What do I have to lose? Brian’s idea to save journalism.

Old-Fashioned Grade A American Money -- Wikimedia Commons

Since you got past that headline, I presume you’re as stuck as anyone else in the news industry trying to figure out which direction newspapers (and journalists) are going. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I just finished reading AJR Editor Rem Rieder’s latest column about the hunt for media gold, and I’m going to take the bait; I have been devising a plan for some time and now feel that, even if the plan ends up miserably fruitless, there will be ears available that would not have been open to a student like myself just some short time ago.

First off, a disclaimer: I admit I am no expert in economics (micro or macro), nor am I any more knowledgeable of credit card policies and advertising schemes than any other regular newspaper reader, or media consumer in general. That said, as many of us in Carl Stepp’s Journalism History class will remember, many of the greatest innovations in journalism have come from young people –Philo T. Farnsworth had the television more or less figured out by the time he was 21, same goes for Guglielmo Marconi with his radio.

Now, before you editors start typing that “p” word –the one that ends with “ompous”– just hear me out: think of this idea as more of a question to those who have a deeper understanding of the media market. And as one of the most hackneyed clichés in journalism goes, “there is no such thing as a stupid question, except for those that go unasked.”

So, here goes…

One of the first pieces of legislation President Obama signed was for credit-card reform, designed to protect consumers from early and unbearable debt. Also part of the new laws were bans on advertising at colleges and credit cards for minors. If carried out properly, this will allow consumers to start a healthy line of credit AND limit the mass of transactions that are made illegally by identity thieves, etc. (less cards = less cards and money to be stolen).

This is crucial to my plan. Currently, the only requirement for free news at most major online sites is an email address. This means any high-school dropout computer whiz can create a program that generates a massive amount of email “accounts” and sell them or then sign them up as readers for WaPo, NYT… Newspapers and, most importantly, advertisers, do not like this. They obviously do not want their money going to a site that has 30 million “subscribers” but only 5 million actual readers.

Secondly, advertisers have squeezed publishers into admitting they cannot necessarily prove that their ads are ever being viewed, due to the broad reach of RSS feeds and legitimate assertion that an ad could only appear on a viewer’s browser for a fraction of a second.

THIS is where the credit-card companies come into play:

If subscribers are required to provide a working credit-card (or check-card) account, along with the email address, the “inflated subscription” factor becomes void. Little Billy Gates Jr.’s program can’t amass those fake readers that the advertisers are wary of (that is, if the capitalists aren’t behind the problem themselves).

I know what you’re thinking, “Brian, there’s still no way of telling how long ads are being viewed and how effective they are!” And if you’re not thinking that, then you’re probably ready to close the window and head back to facebook.

But wait!

Since online sites would have the credit-card accounts at hand, a “catch and release” scheme could be taken up by news companies, without requiring a charge to consumers. By “catch and release” I mean a news site would require a minimum amount of time consumers spend viewing a story or staying on the site. To put it plainly, the news could still be free, but the viewers would be forced to either stay on a page for a minimum amount of time, or pay a microcharge that would be made directly to their account whenever they click away from the site.

If you think such technology is not available, think again. Yahoo and Google have been keeping watch –and making money– with their complex ad-targeting systems that track user behavior.

Another advertising problem many online sites face is that they see a low “click-through rate” for online banners and pop-ups, meaning the pay-per-click policies garner considerably less revenue from advertisers than actual printed ads. If news companies can manage to cooperatively take up “catch and release” systems, they may be able to jack up their click-through rates by creating a microcharge bypass for people who click on the ad. In practice, a person could still get free news, so long as they stay on the site for long enough, or they click the ad.

As of now, without a means of tightly tracking reader behaviors, news sites have little leverage in proving the ads on their sites are working –but “catch and release” allows them to render considerably more of the clicks as being legitimately human, and thus, more effective than before.

An advantage television has over the Internet right now is that the ads are nearly unavoidable –you can’t close out of them, and they can last for minutes at a time. But ads are becoming more advanced every day, and companies like Unicast have proven some online ads can be just as lucrative as their tubed counterparts. These designs stick video ads, much like those on tv, right where that static online banner or sidebar ad used to be.

To put this last example into perspective, magazines normally run a full-page ad for somewhere between $30 and $50 per 1,000 “impressions,” normal online banners have been known to rake-in little more than 50 cents per 1,000 impressions and those nifty floating ads you see on WaPo can pull anywhere from $3 to $30 for every thousand clicks.

As for the Unicast ads I mentioned, according to Howstuffworks founder Marshall Brain, “Because Unicast ads have branding power and because people click on them, $30 per 1,000 impressions is a common rate paid to Web sites.”

Jackpot?

Well, not so long as advertisers can prove “clicks” aren’t always real-live viewers. Thus, another example of how a credit-related “catch and release” system would provide a guaranteed number of verifiable viewers. I should also clarify that this idea may not have been feasible before the credit laws were passed due to combined risks of unused cards being attached to unreliable subscribers, and a fear of credit catastrophe on the part of the consumers. But revamped protection, and a more reliable way of validating sunscribers could very well be the way to prove a site’s true popularity.

And for the Grand Finale, I ascribe to the ideals of youth and entrepreneurship. With the demographic of print readers growing ever-older, it is inevitable that the Web’s news viewership will grow larger and larger with each generation. If my “catch and release” plan turns out to be feasible and lucrative, it could be a relatively easy way for young people to establish good credit, subscribe and consume quality and competitive journalism and, most importantly, SAVE THE NEWS INDUSTRY.

And if it doesn’t work?

Well, it will more than likely be back to the drawing board, seeing as to how I am no marketing or business genius. My solution is less about introducing this new idea as much as it is  an example for how journalists should be thinking and participating in the effort to save their (you know whats).

Someone may find a simple flaw in the foundation of my blueprint, but hey, at least I’m putting something out there… who knows what buttons you can push in a reader to get them closer to a solution.