Friday Funnies: Sick Puppies at Pols, Barry takes my bet – reaction to Monica Marquez pick for Colorado Supreme Court

by CTBC Director | 7:11 am, September 10, 2010

Reaction to Governor Ritter’s selection of Deputy Attorney General Monica Marquez to become Colorado’s next supreme court justice (replacing outgoing Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey, who announced in June that she would resign rather than be held accountable by voters this November) and concerns expressed by Clear The Bench Colorado regarding her positions on important constitutional questions [...]

Citizen participation vital in restoring Accountability and Transparency to the Colorado Supreme Court

by CTBC Director | 4:11 pm, August 2, 2010

For perhaps the first time in our state’s history, an increasing number of Colorado Citizens are taking an interest in the Colorado Supreme Court  judicial retention elections – our only opportunity, as Citizens, to hold the officeholders in our 3rd branch of government (the judiciary) accountable (to the rule of law generally, to the Constitution [...]

Surveying the Media on Mullarkey Retirement – was Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice ousted by Clear The Bench Colorado?

by CTBC Director | 3:03 am, June 7, 2010

Either the Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice has been afflicted by the same highly contagious epidemic of political figures “wishing to spend more time with their family” as befell Governor Ritter, or there’s something else afoot…
Those journalists willing and able to look deeper than the retirement announcement intended for public consumption didn’t have too far [...]

More details emerge on group formed to oppose accountability for Colorado Supreme Court incumbents

by CTBC Director | 4:11 am, June 2, 2010

Initial reports in mid-May (story broken by Law Week Online) about a well-funded group formed specifically to counter the growing momentum and success of the grassroots judicial accountability organization Clear The Bench Colorado in raising public awareness about the issue of judicial accountability in Colorado were substantiated Tuesday (June 1st) with additional details on the key members [...]

Clear The Bench Colorado movement to restore accountability to Colorado Supreme Court gains momentum, resounding response

by CTBC Director | 3:03 am, May 22, 2010

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” – Abraham Lincoln
Clear The Bench Colorado has succeeded – through sheer drive and determination (and the support of growing numbers of concerned Colorado citizens) – in raising awareness [...]

Where have all the civil libertarians gone?

by Amy Oliver | 6:05 am, March 23, 2010

They’ve gone to Boulder to weigh in on the rights of free expression for a woman who wants to garden topless in her front yard right near an elementary school. According to Westword, the Boulder Chapter of the ACLU doesn’t think the city should ban exposed female nipples in the front yard.
Judd Golden, chair of [...]

Westword weighs in on Colorado Supreme Court non-retention movement spearheaded by Clear The Bench Colorado

by CTBC Director | 8:40 am, January 23, 2010

The widely circulated alternative weekly Westword weighed in Friday with an article about the grassroots movement to hold the Colorado judiciary (particularly, the Colorado Supreme Court) accountable – and bring back balance to the bench – spearheaded by Clear The Bench Colorado.
Aside from not actually having used the word “bums” to describe the current majority on the [...]

Dear Dean Singleton, Please Charge Me

by Ari Armstrong | 12:04 am, November 25, 2009

Westword’s Michael Roberts reports that “Dean Singleton… plans to start charging readers for lotsa online content at select MediaNews papers in California and Pennsylvania beginning in 2010.” This is relevant to us in Colorado because Singleton also publishes the Denver Post. Are fees for the online Post in our future?

God, I hope so.

Good journalism is hard work. Good investigative journalism is especially hard and time-consuming work. People tend not do do a lot of hard work without compensation. (I imagine Roberts would confirm this.) Thus, journalism needs to pay.

Journalism can pay in one of three general ways: advertising, philanthropic contributions, and reader payments. Advertising can be direct or indirect; for example, Michelle Malkin runs direct advertising, and her entire blog serves to advertise her books. (You’ll notice that I advertise my own book, Values of Harry Potter, on my web page. And it makes a fine addition to the tree or stocking!) I would be interested in learning how much of the Incredible Shrinking Westword’s revenues come from print versus online advertising. (While the weekly’s print edition has gotten noticeably smaller, its online content has expanded dramatically.)

I doubt anybody is going to make a generous gift to the Post.

That leaves reader contributions to supplement advertising revenues. These payments can be by the piece or via subscriptions.

As I suggested earlier, I think papers (and it’s funny even to still call them “papers”) should give readers a choice: watch an annoying ad, pay a monthly or annual subscription, or pay to read a single article at a time.

How is that not the best of all worlds? Cheapskates can still read content for free, except they have to pay with their time by watching a real advertisement. Regular readers can subscribe, preferably for a low annual rate (I would seriously consider paying, say, $50 per year to read the Post online). And occasional readers who value their time can pay some token amount — perhaps an amount that varies with the ambition of the piece — to read a single article. As I also mentioned before, the key to this is to figure out a very-fast way to make micropayments (else there is no time savings).

The fact is that readers who value good content and don’t want to waste time looking at ads will be prepared to pay to read that content. I absolutely hate the Post’s online ads that pop up, block text, push text down the page, and otherwise annoy the living hell out of me when all I’m trying to do is read a spot of news. I would much rather pay a little than deal with those sorts of ads.

I think it’s worth revisiting what Post editor Greg Moore said in September:

In terms of advertising being a means of supporting original [journalism]… right now advertising provides like 85 percent of our revenue. It’s still a huge, huge, huge driver. It’s a huge source of revenue. It’s going to be probably for a while. But I think our survival — and when I say survival I’m not talking about the newspaper, I’m talking about our ability to do journalism — I think we’ll have to shift to a different model. And I think that model is that the user will have to pay for the content that he or she consumes.

I don’t think that the cat is out of the bag. I think that the record industry sort of proved that, the music industry sort of proved that you can change people’s behavior. Napster, in the mid-1990s, everyone thought that would just sort of kill everything, and they put those people in jail, put them out of business, and now people pay for music. They do it differently — they don’t buy albums anymore, they buy singles, but they still pay a lot of money for music.

So I think there’s still hope for us, that we can sort of reverse this trend. As somebody said, I think the worst decision that was made by the owners of newspapers was to sort of be stampeded into giving away their content for free. But it doesn’t mean that it’s over.

Unfortunately, rather than quote somebody who knows what he’s talking about, such as Moore, Roberts quotes some clueless blog post by Rob Burgess.

Burgess quotes survey results from NewFiction:

80 percent of consumers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they would discontinue their favorite free print content if they were asked to pay for it. Less than 10 percent of respondents would agree to subscription models; only three percent would opt for micropayments.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner nicely summarize the problem with this in their new book SuperFreakonomics: “There is good reason to be skeptical of data from personal surveys. There is often a vast gulf between how people say they behave and how they actually behave” (page 7).

If you ask people if they want to pay for something they now get for free, what do you expect them to say? They’re going to give you some variant of “no.”

But if a person actually has a choice of reading a great article and paying, versus not reading that article, in at least some cases the person is going to pay up and ask for more. (Again, I think newspapers would be smart to offer a third option of spending time watching an ad, probably in the form of a short video. These sorts of ads are already common on a variety of web pages.)

So Burgess’s first argument is bunk. Let us turn to his second argument:

You ruined everything in the beginning by starting with giving everything away for free. It has now been almost 15 years since the Internet broke wide and you’re just NOW getting around to asking people to pay for your content? I don’t blame people for not wanting to pay for it anymore, why should they? Who would pay for something they can get for free?

The options are not “get free content” versus “pay for content.” The other option is “get no content,” at least as far as investigative journalism is concerned. With that as the alternative, paying doesn’t look so bad after all. People “should” pay, and they should be willing to, if that’s the only way to get hard-to-produce content they want to read. (Again, easy-to-produce content will remain free, and ads can help pay for hard-to-produce content.)

What Burgess seems to think ridiculous is Singleton’s comment, “We have to condition readers that everything is not free.” But Singleton’s comment is perfectly sensible. Moore uses the example of paying for music online. Today many people pay to receive television stations that they could otherwise get for free, because the reception is better and the broadcast stations are packaged with cable-only stations. Consumers change their behavior all the time, even (or especially) after they say they won’t.

There ain’t no such thing as free journalism. If journalists aren’t willing to work without compensation, philanthropists don’t pay, and advertising doesn’t pay enough, the only alternative is for readers to pay, if they want the benefit of the product.

Really advertising is a way of extracting a payment of time from readers. Again, I think papers should offer that alternative. I would much rather pay in dollars, as for me that would be the far less costly alternative.

Transparency: It’s a good question

by Amy Oliver | 3:30 pm, October 6, 2009

“Why does Governor Ritter have to be dragged kicking and screaming into transparency?” asked our big boss Jon Caldara.
Investigative reporter Todd Shepherd exposed Ritter’s latest battle against transparency.  Shepherd discovered that Ritter and his administration have virtually ignored a Governor Bill Owens executive order requiring that “all cabinet members as well as senior staff members [...]

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