it's important to you
well
we just recently survived another pledge week
on npr
another week where i didn't cave
to the ceaseless lecturing and guilt-tripping
of my usual drive-time companions
i know
i'm a bad person
they'll probably kick me out of newton for confessing this
but i've probably mentioned before
that pledge weeks profligately waste the months of good will
brought by quality programming
not by interrupting it
but by doing so with a condescending tone
and living up to the precise details of the
stereotype of arrogance
that its listeners are so often accused of
so why is it
that in the boston globe's hour of need
that i'd recommend just such a model
(i've read this idea elsehwere too)
for them
thing is
i'm not opposed to paying for quality content
i'm not opposed to paying for content that i got addicted to when it was
free
i'd be happy to pay for npr if they could find a way to
not talk down to their listenership when they ask
i paid for salon once upon a time
i paid for slashdot once upon a time
i pay for espn to read peter gammons
the big-fee model like salon and espn probably wouldn't work for the globe
newspapers are so easily linked
copied
pasted
that the value of their content
is ephemeral and
can be easily diluted
slashdot's penny-a-page model is a better one
just because it follows the itunes model of making it easy to spend a tiny amount
a jillion times
but it too is subject to circumvention
newspapers are different in that they are a public good
operated in private
part of their value is inherent to that public-ness
so if it costs $10 a week for dead-tree paper
call it half that for the content
that's $250 or so a year
well in line with what our radio friends ask of us
that's a lot of money
but the general idea would be to get all of us online
subscribers to pay our way after a decade of
freeloading
reporting will be missed
if the paper goes away
blogs are great for covering things people like
not so great for covering boring stuff that people still like to know
it's of value to me
the trick will be in reminding people it's of value to them
and not pissing them off in the process
