Chronotope’s Twitter Archive—№ 91,168

Here's a real issue that I think this creates. Outside of independent folks with Patreon's no one has really crafted a message that says 'here's a place you can give us money because you just encountered good journalism'. It just isn't part of the pitch. noahchestnut/1002662953911373824
Permalink On twitter.com ♻️ 2 Retweets ❤️ 5 Favorites 2018 Jun 2 Mood +2 🙂

…in reply to @Chronotope
I think this is a two-fold problem: 1 reason is because we don't have good tools to contextualize that decision if readers were to make it & other is journalists fear the 'clickbait' problem. What if readers decide the journalism they want to fund isn't what editors want written?
Permalink On twitter.com ❤️ 1 Favorite 2018 Jun 2 Mood -1 🙁

…in reply to @Chronotope
If I were to look back on my thinking on this second idea throughout years of Twitter use I suspect I'd see an evolution around the ideas of communicating with and writing to the reader. I suspect that evolution came out of better knowledge of analytics tools.
Permalink On twitter.com ❤️ 1 Favorite 2018 Jun 2 Mood 0

…in reply to @Chronotope
When I started my career I assumed internet magic would connect readers to journalists and those readers would tell them what they wanted explicitly or via easily trackable actions. For the most part neither of those options have appeared.
Permalink On twitter.com ❤️ 2 Favorites 2018 Jun 2 Mood 0

…in reply to @Chronotope
There was also prob a time when I would have said 'well readers are idiots who want cat videos & we can fund journalism using cat videos' but that isn't true. We just don't have the mechanisms to understand what it is readers *want* or *enjoy*, only what they decide to encounter.
Permalink On twitter.com ❤️ 2 Favorites 2018 Jun 2 Mood +2 🙂

…in reply to @Chronotope
Generally I think this is why the Trump coverage bubble is more dangerous than we might think, because either his reelection or departure will cause interest to collapse in a really unprecedented way as people decide to no longer encounter Trump news because it feels useless.
Permalink On twitter.com ❤️ 1 Favorite 2018 Jun 2 Mood -6 🙁

…in reply to @Chronotope
Anyway, the point here is we still don't have good industry-wide tools that tell us what readers *want* in almost any dimension of the business. Large publishers have user groups they can poll but that is expensive and time consuming and doesn't translate to small-med pubs.
Permalink On twitter.com ❤️ 2 Favorites 2018 Jun 2 Mood +4 🙂

…in reply to @Chronotope
I think there will be heavy resistance in the newsrooms of the world but I suspect per-article direct prompts are the way the subscription wave is going to evolve, as the only real methodology we currently have to understand the relationship between subs and content.
Permalink On twitter.com 2018 Jun 2 Mood -1 🙁

…in reply to @Chronotope
My most unlikely journalism prediction: I think we're on the verge of seeing channel-culture that grew out of recent YouTube applied to journalism, where publications become common platforms for loosely affiliated independent operators who combine rev share w/patronage. Maaaaaybe
Permalink On twitter.com ♻️ 1 Retweets ❤️ 2 Favorites 2018 Jun 2 Mood 0

…in reply to @Chronotope
I think it was about to happen and then Patch sort of absorbed that momentum and the people it brought in and spat out have never recovered.
Permalink On twitter.com 2018 Jun 2 Mood +1 🙂

…in reply to @Chronotope
(PS: The one exception is The Guardian, and a few others with per-page subscription prompts. But I don't think those messages about a specific piece of journalism, just general mission)
On twitter.com 2018 Jun 2 Mood 0

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