Clay Shirky neatly summarizes the state of the newspaper business and offers a succinct analysis of the economic future of content in "Newspapers, Paywalls and Core Users."
"There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.
"In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.
"It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival."
Reminds me of the dilemma created by those who continue to view association members as customers, board members as owners, and staff as hired guns.
Aren't Shirky's "politically engaged readers" the same as actively involved members? The 15% who show up? What if we too could finally forego "mass in favor of passion" and reward the people most committed to (our) long-term survival?"