Somebody just wrote that there is good old common-sense economics at work. I’d say the subprime crisis is also good old common-sense economics at work. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a healthy thing and it's good for the industry, for the economy or for society as a whole.

Quality journalism plays a critical role in our society. In every society - that includes the ones in "Western" states. The death of a newspaper in San Francisco or Boston is nothing less than a tragedy. Journalists do what they do - they write. They are obviously not exactly experts regarding the WWW and the "new" technology their distribution is based on now. They weren't capable of adjusting their business strategies and products to this disruption. Somebody needs to do that for them and the business model is not advertising alone anymore.

In the past they generated revenue from ads and from content bundling. In the print channel interesting and high-quality articles subsidized less interesting ones or even whole departments. On the web there are no bundles, content is atomized and shareable. Clicks and links are the currency and people only click on links to articles (and ads) they’re interested in. Therefore in my opinion the only possible solution is to stop relying on ads alone and start charging readers for the product itself, which is the content - INCLUDING the delivery and presentation of it.

Usually product development follows a business strategy of maximizing profit. Obviously that’s the profit of the company offering the product and not the profit of competitors and providers of supposed substitute products, like bloggers and evil news aggregators. But the technology makes the content shareable. It’s complicated and a somewhat "socialistic" approach to the problem would help. No worries, I don’t want to raise taxes or fees to finance the good, I certainly don’t think that’s the right way. All over the world press representatives ask the administrations to come up with ancillary copyright laws securing their interests. That’s ridiculous and shows that they didn’t even analyze the issue right.

Bottom line: I’d try the re-introduction of bundling through simple flat-rate payment - with a solution based on the economics of the web, not the print world. Readers don’t face any switching costs. If one publisher asks for payment they just go to another. But if we offer content of all sources in one place, combined with revolutionary features they don’t get anywhere else, there is something to charge for. Start focusing on the delivery and presentation of the content. Start listening to users’ needs instead of advertisers.

Journalists produce content. A third party platform is working as a personalized content hub based on simple XML-formatted or API-powered exchange of content and serving all kinds of reading devices. No, I am not talking about feed readers or Google News’ index but decent, well-planned apps and websites. The platform would have to offer really innovative features and top user experience and would be considered worth paying 2-3 USD/month. On a voluntary basis wealthy readers could even pay more and therefore get a higher "supporter status" they can communicate to the outside world (the same target segment already pays a lot for their LinkedIn accounts and other web-based services). It’s amazing what peer pressure can do.

That paid amount is being split and percentages are paid to the according publishers based on the user’s reading behavior. The meshing-up is contrary to the content strategy of most publishers today but could become interesting to them as soon as they face revenue in exchange. As a result publishers could focus on their core competency (investigating and writing) and earn from partly "outsourced" delivery, like they often did in times of paper delivery. They could also focus on niche topics to build up competency and reputation in order to be "followed" in those areas by readers through these hubs - a truly capitalistic mechanism.

Now the question is what are the killer features to make this happen? 1) The product would have to offer content from various sources. 2) It would have to improve the way readers can consume their daily or hourly news so drastically that they’re willing to pay a small amount. 3) Payment would have to be really simple. I do have thoughts on how to achieve this step by step with a freemium business model based on existing technologies and with existing shared content. I also have concrete thoughts on features as well as an almost finished product design. Personalization is the key.

I am looking for developers and front-end developers with state-of-the-art CSS and AJAX knowledge, who think what I just wrote is not just stupid utopia and would like to work on this sisyphean challenge. Who would like to build a team and apply at Y Combinator? I am an ex web developer and UI designer and recent MBA graduate and Xoogler from Germany.

Poll: approx. 34 % of users are willing to pay 2-5 USD/month

Mashable - The New York Times Asks Readers If They’d Pay For Online Version (http://mashable.com/2009/07/09/new-york-times-online-subscri...)

The New York Times - Let’s Invent an iTunes for News (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/business/media/12carr.html)

Nieman Journalism Lab - How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/how-an-nyt-developer-built-...)

Google Code's PubSubHubbub publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to XML content exchange (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub)

TechCrunch - The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dea...)