I think the ability to make money from marketing information is more about identifying an audience to cultivate and developing a model designed to appeal to that market segment: technology must be a servant to the product, not the other way round.

The problem with this is that in a huge majority of cases the feature would go:

“Checked emails, opened attachment, copied and pasted press release into word, changed occasional words to fit house style, submitted copy to newsdesk, went to pub”.

Sounds like a blog idea! Why would you want to fund a newspaper for that?

Saying that though, has anyone seen the article on Politico.com – and how the site only started turning money once it produced a print version? I think it’s in Vanity Fair…

The problem, it seems to me, is that newspapers are still very bloated and not hungry enough. Far too nepotistic and people rely on press release to fill stories. I think they could go much further in slimming down, and frankly they need to. They need to be more like Politico basically…

Loss making model – Rusbridger’s idea is good but the papers are moving away from local council reporting anyway. They got bored of it before the current crisis – so I’m not sure whether this would get anywhere.

I’d rather we think about how citizen journalists can look at keeping tabs on their council. That seems to me a much better way than funding some PA type group which may come with its own biases.

Gmail model – already used by FT now.

Flickr model – looks closest to what the Guardian is considering now…

Smart music industry model – the papers can potentially use their star people to make money but I bet it will conflict with those journos wanting to make money themselves doing talks etc. Besides, I bet people would soon start accusing those papers of bias.

DVD industry – not sure why people will pay for this… but the Guardian does this sometimes. Most newspapers don’t do mostly because the answer is: ‘press release’.

Book Industry model – actually I see more of this happening. The Guardian has been quite conservative in this regard actually… it should think more like the Atlantic – where it has some external bloggers coming in and setting the agenda, while it’s own journos concentrate on journalism rather than blogging.

How they handle it will depend on two things:

1 – how much do external links drive traffic.
2 – how much do external deep links help drive search engine prominence of articles, and how much does *that* drive traffic.

And it will also depend on whether newspaper websites get any better at internal navigation.

If I can’t access websites to research my pieces, I can’t link to articles on those sites.

Or will the whole thing actually drive traffic to independent sites?

There is a hardcore of people out there who would surely pay for a newspaper to be Out There which produces content that endorses, or at least does not conflict with, their world view.

£5 a month to fund a progressive newspaper? I might be tempted to cough that up, but I might want a say in how it is run. Elections to the editorial board?

Is the model we should be looking at MoveOn’s? And instead of bemoaning that existing newspapers are dying, should people be thinking about what future papers – largely online but possibly with a published arm – might emerge?

A Lib Dem newspaper? A Libertarian newspaper?

On the mobile small prices are bigger. 70 pence a day would seem massive to those used to paying 59p just once.

The newspaper industry have to get their head around the idea that their age is over. They’ve had nearly 15 years to come to terms with the Internet haven’t really grasped things properly.

On a more basic level i just think that consumers should stop being such a bunch of fucking freegans, when it comes to something that necessitates enormous human endeavour.

Most of us didn’t forsee how Google could be a success either, and that’s why we’re not rich.

As to the DVD extras, I’m an obssessive collector because both the extras and permanency. I’d happily ditch my bootlegs of ‘Out of the Unknown’ if the BBC or Network brought out official versions, vidfired and loaded with extras.

How that translates to news coverage, I’m not sure. Maybe this could include automatic updates on stories, or where-are-they-now followups?

Frankly I don’t think the distinction between print and online media is the problem. The problem is content. Get rid of all comment/opinion, ditch most news too (except detailed stuff, interviews and investigative journalism) print a slimmed-down version of the paper which provided content you can’t get elsewhere, and I’d probably buy it.

In a similar vein, I wouldn’t say the DVD model works by providing extras. With the amount of movie piracy, it’s debatable whether it’s working at all; perhaps still waiting for a dominant “iTunes” marketplace. Where it does make sales, it seems to be mainly people wanting permanent, owned copies of loved movies, not the extras.

What would be interesting is knowing how much of the 50p or so that it costs to buy a newspaper is printing costs. The ‘download for offline reading’ model is an interesting one. Perhaps you can have a personal and business use model there (so for instance you download the day’s paper to your phone, and if you want to read more than X stories you have to pay a fee).

It’s essentially the computer game model. A demo is free for everyone, but those who want the full experience have to pay.