Back to the Penny Press?

I remember reading Patterson's PEJ project just two years ago, which was cited in Fahri's article. And how outdated it looks now. His recommendation that time was "Just play new better online!". Nowadays, I don't think many will believe that making stories with lots of interactive feaure will save the mainstream media.

It is outdated because Patterson's recommnedation is based on the old business model. Standardized news symbolized by AP stylebook, hypocratical ethic of Objectivity, strong brandname such as New York Times, Bob Woodward, Walter Cronkite...and most of all heavy depence on mega size adverisers.

I get angry when scholars say that media refused to change. It's almost sad! I think they have tried to change for a long time. The association of newspaper had opted for a slogan "We are digital!", several years ago, before Patterson's recommendation. But their effort was fruitless because they thought competition was against another online news media. In actuality the threat was from aggregators, search engines or craiglist.

I like the way David Carr put it, the old media decided to "shoot their way out". Well, many media cannot escape the fate of death even though they charged for their news, I think. Because it is not only aggregators who are parasites of contents. In reality, substantial proportion of old media don't have their own contents. They relied on AP or other media, meaning there ain't anything for them to sell.

Paid contents business model is not totally new to the industry. There were time when a Yellow Kid would run around shouting "Read all about it." So paid news is not abondoning the practice that media had from the birth. It's more of back to the past, when they relied more on pennies from the subscirbers, rather than on million buck from advertisers.