Breaking: Reported Dismissals at Post Web Site – City Desk – Washington City Paper.

You’ve got to love the comments on this story from the self-proclaimed real journalists. They criticize the other commenters for not understanding what “real” reporters do — news flash: we know; we’re just tired of hearing you blather on about how it’s the only important work in all of democracy — yet they seem to have no clue that washingtonpost.com produces a ton of original content as well. As former executive editor there, I can assure you that we stopped “putting the paper online” many years ago. In fact, two of the people reportedly let go this week are video journalists Travis Fox and Pierre Kattar. Both Travis and Pierre have won many awards for their work, and Travis won the first national Emmy ever given out for Web video. Travis and Pierre are talented guys who produce world-class journalism, and as hard as it is for some to believe, it’s actually possible for great journalism to come in a form other than a newspaper.

It’s the attitude of Stone Age commenters like these that still pervades far too many print newsrooms. Instead of attempting to adapt to what is clearly a digital future, they complain about the world collapsing around them, yet demean anyone who tries to do anything differently. And they wonder why so many people have stopped listening to them, both professionally and personally.

The rise of Twitter and Facebook has been well-chronicled the past few years. But too much of the discussion about these sites focuses on how they’ve disrupted traditional media companies. Every day, it seems another news organization is releasing guidelines for journalists on how to use (or not use) Twitter. Every day, a panel is held somewhere in the world where someone decries the increased over-Twittering of society (here’s Brian Williams doing that today). Every day, someone else declares Twitter the future of journalism. It’s a fascinating topic, evidenced by this piece today in The New York Times about how Twitter and The Guardian teamed up to bust open a gag order.

But the rise of social networking has also created one major advantage for media companies that isn’t much discussed: the fact the news consumption has now become seamlessly blended into the daily lives of so many consumers. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to read the newspaper, you completely dedicated yourself to it at the breakfast table or dinner table or den for some fixed period of time. When you were done, you went off to work, paid bills or went shopping, and news wasn’t a part of the equation. If you sat down to watch Walter Cronkite after dinner, you were once again focused on news. Once he signed off, you were not.

Now, think about media consumption in the social media era. Today, content from media companies lives in the same stream as so much other information in a consumer’s life. Now, while you’re in Facebook uploading vacation photos, your eye can be caught by a headline in your news feed. While you’re in Twitter venting about the weather, you can stumble upon news articles sent by a news oganization or a friend. This phenomenon already existed in e-mail, where newsletters were mixed in with personal correspondence. Now, if you’re using e-mail, Facebook or Twitter — three pretty big chunks of time for most Web-savvy consumers — you can, at any moment, be pulled back into news and information. This is a massive opportunity, and one that requires news organizations become fuller participants in those venues.

Newspaper executives frequently complain about the fact that people no longer spend 30 minutes a day with the paper, but if anyone truly doesn’t understand that those days are over, they should write a letter to President Eisenhower. Now, we’ve entered a world where many news consumers are available to be distracted all day long, and not just for one 30-minute block. Does this phenomenon present advertising challenges? Of course. Has it contributed to declining value of many news brands? Absolutely. But this is the direction news consumption is headed, and failing to acknowledge that may be fatal for many news organizations.

I’m firmly in the camp that believes pay models will work only for a tiny percentage of Web content produced by media companies. This means I’m part of a group often derided as idealists who believe “content wants to be free” and are utterly naive about basic business principles. It’s a weak, inaccurate stereotype. I’ve been on the digital side for 14 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone utter the words “content wants to be free.” I believe in free content not because of some earthy ideal, but because I understand the basic business principle of supply and demand. There’s more content available to news consumers now than at any other time in human history, and much of that comes in the form of commoditized news. The power of individual news brands is weakening in the face of massive disaggregation of content and the growing power of social networks. I believe in the free model because I don’t think readers will pay for 95 percent of what news organizations currently produce.

I was thinking about this while reading TheWrap’s report on Tuesday’s Magazine Innovation Summit in New York. Here are some of the quotes about pay models made by participants at that event:

• Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix: “[Pay models are] certainly worth a shot.”
• Ken Auletta, New Yorker writer: “There’s a growing recognition that free is not the answer.”
• John Squires, Time Inc.’s executive vice president: “In the end you have to have guts to say I’m not going to give content away for free.”

Comments like these are typical of those made by pay model advocates. Instead of answering the very debatable question about whether people will pay for content, these comments merely imply that they should. Since when do we build business models based on what consumers should do? Yet, on a daily basis, you see comments from media executives saying that what they do has value and/or costs a lot to produce, so asking to be paid for it is only fair. Sure, I suppose content would have value to you if you were the executive running the unit that produced it. But that’s an altogether different question than whether the consumer thinks it has value. Yes, it costs a lot of money to produce quality enterprise and investigative journalism, and yes, you have to find a way to recoup those costs in order to have a viable business. But, last I checked, network programming cost a lot of money too, but the medium that delivers that content remains free. Just because something costs a lot of money to create doesn’t mean direct reimbursement is the only road to fiscal stability.

In the end, there won’t be one silver bullet that magically creates viable Web media businesses. It’s going to be shrapnel, little bits of revenue from many sources — one of which, by the way, will be quality, niche premium content. But we should be wary of any business model predicated on what we think our content is worth.