Category Archives: Cooperatives

David Talbot drops serious clangers in his appeal for the resurrection of Salon.com, an e-publishing pioneer

. 4th Estate moves, Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , , , ,

'The Great Grievance', an etching associated with the French Revolution, by an unknown artist

Salon.com is not actually extinct. It is just that its readership has declined precipitously, and no one talks about it any more – even though it is still capable of running first-rate pieces, like a report on Sunday about the indispensable Google Translate’s implications for multilingualism.

David Talbot is clever, likeable and tremendously enterprising. He deserved the towering pile of laurels that all but suffocated him and his fellow-Salonniers when they co-pioneered online journalism in the mid-1990s. I myself wrote a piece or two for him, at his invitation, in those early years. I enjoyed the typhoons they whipped up in reader reactions enough to sign on as a subscriber when the magazine slipped behind a pay wall a few years ago. It virtually disappeared behind it.

Not long after that, the e-zine lost David and its groove.  I let my subscription lapse and forgot all about it. But into my email box, a few days ago, dropped a surprise announcement – at least, for me – that he was trying to revive the magazine. The message said that he was back as its über-manager, after stepping down as editor-in-chief around 2005.

Unfortunately, what I could glean of his strategy ignores – or gives only the faintest nod to — the rise of the 5th Estate, the new media voices on the verge of eclipsing the once supremely authoritative 4th Estate with which Salon.com evidently still identifies. A more realistic plan would at least experiment with giving readers a chance to share ownership of the publishing sites that they sustain with their eyeballs and clicks – as in, for instance, this proposal recognising that the philosophical DNA encoded in the term ‘4th Estate’ belongs to the run-up to the French Revolution.

Instead, here is the gist of David’s email circular:

Dear Salon reader and Premium supporter:

I founded Salon 16 years ago […] For the first time in my life as a journalist, we — editors, reporters and critics — were in sole control of our work, not managers and corporate sponsors. […]

Now, six years after leaving Salon, I’ve decided to return as CEO, because I think the country needs a fighting, independent media more than ever. […]

I wanted you to know first because your previous support for Salon has meant a great deal to us — not just the money, but the sense of solidarity from your choice to become a Salon Premium member. […W]e are revamping and renaming Salon Premium. [ …]

We are adding many new benefits, amongst which are: opportunities to engage with writers and editors, magazine subscriptions, and if you choose, benefits from select marketers. […]

With the American people struggling to stay afloat in the Great Recession, and their hopes and well-being largely ignored by our political system, a free press is more vital than ever. We need an independent media to […] fight for the people. […]

I could be mistaken, but honestly do not see that getting many takers. What’s wrong with his appeal?

  • It’s the same old model. Reporters and editors perform on a stage. Readers pay to watch and listen. It ignores the new reality, which is that readers expect to have a chance to do star turns themselves. When I first visited the site a day or so ago, I found that a section of it, Open Salon, has since 2008 been dedicated to featuring readers’ blogs. I have been back twice. That might not be enough, but I have so far found no arresting or startlingly good – or simply startling – contribution, even though I remember that there were hundreds of readers with the requisite talent among the 100,000 paid subscribers the magazine once had.
  • Without a serious financial incentive – or at least, stake – in Salon’s revival and, ideally, voting rights in at least part of its running, why should anyone outside David’s small circle bother to post their best efforts on Open Salon? Its part of the site looks so strictly functional and dull that it could almost have a sign saying, ‘Makeshift Kiddie Corner’. Joan Walsh, the last editor-in-chief, said that OS would make the magazine’s ‘smart, creative audience full partners in Salon’s publishing future’. Her replacement, Kerry Lauerman, has promised, ‘We’ll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open.’ I hope to find my pessimism unjustified, when that veil drops, but from his tone, it does not sound as if the Salonniers plan anything more enticing than some equivalent of the old 4th Estate offers of small cash prizes for ‘tastiest reader recipe’ or ‘best holiday snapshot’.
  • David’s appeal is addressed to ‘the American people’. Big mistake. Online readers are best addressed, for the most part, as citizens of the world. This part of his pitch sounds like the blinkered parochialism of George W. Bush. What do we expect now? The phrase ‘accelerated global conversation’ says it all. I found it here, in a piece reporting that,

    […[Pete] Cashmore, the soft-spoken chief executive of Mashable, the one-man blog he turned into a popular news site … appeared totally at ease [in his video interview.] … [W]ithin half an hour, an important measure of success was achieved. [Elie] Wiesel, who wondered aloud during the talk what might have happened if Moses — and also Hitler — had used social media tools to get their messages across, was trending worldwide on Twitter.
    “It just shows the acceleration of the global conversation and that Mashable is a force online,” said Mr. Cashmore, whose company worked with the United Nations Foundation ….”

Worldwide. Global. United. Online. Surely those are the essential thoughts, not just for me but all of us – and the hour.

Why, I wonder, is David ignoring them?

Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders

. Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , ,

The phone-hacking scandal and the subsequent launch of a public inquiry examining not simply the ethics and regulation of the press but media ownership more generally […] provide a real opportunity to replace one form of media power – concentrated, unaccountable, privileged – with another form that holds elites to account, offers more than a token range of “legitimate” views on urgent matters of the day and represents British society back to itself. This will require a series of reforms to ownership structures and self-regulatory practices that are clearly not currently operating in the public interest.

What does it mean to ‘break up’ media power?

Des Freedman, The Guardian, 31 July 2011

How would you redesign the ownership of newspapers? How about starting here:

Last month, for example, 51 million individual users clicked into the Guardian site — a number that should please online advertisers.

Great! So what if the Guardian were to let us readers/commenters buy shares in the comments sections of its site?

— Reader commenting on:

At their best, newspapers became beautiful objects, I shall miss them

Ian Jack, The Guardian, 24 September 2011

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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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Here is a summary of what a test of a jointly owned site would involve for publishers and reader-commenters at the beginning:

As this is a scheme for helping print media to adapt for the arrival of the 5th 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.