There, as here, many fine journalists, each with irreplaceable knowledge of local places, figures and issues, were lost. Worse, their fine work is buried behind a paywall at a website that doesn’t even work (in my experience, anyway) for subscribers.

I could go on, but it doesn’t matter. This morning I counted how many homes on our street get the Globe every morning. Just one: ours. I’m sure that 20 or 30 years ago, the Globe landed on nearly every doorstep.

In addition to a comments section, the Globe could add a “related predictions” space by each article or column for readers to make cogent (Twitter-like lengths) forecasts of specific events related to the article that they see unfolding over a three or six month period.

To make predictions, readers would pay a one-time or subscription fee to enter the pool, bringing needed revenues to the publication.

The best predictors over time could earn karma points convertible to status or visibility. One reward option would be inclusion as a high profile guest columnist, after the precedents that Nicholas Kristof and others have set at the New York Times.

Another reward option be to periodically include the best predictors in a “open forum” on trends in given fields, where they would be free to comment on trends and make further predictions.

Such a newspaper/blog-sponsored prediction market system might also provide for cash prize, in which a share of the reveue stream could be given to local or global good causes of the best predictor’s choosing.

Hope this helps – look forward to further thoughts on the approach.

Mark Frazier
 Openworld.com
@openworld (Twitter)

Observations from someone who grew up in a two newspaper (a.m. and p.m.) household, has subscribed to the main city paper everywhere he’s lived, and who can’t imagine not opening two papers (the WSJ and now the Globe) every morning:

- It’s helpful to understand whether a comment or conversation is about what we would like to have happen or what we think will likely emerge in the market and be sustained over the intermediate- to long-term.

- Various technology-driven approaches that require a modification of consumer behavior will be suitable for the (relatively) small number of people who who choose to make the change. Some mass media properties will try them; others won’t. Whether they survive at all will be based on that competition and the resulting business models that each is able to establish. There is no reason to believe that all newspapers (really, traditional print mass media organizations) will choose the same model. And of course some niche print and online efforts will be supported by subscribers.

- Little of the discussion around the fate of print mass media has reflected an understanding of the various value-creating components and the way in which they serve different audiences.

In the case of newspapers, for example, there is less value than ever in the traditional physical, branded collection of journalists, editors, and advertisers.

When a plane lands in the Hudson you want an an up-close view of what happened, you may find it in someone’s phone camera images posted on CNN. For a follow-up report on bird strikes and the response of manufacturers, airlines, and the FAA, the authoritative source may very well be someone who writes exclusively about the aviation industry for a niche site/pub. There is no value added by having, in this case, a Boston Globe reporter trying to cover all of that. They may, however, get the first interview with Boston-based passengers when they land at Logan, and the audience for that piece is much larger than the Globe.

Aside from the editorial page, for online readers there is less of a connection between hard news sources and a masthead than ever before. (The NYT, WSJ, and a few other traditional print newspapers are probably also exceptions.)

- Online, one wants to have a curated (by one editor or a crowd or a search utility) list of the news that’s of interest and an easy way to follow particular stories from the “best” source, which may or may not be from the source that broke the story.

The ability to do that online with near-zero costs for the reader exposes the fact that the traditional print media business model has a cost structure that people no longer need to pay for. And with alternatives that many readers see as hard to distinguish, they see no reason to pay the premium.

- Online advertising is a surprisingly elegant solution for paying for content creation, despite the distaste of some that such a grubby commercial venture as selling things should appear next to articles. After all, for many media companies that are publicly-held, the goal is to deliver target readers to advertisers. Compelling content is the way that’s done. Online advertising provides tremendous precision around this, with the ability to connect reader with advertiser in ways that heretofore weren’t possible.

The fact that advertising rates are much lower online than in print is a function of competition among online content creators/publishers.

Print rates will decrease further as the decision makers at traditional print buyers (advertisers and their agencies) continue to be replaced with younger individuals who have no ties (mentally, emotionally, or socially) to the traditional print media advertising infrastructure.

- We will have fewer full-time traditional journalists in the future, just as we have fewer TV repairmen than we used to have.

- And the role of technology in the evolution of the mass print media? As opposed to innovation on the payment side, broad, lasting impact will likely be in continuing to drive down the cost and increase the quality of the tools journalists (however defined) use to gather and publish news, the ones readers use to sift/sort/track and comment/share/rate, and the ones advertisers and publishers use to match message/offer with individual.

I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to Paypal, it just happens to be an account I already have, with which I’ve had a positive customer experience for both one-time purchases and recurring subscriptions/donations. As a preference, it’s one inspired entirely by laziness on my part D. I don’t know what else is in the micropayment space, but I’d very likely pick the service supported by the most sites, followed closely in priority by a service tied into a company with whom I already have an account (Google Checkout, Yahoo! Wallet, etc.).

I think another thing that print publications who migrate online need to figure out is hyperlinking. Moving online is much more than just copy-and-pasting article text into a page layout with navigation links and ads. Maybe I’m asking papers to be too much like Wikipedia, but it’s very frustrating to read an article quoting an online source that doesn’t link to that source so I can do a deeper full-context read if I’m interested. Not really a revenue issue, I suppose.

As for revenue, I’m always willing to pay a fair price for ad-free content, although as it is my brain has pretty much been trained to ignore online advertising unless it completely covers the content (and if your site does that, I probably won’t be back). I take it free now largely because that’s how it comes and that’s easiest; the same goes with using my DVR to skip commercials: it’s a personal time-saver. If it’s easy to authenticate my payment for content (iTunes and Amazon One-Click are both good examples of single-shop cases where impulse buys are all too easy), I’m there.

We have relied on marketing budgets to subsidize our media for too long, and it is time we kicked the habit.

The current problem is that it is difficult for new models to emerge while big dieing trees block out the sunlight. Those trees need to die, fall down, and rot to provide nutrients for new growth.

Meanwhile, those marketing budgets are still out there, representing demand for mindshare. The premise of MyMindshare is that those dollars can be used to buy mindshare directly from the source — you, me and every other human being with a functioning mind. Then, we can decide how those dollars should be spent; it could be on a six-pack of beer, or it could be for journalism.

Bullocks. I’ll await to see some serious academic work correlating apparent bias with subscription loss. (I once saw a presentation at a semi-academic conference that asserted that the Globe was abandoning the “working class” through its news coverage and ads, but it wasn’t very scientific either.)

FYI, Beth Lawton at NAA sent me a link last night to an analysis by Jeff Mignon on different revenue models.

What would be nice to do (for you, CJR, or NAA) is to maintain a list of the news orgs that are trying alternative pay models, and encourage them to share as many numbers as possible. A commenter to this recent CJR article pointed out that INDenver Times (aka “Rocky II”) will be trying a variant of the freemium model. Free content, but paid conversations and paid everything else (see their FAQ explaining such). And whether or not this works, this *has to* get the support of the pressblogging elite (Jarvis, Rosen et al) because it follows from their rhetoric. When they say “news moves from a lecture to a conversation” what they mean is people value 2-way conversation more than 1-way news. The latter has become commodity. The former is a limited resource, and thus has economic value.