How likely would you be to pay a $2.50 monthly fee — which would be a 50% discount for home delivery subscribers — for continued, unlimited access to nytimes.com?

Nobody really knows the answer to that question. And most people would say “very unlikely,” even if they would pay it, because they might listen and it might stay free.

The NYT should be asking questions like “do you feel any special affinity to other NYT print subscribers?” and “what is your favorite online feature at the nytimes.com web site?” because these are questions that will produce valuable insight for the marketing copy they’ll need to sell their online subscription system.

If what you produce is worth $5/month, then charge it. Focus on selling the benefits of your content — the feeling of community, clarity of information, video and interactive components that make one feel informed.

If they’re looking for a data-backed excuse to start charging for access, they won’t find it. You have to know you have a product worth money, and you have to assert it confidently. Selling your site is a whole different business than giving it away for free.

In a community where there are dozens of passionate, skilled citizens who are actively building their own news following online, what’s the best move you as a legacy news institution can make? I’ll give you a hint: “compete with them” is not the right answer.

Embrace and extend.

Offer complimentary services so that you both win. Bring them into the fold. Neighborlogs provides technology infrastructure for individuals who want to start a neighborhood blog, and it just takes a little off the top. Good model.

Why not offer technology or network advantages to good neighborhood blogs in exchange for a revenue sharing agreement?

We’re past the point where blogging is a novelty, where good writing happens for free (trust me, even free blogs make money now). The benefit to a publisher in the new market is that you don’t have to promise a salary, you can promise a cut of the winnings.

Malone said he didn’t think that an advertising model made sense on Twitter, but there was some hope for a subscription model. “Sooner or later people will be willing to pay for these services,” he said.

Of course, ads and subscriptions aren’t the only models available for online services. Companies like Twitter produce an incredible amount of valuable data that could be sold to third parties.

The thing about ads is that they’re kind of a cop-out, because you don’t actually have to sell your “core” product to an audience, you just have to sell that attention to an advertiser (which is often easy to do; advertisers are looking to buy attention, you just have to meet the right price point).

It’s a great arrangement when the price point is high. But now it might be time for newspapers to develop a product and sell it the old fashioned way.

And don’t worry about Twitter, they’ll be fine

They all have specializations, and they all cost money. A full salary. Benefits.

Neighborhood blogs have newspapers shaking in their shoes not because those blogs are real editorial powerhouses, or because they have the resources to compete on citywide coverage, but because they can do so much more with so much less.

I’m about to move to Eastlake, where former P-I staffer Curt Milton runs the Eastlake Ave blog. He keeps a part time job, makes tons of local connections, writes his posts, edits them, and shoots and edits and uploads video and pictures.

One person.

How can you compete with that?

On the internet, where the money you make is often measured in the pageviews you serve, being first can seem to be of paramount importance. After all, Google ranks its search results by (among other things) how many different sites give you credit.

Of course, First comes with some problems, too. It’s unpolished. Sometimes you look stupid. You don’t have time to make it engaging.

First isn’t the only way to get credited, though. You can also do things Well. You’ll come “late” to the game, but you have a chance to be interesting, to provide real analysis, to put some work into the delivery and make it yours.

Would you rather do things First, or Well?

They’re both valid models. Which one do you want to use?

When you go into business, you ignore the people who are least likely to buy your product. The number of people you ignore is much, much larger than the number of people you have or work to earn as customers.

As we move forward, the news business is increasingly a business to serve the news-enthusiast subset of the general population. Social pressures and scarcity of information used to twist the newspaper and cable news company business into a more ubiquitous product, but the internet and small news entrepreneurs have changed that.

People seems to have gone nuts with this idea of all these millions of people who want stuff (like news) for free. Screw ‘em. You’re a business. You’re only interested in the people who want news for money.

Free is the name of Chris’s new book, and it’s going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.

The first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?”

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”

Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

Nevermind the fact that Gladwell didn’t raise either of these wishy-washy points. Nevermind the fact that there’s stunningly little evidence that we’re in an inevitable race towards a new business model of free.

The problem with Chris’s new idea is built into the concept itself: that costs will grow close enough to zero that you can round down.

Seth should know better. He runs a whole business based on the idea that you can take the exact same concept, and round up. 900,000 people making pages on Squidoo, handing 50% of their “couple of dollars” of ad revenue over ads up to a good $500,000 or so.

I have to read Chris’s book (Chris, can I have a free copy?) before I’ll feel qualified to really dig into it, but I think that he’s describing a fad. No product, not even an informational product, is free to produce. It is nearly free to copy it, but that is often theft.

Just because it’s easy to do doesn’t make it legal. Or right.

If we are to have a digital based economy (and this, I think, is the inevitable truth), then we need to have more digital goods that cost money, not more digital goods that are free.

Free is, ultimately, an impotent business model, because you cannot make money. Even in these scenarios where you “make money on the surrounding businesses,” those surrounding businesses are not based on Free. They are independent business models in their own right, and if they’re bringing in revenue, that is in fact your primary business. Everything else is marketing.

The truth in this case (however inconvenient) is that if you want to make money, someone has to give you money. And they have to give you more money per item than it cost you to create it. Even if your cost is 0.0000002 cents per article, you’d better make at least 0.0000003 on it, or you’re in trouble long term.

1. really, really easy to waste time
2. crucially important that you stay productive

Print cycles meant that you had a rotating deadline. At a daily you had to push something out the door by the end of every day. At a weekly you had a big crunch once a week.

The internet has no print cycle. It’s just now.

The luxury of non-productive time is disappearing. If you’re not producing something right now, somebody else is, and they’re going to earn the attention of all those online eyeballs. It sucks because it means you can’t get a cushy career in journalism anymore.

But it’s awesome because there’s so much opportunity out there for someone who’s willing to work hard.

The fact that Twitter was filled with tweets like this:

no one other than TMZ is claiming to have evidence that he’s dead. so either they’ve got a source no one else does, or… something. 42 minutes ago from web Bill Palmer

Goes to show how much credibility TMZ has. The public on Twitter, and I’ll wager the public at large, have learned to approach early breaking stories from non-established brands with skepticism. TMZ is well known, yes, but it’s not well known for careful fact-checking.

If anything, what this incident proves is that credibility is a very valuable quality. TMZ bet on the accuracy of their story, and they won that bet. Why make the bet? They want to earn a reputation for credibility.

And you know what “old media” has in droves right now? Credibility. Michael Jackson wasn’t, as far as I could tell, widely considered dead until the LA Times independently reported that doctors had pronounced him dead.

It’s not true until I say it’s true. That’s power.

To read more about the changing news and publishing industry, make sure you subscribe to the Eat Sleep Publish RSS feed.

If you go your own route, you get to define your own niche, your own audience, and you get to be the best news product in the world for them. Politico rocks the national political scene, and they’re thriving because of it.

The best thing you can do right now is something nobody else is doing.

Thanks to everyone who came out and made it an interesting event!

The topic of last night’s discussion was, somewhat simplistically, “Is Photojournalism Necessary?” (The answer from the audience was a resounding: Yes!)

As I pointed out near the beginning, the question is meant to address multiple facets of the problem facing professional photojournalists (and professional photographers): practically everyone is taking photos. How do you justify your salary when, in most cases, grabbing a photo from the pro-sumer crowd is just as easy, and cheaper.

One answer that seemed to surface throughout the night was: you have to add value to your work. You can add value through a knowledge specialty (”I know everything about golf, so if you want someone to shoot golf, I’m your photog”), or through a technical specialty (”If you want someone to shoot with a Holga, I’m your photog”).

The fact is that “the crowd” is going to keep taking, and distributing, news photos (spot photos). Rather than fighting that fact, the future of photojournalism is in doing what the crowd can’t do well. In other words, it’s about making photography a profession again.

It was a really smart conversation with a really interested and passionate group of people. I’m looking forward to watching photojournalism develop with new imaging and distribution technology, and seeing how the craft changes as more photographers learn to work for the web.