Sometimes you wonder.....

...have been at 3 conferences in last 2 weeks, and in each one I made the point that the New Media model is consumers pay for handset and distribution costs via upfront + subscription/payg, and for content / aggregation via advertising (and very reluctantly any other way).

All that's happened is we are paying someone else to distribute the content now, not the mainstream media.

I just assumed it had been blindingly obvious for 10 years, because it was certainly known in Web 1.0 - but lo, people came up praised me on my "insight" each time.

I thought they were just being nice....and then I read this from a very respected blogger and new media analyst (Scott Karp) written but a few short days ago*:

I read this article about the rise of free daily newspapers in the US and had a sudden realization about the perceived failure of news organizations to charge for news online. The New York Times has torn down the TimesSelect pay wall — does that mean that reading TimesSelect content online is now FREE?

What I realized is that, actually, it’s NOT free. To read the New York Times or any other newspaper online, I have to be connected to the internet — and that, in most cases, is definitely NOT free.

Same thing in the comment base - praise for amazing insights etc etc. Not just me then.....

Sorry, but if its taken this long for "Meedja" people to "get it" (and still not all do it would seem) then they are all in deep, deep cr*p sans shovel.

As Scott Notes:

What needs to be reinvented is the economics of content CREATION, which has been cut loose from the economics of distribution. Fewer and fewer people are paying news organizations to distribute news — so they need to find a model that pays strictly for the creation of news.

That is…unless news organizations can once again become hubs of distribution — a destination for consumers to access a rich package of information. Right now, most news organizations are merely offering the same package of information online that they do offline — but the web is much, MUCH bigger than that.

Correct - we have been doing a lot of interviewing recently with media companies about the rise of broadband media, and a comment from one guy in a MSM content company was very perceptive - in essence it was:

We have to figure out what (MSM) does best in this new world, and what Web TV does best - and then to stick to what we each do best.

And that is the challenge - we don't yet know what "we do best" is.

*tip of hat to Seamus McCauley for the link....