NYT 1995 Transcript On Making Money Online Shows It’s Not Gotten Any Easier; Also, Sulzberger Hates ‘Cats’
NiemanLab has dug up a 14-year-old transcript of a panel of a forum held at the Nieman Foundation: “Public Interest Journalism: Winner Or Loser In The On-Line Era?” Yes, back then they hyphenated it. See how far we’ve come? On the panel, called “The New Economics of Journalism,” Esther Dyson and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. discussed how they planned to make money from their Web products.
The Lab notes that yes, some statements seem laughably outdated, but:
the transcript is also notable for how little distance some of these debates have traveled in the intervening years. Time Inc. is, in fact, still experimenting with online subscription models, and The New York Times Co. is still trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet.
So what does this mean? If newspapers have been working with these ideas for a decade and a half, why are we still stuck?
The full transcript is available at NiemanLab, as is a “highlight reel” of the best stuff. Including this gem:
In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. We do know that. In the end, it’s going to have to pay for itself. And there’s not a lot of ways to make money.
As far as I know, there are only four — three, if you exclude blackmail — “Mr. Roberts, I won’t put that information up in exchange for $100,” which may be the only way to make money at this business today. Either the reader is going to pay or the advertiser is going to pay, or we’re going to get a piece of the transactional action. If the reader decides that she wants to get theater tickets from the Shubert organization for “Cats”, one, we’ll try to talk her out of it, but if she still goes out to see “Cats”, then maybe we’ll get, you know, one one-hundredth or one-tenth, or whatever the heck it is, of that transaction.
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