By John McGrath
One of the most talked-about articles of the last week is Walter Isaacson's piece in Time, "How to Save Your Newspaper". In it, he basically argues that what newspapers need is a workable form of micropayments.
One of history's ironies is that hypertext -- an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site -- had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
It's easy to get sidetracked here, and note that in fact Gates was wrong: there are plenty of people who write good code for nothing, and some of them come up with better solutions than Microsoft. (Firefox, anyone?) There's relevance to journalism too: there's a lot of open-source software out there that is a hybrid, where a small core of people have paid work but are assisted by a vast network of supporters. Call it the Talking Points Memo model. But hey, that doesn't have to be everything -- the Internet has tons of room.
What I'm relatively sure of, though, is that micropayments have been permanently consigned to the dustbin of history. There have been literally dozens of attempts to wire micropayments in to the Web since its inception, as Isaacson notes, and all of them have failed. To pin the hopes of journalism on something that has failed, repeatedly, is to help the industry dig its own grave. My reaction to Isaacson's column was similar to the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's:
See, it's the cover story in Time Magazine, written by the former managing editor of Time. And after a fairly promising start summarizing the importance of journalism and how we got into this mess, the solution proferred is, essentially, that somebody should figure out a way to make micropayments work.
To put it another way, Time magazine's cover story solution to the crisis in journalism: somebody should do something!
Oh, and to top it all off, you probably can't raise enough money through micropayments anyway.
Micropayment advocates imagine extracting as much as $2 a month from readers. The Times sells just over a million daily papers. If every one of those million buyers went online and paid $2 a month, that would be $24 million a year. Even with the economic crisis, paper and digital advertising in The Times brought in about $1 billion last year. Circulation brought in $668 million. Two bucks per reader per month is not going to save newspapers.
So it hasn't worked in the past, and it probably won't work in the future. But yeah, aside from that micropayments are a fabulous idea.
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