I have a bigger Wired post but until then I wanted to say something about tactics in the page view/rate base race. Earlier in the summer, Wired had an issue edited by JJ Abrams of Lost and Star Trek fame. In that issue were a variety of puzzles that readers could solve and some of them lead to other puzzles elsewhere, a hunt to find the greater solution. It was incredibly successful, so much so that I think it should be a regular feature for the Wired.

In video games they are called ‘Easter Eggs’, surprises, extras, and hidden features that are found only by those gamers who explore every single aspect of the game environment. Well it occurs to me that this is exactly what a site wants its readership to do, check multiple times a day, and views everything. More page-views are more impressions to sell, period.

So instead of running a giveaway like they do today with a Sweepstakes sign-up, they should have ‘Easter Egg’ hunts every week/month. Weekly giveaways could be small things, like iTunes gift cards, a Zune, ect. But monthly give-away’s should be bigger: computers, trips, TV’s ect. The weekly giveaways can be web only, and include a 1yr subscription. But the Monthly giveaways should always start in the magazine itself, with tie-ins on the web throughout the month.

They way these usually work is to set out one puzzle, that leads to another puzzle, and another and another, the trick is to dole out the string slowly and in a variety of places; by doing so you spread your readership around your properties as they search for the next clue. This not only drives page views, but it turns the magazine into an experience, and gives a clear value-add to subscription. If I subscribe, every month the magazine is going to set me off on an adventure that is interesting, challenging, and potentially rewarding.

(Wired maintains a rate-base of 700K with 350K monthly newsstand sales, clearly an further inducement to subscribe is needed, and at $12 a year vs $5 an issue price isn’t the problem)

This is, like most blogs are for people, a pet project of mine. It’s not that I have all that much original to say or report; I am not a journalist, and don’t purport to be one. But I love to read the news, and I love journalism (even if I could live without a few specific journalists). Yet, this enterprise, as a business, is falling apart.

And this blog is really all about that.

It’s about the dollars and cents of news reporting, and the media structure that supports those endeavors. Having been born in the 80’s and worked my first jobs with tech and marketing startups, I am a quintessential ‘digital native’. Now working for the much derided MSM, I also know what it takes to make real money. The kind of money needed to fund original news gathering, an inherently expensive enterprise.

Blogging is great, but they wouldn’t have anything to blog about without the work of AP, Reuters, AFP, NYT, ect . Some online journalist do original reporting, but most lack the money needed to work on a single story, and see it all the way through.

And that’s not entirely their fault. Banner ads SUCK! And text based search ads are slim margin options, only suitable to gargantuan portals like… Google.

This is the world we live in today, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And sooner then we think, it won’t be that way. A change is sweeping away the world we once knew.

The MSM is going to stay stuck in the mud, and the blogosphere is going to bump into a revenue ceiling, until 5 fundamental changes take place:

• Editors and Publishers need to marry, and consummate the union.
• An end to the lest-cost commoditization of writers and journalist.
• Design rEvolution.
• Individual Advertizing – In price and model / An End to CPM and CPA Billing
• All Media – In (Almost) Every Medium

These are points that I hope to flesh out in theory here, and eventually launch in practice. However, it’s important to note here, that political news, financial news, cultural news, and fashion news will have very different business models because of the differing audiences and advertisers involved. Some forms of journalism, such as local news in places with >1MM people, will have to partly subsidized by more profitable areas.

There is no road forward… it hasn’t been built, yet. In building it, some will get stuck in sand pits, others will hurtle ahead and crash into a tree, but on the other side is a hill top, which offers a view from which less corruption can hide, and all the news that’s fit… is print.