When good beats great

Whenever I read about the demise of print media, about blogs, about paywalls, etc. , I think about an argument probably made elsewhere on the internet (I forget where) about the history of the VCR, the video cassette recorder.  For those of you born after 1990, you can look it up on Wikipedia.  I'm old enough to remember when the VCR didn't exist.

Initially, we had to suffer from the format wars.  There were competing formats, once called VHS and one called Betamax, or Beta for short.  On an objective scale, Betamax was the better format.  It had better picture quality.  I'm sure some in the industry predicted that this was going to be the tipping point that would drive VHS off the market.

However, the Betamax had one problem.  The most recording you could get on a Betamax tape was two hours.  With VHS, the extended play setting would store six hours worth of material.  Granted, that material might have poor picture quality, but you could store a lot of material on it. If you wanted to record anything longer than two hours on a Betamax, you had to remove the cassette when it reached max capacity and pop in another one.

Betamax was great, but VHS was good - good enough for what people wanted to do.  VHS began to drive Betamax out of the market.  When you went to Blockbuster (you can also look that up on Wikipedia), the store would be dedicated to thousands of VHS tapes and a small shelf of tapes for those still dedicated to the on-life-support-and-irrevelant Betamax format.

Right now, print media is Betamax.  Yes, the articles you'll read if you pay that $10/monthly to the New York Times are of much greater quality than the articles from the blog your Crazy Uncle Ed publishes on-line.  But, honestly, there are a lot of bloggers out there working for free whose quality is not necessary great, but good - good enough, at any rate.  And about 15 years ago, I took a college course from a man who stated that his motto was "You shall not pay for something you can get for free."  Bloggers are VHS in our analogy.

Print media has a Catch-22.  In order to entice people to pay for quality on-line journalism, you have to show them what you're selling.  But since these are articles you read, once people read the article the value of the article drops to something near-zero.  Basically, you have to sell people something they're not allowed to see and that's a tough row to hoe.  When I'm directed to a link on line that leads to a paywall where I'm offered the low deal of $10/month for the high quality journalism of the Boston Herald (if that's the price), I decline and look to see if:

a) someone is offering the same information for free,
b) someone is excerpting the article in full,
c) someone is excerpting the article in part, or
d) someone is summarizing the article

I'm sure that the NYT/Washington Post/Boston Herald/Times of London believe in their heart of hearts that if I just read enough of their articles, I'd be so astonished by the quality that I'd be gladly willing to pay.  Well, they've not won their bet yet.  The only two places I pay online for content are at wbbstate.com and WNBA Live Access.

As for the WNBA website, its content isn't even good.  Rebkell, with its sometimes trollish invective and occasional posting of rumor-as-fact beats the WNBA website by about ten miles.  The website should frankly just post a link to Rebkell or ESPN and be done with it.