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Penny a Click (con’t)

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The discussion over how to fund newspapers continues, with Michael Kinsley weighing in today on the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Based on the failure at Slate (ancient by Internet time standards), Kinsley argues you can’t charge “by the slice” for content. I usually enjoy Kinsley’s observations for their wit and insight, but this time he missed the mark, showing little cognizance of tech and market advances since his Slate experience). Ironically, his piece came on the same day as coverage of Amazon’s new Kindle 2.0 device, which happens to charge by the slice. Michael, perhaps you could sit down with Jeff Bezos and compare business plans.

Kinsley’s piece apparently is in reaction to Walter Isaacson’s TIME endorsement of “micro-payments” for news content. (By the way, how can The New York Times or Kinsley for that matter justify not linking to a piece explicitly referred to in Kinsley’s article? I mean, just what is going on here? Arrogance? It has to be intentional, coming at a time when The Times is getting lots of attention for Web innovation.) Many other new contributions to the debate we raised here a month ago ago (really a renewal of the longstanding debate over micro-payments) are surfacing: Glenn Fleishman at Publicola has an insightful analysis of advertising realities on the Web, and Clark Humphrey comments on Glenn’s piece (neither are about micro-payments per se). Meanwhile, the most (in my opinion) thoughtful and comprehensive look comes from Steven Brill:

“All online articles will cost 10 cents each to read in full, with simple, one-step purchases powered by an iTunes-like Journalism infrastructure. (Apple, which turned my children from music pirates to music micro-buyers, could become a joint-venture participant, but that is hardly the only way to create a convenient payment engine.)”

I don’t think Brill’s multi-tiered system (he also supports a “one-day pass” for 40 cents, a month-long pass for $7.50 and annual fee of $55) is the right answer. I still back a penny a click, given the dynamics of Web commerce and critical mass. Once you start slicing and dicing, you confuse consumers. And people don’t want to pay even a day in advance for something they aren’t sure they’ll want to buy (compare RealNetworks’ music success with Apple’s). If Apple had charged $4 for a Beatles song, $1.50 for a  Starlight Mints number and 3 cents for an Eagles tune, iTunes would have kept Napster in business for years. (Brill even calls for 5 cents to forward an article. That’s just bone-headed; forwarding should be free. Let recipients decide whether they want to read the article and pay for it themselves.)

A couple of thoughts:

First, can we officially retire the term “micro-payments”? It’s been stigmatized beyond redemption. And there are so many different types that the term has lost all meaning. We can refer to pay-as-you-go systems by their specific form; e.g., subscription-based, or pay-per-view, or whatever. I prefer “penny a click.” KISS.

Second, no one seems to bring up content providers’ biggest asset: Archives. Recall that The New York Times used to charge for archived articles. It gave up because charging was such a huge disincentive versus “free.” But its mistake was charging too much: $1.50 per piece if memory serves. Not to overstate it, but a penny would prove no barrier to archival retrieval and over time represent a healthy revenue source, for any content provider, not just The Times.

However many permutations the discussion involves, at least it’s happening. And that’s good. We need to get people to think of content as something to be paid for. The exact iteration will work itself out. I vividly remember early discussions over video on the Web. Why wasn’t it happening? What would it take for someone to provide easy ways of posting all those home/hobbyist videos they were taking? The arguments back then — that it was too time-consuming, storage was too expensive, broadband was not fast enough — all disappeared virtually overnight with YouTube, because storage became cheap and broadband got faster (and more ubiquitous). All we need are a couple of technological advances to make a penny a click easy and transparent, and we’re off and rolling toward a transaction economy for the Web.

Choosing Not to Choose

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After reading Goldy’s post below, I had to check out whether or not the number of people who voted Yes on I-25 in November 2007 outnumbered the total number of votes cast in the special election they voted to have.

Almost…

King County Initiative 25 – 11/07

YES 240998

Director of Elections – 2/09

Ballots Cast: 249086

So, either there were really less than 10,000 people who both voted NO on I-25 and then voted in this election, or there were a large number of people who went to the polls in November 2007 to demand that our elections director be elected, then didn’t even have the motivation to fill out a ballot that was sent to their house and mail it back in.

Hooray for apathy!

Be careful what you wish for

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I will agree with the whiners over at (u)SP about one thing: the turnout in last week’s special election for Elections Director was absolutely pathetic.  A week into the counting it looks like barely 22% of registered King County voters cast a ballot last Tuesday, compared to almost 84% in November.  To put that in perspective, the 48,001 votes runner-up David Irons Jr. managed to garner would have only amounted to about 5% of the November vote.

Huh.  I guess folks weren’t all that exercised about the performance of the elections office after all, a notion reinforced by the fact that Sherril Huff, the winner, was not only the incumbent, she was the only candidate in the race to speak out against electing the Elections Director in the first place.

It has been suggested to me that with the 2004 gubernatorial race finally over (and this was indeed the final nail in the coffin of that controversy), we can perhaps amend the charter back to appointing the Elections Director before the position goes back on the ballot in 2011.

Well, good luck with that.  Understandably, voters rarely vote for less democracy, no matter how sensible that option might be.

Amen and pass them the phonebook

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At Blue Oregon, former Senate candidate Steve Novick makes the case for restoring the education funding slashed by the mindless “centrists” in the Senate, and goes one further:

What are we worried about ­ a Republican filibuster? Bring it on! Let teachers and parents and principals and economists and Governors deluge their Senators with calls begging them to do the right thing! Let these so-called “moderate” Republican Senators (and a few self-styled “moderate” Democrats) explain why hundreds of billions for banks, hundreds of billions for the war in Iraq, are just james dandy, but saving our schools from cuts, rebuilding schools first constructed in the first New Deal, helping college students facing huge increases in tuition ­ oh, no! They’ll cave.

I’d have to agree at this point. The threat of a filibuster has to be tested or the GOP will always obstruct, delay and grandstand. Might as well get it on now while the country’s attention is focused. While delay is not desirable, it might actually save time because I’m hard pressed to believe the House is going to go along with the Senate version.

Let the nation watch, spell-bound, as Senate Republicans try to explain to the American people why they have to save our kids’ futures by letting the economic crisis decimate the public school systems.

Jeff Bezos’ faith based initiative

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My daughter and I are flying to Florida later this week, and I’d love to get my hands on one of those nifty new Amazon Kindles to help pass the time on those long travel days, and perhaps a little more time while sitting by the pool.  But to be honest, I’m not a speedy reader, and I doubt I’ll get through even one book on this trip, let alone the twenty-or-so books I could buy with the money spent on the $359.00 Kindle alone.

Sure, it’s a cool piece of hardware, and the electronic-ink display is literally easy on the eyes—the best display technology I’ve yet seen for reading large amounts of text… you know, short of the printed page.  But the feature I covet most is the ability to wirelessly download one of hundreds of thousands of books, in minutes, from just about anywhere.

That’s the way content should be: totally and completely ubiquitous.  And while the book may yet survive as our last physical medium holdout (despite Jeff Bezos’ best efforts), content consumption in general is inevitably moving online.  No more CDs. No more DVDs or BlueRay.  And in some cities, no more newsprint.  Even radio and television broadcasters’ airwave monopoly will collapse as audio and video consumption increasingly shifts to the Internet.

I know there are a lot of people who worry about finding a business model that can support content creators in this new online world, but me, not so much, especially when there are so many smart, creative folks like Jeff Bezos out there willing to risk failure.  Yeah, sure, in the short term these new technologies are incredibly disruptive, but then, history tells us that new technologies almost always are.  

If we don’t find a viable business model, in the end, I believe, a viable business model will find us. In this, you could say, I almost have faith.

Whistling past the Second Depression

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It was nice to see Senators Smoot and Hawley Collins and Nelson on my tee-vee this morning, and then later that 14 kids octuplet lady who is on NBC every day.

Each one of them seems to have the same basic grasp of basic economics, although having 14 kids in the hopes that someone will pay for them is probably going to actually work in the end.

Meanwhile, in the real world, check out the truly frightening chart Barry Ritholtz has showing job losses for all postwar recessions.

Bankuporking

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I have no idea how to stop the media from stupidly blibbering about 14 babies and tax cuts, nor do I have any idea how to stop the right wing narrative that revolves around how bad it is to fund things like education. Maybe if we made up words, say like “bankuporking,” it would help.

The morons are winning, that much is clear.

We are at a defining moment in our history. God bless the United States of America.

Good news for Boeing, bad news for us?

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FAA to loosen fuel-tank safety rules, benefiting Boeing’s 787 :

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has quietly decided to loosen stringent fuel-tank safety regulations written after the 1996 fuel-tank explosion that destroyed flight TWA 800 off the coast of New York state.

The FAA proposes to relax the safeguards for preventing sparks inside the fuel tank during a lightning strike, standards the agency now calls “impractical” and Boeing says its soon-to-fly 787 Dreamliner cannot meet.

[…] But the move has stirred intense opposition inside the local FAA office from the technical specialists — most of them former Boeing engineers — responsible for certifying new airplane designs.

Good.  Now, if a 787 blows up in a lightning strike, we know exactly who to sue.

Weekend Wrap-Up

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UPDATE: Definitely check out Norm Stamper’s post about the South Carolina sheriff who wants to charge Michael Phelps with a crime.

A few more updates on what’s been going on this week:

– The Obama Administration reiterated its promise that the raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California will stop as soon as they finish appointing new people to run the DEA. Four dispensaries in Los Angeles were raided this week. The change.org site has a petition you can sign to encourage the Obama Administration to end the raids here.

– After a dozen State House members co-sponsored a bill to decriminalize marijuana, State Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-36) and three others introduced a similar bill, SB 5615. Unlike the House Bill, though, this one will be getting a hearing – scheduled for this Tuesday, February 10 along with several other criminal justice and drug policy bills.

– The latest pre-trial hearing in the Bruce Olson case was scheduled for yesterday. I haven’t been able to get any news updates yet so if you were there and have an update, please leave a comment.

– Ryan Frederick was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter this week. Frederick was the man who killed a raiding police officer whom he mistakenly believed was a home invader. Frederick was also acquitted of the charge of manufacturing marijuana, the initial justification for the raid in the first place. He faces up to ten years in jail.

– Pete Guither has another infuriating drug war story.

– I have some mixed feelings about the Stimulus Plan making its way through Congress. I’m thoroughly annoyed by the simple-minded arguments coming from Republicans on why to oppose this bill. I think it’s clear that some form of government stimulus is necessary right now. The idea that we’re going to fix this mess simply by cutting taxes or scaling back government is foolish.

That said, there are some things in the bill that absolutely should not be there. For one, the bill contains $3 billion dollars for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program. This money would fund drug task forces, like the one in Kitsap County (WestNET) that busted medical marijuana patient Bruce Olson.

In order for government spending to really be a “stimulus”, it can’t just create jobs for the sake of creating jobs. It needs to create jobs that, in turn, create more private sector jobs in the future. Building roads and infrastructure can do that by making it easier for businesses to operate and expand. Funding research can do that by improving technology and furthering scientific discovery. But funding more prisons and the programs that continue to fill our bloated prisons doesn’t do that. It actually puts the burden on government to fund even more public sector jobs, like additional prison workers and public defenders.

– And finally, how stupid is Kellogg’s? The company that makes Cheez-It’s, Pop Tarts, and dozens of other snack products drops Michael Phelps as its spokesman because he took a bong hit? What? Does Kellogg’s have any idea how much of their revenue comes from pot smokers?

Tell the people

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFvrL_nqx2c[/youtube]

The point is not that the situation is exactly the same, because it’s not, but a president can indeed explain stuff if he can form coherent sentences.

I trust Obama will do so, perhaps in a news conference on Monday, and given the situation it’s worthwhile to hear how it can be done.

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