Major news outlets to sell multipart investigations as “digital newsbooks”
At more than 24,000 words, Steve Fainaru’s Pulitzer-winning reports on American mercenaries in Iraq were nearly as long as Heart of Darkness and just as eerie. But spread over nine installments in nine months, the Washington Post series could hardly be read as literature.
Later this month, a coalition of news organizations — including the Post, Los Angeles Times, and Memphis Commercial Appeal — will try selling some of their multipart series as repackaged “digital newsbooks” for e-reader devices. Fainaru’s series, “The Private Armies of Iraq,” will be among those available for $4.95.
It’s a small but intriguing attempt to monetize the most costly and least profitable work in a newsroom: investigative journalism. The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri is producing the newsbooks and coordinating their sale through two retailers, eReader Outfitters and MBS Direct. The latter targets educators, who Reynolds is hoping might use newsbooks in their courses.
“The newsbook is really an experiement to find out if people are willing to pay for a more convenient package of information,” Roger Fidler, who’s leading the initiative for Reynolds, told me in an interview. “And I believe they will. If you’ve tried reading a long series of content on the web for free, it’s not really enjoyable. What you’ll be paying for here is convenience and comfort.”
You can get a good sense of what newsbooks entail by browsing this prototype for a series in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and there’s more information about the Digital Newsbook Publishing Project at its website.
I’m intrigued by the initiative because there are countless newspaper series that I’ve missed but always meant to catch up on. Or take that 19-part series in The New York Times deconstructing various causes of the financial crisis. I liked what I read but pouring through the rest would require the same commitment as curling up with a good book. And I agree with Fidler that lengthy articles aren’t — yet, at least — easy to read on a computer screen.
More than 30 news organizations are involved with the Digital Publishing Alliance at Reynolds, though not all of them are releasing newsbooks. They’re paying from $1000 to $3000 a year for membership, which is the only upfront cost. The price for non-profit organizations is $500 a year. Our sister publication, Nieman Reports, is a member and will soon release two newsbooks with content from the magazine, one focusing on digital journalism and the other on non-profit models for news. A third is in the works. “They are designed to offer journalism professors an up-to-date classroom resource to use as curriculum with their students,” editor Melissa Ludtke told me in an email.
News organizations will take 40 percent of the revenue from sales of their newsbooks, with another 40 percent going to the retailer and 20 percent to Reynolds. “It’s not going to make a huge amount of money,” Fidler told me at the start of our conversation. “The expectation is that it’s a long-tail type of strategy.” That is, any substantial revenue will be cumulative over the long term.
The project will face a few obvious roadblocks. Newsbooks won’t initially be accessible on the two most-popular e-readers, the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, because their screens are too small. In fact, newsbooks are just PDFs that you can view on a laptop or more obscure e-reader, which takes a lot of charm out of the project. Fidler said he’s working on later versions that would work on the Kindle, iPhone, and other devices.
There’s also the matter of charging five dollars for content that’s largely available for free on the news organizations’ own websites. I think some people will shell out for the convenience, but the market will undoubtedly be small. It could, however, augur a shift to charging for in-depth, enterprise reporting.
But that Washington Post series on mercenaries in Iraq? As with a lot of big investigative projects, Fainaru has already turned turned his reporting into a full-fledged book, available on the Kindle for $14.30. Whether anyone will pay for a cheaper collection of the original news articles remains to be seen.
UPDATE, April 10, 2009, 5:47 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal and Associated Press are members of the Digital Publishing Alliance at Reynolds, but they aren’t releasing newsbooks. I’ve updated the second and seventh grafs to reflect that information.
Given how easy it is to turn this into a printed book using POD technology and logistics and given how few things there are worth reading in high school ed, does anyone else think this could find a market in inner city bottom of the pyramid high schools?
Newsbooks have potential in multiple formats. This is a good idea, but the execution seems backwards to me.
Better to either print the collection on paper or make the digital version make more use of the medium, such as by adding interactivity.
Maureen,
Good point. My 2 cents is that ebooks are great to serve a niche market of readers. That explains the success of the Kindle. But most people don’t have the time or willingness to read. For them, a newsbook-on-paper, is a much easier scan. For a high school kid and teacher it could be invaluable.
The good news about printing these days is that we don’t have to make an either/or choice. The prep involved in doing an ebook can be repurposed to output in print. With POD technology there is no need to invest in 10,000 copies. They can be printed 200 at a time and follow the market, instead of trying to predict it.
Great idea! I’d only add a firm suggestion on the monetization front. I use Skype all the time. What I most like about it is being able to load up $10 from my credit card and then little by little, I use it for calls. Now granted the bits are pretty little. But the extraordinary hassle of having to try to pay with a credit card for every little bit of news, even sites that I might want makes me grimace.
A broad consortium of newspapers should get together and either find a company or establish one that would be a central journalism clearing house for payments like Skype. This cannot be of brain surgery complexity, and I do realize that the principal barrier would be trust. But if we throw in our dollars, there’s no problem, no bad press, etc., then I see monetization as workable.
And in keeping with that, the specialization that has to be happening for viewers of any medium, will just be a fact of life. I’ll pay for someone to serve my specialization interest and I’ll bet there’ll be a lot of others who will as well. Any comments?