Infostack on Infostack’s Newsletter

David, your August 31 note about a journalism CO-OP drew me to following you. I think the connection may have been Jay Rosen. That said there are 3 micro challenges* for the news media: 1) they are still thinking mostly 1-way 2) they are still thinking mostly silo-ed 3) they are still thinking narrow niche audiences. The solution? 1) forget about the platforms. enough qualitative and active discussions occur away from them 2) help the reader virtualize their discussions and engagement widely, not narrowly. that creates much bigger network effects, across 3) each piece of content which is it's own switch or exchange (look in particularly to foster long-term, generative discussions in a way that transcends time and space and context) 4) open your business model and virtualize paywalls via a much larger exchange system based on a marginally costed and priced settlement system The reader or commenter owns their engagement. Ad-tech then plugs into this model nicely and the platforms either conform or get bypassed. I've worked on several of these exchange models and one in particularly that stands out was the failure of digital paging in the US in the late 1990s. I had been the first analyst to prove that wireless digital voice (aka cellular) could be profitable at 10 cents/minute in 1996 (when analog rates were $0.50-$1.50 and penetration stood at 7%) and that this meant the death-knell for ~35m numeric, cheap-beep pagers. But the value was not in those 35m subscribers, rather in the 100's of millions of people who paged those devices. The value was in the simple send-side "call-me -back" feature associated with a simple number that 100s of millions of people were used to using. What if the paging industry had built a CO-OP exchange that harnessed all that latent "send-side" energy and replaced "call-me-back" with "here's the complete text message" in a simple from any-where to any-where text message. Save, money, time and increase effectiveness and utility simultaneously. But they couldn't see this for all the reasons the news media can't see their deficiencies of being relegated to a tab in a browser or a link in some 3rd party content or app. Had the paging companies understood the value of this CO-OP I developed and executed on it 7 years before US mobile carriers could agree on inter-carrier (inter-protocol) SMS, they would have owned the world of messaging (not Blackberry, which was a nascent start-up pursuing email as the exchange model with all its warts) as nobody had the paging providers and vendors' enormous lead in low-cost, pervasive, reliable, digital messaging devices and networks. I see reader engagement and discussion as providing that same latent energy to be harnessed and scale the CO-OP without involvement of the platforms. In fact, I think this CO-OP could serve as a solution for the fediverse to scale rapidly in a way that preserves their goals and counters the 3 devils of the internet: permissionless, settlement-free, and anonymous. All while making information and discussion universally accessible. *--macro challenges began with the internet and the browser, namely being relegated to being an open tab (which is easily closed) on a browser or an html link to 3rd party content or an app. Both of which means they don't control the user or the engagement. And paywalls and digital apps aren't the answer.