Free Online Content? Steve Brill’s “Definition of Stupidity”
Stupid. The definition of stupidity. Idiotic. Beyond belief. A Disaster.
These are the words that Steve Brill uses to describe the way media outlets are passing out their wares for free on the web in an interview with The Atlantic’s Bob Cohn at the Aspen Ideas Festival. But lucky for them, all those stupidiotic giveaways will begin to give way to plausible subscription models once Journalism Online — Brill, former WSJ publisher Gordon Crovitz and media private equity man Leo Hindery, Jr.’s “engine” — is up and running this fall. The engine will provide “one simple way to be a content consumer,” and help newspapers and magazines, you know, make money again.
Daily Finance reports that Journalism Online will be announcing its client list in the next two weeks. But, for what it’s worth, not a single potential client has outright turned them away.
Chris Anderson (earnestly?) inserted himself in the comment thread on The Atlantic’s site to remind all of us that he wrote a book recently about this sort of thing:
Additional coverage of Journalism Online: paidContent, editorsweblog.
Crovitz chimed in before the interview turned into a second round of back and forth between Anderson and somebody else who has an opinion about this sort of thing.