to plaster the market with these sort of iNupe cards, and to cross-promote the cards with special deals and discounts only available online or on the micro-purchased pages. The focus is on the cards; the revenue will come later.

Two other points in closing.
• The term "Real-Time Web" may be gaining consultant, buzz-word status, but hype aside, the aggregation and distribution of data will just keep getting easier. Thing is, data does not equal content; once it arrives at the front of the screen, it becomes measured by the principles of information architecture and usability. A lot of stuff on online news websites seems just sort of plugged-in, kind of disembodied and floating. The tighter the look and feel, the better the end-user experience.
• I'm a firm believer in human editors, and if so many content management systems have severe limitations because the people using them don't know code, then don't upgrade the systems, upgrade the people. Newspapers got away from linotypes, TV stations moved from film. Web-technical editors seems a natural evolution to me.