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Why 'membership' is an old media solution to a new media problem

A version of this post first appeared on BenjiLanyado.com. Benji Lanyado (@benjilanyado) is a freelance journalist based in London and a travel writer for the Guardian and the New York Times.

For once I disagree with Jeff Jarvis. Unlike Jarvis, professor of journalism at City University New York and blogger at BuzzMachine, I do not think a 'membership model' for news organisations is a good idea.

With journalism desperately seeking ways to pay for itself, the membership model is a co-optive alternative to the two other predominant ideas:

• Paywalls (as employed by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and others)

• Using events to make up for the profits that ads aren't yielding (as employed by TechCrunch)

As Jarvis outlined in his post, a good membership model would mean 'contribution [by members] to a community to build it as an asset; ownership of the community by the community; members having a mutual stake in the community; members exercising control over the whole'.

He argues that this model is 'no salvation but a fine idea', so long as the organisations didn't think of themselves 'as the owners of this club but instead as just another member.'

But I don't think it's a fine idea at all and here's why:

In an age of abundance, few will commit
Any concept of membership relies on loyalty. We interwebbers are fickle. If something is interesting, well written, imaginatively delivered, or just pretty. I don't care where it comes from.

I enjoy reading the Guardian, the New York Times, The Telegraph, the Times of London, Fox News, Gawker, and (gasp) sometimes even the odd Daily Mail article.

In fact, I frequently have no idea where I am heading when I click a link: many of them are anonymously provided by url shortening sites on Twitter. I actually quite like the surprise.

So why would I choose to settle down and buy up some real estate in one particular corner of the web? I want to see the world!

The new generation of news consumers are too greedy and too easily distracted to care deeply about one media source. We are all portfolio news consumers now.

We can click around without worrying about what others think of us (unlike in the days when you had to hold a giant piece of branded paper in front of your face). We're goddam floosies! And floosies aren't particularly good at committing.

You can't rely on class or politics to inspire membership
In the recent old media days, people would talk about what newspaper they 'took'. It was a badge of honour. And broadly speaking, this old media world was defined by class.  In the UK the upper classes 'took' the Telegraph, the Guardian and Independent were for the middle classes, and the tabloids for the working classes.

A horrible, archaic delineation. If this horrible, archaic delineation still existed, then yes, newspapers would have plenty of prospective 'members' waiting to sign up.

If we had a socially stationary society, where one generation of card-carrying Guardian readers would inevitably give birth to another, then yes, there would be a decent, stable demographic of 'members' for the newspapers to work with.

But we don't. We live in a socially mobile, aspirational, increasingly classless age. The internet's lack of class divisions - tangible in open comments sections, crowdsourcing and Twitter - is a wonderful expression of this.

It's a meritocracy: quality is king and politics are irrelevant.

Consider the entry points. Yes, I know the political affiliations of the various newspapers that I read online, and for me Telegraph.co.uk comes with the affiliations of the Telegraph newspaper.

But I'm convinced that younger internet users are increasingly unaware (read: blissfully ignorant of the baggage). They don't care about the political history of a paper, and it certainly won't stop them reading something they really want to read, especially if it is free to access.

For example, does a youngster on the London Tube care that their copy of Metro with the latest celebrity gossip is distantly related to the late Lord Rothermere, reportedly a fan of Hitler?

Does a young football fan, stumbling upon the Guardian's brilliant YouTube roundup series care that the Guardian is one of the world's leading liberal voices?

No they don't, they just want good stuff. Banking on loyalty - a loyalty forced by superimposing ancient dividing lines - is dangerously presumptive. I don't 'take' a particular newspaper, I 'take' the internet.

No-one likes the 'in' crowd
And finally, on a very basic level, membership is alienating. If newspapers are to reach out to as broad a readership as possible in order to save themselves, it seems like a pretty bad idea to form a 'cool gang' of members within the establishment.

Isn't this just oligarchy lite? Could it reinforce reductive identity assumptions? That is to say if you are a 'member' of this newspaper, then you must believe everything that comes out of it?

I certainly wouldn't like that. Just as I don't like going to members clubs to drink; I like bar-crawling.

The 'solution'
So forget membership models (and, indeed, individual paywalls) as you simply cannot rely on loyalty in an age of classlessness and abundance. And forget events too, because it'll turn your news into a loss leader.

Everyone should lump together, forget their disagreements, implement a giant collaborative micropayment system and be done with it. Just don't ask me how to do it.

As Peter Preston, former Guardian editor, wrote in the Observer last Sunday:

"[O]nly hardened readers of newspaper editions, including journalists, read the websites as though they were digital papers.

"And that the rest just click quickly through in pursuit of some fact or picture. No branding or devotion: only utility."

"Your enthusiasm for glitzy celebrity gossip, and very expensive celebrity photos, has made the Daily Mail's website number one in Britain, even though its relationship to the core Mail has become vestigial."

Preston gets it: newspaper website does not equal newspaper. We use them but that doesn't mean we support them.

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jeff jarvis | monetisation | online money making | online payment |

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