editorlisa

From “How Tweet It Is,” Will Leitch’s really terrific NY Mag article about Twitter:

“Now think about that for a second. In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.”

[via fred-wilson (emphasis mine)]

This strikes me as incredibly interesting, especially in light of yesterday’s discussions about micropayments and paying for newspaper content.  The argument in support of paid content is based on the assumption that we need people to report information to us from trusted sources.  But how many of you learned about the crash landing of US Airways Flight 1549 from a traditional news source?  I heard about it from tweets and dodgeball shouts, followed by texts and phone calls to people back home (I was in Utah at the time).  Technology-aided word-of-mouth.  Print media and their online counterparts played basically no role in that reporting, at least for me.

But let’s imagine that immediately upon finding out about the US Airways flight, your first instinct was to go to nytimes.com to get more on the developing story.  Imagine going to the homepage, clicking on a link, and seeing this.  What’s the likelihood that you’d be willing to pay for a developing story when you know just as well as the newsroom staff that they don’t have the whole picture yet?

It seems to me that simply implementing a plan to charge for all online content isn’t a winning strategy.  Newspapers will need to be savvy about charging for the right kind of content.  And that probably isn’t breaking news (Twitter and TV will [continue to] have newspapers beat on that front) or commodity content (stock prices, weather, movie showtimes, horoscopes - basically everything newspapers began licensing as part of their portal strategies in 1998).  What the right content is will be different for each paper, and will take some serious product strategy and pricing analysis to determine.  But in broad strokes, it can be categorized as uniquely specialized content that can’t come from any other source/paper/writer.  That’s the stuff that I would be willing to pay for.