turbine

chartier:

“Here’s my point: businesses don’t get to pick the timetable for when their preferred model takes a permanent dirt nap. It’s insane to me that these business’s fans see this so much more clearly than the actual stakeholders do. The fans want desperately to see these places stay alive and many, like me, pay tons of actual cash every month or year to support that.”

—

kung fu grippe: Entitled to Care

Bullshit.

Most people don’t give a crap about where they get their laughs or information, so long as it’s free. “Because so many things on the Internet are free, everything else should be free.” They don’t want to see ads, don’t want to donate, won’t subscribe, don’t want to click something to magically generate a free penny that goes into a tip jar. In fact, there seems to be a growing collective distaste for the idea of you making money at all.

I admire Mr. Mann for spending tons of cash on the things that he loves. I often do the same. Most people don’t and—thanks to the current culture of the Internet—won’t.

This isn’t about some brave new world of change, and it’s not a revolutionary new business model that “old media” is trying to kick, scream, and blindly run away from. It’s pure, nihilistic, fucking entitlement.

Some people get to make great stuff on the Internet and make a name for themselves. Someone in a position of power gets a glint in their eye, and then these people get offers to speak around the country or get a job at an established company doing what they did in their garage for free. That’s awesome for them. Truly.

But what works for some people, or even some companies, doesn’t work for others. The only revolution here is that people are turning a blinder eye in greater masses than ever to this essential fact of life.

It’s entitlement, and it’s bullshit.

Merlin’s points aren’t entirely bullshit. David’s aren’t either.

People enjoy free things. The sense of entitlement comes when people complain about the things they get for free. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people complain bitterly that some piece of free software won’t do x, y, or z for them. I imagine Merlin has done it. Though rather than just bitching, he went ahead and wrote a nice email to the software’s developer suggesting an upgrade. Now Instapaper syncs with the Kindle.

That’s the way things work, right?

This is the crucial piece I see missing from all the back and forth about ads and RSS feeds and customers and magazines and publishing. Yes, businesses don’t get to choose when their current model takes a permanent dirt nap (Mann, 03/10)—wouldn’t it be interesting to see an impermanent dirt nap?—but I think they should be allowed the opportunity to experiment with various business models. We folks on the front lines of the Internet revolution (totally hate myself right now), become complacent, I think, because we’ve been in this space for a long time. Like any person doing the same thing for a while, we forget what it was like first entering the space. We forget our own mistakes or, because they occurred on a stupid Diaryland blog, they didn’t make a bit of difference because no one saw.

There are some sites clearly not worth saving. If Huffington Post went dark tomorrow, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Yet, no one seems to be creating a blueprint for saving the ones worthwhile. Or maybe they are, but they’re keeping it to themselves in hopes they’ll get some money for it when the publications become really desperate.

I wrote about this before and recommended two different models for online and print, each of which seem viable at this point. Maybe the ideas are silly. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing until recently, but it’s becoming increasingly important to me for reasons that for now must remain my own.

Maybe it’s time for many of the old publishing houses to close up shop and for the established writers to strike out on their own. I mean, Roger Ebert could probably do okay without the Sun Times and might not even have to sell backstage passes to his RSS feed. Still, I think this would damage journalism, and as a craft it can’t take much more. A certain type of investigative journalism—a type we see less and less these days—benefits greatly from a well-funded newsroom. It allows reporters the luxury to follow leads and get facts straight. It allows for research conducted at the required pace, not on some slip-shod, gotta-be-done-yesterday Internet timeline. Young writers also benefit from a well-funded newsroom. A well-funded newsroom can afford to pay established writers enough to keep them around, and new writers can benefit from traffic coming into the site or publication for the established writers. Maybe established folks like Ebert can strike out on their own and pay or offer other incentives to new writers to help keep the practice alive. And maybe investigative journalists can begin Kickstarter campaigns to help fund the long, dark months they must spend without content while working on a complex story. I’m not certain. I’m not that bright. But a lot of people ‘round these Tumblr parts seem really smart and could probably come up with some rather elegant solutions if they’d concentrate less on how people are doing it wrong and concentrate more on explaining exactly how to do it right.