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The Future of Journalism (And How to Start It)

On November 5, people across the country lined up at newsstands, convenience stores, and coffee shops to snag a copy of the morning paper, a keepsake from the 2008 election. But they didn't need the paper to tell them who had won the presidency; the news of Barack Obama's historic win had already been gathered, broadcast, beamed, and packet-switched around the globe countless times. In fact, almost every word in almost every paper had already been available for free online for hours. "You can't put a computer screen into a scrapbook," one woman told the Washington Post as she waited in line.

Microsoft Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy Thomas C. Rubin sees a problem in that situation for the future of the newspaper industry, and rightly so. Physical sales of newspapers have been declining significantly as the combination of 24-hour news channels and the Internet has replaced the once-daily print edition of the local paper. As Rubin recently told the UK Association of Online Publishers, "It would be one thing if print editions were being replaced with vibrant and profitable online versions. But as we all know, that is just not happening. Today we are still searching for healthy symbiosis between newspapers and new technology."

Rubin doesn't have one particular business model in mind, but he borrows from biology to frame the issue as a choice between "parasitism"--an "information wants to be free" approach where content platform owners strip publishers of control over their content--and "mutualism"--a "healthy symbiosis between newspapers and new technology." Obviously the latter is preferable for maintaining a vibrant news publishing industry, Rubin says, and to get there he lays out three key principles, which he calls the "Three Cs:" copyright, competition, and collaboration.

To put Rubin's discussion of the Three Cs succinctly, copyright must be preserved but not over-enforced, and it must be made more flexible in the digital world; publisher control over content must be preserved to maintain quality and foster robust competition between media outlets, and there must be competition between content platforms (that is, Google shouldn't dominate paid search or news aggregation); and content owners and platform providers should work collaboratively to create an online business environment where information is readily available to users and revenues are equitably shared among content owners and platform providers. This is not, Rubin laments, how online journalism currently operates.

There's reason for optimism though. The Three Cs have been paramount in the recent evolution of distribution models for other types of content, especially entertainment goods like movies, television, music, and games. But those industries also struggled to find workable solutions, and it seemed for many years that the online availability of music, movies, and other digital content was fundamentally at odds with fair compensation of artists, musicians, writers, and the people who support their efforts.

The first 15 years of the public Internet were characterized by unchecked digital piracy and distribution of content without regard for the wishes of copyright holders. A startled entertainment industry reacted to the threat by focusing on one of the Three Cs: copyright.

But the demise of Napster and the growth of Apple's iTunes store have given rise to a flood of new solutions for safe, legal distribution of digital content. Consider the collaboration necessary to fuel the exploding popularity of Hulu for television programming, imeem for ad-supported file sharing, and Netflix for movies, among others. Google is also getting in on the act, bringing full-length feature films to YouTube and allowing content owners to "claim" their works and generate ad revenue.

Perhaps the best example of progressive collaboration is the recent settlement between Google and book publishers over Google's attempt to scan and make available millions of books. The decision to work with publishers, rather than against them - making the books searchable and allowing creators to share in the revenue earned from the distribution of their books - will result in far more consumer access to books. This is a positive indicator that Google is ready and willing to work with content providers to provide workable solutions that protect copyright holders.

How might this work in the news world? Perhaps Google News and media outlets could collaborate to provide high quality content in exchange for a share of revenue and control of when and how their content is displayed in a search. Or perhaps news organizations could collaborate similarly with news aggregators, such as Google Reader or Bloglines (a division of Ask.com).

These arrangements are a win-win-win development: consumers get convenient and easy access to the content they want, publishers can distribute their products with unparalleled efficiency and recapture revenue lost to infringing content use, and platform providers get better content and achieve legitimacy in the market.

Collaborative approaches -- models that allow users legal access to copyrighted works at a low cost or, in many cases, for free -- can and should be applied to the online publishing industry. As Google has said, collaboration "advances Larry's and Sergey's original dream in ways Google never could have done alone."

This suggests a fourth C: "Content" -- quality content, to be precise. When copyright owners' control is preserved, competition is sufficient, and collaborative solutions are the goal, the quality of available content will be dramatically improved.

For a case in point, just look at the difference in quality between a ripped, user-uploaded Monty Python sketch on YouTube and the version made available on the new Monty Python YouTube channel. Or the difference between an infringing SNL sketch on a MySpace profile and the version provided by NBC on Hulu. Night and day.

With collaborative solutions between content providers and content platforms, quality improves, and the need for users to traffic in infringing content is greatly diminished.

As Rubin notes, a free and open press is essential to a vibrant and successful democracy, and the press must learn to adapt to the digital world. That evolution may be painful, but the landscape for the newspaper business as a whole doesn't have to be as bleak as some would paint it. If the forward-looking, collaborative spirit that has taken root in the entertainment industry is any indication, the future for online journalism may not be so bleak after all.

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