Conversation between Walter Isaacson and Massimo Gaggi Destroy to create After two years of debate and experiment, publishers are now resorting with some success to charging money for quality information online as well. After an initial success enjoyed by the Wall Street Journal failed to make much of an impression on people (who argued that it was a unique case associated with the specific nature of financial and economic information), the New York Times has begun to pursue the same path, achieving results that may be considered extremely positive. In the meantime, the ipad and other tablets, assisted by a large number of new applications, have begun to offer printed media publishers new ways of reaching their audiences. Nothing is easy or obvious in the news world, and the changes taking place are in every instance fairly risky wagers. But the dailies which appeared in early 2009 to be caught in the blind alley of a crisis with no way Walter Isaacson is the president of The Aspen Institute. His most recent book is entitled Steve Jobs: a biography. Massimo Gaggi, Corriere della Sera s correspondent based in New York, is co-author, with Marco Bardazzi, of a 2010 book entitled The Latest News. From the crisis in paper empires to the paradox of the glass era. out are now starting to see a little light at the end of the tunnel. They are certainly seeing more light than television, on which the digital revolution with people resorting increasingly to video on demand, to footage on YouTube and to a personalized use of their screens is going to have a far more radical impact than the press has experienced. The major mainstream all-purpose us television networks will no longer exist five years from now. At 60, Walter Isaacson is already a kind of living monument to us publishing. After a spell as editor-in-chief of Time magazine and as ceo of cnn, Isaacson has now carved himself out a niche as a writer and biographer. His biography of Steve Jobs the only biography authorized by Apple s founder, an extraordinary innovator in the it world, who recently died after a long illness has been called the publishing event of the
20 year. Aside from that, Isaacson, in his capacity as president of The Aspen Institute, has devoted his energies above all to the sphere of international political relations. Two years ago he was chosen by Barack Obama, shortly after the latter took up residence in the White House, to head up the Broadcasting Board of Governors in charge of the Voice of America, of Radio Free Europe and of other initiatives in the sphere of journalism run by the federal government. His task is to update these public information networks in light of the new digital era. On February 5, 2009 while the whole world was reeling under the shock of the global credit crunch triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Western economies were in full recession and newspapers were spinning into freefall, tripping over each others feet in announcing shutdowns or drastic downsizing Time caused something of a stir by publishing on its front cover a picture of a fish wrapped in a copy of a newspaper, under the headline: How to Save Your Newspaper. Inside, a lengthy articlecum-essay by Isaacson reviewed the stages in the publishing crisis, the interactions between the impact of the changes in information technologies and the changing prospects of the economy. He reached the conclusion that the road down which publishers were headed free online information supported by an increasing flow of advertising was no longer viable in the new economic scenario. The study of the so-called paywall the introduction of flexible payment methods for more in-depth articles, via different formulas, ranging from micropayment via cell phone, to subscription, to online sources got off the ground both in America and in Europe precisely with the publication of that article. MASSIMO GAGGI The publishing world has changed a great deal in two and a half years. The New York Times paywall has kicked in, while publishers everywhere are experimenting with new formulas to make their businesses profitable again. But at the same time, we have seen the explosion of social networks, which have become channels of information in their turn, and which, along with new digital communication initiatives, such as the Huffington Post, have altered the balance of forces between professional journalism and citizen journalism. WALTER ISAACSON Yes, there can be no doubt that the mainstream media, our traditional sources of news, are having to address new problems and epoch-making changes. But when all is said and done, digital technologies destructive nature, despite all of the problems that it entails, is a good thing: it forces us to invent new kinds
of information. It is a process in which some will inevitably fall by the wayside, but overall, we are going to end up the richer, with a wealth of new information tools, and hopefully also with new business models capable of making these journalistic activities financially sustainable. 21 Yet profit margins seem inexorably fated to shrink, also on account of information s transformation into a commodity. And sure enough, there is no point in trying to make money with basic news, which, at this juncture, is accessible to all. The effort must focus on putting a premium on original information such as analyses, in-depth probes and investigative journalism. All of these things cost a lot to produce, of course, but they are also of immense value to those who read them and who are still prepared to pay for the service. That was the significance of my appeal back in 2009, and I note with some satisfaction that there are several successful experiments around today, like the one being conducted by the New York Times. It is now obvious that not all content should be placed behind the paywall, even in the quality news media, but it is crucial to make sure that you do not rely on advertising alone to cover the cost of good, professional journalism. Internet fans still defend totally free online information, but at the beginning of the digital era it was the publishers themselves who traveled that road, thus committing
what some people have called their original sin. You yourself, in an interview with Advertising Age a while back, admitted to being partly responsible for that mistake. I said that I was guilty over the way in which I set in motion the development of the Time Inc. website about fifteen years ago. Advertising on the internet was growing exponentially; it felt as though the only problem was how to capture the largest possible number of eyes, without needing to seek any other source of financing. Then we discovered that things were not all that simple, that advertising cannot support everything. We have to create a more complex model, spread over various different forms of revenue. It is a matter of finding a balance between free and paywall. The Times, for instance, has identified a formula for charging its truly regular readers in a selective manner, while seeking at the same time to sacrifice as little traffic as possible to the free website. 22 The avalanche of newspaper closures in 2009 seems to have come to a halt and the downsizing appears to have worked, but the slow erosion of the printed press is showing no sign of letting up. The leading publisher in the Bay Area, the region around San Francisco, has just consolidated his business by merging ten different dailies into only two newspapers and shedding another 120 employees. Do you perceive a new business model looming on the horizon at last? We are on the right path, but there are still a few problems to resolve. For instance, I think that despite all of the efforts being made in this field, no easily accessible mechanism for making micropayments has yet been devised. I am not talking about subscriptions but about the few cents I might be prepared to spend if I wanted to buy a single edition of a newspaper or magazine on the spur of the moment. I think that Amazon, American Express, Google and others will soon be offering us such digital packages. In your important biography of Steve Jobs, do you depict the founder of Apple as the standard-bearer of the liberal digital culture that has ended up on a collision course with the mainstream dailies, or as someone who can save the press thanks to his ipad? Jobs s ipad is a tool that offers extraordinary new opportunities for creating forms of interactive journalism, new applications and different versions of reporting activities that consumers will be prepared to pay for. These innovative digital tools, especially mobile ones such as the smartphone and the tablet, offer journalists opportunities that they have yet to explore fully in order to express their creativity and to generate income for their publishers.
But innovators, like the Huffington Post for instance, are sometimes accused of being parasites that owe at least a part of their success to the assemblage of journalistic content produced by the traditional media, which is simply copied and offered to their own audiences, possibly with new packaging. Bill Keller, who recently quit as editor-in-chief of the New York Times, triggered a fierce controversy over that issue last spring, and Arianna Huffington s response was, if anything, even tougher. These are growing pains which should not give us any cause for concern if we take the longer-term view. The Huffington Post certainly began as an assembler of other people s news, but it did a good job right from the word go in also putting together the input of numerous bloggers who would otherwise have been unable to achieve such a high profile. And in any case, the HuffPo has now entered a new phase in which it has built its own editorial staff and is developing its own original reporting. I believe that the assemblage of news, which has been successful over the past five years, is rapidly going to lose its power of attraction because people have now mastered the system and they want original material. I think that websites have realized this and that they are acting accordingly. By the summer of 2011, the Huffington Post had 145 salaried journalists. Yes. They are hiring genuine professionals because they have realized that they need to develop a narrative of their own, to launch original stories. 23 The New York Times, which probably feels that no one can hold a candle to it in terms of the quality of its reporting, has said with a smidgen of aristocratic haughtiness that it offers its readers steak, while the most websites will ever be able to offer their readers are hamburgers. I am not going to get into the battle of metaphors. In my view, we are going to see more cooperation than rivalry in the future. The Daily Beast website has already merged with a press source of the caliber of Newsweek. I believe that online and hardcopy are going to work well together in the future. So, putting it in a nutshell, you do not think that the internet is going to kill the printed press, then? As I told you, I believe that the source that is going to have the biggest problems is television. Traditional program scheduling has already ceased to exist; it has been steamrollered out of existence by the web, which allows viewers to build their own
personal schedule in the sea of programs offered by hundreds of digital channels, not to mention the millions of videos available online. I believe that the traditional mainstream all-purpose television networks will no longer exist five years from now, at least not in the United States. 24 The Voice of America recently caused something of a stir when it decided to cease broadcasting shortwave radio news bulletins in China. Several conservative politicians accused it of beating a retreat, but in actual fact the decision seems to owe more to the evolution of the technological scenario. How are the new digital tools changing the way the us government s information structures work? If the people who founded Voice of America all those years ago could have created a magic bullet to get our message across in the world s bumpier areas, they could not have dreamed up anything more effective than the internet. The web is perfect; it is far more effective than radio frequencies for the Voice of America s mission. And we are making the fullest use possible of it. It facilitates the flow of information, and I believe that it is going to play a role in bending the bow of history toward democracy and freedom.