Few journalists would have had the audacity (or is it stupidity?) to pitch a story idea to Time Magazine about micropayments for journalism.
Even fewer journalists would have gotten that story idea accepted. And almost none of those journalists would have had their story wind up on the front cover of Time Magazine.
Enter Walter Isaacson.
He got a cover story into Time Magazine on the incredibly half-baked idea of micropayments — charging for content by literally nickel and dimeing people. Let me remind all of you that this idea is not remotely new. Mark Potts points out that this idea dates back to well into the 1990s.
The difference is that Isaacson is a journalism bigwig. He is revered in many circles. He can write whatever he wants, and we’ll print it.
And we did.
If I wrote the same exact piece and published it to my blog, I would have been laughed at. and Time Magazine would never have seriously considered publishing it. But shouldn’t Isaacson be held to a higher standard than me, not a lower one? After all, my half-baked ideas aren’t thrown on magazine covers and TV shows for all to see.
Or is journalism really about comforting the well connected and privileged? I hope not.
If a politician proposed a really bad idea, journalists would jump all over it and start dissecting it. But when a bigwig journalist proposes an idea, regardless of merit, it’s accepted as gospel within mainstream circles.
Thankfully the journalism blogosphere and Twitter have thoroughly dissected Isaacson’s ideas (the kind of work Time’s editors should have done). Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the people in charge of a magazine like Time — or other large, influential news organizations — spend much time reading blogs or Twitter. Pity, they might learn something.
It’s clear from reading Isaacson’s ideas that he did not do any substantive homework. If he did, he would have known micropayments for journalism have been discussed for more than a decade and that there are strong concerns about being able to overcome transaction fees and make a profit. Plus, Apple developed the iTunes store to help sell high-profit margin iPods.
Isaacson and others have forwarded the iTunes Store as a successful micropayment model. The problem is that Apple sells plenty of higher-margin macropayments on the store (the iTunes store is for a lot more than just music, and I hope — but doubt — that Isaacson knew that) and Apple has been actively trying to find ways to make money off of those 99 cent micropayments by getting people to purchase a lot more than just 99 cents at a time (cards loaded with $20 are a great way to do this).
Jay Rosen on Twitter nailed why Isaacson is allowed to have such a big mouthpiece for such poorly researched ideas:
One answer to CJR’s question: http://is.gd/jizZ Journalism babies its bigfoots. They get to skip the homework and jump right to solutions.
Journalism bigwigs play by different rules than most of us. They are babied and rarely challenged. And that’s a loss for all of us.