Why Not Donate to the New York Times?

In the digital world, we will pay for experiences, not physical products.

I just made a donation to a project on Kickstarter. I pledged $25 to a professor at New York University who is writing a book I’m interested in. For my $25, I will receive a copy of the book in PDF format and in hard copy. In reality, I just pre-ordered the book. But on Kickstarter it’s called a donation. Other than the gap between paying for the item and receiving it, there’s no difference between buying the book and making a donation.

That’s the insight of Kickstarter, a website and community designed for people with projects who want to appeal to the internet masses for support. Call buying something a donation and suddenly wallets open up and the money flows. All the haggling of the marketplace vanishes. The success of Kickstarter is a powerful example of the significance of language in framing an action. It’s not just semantics. Kickstarter has facilitated the exchange of millions of dollars for a vast and often obscure collection of projects. It was prescient (or lucky) in that it capitalized on the bubbling societal desire to directly engage with creative activities and feel a part of the process. After all, I’m donating, pledging, supporting – not just buying.

Kickstarter has disassociated the act of exchanging money from the harsh win-and-lose marketplace. It created an economy driven by social capital, and a sense of community first and money second. The mainstream emergence of Kickstarter comes just as the New York Times has, again, tried to spur people into paying for news.

Late last month, the Times rolled out its complicated new subscription model in Canada as a test. The model gives readers access to 20 free articles a month and beyond that, they have to pay a weekly fee. There are a bunch of exceptions, such as if you are directed to an article through another website and have exceeded your monthly limit, you will still be able to read that article – a nod to the open web. The formula gets confusing and some of the harshest criticism from new media oracles lambastes the technical structure of the subscription model. They claim that it is too confusing and will never work. This may or may not be true. The technical aspects can be refined. This avenue of criticism, however, totally misses the point.

We have reached the inflection point in the news publishing continuum when the revenue from the hard copy can no longer sustain the digital content and product development. It is obvious that new technologies cause periods of chaos where old models are disrupted. Marshall McLuhan likened this to collective surgery performed on the social body without regard for antiseptics. Eventually this chaos settles and new models emerge. Are we through this period of chaos yet? No. But we are on the down slope of the chaos curve, and it is reflected in the emergence of these new, seemingly sustainable, models.