4 ms·
This is smart. Good journalism has never paid for itself (classifieds, paid subs, ads, etc), and it never will. With most of the old revenue diluted, anyone who
by awwstn 11y ago
This is smart. Good journalism has never paid for itself (classifieds, paid subs, ads, etc), and it never will. With most of the old revenue diluted, anyone who wants to do good journalism needs a way to pay for it, and this model (invented by BuzzFeed) is a solid effort.
Basically, you drive massive traffic with high-quality, low-brow content, and sell ads against that content to make enough money to pay for expensive, important, ongoing journalism.
BuzzFeed started with the viral stuff and moved into journalism, and Washington Post is doing the reverse. It's particularly good because viral sites have notoriously low CPMs and shitty ads ("1 weird trick" etc), but when you build a brand known for credible news and pair it with credible (albeit low-brow) viral stuff, you can sell ads to better brands at higher rates – thus increasing your ability to pay for important reporting.
It's the most viable model I've seen in a while for long-term sustainable journalism businesses.
- petra 11y agoBut in the end , long term, don't this low-brow content means the brand is diluted , and than it's a "run to the bottom" between low-brow content makers, with little left to spend on non-profitable activities?
- snowwrestler 11y agoMaybe, maybe not. A print newspaper was filled with a lot of stuff that was not high-quality news reporting: features, opinions, "local color," comics, horoscopes, crossword puzzle, sudoku...and of course a lot of ads. Classified ads, help wanted ads, a "car reporting" section with car ads, a "real estate reporting" section with real estate ads, a "travel" section with travel ads, an "entertainment" section with entertainment ads, plus ads next to news stories, and regular coupon inserts. A reputation for great reporting really depends on great reporting, not the proportion of great reporting to the rest of the content. The Watergate stories--which to a large extent made the reputation of the Post as a top-notch national newspaper--ran next to a lot of the things I list above. More recently, the Post was one of the first publications to run stories based on the Snowden documents, and broke stories about problems at the Secret Service.