Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders ( updated, 25.5.2019 ). The keiretsu-cooperative is a kind of platform cooperative — an idea getting closer to takeoff 

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Like these two on an egg farm in Germany last November, there will be keen newspaper-readers — in some medium — for a few more years, yet. The question for the future is, can we organise a better way of owning and running newspapers and media sites — one better suited to a democracy than conventional corporate ownership? Photograph: Roy Eales

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The purpose of this entry on post-Gutenberg is to reverse the unexplained disappearance from search engines of the headline and link for the site’s very first post, which launched p-G on 5 September 2011. 

Not for the first time, someone appears to have gone to special trouble to make it impossible to find a p-G post in Google or Bing by typing its title into a search box. Adding the site’s name as an additional search term only yields indirect routes to it. Because Google, certainly, does not explain its methods, it is impossible to identify the culprit — inadvertent technical errors or active tampering by human algorithm-tweakers. Human tamperers can hide behind algorithms, which leave no fingerprints.

Riding the most recent wave of interest in ‘platform cooperatives,’ which began in 2016, this month’s print edition of Wired spotlights online workers’ cooperatives — through which operators in the gig (freelance) economy can jointly own and control a website from which they market their services and get paid. This is a radical improvement on working through platforms owned by, say, a classic employment agency for housecleaners — or a cleaning service — cutting fat commissions out of workers’ incomes in exchange for setting up and running the website, and acting as an intermediary.

The writer of the Wired piece, Clive Thompson, pinpoints the solution to the most aggravating obstacle to launching a platform cooperative — which is, getting it organised and ready-to-roll and, in that helpful cliché from physics, achieving critical mass. This did not present a problem for Up & Go, the successful platform cooperative for housecleaners that he singles out for special mention, because ‘the workers were already organised.’

For precisely that reason, post-Gutenberg’s original proposal of a keirestu-cooperative — a collaborative internet platform for newspapers and other media — did away with the idea of starting from scratch. It recommended beginning with an existing newspaper, with its established core of readers and commenters. As a post revisiting this subject last year explained:

These are the principal components of a ‘keiretsu-cooperative,’ or economic structure for the future — a keiretsu being a sort of Japanese industrial club made up of companies pursuing similar or complementary aims:

• A newspaper publisher might create a meta-site with one or more book publishers with which its audience overlaps — and these partners could share this site’s capital improvement and running costs.

• Reader-commenters visiting the site would not be paid for individual comments. Instead, they would buy subscriptions that would also be small financial stakes in the keiretsu publishers’ meta-site.

Here — except for its old introduction — is the original text of the first entry on post-Gutenberg that, at present, cannot easily be found through an internet search:

Newspaper and other print media sites to which I have returned several times a day – or week, depending on what has been happening in my life – have had two things in common:

• Unusually sharp and entertaining comments sections in site segments dedicated to topics that interest me.
• A group of stimulating, well-informed debaters among the regular commenters, who often enter into extended wrangles – sometimes, not just with each other, but with the writer of an article.

Unfortunately, commenters tend to come and go unpredictably, then vanish altogether. And I have to start looking for a new equivalent of an online coffee shop.

But what if commenters were given some incentive to keep commenting on a particular site – for years at a time? Two years ago, thinking about what would make contributing posts irresistible to me, my conclusion was: money, and the feeling that I was helping to build a semi-permanent family of debaters. Without some form of payment – or the possibility of being paid in the future – posting frequently on newspaper sites becomes suspiciously like wasting time. I have found it hard to justify time spent commenting, even though joining online discussions has deepened and enlivened my understanding of all sorts of topics.

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In January of last year, I outlined a scheme that a newspaper could run as an experiment in sharing ownership of a part of its site with reader-commenters. In a future entry in this blog, I will describe the reactions of particular publishing organisations to which I sent a link for my proposal. There were, broadly, five reasons for their reluctance to try it out:

• ‘Too new’ – the scheme diverges too far from their ideas about the future evolution of media.
• Protectionism. The mistaken belief that the scheme would entail paying commenters at the same rates as professional writers and journalists. That is not what the proposal says at all. The idea is that the arrangement would work very broadly in the way insurance does: people contributing more or less equal sums into a pool of money from which disbursements would be made in accordance with merit and need.
• Semantics. Interpreting the scheme as ‘socialism’. There is no precise counterpart for the proposed arrangement – certainly not in publishing, as far as I know. But to convey the idea of shared ownership I used the word ‘cooperative’—which unfortunately spells ‘hippie’ utopianism or bankrupt socialist idealism to many people. It says something else entirely to me. For nearly 20 years, I have been a member of a rural electricity cooperative founded 75 years ago by a group of farmers – after the local power company refused to put them on its network. This organisation runs so beautifully that my electricity bills have always been a small fraction of sums I have paid for the identical usage patterns in other places.
• Fear of losing power. Most publishers of the print era cannot give up the idea of journalists and editors performing on a stage for readers – the audience down in the pit, which is where they would like them to stay. They cannot accept that technology has made it realistic for readers to want – indeed, expect – to share the stage with them, even if only in walk-on parts, in most cases, at the start.
• Pessimism. Publishers cannot conceive of making a bigger pie – that is, expanding revenue, and even earning profits, with luck – through sharing ownership with reader-commenters. They can only imagine being forced to accept smaller slices of an unchanged or shrunken pie.

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As this is a scheme for helping print media to adapt for the arrival of the 5^th Estate, a publisher would have to initiate the experiment, inviting readers to become part of it.

The publisher would set a price for a subscription-cum-stake in the jointly owned site called, say, the Forum. Just one stake per reader. Site visitors who do not buy a subscription-stake would not be shut out from reading articles and discussions but could not, of course, share in any future profits.

The publisher would develop the software tools and infrastructure for the experiment – to collect and record subscription-stakes; run elections and referendums; develop apps, links to social networking sites, and so on – and, if the test site makes a profit from subscriptions and advertising, distribute it to stakeholders.

Both the publisher and readers would nominate a few reader-stakeholders for membership of the Forum’s (say,) eleven-member management board. All reader-stakeholders would elect six of these as their representatives. The other five board members would be appointees of the publisher from within its own executive and editorial ranks.

As noted above, the arrangement would work in roughly the way insurance does. Reader-stakeholders would pay more or less equal sums into a pool of cash. Payments from that pool would be made according to certain criteria. How would classes of subscription-stakes be established? Who would set the criteria? These – and all other rules for the site’s operation – would be proposed by the management board and then voted into existence by subscriber-stakeholders.

So setting rule-making in motion would be the first task of the management board, and the first job for reader-stakeholders after that would be choosing from among alternative rules proposed to them.

A publisher would not have to finance the experiment alone. A newspaper could, for instance, share the costs and administrative burden with a book publisher. Their partnership would resemble a Japanese keiretsu – or arrangement between companies with common or interlocked business interests.

The rationale for this scheme for shared ownership is set out in more detail here.

Any takers? Careful suggestions for refining and improving the experiment would be indescribably welcome, and will be given proper credit in a future post on this site.

Correspondence to postgutenberg@gmail.com, please.