The Atlantic to Sell Short Stories on the Kindle… Can this work for journalism?
As The New York Times writer Motoko Rich puts it, “Let the iTunes-ization of short fiction begin.”
According to the Times’ article, longtime magazine The Atlantic will soon sell a variety of short stories exclusively on the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader. The stories will cost $3.99 and will only appear on the Kindle, not in the magazine’s print edition.
This sounds like a great idea for short fiction (it’s basically the same model being used for novels and other literature that can be found on e-readers), and I thought about whether than could be mapped onto journalism. But after thinking about it, I’m hesitant to say this would work for journalism, at least for individual stories.
Not to devalue fiction of any kind, but the issue here is that people need journalism, right? (At least that’s what we like to think.) Stories on embezzlement or on the war in the Middle East are things people shouldn’t have to pick and choose to pay for.
It seems like an iTunes-store like thing for individual issues or packages of stories seems more practical, like what some people said in class Friday.
I also think newspapers could also be sectioned off. At the risk of sounding repetitive, One in 8 Million by the New York Times is something I can picture being sold on a subscription basis. The individual stories could probably be sold like “episodes” in a TV series, like how TV shows are sold on iTunes. (I wonder if this could work for series of print stories, too?)
Of course, you’d have to entice readers/viewers with samples of what they can get, but maybe it can work. I’m just throwing around ideas here.
I’m convinced that if news media are going to try to even sell individual pieces of content is has to be niche content in some way. General news will have to be sold in a general way to succeed, but newspapers especially might have a lot more to gain from selling enterprise stories or multimedia on an individual basis, as opposed to one flat fee.
I can almost picture buying news like you would a cell phone plan. You pay a certain amount for this much access, being able to add and remove features as you please… pretty much like you do on a cell phone plan as well.
Who knows…
