Much of the media world has been waiting with bated breath since Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million last year, eager to see some sign of the Amazon founder and CEO’s hand at work. The first tangible evidence appeared on Tuesday, when the newspaper announced a major national subscription partnership that will offer free digital access to readers of other newspapers in major U.S. cities.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Thirteen years ago, I wrote,
First of all, the “silo” model tries to maintain an anachronistic wall between the content in one silo and content in other silos. In the world of physical magazines, it certainly makes sense that a subscription to “Business Week” does not entitle you to read “Forbes.” Clearly, they are two separate physical collections of paper.
On the Internet, however, this distinction is not a physical necessity. Most consumers in fact pick and choose articles from a variety of online magazines. In contrast to the physical world, consumers can engage in extensive content aggregation without imposing meaningful costs at the margin.
…While I would not pay to subscribe to an individual online journal, I might be willing to pay to join a club that gives me access to a variety of journals as well as to helpful annotations. Annotations might consist of Lawrence Lee’s recommendations for articles on Internet marketing or Virginia Postrel’s comments on articles about policy issues.
A club could offer several different levels of membership. The most expensive membership could entitle you to personal chat time with famous authors. Or it could entitle you to 24-hour response time to inquiries that you submit to human experts. Or it could entitle you to use the most sophisticated indexing and cross-reference tools.
Bezos apparently is moving in the direction of the club.
Shades of the New Century Network, “a defunct news aggregator that was run by a consortium of newspaper companies. The company launched in 1995 during the time when Internet first started to enter the public consciousness, and ceased operations in 1998.” (from Wikipedia) I recall talking to the then-CIO of the Washington Post about this when I worked for Netscape and they were in the process of getting NCN launched.
I note from the original Financial Times article (linked to from the Matthew Ingram article) that “It is unlikely that other national US newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will join the programme, because it is not open to publishers that distribute in the Washington Post’s distribution area.” This I think is the key: It limits the possible competitive conflicts over revenue-sharing, etc., that were major factors in the demise of NCN.