Final thoughts: My debate vs. Felix Salmon about Matter and why I still believe that the Matter team created a dishonest Kickstarter campaign and why their business model is unsustainable

My debate about Matter with Felix Salmon got some pretty good traction on the internet, as it was blogged about by Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, Matthew Yglesias at Slate, KPCC, Wired, Techdirt, Poynter, and more. I missed all of this as these responses appeared during my scramble to get my act together prior to heading down to Austin for SXSW. I figured now would be a great opportunity to sum up the points that I made, because my 45 minute debate was reduced to 4.5 minutes on ReutersTV and Felix encouraged me to respond at length:

Stephen Robert Morse’s list of reasons why Matter has an unsustainable business model and likely won’t succeed

1. A plethora of science and tech magazines (Wired, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, The New Scientist, Scientific American, etc.) as well as non exclusively science magazines (Mother Jones, The Atlantic, etc.) already provide free long-form content that covers science and tech. When these organizations do charge subscription fees, it is not on a per article basis. Therefore, consumers achieve way higher value than the one article per week that Matter plans to offer for 99 cents.

2. The costs of producing and editing a high quality piece are generally in the $6,000 range. This estimate includes $5,000 to pay the reporter and cover the reporters costs, plus $1,000 to pay an editor for a week’s worth of work. This doesn’t include any legal reviews, technical considerations, or marketing budgets which also have to be included in the final production costs.

3. As part of their Kickstarter campaign, the Matter team already sold the exclusive right to advertise as part of their corporate level sponsorship for seven months (at the time of this writing). There proposition that there would be no influence from advertisers is now nonsense. In my opinion, the Matter team already lied by implying that their publication would be advertisement free based on quotes from their video critiquing advertising beside articles and writing in their pitch: “We’re building MATTER for readers, not advertisers.”

4. Matter now has over 1,000 people on their “Editorial Board.” Is that supposed to be a good thing? Who will the editorial board be permitted to choose from to write the articles? It’s likely that the authors and their cronies will be decide the slate of candidates whom the crowdsourced public can vote on to write stories to begin with.

5. When I originally wrote my piece, Matter had not even hit its $50K goal. Now, it is at $120,000, which should in theory give it more money than just producing 8 issues. One of my original criticisms was the publication would run out of money after only two months. Now, I presume they can produce approximately 20 issues, or 6 months worth of content, which is still nothing too impressive. As they say in their trailer, “Producing high quality long-form journalism is expensive.”

6. Having a great trailer for a Kickstarter project with big names endorsing a non-existent product is disingenuous as they create a false hope. (And it makes the web-celebrities lack all future credibility in my book.) If the journalists responsible for this project were so great, they would already be household names after years of science and tech reporting, but they are not.

7. Long-form journalism specialist publication The Atavist has become profitable not by selling their journalism, but by having an ancillary revenue stream: The Atavist makes approximately 50% of their revenues by licensing their priority software to others.

Why I will not donate to this Kickstarter campaign that purports to save journalism and why you shouldn’t donate to it either

DISCLAIMER: To clarify any questions that may arise over my use of language in this post, I used the words “scam” and “snake oil salesmen” with hyperbole in mind. The same goes for my references to English accents. (I recently returned to America after spending the better part of the past 1.5 years in the UK.) My blogs sit at the intersection of my opinion, current events, and  humor. This blog was first published at StephenRobertMorse.TowKnight.com, but my words do not reflect the opinions of the Tow-Knight Center, the City University of New York, or anyone other than myself.

UPDATE: As was expected, Matter has aleady hit their goal of raising $50K (currently at $57K) with 28 days to go. I estimate that they will hit $500,000, but I still do not support the structure of their business, even if they have outlined some sort of a business plan in response to this post.

Learning from Mel Brooks’ The Producers, creating and executing a successful Kickstarter goes something like this:

Step 1: We find the best video production team we can afford.
Step 2: We find a big name techie spokesman and some guys with posh English accents to star in the trailer.
Step 3: We raise two million dollars…There’s a huge Kickstarter community out there!
Step 4: We hire the best tech writers we can to put out a few issues. And before you can say
Step 5: We close our publication, take our two million, and go to Rio.

I noticed a Tweet this morning that promoted a Kickstarter campaign for Matter, a long-form journalism effort that comes from an international group of journalists who previously wrote for mainstream publications that cover science/tech. While the trailer has an obscenely high production value and the project may have some biggish-in-this-insular-world names on screen, they never make a point to say where the money that unsuspecting victims donate is actually going.

(I know as well as the next guy that Americans are so easily duped by  posh British accents of the Oxford/Cambridge variety that they would probably donate to these guys if they were selling a pile of sludge. Let’s just call them Snake Oil Salesmen 2.0.)

Yes, they’ve got Evan Doll (co-founder of Flipboard) and Cory Doctorow (co-founder of Boing Boing) promoting the project in their trailer,  but what does this effort actually do to save journalism or create a sustainable business model for long-form reporting?

Investing in sustainable models that help save long-form journalism

On the other hand, my colleague Noah Rosenberg is developing a project that actually seeks to create a SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODEL for long-form journalism. And people like Evan Ratliff at The Atavist and the folks over at Byliner have already invested in creating these models too.

Matter claims: “Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science.” This is NOT a sustainable business model. It means that a top quality writer who commands 75 cents per word will blow through this money very quickly. And it mentions nothing of the costs of editing and promoting the content, or the costs associated with research and travel to create these pieces about the aforementioned big issues.

And in their Hollywood-quality trailer pitch, they say “Nobody’s built to produce this stuff.” Actually, people are built to produce this stuff. Many of them. From Mother Jones to The New Yorker to The New York Times to the aforementioned startups to the publications that these dudes previously worked for…

Anyone who would ever consider financing these self-proclaimed top notch journalists (in return for T-shirts, cupcakes, and whatever other junk they are offering) to write cool stories about saving the planet, shouldn’t.  Your money would be better invested in projects that can actually have long-term financial viability and longevity. Buy a subscription to one of the other legacy magazines already out there that produce way more content.

I don’t doubt that this project will hit $50K within a day or two. But it is a scam in that the costs of completing an operation like this have not been articulated to the people who may be making donations to the project. In my humble opinion, a solid trailer is the key to success on Kickstarter. And with 28 days left, these guys may raise $500,000. But I don’t like it one bit. Where will that money go?

To potential Kickstarter donors who hope to save journalism: Invest in business models that has been thought out and created to do more than produce one long-form article every week. This project is just something cute, like a meme-of-the-week. It lacks a thorough plan.

But who am I to tell people how to spend their money? I’ve just got to come up with something better…