The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies.
Blogger: Steve Outing
Position: Founder of the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and former columnist at the now defunct Editor and Publisher
Blog name: Steve Outing
Backstory: In December, The Miami Herald added a link to the end of all of the stories on its web site inviting readers to make a donation via credit card to “support ongoing news coverage;” Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal said the experiment has “elicited an encouraging steam of gifts, ranging from $2 to $55.”
Blog post: But Outing says the Herald is taking the wrong approach, calling it unsophisticated. “How about instead tracking frequent readers, and presenting them with a donation pitch after they’ve read a number of articles?” He also suggested donation package options that could include gifts, a la NPR.
Post-script: But when I talked with him, he was even more bullish about a different tack, suggesting that newspapers themselves shouldn’t even be involved directly in the soliciting of money. Rather, he thinks papers should join a third-party service like Kachingle or the now out-of-business Contenture, where newspaper fans could potentially set aside a certain amount of money each month and then can allocate it among their favorite sites.
Outing said that because traditional newspapers are for profit-enterprises they face “pushback” from readers who will wonder “why is this giant corporation begging for money” if they solicit donations directly. Also, it’s likely that visitors who appreciate online news won’t want to allocate all of their free cash to just one for-profit site. “I don’t think this is going to save the news industry by any means, but if one of those (services) really takes off, that could get pretty interesting,” he said.
Know of an insightful employee blog that covers digital media, entertainment or tech? Please e-mail the URL to joe@paidcontent.org, so that I can include it in a future edition of the Inside Word.
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