A Monthly Subscription to Hawaii’s Future

Pierre Omidyar’s experiment in local news is set to launch on May 4th. Civil Beat, which was formally known as Peer News, will provide “a new kind of civic square”. For their initial news coverage, Civil Beat has selected critical issues centered around five fundamental beats (Hawaii, Honolulu, Education, Land and Money). The journalism-as-a-service site is being offered at the introductory price of $4.99 for the first month, with a standard subscription rate of $19.99/mo. Membership benefits include complete access to all the content on their service, as well as participation in discussions with editors, reporter-hosts, and other members.

There are various business and social models in play here, including premium content fees and crowdsourced journalism, which have experienced historically mixed results. Many news services believe premium content should be provided at a cost, but few have executed that strategy with success. Paul Graham provides some interesting insight into the dilemma in his article, “Post-Medium Publishing”. He argues that:

Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left to sell. Some seem to think they’re going to sell content—that they were always in the content business, really. But they weren’t, and it’s unclear whether anyone could be.

Graham also notes that “people will pay for information they think they can make money from,” which explains why financial publications have implemented the pay wall model with success. The Wall Street Journal had more than 400,000 digital subscribers as of October 2009. Alan Murray however, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, doesn’t believe financial information is unique in its value. He believes that content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, and the more specific the better. In an interview with Zachary Seward he notes, “the question is to find the information that has an enormous value to not necessarily a big group of people — maybe it’s a small group of people — but enough value that they’re willing to pay for it.” It remains to be seen if Civil Beat will be able to identify and produce content of this value, but it appears critical to their success.

Crowdsourcing can produce valuable information, Wikipedia is a shining example, however much of that success is dependent on the diversity and accessibility of the crowd. Having a subscription model limits both diversity and access. If Wikipedia charged even a nominal fee for access to its articles, it would not have blossomed into the resource it has become. By instituting an entrance fee, Civil Beat filters the participant pool, limiting potential. However, that monetary commitment does imply a vested interest by the subscriber, potentially increasing overall participation, as well as quality of input. Because no articles are currently available on the site, it is difficult to judge how this will evolve.

For us, it’s about building a place where we can all learn about and better understand our home, the challenges we face, and debate and discover ideas and strategies for moving forward.

Civil Beat is not Wikipedia. Nor is it a newspaper. It’s somewhere in between, a mixture of the objective with the subjective, unified by locale. Omidyar explains in his post, “For us, it’s about building a place where we can all learn about and better understand our home, the challenges we face, and debate and discover ideas and strategies for moving forward.” It’s an optimistic outlook, but like any social network, its value will be determined by its membership. The pressing questions are these: Who in Hawaii is ready to embrace this paradigm? Is Civil Beat positioning itself to become an elitist think-tank? And perhaps most importantly, how will dialogue be motivated into action?

Civil Beat
Post Medium Publishing – Paul Graham
Five Tips on Charging for Content from Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal – Zachary M. Seward
GlobalPost Expands Partnerships, Struggles with Pay Service – Mark Glaser
Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned – Jeff Howe