Hi again
On our current site we have a mysql userdatabase that gets updated twice a day from a csv-file from our subscriber management system. I'm starting to do some thinking about how to do this in drupal.
In the csv-file I get a subscriber number and a string describing which days the subscriber gets the paper (ie 123456 for monday-saturday or 56 for friday and saturday). The users permission to view full versions of the articles on any given current day should depend on these settings. IE if you only subscribe on friday and saturday, you should only be able to view the todays full articles if today is a friday or saturday.
Articles older than 48 hours are free for everyone.
How and where would you insert these data? In user profile? or as a role? or something third?
Sorry if I'm not being clear here. It's kindda hard to describe these things in a forreign language.
Best,
/J
Comments
Authentication is a discrete step
You might want to think about dumping your CSV data into some external repository (ldap?) and using one of the existing Drupal authentication modules to hit that data store. Drupal will silently create the local account/profile stuff on the fly.
Surprise
And here I thought Steve would say "You should scrap that antiquated business rule!"
Internally to Drupal, you'd likely have to store that data in it's own table. Using role-based permissions would be too complicated (wouldn't you have 7! possible roles?).
But here are the problems you'd have to overcome:
1) Full articles published on that day?
2) Or view the whole site on that day?
Option 1 requires knowing the pubdate (which may or may not be stored accurately in Drupal). And it seems to be the spirit of the rule: embargo articles for 48 hours for non-subscribers. So you'd need to know:
a) the article's pubdate
b) today's date for the user (what about international travelers / subscribers).
c) the user's subscription permissions.
To do this, I'd probably create a node-specific table that indicated the publication day-of-week. Store each nid and the appropriate daystamp. Then use node_access rules in conjunction with a user-specific table imported from your CSV.
Option 2 is easier, and Steve's path seems smarter and easier if that is the rule.
But since Steve didn't say it, I will: This kind of business rule will cripple the newspaper industry. I think you should fight this request. If one of our publishers asked for this, he'd get denied from the highest level.
But you did say that this is the rule now. Any reason why is has to stay in place?
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http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Good rules?
Hi Ken,
Off course you're right: We should scrap that antiquated business rule! And we're trying to! Unfortunately I’m not the only one who has a say here :-)
What we're trying to do here is not to shut down the site for anyone but subscribers, but more like an open variant of the TimeSelect model: about half of the articles will be free immediately, about half will be for subscribers only (we're not quite sure how to slice it yet). But all articles will be free after 24 hours (or 48, that we haven't settled either). So when users want to access a premium article, they'll be presented with three choices: You can either sign in as subscriber, sign up for a web subscription or wait a few hours until the article opens up.
Here in Denmark at least there is no money to be made from archives (NYT charges 4.95 for an archive article). From any library (and these days, you can sign into the library from you're computer at home) you can access the Danish equivalent of LexisNexis. So as a research database, our archives aren't worth a lot. But with open access and a permalink for every article, the archive will be part of the greater conversation on the net. That at least is the hope.
Having said this, I'll just add another thought: free isn't always good.
As an ideological approach, as an idea of the greater conversation and of open access, free of course is good. That is, free as in free speech. This - you could say - is a question of moral.
But free as in free beer is just a question of finding a business model that works. I don't exactly appreciate the fact the most kids will happily pay five bucks on the Internet for a lousy ringtone, while no one would consider paying a dime for a well-researched news article. But that is how it is.
So if we leave the ideological questions aside for a moment and focus on the business model, here's my question: How should we finance well researched news, thorough journalistic work, cultural reviews that doesn’t depend on ads from the very industry it’s reviewing? Is the business model for newspaper on the Internet just to say: print subscribers will pay for that?
There’s been plenty of hype every time something that just looks like an alternative financing shows up, but how much journalistic work has so far been paid for by for example http://www.newassignment.net - just to stay in a Drupal-world :-) ?
Denmark has for last ten years been something like a test nation for free dailies. We have three free dailies distributed to peoples homes every morning, we have to free mornings papers distributed at traffic hubs in the cities, one distributed in the afternoon, free weeklies etc. Even Mr. Free Newspaper, Piet Bakker, a Dutch academic that has made it his life mission to tell about the wonders of free newspapers, was mildly shocked when he in Copenhagen encountered the saturation in the Danish market: http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/?p=284. Since a picture says more than.... this one is taken with my cell phone outside a Metro-station: http://luftskibet.information.dk//files/u45/freenewspapers.jpg.
On the front page of our newspapers it says: "free of political and economical interest." How does that translate to the Internet? Relying on ads as the only income is in itself a business model that will “cripple the newspaper industry”
Sorry, this became a very long reply, but I believe it's a very important issue with no easy answers. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on the matter! What good rules are there?
All the best,
Nikolai
Rules
Well, Nikolai, I think you said it right: the business model is everything. I can't say what model works -- no model works in all cases -- but I think that access based on a daily print subscription model doesn't work.
The Salon.com compromise is a good one. They have 3 options when you hit a page:
1) Log in as a paid subscriber
2) View an ad, and have your entire session 'sponsored' by an advertiser.
3) Leave.
This model works if the sales can finance the operations. My fundamental objection to the daily subscriber model is that it translates a real-world cost element (the cost of physical delivery) into a medium where delivery cost is minimal.
Now, pay-for-access is a slightly different argument. For us, our business model is "Assemble the best local audience and sell advertising." We sell directly against broadcast TV, cable TV, and radio in our markets. Locking down our sites to subscribers-only just doesn't work. And, since we're not the New York Times, paid archives have little value to consumers, so there doesn't appear to be a business model there.
I don't think that I'm philosophically opposed to a subscription-only site -- so long as you allow single-article or day-pass access. I would throw out the "what day does the person subscribe" requirement. That's a very large technical obstacle for both your programmers and your audience. If you must, implement a small surcharge (1 or 2 euro per bill) for subscriber access online.
I respect your point about advertiser-supported services being antithetical to a truly free press. But most U.S. newspapers are in business to make money. I think we're seeing an evolution in business models; particularly with respect to publicly funded newspapers (or those supported by trusts, such as the St. Petersburg (FL) Times).
I don't think the model is "print subscribers will pay" to support the Internet side. We've moved beyond that. I think the state of the industy in the U.S. is such that you could replicate the public-service function of most newspapers for less than $1 million USD per year. That would mean a greate reduction in staff (though it may mean more reporters and editors, ironically).
As the folks inventing and producing the web-based side of the business, I think we have to push for new models that serve the public (and for some, the shareholders).
That said, I don't have a good answer to your challenge, but agree that this group should debate it.
Ironically, I do have some ideas about how your requirements might get implemented in Drupal. I think the key is node_access (http://api.drupal.org/api/5/group/node_access), which I haven't explored very deeply.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Interstitials
I also used to like the Salon compromise. Interstitials is a good way of highlighting the exchange of the user watching an advertisement and receiving access in return. But it's a very specific way of selling ads – we don’t have the expertise, so I actually contacted www.ultramercial.com (the company that was selling the interstitials at www.salon.com) a few years ago. After a long positive dialog, they stopped responding to emails. And so I let go of that idea…
Maybe I came out a tad to idealistic :-) I’m not opposed to profit or advertisement, but I do like the idea of a newspaper that the readers ask to receive and are willing to pay for.
Ever since I heard this IT-conversation with Rob Curley a few years ago (http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail550.html), I have been envious of local newspapers. The idea of webifying your priorities is so obvious: »Put a little cyberwall around Lawrence Kansas,« he says of the LJWorld.com, »and make sure no one does Lawrence Kansas better than we do.« It’s rather straightforward to do this with a paper defined by geography, but not quite as straightforward for a national newspaper, even for a very small one like ours…
Jeff Jarvis was on to a similar point the other day:
»News is not one-size-fits-all. We don’t get all our news from one source anymore. We get bombarded with news all around us. So we all knew that Anna Nicole Smith was dead … So that means that not every newspaper needs to cover that story in depth. It certainly means that The New York Times needn’t. So why did the Times devote considerable space and reporting and editing talent to the Anna Nicole story this week? They added nothing more to the story. It’s not what they do best «
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/02/22/new-rule-cover-what-you-do-best-li...
I see the angle, but I don’t quite agree: the Anna Nicole Smith hysteria hasn’t reached US-heights in Europe, but the most interesting obituary I read was the one The Economist. It was interesting to how they retold that strange life story. Should People Magazine alone tell the story?
I’m getting of topic, sorry…back to the business rules: The whole thing is still up for discussion here, so thanks a bunch for your input!
And thanks for the link to node_access - Johs is on it, he’ll post back when we find a solution.
Nikolai
Some history
Just so you know, Rob Curley used to work for us (Morris), and he reported to Steve for awhile (back when we were getting our feet wet on the Internet). So we know all about Rob's wall and bridge building habits.
</end inside joke>I also know that Lawrence wasn't held to any real revenue numbers online, though that likely has changed. From Lawrence, of cource, also came Django (http://www.djangoproject.com/) and Ellington, for those of a Python bent.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
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http://ken.therickards.com/