If a dead-tree medium falls in the forest... can it become a nurse log?

The media's abuzz about the death of tangible media. Recently casualties include Gourmet, Modern Bride, National Geographic Adventure, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Rocky Mountain News. The Christian Science Monitor became America's first nationally circulated paper to move entirely online. Magazines like PC and Playgirl have done the same, digital migration.

In 2009, 428 titles closed, compared with 618 in 2008 and 643 in 2007. The good news? The rate of decay is slowing. But new efforts are down from 335 in '08, according to Mediafinder.

“Despite the difficult year for the magazine industry, more than 275 magazines launched in 2009 – showing there is still strength in the regional, health, and food categories, with Food Network Magazine reporting more than 1 million readers,” explained Trish Hagood, President of Oxbridge Communications, publishers of MediaFinder.

Some of this turbulence is good, as Steve Rubel, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, pointed out on Micropersuasion.com in November 08. "We're moving fast toward becoming a society that consumes media entirely in digital format. Part of it is environmental, but a lot of it is because of broadband and connected devices. Now of course it will take a long long time for this to become a global phenomenon. But in the US at least, the pace has picked up a lot just in the last few months."

The buzzword here is "media green" ... and the trend's advantages are obvious. But now the debate centers around how to keep content-creators fed, both long-term professionals and "citizen publishers" stepping up to the plate like us.

The answer may well lie in technology from smartphone apps to electronic ink, which prevents the eye strain often provoked by backlit displays. Even in bright sunlight, e-ink pages resemble those of a paperback.

Products like Sony's Reader, Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook allow folks to download books, blogs, magazines and newspapers onto a wireless device. Portable, the 1/3-inch-thick Kindle is often called the last digital great hope: even Oprah's a fan. The idea's pretty basic: make it easy for users to pay for quality content and, a la iPod, they just might. But Amazon employs a proprietary format: Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues diminish the Kindle's appeal for many. Here tech-writer Yardena Arar reviews the best e-book readers in a 2009 PC World article.

In another article, the author notes that emerging technologies will soon blend color and video into such devices, along with more swiftness and sturdiness.

In early April 2010, Apple launches its much-heralded tablet computer, the 1.5-lb iPad, weighing in from $499. Here two experts debate whether this medium will save publishing. Hopefully, as Tony Bradley, co-author of Unified Communications for Dummies, points out in another article: "Traditional media – whether books, magazines, newspapers, music, or movies – stillneed to grasp the digital landscape, and the changes that it brings for the economic models they have built their businesses on for decades. Somewhere out there is a revenue structure that creates a win-win-win for the publishers, the platforms (like the iPad and the Kindle), and the customers."

Electronic paper could take this a step further, introducing flexible, scrunchable displays. I have high hopes that bigger canvases will encourage some of print media's "eye candy" elements – like strong photography and design – to migrate into cyberspace.

The web's future is uncertain, but with that instability, brings much excitement. Check out this great article for an overview of where this all could lead.

Micropatronage and blog sponsorship

Online money conduits like Paypal allow readers to make small donations to authors. Blogger Jason Kottke coined the term "micropatronage," when he spent 2005 blogging full-time, living off the largesse of his audience.

As Blogging for Dollars reveals, he "quit his job to blog full-time and asked his readers to become 'micropatrons' at a suggested rate of $30. He received $39,900 from 1,450 people but abandoned the experiment after a year. Kottke is vague about the reasons why he swore off micropatronage, but he suggests that he was worried that people wouldn't donate year after year. In order to build a bigger audience and potential new donors, he would have had to do some of the cheesy things to drive traffic (i.e., "Top Five Best" posts) and/or become a cult of personality (overshare, start flame wars, social network relentlessly). These days, he accepts ads as part of the Deck network."

A handful of bloggers have found sponsorship deals with larger outlets. Sometimes that's an endorsed feature like Craig Romano cross-posting a hike a week on WeatherChannel.com. I worked on a Diet-Coke-branded MSN site in 2008 that mixed text with short film clips of presenters, whom the snarkosphere dubbed "video puppets". Our budget derived from the advertising end and, in fact, my editor worked at a marketing company: an odd mishmash of intentions we'll probably see more and more (MSN Daily Access ceased publication after nine months or so).

Other times sponsorship's an outright "this post was brought to you by Brand X" entry-label. As an old-school journo, I'm pretty uncomfortable with "advertorials" unless they're distinctly labeled. And the government – in the US, at least – may soon require better labeling. But in the meantime, you're da boss. Do what suits!

For charitable endeavors, turn to fundraising platforms like Kickstarter, which showcases "backer rewards" and easily processes donations via Amazon accounts. My friend, travel writer Charyn Pfeuffer, just raised $20, 518, so she could voluntour in 12 countries. Thank-you treats ranged from homemade Theo chocolate bread to 40% off three nights at the Royal Hawaiian. Pfeuffer now can trade her Blackberry for a backpack, volunteering and publicizing programs around the world. Not only will her adventures give something back to cultures she routinely covers, but she now has a powerful social-network to broadcast her findings. It's a fantastic experiment in voluntourism and grassroots media funding.

Merchandise me!

Once a brand's established, bloggers can start with the spin-off merchandising, just like a blockbuster or Pixar hit. Companies like CafePress blaze your logo or slogans onto everything from mugs to hoodies to light-switch covers – all created on demand.

The cruel truth about exposure

Hating all the business end of this? Opt out with a "conglomerate" like Gawker, a network that includes Wonkette and Gizmodo, or Weblogs Inc, specializing in tech, media and science. On a more relaxed end of the spectrum – not requiring 10 to 12 posts a day – are profit-sharing schemes like Examiner.com and Today.com, which feature a range of unedited bloggers under one banner.

Once the companies have taken their cuts of Google Adsense and other revenue streams, writers rarely see more than pennies. And clips from outlets like that can hinder a professional-hopeful more than help... An emerging author is better off posting on her own site or volunteering for a reputable webzine.

Still, any way you slice it, the deal's better than "reader blogs" currently offered by companies like p-i.com and the revered blog-giant Huffington Post, which hog all the income with honeyed promises of "exposure" in return.

As wags put it, "why would I want exposure? People die from exposure". You want to meet the bills each month. Find a network that's on the ball about tech support, promotion and search engine optimization. Otherwise you might as well remain a one-man band...

Screenwriter Harlan Ellis rants memorably about all this on a preview of the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth. "You gotta pay me ... By what right would you call me and ask me to work for nothing? Do you get a paycheck? Does your boss get a paycheck? Do you pay the Telecity guy? Do you pay the cameraman? Do you pay the cutters? Do you pay the teamsters when they schlep your stuff on the trucks? Would you go to the gas station and ask for free gas? Would you go to the doctors and ask them to take out your spleen for nothing? How dare you call me and ask me to work for free?"

Publicity was the answer. And, as Ellis points out, that has little value. How many DVD viewers will enjoy his interview, then seek out and purchase one of his books? "I should do a freebie for Warner Brothers? What, is Warner Brothers out with an eye-patch and a tin cup on the street? Fuck no!

"I sell my soul, but at the highest rates."

 

More, I want to know MORE about monetization

Time to hit the web, kiddies! We're here to give you a foundation and tools to grow with, not a bachelors degree in new media.

I recommend starting with Daryl Rouse's great ProBlogger article.

Why write without pay? Intro to freeconomics

Many writers, especially professional ones, balk at blogging and social-network updates. "I get paid to wordsmith," the logic runs. "Who will buy the cow if I give away the milk for free?"

First off, blogging can pay – and well. The genre's already produced millionaire-bloggers like Markus Frind, Kato Leonard, Jason Calacanis and others. Rafat Ali is another classic example. The laid-off dotcom reporter launched PaidContent, a newsletter about the business of online media. In 2002, his first year, he netted somewhere between $60-80,000, as this Wired News article explains. He later sold the site to ContentNext Media, a subset of the Guardian News and Media Ltd group, and still serves as editor in chief.

Ironically, Ali's subject is subject to intense debate right now. People are accustomed to free stuff over the innertubes. Subscription attempts – hiding material behind a paywall – tend to end badly. In 2007 The New York Times unlocked its archives; last year, so did much of The Wall Street Journal.

As Chris Anderson points out in Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, "Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411."

"Freeconomics," he calls this "race to the bottom".

(Embarrassingly, The Virginia Quarterly caught Anderson "borrowing" too liberally from Wikipedia. He claims this was a cut-and-paste error. Still, watch your sources: Don't be a slapdash author like him. As we've nagged before, Wikipedia is a great place to start research and a lousy place to end it. Also, don't be a pirate: t'isn't polite...)

Until ad revenue reaches sustainable levels online, the mainstream media's gonna panic and holler about all this. Here and here you can observe experts crunching numbers for different scenarios for newsrooms.

Angered by shrinking distributions and ad revenue, media mogul Rupert Murdoch might just take all his toys and go home. "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" he challenged his peers, before threatening to remove all News Corp. content from the search engine. As both Mashable and The Guardian Media pointed out, this quixotic announcement in November 2009 didn't make the intended big waves. The Independent gives a great breakdown of this drama and its possible end-game – saving newspapers – here. (We'll discuss pay models
and the future of media further throughout the class.)

The Associated Press (AP) took on content aggregators in a radical effort to, well, make some money off the net already. Also, newsgathers want to make sure they get credit where credit's due.

“This is not about defining fair use,” said Sue Cross, executive vice president of the group. “There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle.”

One goal of the AP and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work of news organization.

Europe's ahead of the US on the protection front, but one thing's certain: regardless of geography, hard news from reliable sources remains a key ingredient in cyberspace. The AP's just moving aggressively to protect its interests, which could be a good thing, however initially aggravating.

Much as the blogosphere wants to be bleeding-edge, it lags 2.5 hours behind the main-stream media (MSM) still. And studies show that only 3.5% of blog story lines become headlines. But, as The New York Times points out: "Though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo."

For now, no absolute formulas exist for making money online. Heck, YouTube stood to lose $470 million in 2009, despite dominating the online-video market (luckily it's part of the Google family, which can take a hit like that. See the mothership's rebuttal of "hideous loss" predictions...). And microblogging wunderkind Twitter isn't even sure how to bring in the seriously big bucks, though the company's on its way. The site's grown so popular that people are offering up $250,000 for as-yet-unavailable “spotlighted” accounts. Celebrities like 50 Cent and Britney Spears have hired ghostwriters to pen their 140-word tweets, according to The New York Times. Surely someone will cash in on all this sturm und drang soon.

Why not get yourself a slice of that cake?