The Information is not free
Some news outlets found the way to do their jobs and get paid, like The Information, on Recode Media with Peter Kafka
Jessica Lessin started her journalistic carrier as an intern at the WSJ: she soon showed how skillful and aggressive she could be even if she was quite young. She worked there for 8 years, developing deep and inside knowledges, mostly of the tech industry. She and her husband are also good friends of Mark Zuckerberg and she comes from a wealthy family as well. That’s why she can work for The Information, the online journal she founded 4 years ago, without getting a dime: she doesn’t need to.
What is really different about The Information is that it’s not free. Actually it’s quite expensive: it costs $399 a year but there’s also a $10.000 subscription plan called “The Information for Investors”, with many more in-deep infos and briefings. How did she manage to get paid for such a new publication, with no (at least at the beginning) ratings and history? She actually had already showed to the world her skills but she decided to follow a different path: to publish few stories and just the ones you cannot find anywhere else. All about the tech industry, but from a different point of view. Things and tips that you cannot find on the WSJ or on the New York Times.
What she’s selling is exactly that kind of information you can’t find on the free press, and here “free” stands for cheap, in economical and quality terms. Of course, The Information’s readers are wealthy people from the same industry it talks about. Sometimes they are the very same people that are news for The Informations itself. It’s a strange kind of new media: the one where the reader/subscribers are actually buying news that speak of themselves.
It seems to work out very well anyway: with its 10.000 subscribers, The Information is in good shape and able to afford a 20 people staff plus reporters for this or that story.
Its mission is the same one from day one: to publish original content and to be not only the first one to tell a story, but the only one.
As in many other things in life, quality ain’t for free. The good news is that media are not yet dead. Not at all.
