Davos Newbies

Walter Isaacson, a former editor of Time, is keen on micropayments as the path to salvation for newspapers. Scott Rosenberg pithily explains the problem with micropayments and Kay Steiger explains some of the other problems with Isaacson’s view.

But what struck me was the misunderstanding Isaacson has about advertising:

Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula “morally abhorrent” and also “economically self-defeating.” That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication’s primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue.

I’ve run both ad-supported publications and subscription-supported ones. One of the basics of publishing I learned very early on is that the one thing you can’t live without is readers. No one will want to advertise in your magazine (or newspaper or website or what have you) if no one is reading it. So wherever your revenue comes from, you have to serve readers first. So there doesn’t need to be any weakening of the bonds readers feel.

My friend Richard Edelman, in his Davos round-up, included this bon mot from Stephen Green, chief executive of HSBC:

“Business has to get on with being trustworthy. We need consistency of promise and action. We should be  engaged in dialogue to bridge differences.” He offered a quote from Tacitus, “Good people don’t need rules to tell them how to behave responsibly and bad people will always find the ways around rules.”

Those Romans, huh? They had the right phrase for everything. But I wondered, is that really something from Tacitus. Or is it fake learning, that somehow has found its way into some eager beaver’s repertoire at HSBC?

Well, here at Davos Newbies Towers we have a trained squad of classicists ready for any eventuality. I sicced them on the quote from “Tacitus” and, so far, they’ve come up dry. It might turn up eventually, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Incidentally, my erudite classicist reports that a “quote” from Cicero is also doing the rounds:

The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.

Perfect for Republicans in today’s Senate, surely. Except it’s confected. No Cicero was harmed in the production of the quote.