Why Free is Very Expensive - Forbes.com

Raju Narisetti via

I, for one, think that the golden age of targeted digital advertising is yet to come. Do we really want to trade that larger opportunity for the much smaller and unreliable pursuit of consumer dollars? I also wonder if we aren’t better off redeploying our newsroom resources to create new revenue streams and more engaging digital platforms than trying to make the traditional Web experience better and charge for it. And, I think we ought to create a drawbridge around our content—not necessarily for readers but for the aggregators. A business model that insists a Yahoo or a Huffington Post uses your content through some form of syndication, giving them trusted content and giving big media an opportunity to share the upside of their more engaging offerings.

Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. Rather than apply an ‘all or nothing’ approach focused, perhaps wrongly, on just our Web sites, we should be willing to make creative bets on our business model. We continue to make what is being consumed—in large quantities. It is time we figured out how to make it easier, more engaging and useful.

Moving quickly to a more liquid media model is well and good. But the dominant thread of the newspaper crash is that the world doesn’t have a need to the consolidated thing that newspapers were, and it’s as yet unclear which parts of the old regional paper are still relevant.

What is the value of a local reporter? Does the local sports guy really have a better handle on the local games? Does the local reporter really understand the Arizona immigration mess better than someone in Washington? Does someone in Detroit really have better insight into the car business that someone in New York City?

Regional papers are being obliterated, blown into bits, and its not at all obvious what will still matter once the dust settles.

I think Narisetti’s still too focused on doing better at what used to matter — producing high quality works — instead of innovating around liquid media solutions. Why didn’t the Washington Post produce a Flipboard? Why did the NY Times have to spin out News.me?

The successful media companies of the future will seem more like software companies than old school publishing firms.