Valley Independent Sentinel

Pop-Ups Ahead

by STAFF | Nov 11, 2010 6:16 pm

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The next time you click on an Independent story, you might see one of those annoying pop-ups you find on other sites. There’s a reason.

The pop-ups are part of an experiment in how quality news reporting will be funded in this country in the future.

And in the short term, the idea is to bring in some money to pay for the Independent’s day-to-day costs.

The pop-ups are part of Press+, the brainchild of a company called Journalism Online. Journalistic innovator Steve Brill founded the company. (He also founded Court TV and American Lawyer, among other enduring experiments.)

So when you’ve read a certain number of stories, or a series of pieces within a certain section, you’ll find a message periodically popping up on your screen. It will invite you to be come a member by contributing money.

Of course all our stories remain free to everybody who wants to read them and join in the conversation, whether or not you feel like contributing.

Brill has joined the national quest to figure out new models to pay for the kind of professional reporting lost when old-style print dailies started tanking. He first aimed his project at for-profit media companies.

Figuring that most newspapers can’t get enough readers to pay the same money to get local news online, Brill thought of pooling the publishers together. He set up a system where people can sign up to read news online from daily papers around the country for a truly nominal fee. Brill’s outfit collects the subscriptions. His company takes a small revenue share, but each paper sets its own prices and creates its own offerings and marketing messages.

That had nothing to do with sites like the Independent — not-for-profit professional online-only news sites.

We raise our money the NPR-way: Grants, individual large donations, and small annual membership fees, all tax-deductible. (Some other sites like ours: VTDigger, Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, MinnPost, St. Louis Beacon, CT Mirror.)

But now Press+ has received an advance payment grant, from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to cover the revenue share that its grantees would owe Press+ so that they can see whether his innovation can be tailored to help us not-for-profit sites, too.

The Independent has agreed to serve as a test case to see how it can work.

So: Our apologies in advance for the pop-ups. We generally avoid them and other intrusive promotions and ads common to the Web.

We enjoy serving as a lab for ideas that can spread nationally. (PaperG/Flyerboard and SeeClick Fix used us for that purpose, too.) And we’re always looking for ways to build up a varied revenue base to keep the Independent a (here comes the catchword du jour) “sustainable” proposition years into the future.

Let us know what you think of Press+. Comment below, or email Matt Skibinski at Press+ at matthew.skibinski@journalismonline.com. If you encounter a problem, either email Matt or call Press+‘s customer service people at 866-717-7377.

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