Mike McCue Quotes

Just as infinite access to free music ultimately leads to no one making a living at music anymore, free journalism just doesn't pay for itself - particularly not when a search engine is serving all the ads.

In the summer of 2009, I modestly predicted that most major news organisations would be charging for content within 12 months. Charging, I argued, would not only plug the revenue gap; it would also help to re-establish value in their news product.

If money can't be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the 'New York Times' and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. The web model is just so much more complicated, and involves this third party of advertisers, and all these other sources of revenue that are sort of provisional, but haven't been proven yet.

It's a good time to be in the content business though, the branded content business.

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.

The cable model is just a better model. Dual revenue stream: advertising-supported and subscription-supported revenues.

OKCupid's model is almost entirely based on advertising, which is the way most online media is monetized these days, whether it's the news or whether it's sports, and we think online dating is going to evolve in the exact same way.

The one problem with the Internet for journalists who like doing long form is that any story that's going to involve 16 screens on the web page... that's asking a lot of people.

I'm focused on getting to a place where we can prove that journalism can make good money on the web.

Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.

Television saved the movies. The Internet is going to save the news business.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

You could argue that as web audiences have grown larger and advertisers have demanded scale, the web has dumbed down - like the mainstream media we so mocked.

On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.

I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.

The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions or some new invention, but right now what we've got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content.

There's much more money being brought into the advertising and communications business than in the music industry.

The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism.

Yes, the disruption of the Internet can be blamed for the destruction of the business model that once made journalism a thriving, well-paying enterprise, but it has also created an array of new tools for reporting. Somebody will eventually figure out how to make online newspapers profitable - I hope.

The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?

Free is not going to go away. Either the advertising model will still work, or there will still be literally hundreds of millions of people who want to put their information on the Net and want people to have access to it.

Ultimately, broadcasters and advertisers have to change the way they do business or they run the risk of linear TV becoming obsolete.