As Adrienne LaFrance describes it in a post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, and as Marshall has described it in a series of posts on the site, the new membership program that is launching later this month is called TPM Prime — a nod to Amazon’s Prime, which gives members free shipping and other benefits — and will cost readers $50 per year, or a monthly charge that the site has not yet specified (there is also an innovative option that allows readers to sponsor memberships for others).

Members pay for a deeper relationship, not content

And what do members get for signing up? There are content-related benefits, such as preferential access to a line of TPM Singles — mini e-books that the site plans to publish on a variety of topics — and the signup page mentions future possibilities including discounts on other publications that Talking Points Memo might cut a deal with. But the main benefit of membership is the opportunity to get more involved with the site in other ways, including member-only discussion forums, as well as exclusive live chats and interviews with newsmakers and political influencers.

What’s interesting is how Marshall describes the rationale behind the membership layer, and the reasons why he chose to go that route instead of just putting up a paywall — including the fact that he was uncomfortable with how much the site relied on advertising, instead of using a model that was based on creating a relationship with its readers. As he put it to LaFrance:

“What I noticed is that we didn’t have really strong internal financial incentives focused on our core readers… I didn’t like that we were growing in a way where we didn’t have really clear parts of the bottom line that were tied to servicing that community.”

On the surface at least, this rationale seems like it could be used to defend a paywall just as easily as a membership layer. After all, a paywall or strict subscription approach like that taken by the Financial Times or the NYT also relies on readers for support — to the point where both newspapers have crossed (or are close to crossing) the line where they get more revenue from subscriptions than they do from advertising. Doesn’t that mean paywalled newspapers or media outlets are also tied to servicing their reader community, just like Talking Points Memo?

Membership is special in a way that paywalls are not

In a sense, that’s true. But I would argue there is a crucial difference: a membership layer treats readers as though they are special and gives them added benefits in addition to the regular free news content, while a paywall or traditional subscription simply charges everyone the same amount for the same content. One feels like a duty or an annoyance, and the other feels more like something unique that only those who are really committed to a topic or a site have access to — like a velvet rope instead of a wall. As I’ve written before, I think the idea of offering membership with special benefits, or access to additional content and experiences (such as live events, which The Atlantic and others have built into their model) is a much more appealing — and in many cases, potentially more lucrative — approach than a wall or pay-fence.

Former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti, now at the Wall Street Journal, has talked about what he and author Jeff Jarvis refer to as a “reverse paywall,” where readers get preferential access to content and related offerings. And these kinds of efforts can do more than just generate revenue: by allowing a site like Talking Points Memo to deepen its relationship with readers, it allows Marshall to get to know those readers better, and that knowledge can become a powerful tool in its own right when it comes to advertising and other more traditional revenue-generation methods.

The approach that Marshall is taking is very similar to one that Techdirt, the technology-analysis site run by Mike Masnick, recently expanded — giving readers who join the club access to a host of special benefits including a reader-only discussion forum. And the Talking Points Memo founder said the early response has been encouraging: more than 1,000 people signed up in just the first 10 hours. That may be a drop in the bucket financially-speaking, but it is an impressive sign of reader engagement for a web-only political blog, and it will be interesting to see how TPM builds on that early support.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Giuseppe Bognanni

The Politico piece, about an incident on Friday involving presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, calls it the “21-minute news cycle.” As Dylan Byers describes it, Romney made a comment at a campaign stop in Michigan about how no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate — a crack that appeared to refer to the controversial “birther” debate over where President Barack Obama was born. Within a matter of seconds, a reporter attending the event had posted the remark to Twitter, where it was then retweeted hundreds of times over the next few minutes (according to data Politico got from the Twitter-analytics service Topsy).

Political brush fires can erupt within minutes

Several minutes later, Politico and BuzzFeed had both posted items on it making the connection to the “birther” debate, and BuzzFeed had posted a video to YouTube of Romney making the statement. Within minutes, the Romney campaign had issued a comment saying the remark was taken out of context and that the candidate did not mean to dredge up the birth certificate issue again — a statement that was followed quickly by one from the Obama camp, which accused Romney of doing exactly that. Over the next few hours the news made its way to TV news shows and elsewhere, but most of the heat from the incident had more or less died down by the end of the day, and Byers noted that the event is a perfect example of how things have changed:

“Four years ago, the fallout from a controversial remark would have taken hours, if not a full day, to unfold. In 2012, social media, which enables reporters to file in real-time and puts increased pressure on campaigns to speed up their response time, has brought the pace of the news cycle down to a matter of minutes and seconds. The ‘one-day story’ — itself an archaic term in the 21st century — has become the one-hour story.”

This phenomenon is something we discussed at the paidContent 2012 conference in New York earlier this year, during a panel that I moderated with Vivian Schiller of NBC News and Josh Marshall of the political blog network Talking Points Memo. As Marshall described it, social media — including blogs such as his, which started the process that was later accelerated by Twitter and Facebook — have not only sped up the news cycle but have added new “vectors” that political analysts of all kinds have to take account of. In other words, instead of just paying attention to the New York Times and one or two political talk shows, everyone has to pay attention to Twitter as well, and to new sources of political content such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

You could argue that the tendency for inconsequential or even irrelevant incidents to get blown out of proportion has increased thanks to Twitter and the appearance of “viral content” sites like BuzzFeed (which has been making a big push into the political sphere since it hired former Politico writer Ben Smith) and that is probably true. But then, such incidents also got blown out of proportion by television talk shows and news programs and newspaper columnists before blogs and Twitter and Facebook came along. In many ways, all those tools have done is speed up and enhance a process that has been under way for decades.

Irrelevant stories also burn out faster

During our conversation in June about social media and political coverage, Schiller also argued that the speed with which Twitter and other networks operate can be beneficial as well — since it can help defuse or tamp down an incorrect or ridiculous report that might otherwise have taken hours or even days to disprove through traditional media channels. As Byers noted in his story, the Romney comment might have turned into a multiple-day issue, as newspapers picked it up and it worked its way through the usual sources of political commentary, but instead it was mostly out of gas within a few hours. As reporter Sasha Issenberg put it:

“These little stories catch fire on Twitter more quickly than they did even with bloggers in 2008, but it also means that they burn out faster.”

There’s another element of Twitter and social media that could be beneficial during an election campaign, and that is the way that such tools allow for sources directly connected to events to comment and affect the news flow — something that could help alleviate the “pack journalism” effect that Jeff Jarvis and others have complained about, in which thousands of reporters congregate at a single event and repeat the same kinds of information over and over. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social media can be an effective tool to combat this phenomenon during events such as the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, because it allows other non-traditional sources to become part of the narrative.

This phenomenon of having “the sources go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it, is probably one of the biggest disruptive effects that Twitter has introduced into political journalism — and its impact, both positive and negative, is only going to become more obvious as the nation gets closer to the election. Whether it is primarily good or bad depends a lot on your perspective. Is it bad because there is more sound and fury that signifies nothing, or is it good because irrelevant stories burn themselves out more quickly and the sources of information have become broader?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Nils Geylen

Politics used to be a very controlled and almost theatrical process, with politicians and other political actors appearing in carefully scripted events — and the reporting and analysis of those events was also restricted to certain specific media channels: a couple of TV networks, one or two major newspapers, and so on. Now that we have blogs and Twitter and other forms of social media, how has that changed the nature of both the political process and the media reporting of that process? At paidContent 2012 in New York recently, I asked Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and NBC News digital head Vivian Schiller for their perspective on that question and you can hear their answers in the video embedded below.

Marshall, the editor and publisher of the ground-breaking political blog network, said that social media has really just accelerated the process of breaking down those traditional barriers — a process that started with the arrival of blogs about a decade ago:

I see it as a progression over the past dozen or so years, of a more and more frictionless news cycle, and what we’re today calling social media has just accelerated that. The other major transformation is an increase in key vectors in the news — the way the New York Times used to be a dominant vector in how news was propagated, along with the big TV networks and other big metropolitan dailies. With the growth of blogs and the beginnings of social media, you have a more fluid and unstable ecosystem of news.

Schiller, who was previously CEO at National Public Radio before joining NBC’s news division, said that for a media entity like NBC, social media has a way of amplifying the stories that come up in other formats. For three weeks in a row, she said, comments that politicians — including Cory Booker, Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden — made on the TV program Meet The Press became a national story thanks to the power of social media. “Meet The Press is about as old media as you can get,” said Schiller. “But those events ricocheted around the world — that’s social media.”

Both the panelists also said that one of the positive things about social media and its role in the news and political ecosystem is that some events that are trivial or unworthy of attention can “burn out” more quickly when they are exposed to the glare of Twitter and the blogosphere, whereas they might have taken on a life of their own and dominated the discussion in newspapers or on TV networks before social media. And Schiller said despite the fact that Twitter and other forms of social media can be filled with a lot of worthless noise, overall the impact has been positive for both politics and the media as a whole:

Of course there’s a lot of garbage in social media, but there’s a lot of garbage in every form of media, from the beginning of time. But I think that all of the kinds of access and the ways people can interact with content, for politics, it’s all good.

Marshall appeared with Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer of NBC News at the paidContent 2012 conference, where the two talked about how social media has influenced and reshaped the news business. Marshall said social media is part of a larger continuum that began with the Internet and the rise of blogs. With social media, he said, the news business has become frictionless and fluid and, in some cases, chaotic. But it’s helped wrest control away from traditional news powers and helped do away with the notion of a news cycle.

“Parties and counter-parties can get back into a story rapidly, whether it’s on Twitter or this or that.  It’s about immediate access so a story can play out without the slow down of a news cycle,” Marshall said.

Vivian Schiller said social media has become an organic part of news organizations, which are finding that it can be a liberating force, providing new ways to engage their audience and also push out content. She said social media is also helpful in weeding out trivial news, while allowing more voices to be heard on bigger stories.

“I think because there’s so many people who have access to the same information, you get more data points and more information  from the crowd and more debunking.  And everything becomes meatier,” Schiller said.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

All of us at GigaOM and our sister site paidContent are into the final planning stages for our big media show on May 23 — paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads. As paidContent editor and conference chair Staci Kramer has described in her posts leading up to the conference, we’re going to be looking at a wide range of topics related to the disruption in the media industry, from newspapers to e-books, with a great lineup of speakers including Media News Group CEO Jim Paton, Vox Media founder Jim Bankoff and Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne. I’m looking forward to all of those sessions, but I’m also really looking forward to the two I’m moderating: an interview with Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter investor Fred Wilson and a panel with Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller of NBC News.

More than perhaps anyone else, Fred Wilson has been ahead of the curve when it comes to the potential of social media such as Twitter as a disruptive force both for the web and for traditional media as a whole — a track record that arguably began many years ago with his investment in GeoCities, an early web community that was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $3.57 billion. Since then, Wilson and Union Square have invested in a number of other prominent social networking players, including Zynga, design community Etsy.com, Foursquare, MeetUp and of course Twitter.

While Wilson hasn’t invested in anything that is specifically focused on media, you could argue (and I have) that Twitter is getting awfully close to being a media entity, if it isn’t already. Although virtually all of its content is produced by users, Twitter still has media-like aspects, including the ability to censor tweets if necessary. More recently, the company has been adding “curation”-type features thanks in part to its acquisition of Summify, and also hiring editors to create editorial products with partners, such as the one Twitter just announced with Nascar.

The Union Square partner has also said that the world of technology and the world of media need to figure out how to help each other, and I’m looking forward to asking him more about what he means by that. In a blog post, he confessed to being a reluctant pirate when it comes to trying to watch certain sporting events that he couldn’t find legal access to — so I’d like to know how he would advise media companies to handle traditional functions like time-based “windowing” and geo-blocking in a digital era.

What’s the impact of real-time media on politics?

On the political front, we’ve seen over the past year or so how the real-time nature of the social web can play havoc with political campaigns and spin doctors. Not only can the candidates themselves post their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook — an example of what web veteran and blogging pioneer Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct” — but those comments can snowball to the point where they take over the entire political agenda, as Hilary Rosen’s remarks about Mitt Romney’s wife being a stay-at-home mother did just a few weeks ago.

Whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing for the broader political and social sphere is something I’m planning to ask Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller, the head of digital for NBC News and the former CEO of National Public Radio. Are we just seeing a more high-speed version of the same spin cycle we’ve seen for years, or has social media changed the balance of power for the better? What is the impact of meme-trackers such as BuzzFeed, which has added a lot of political firepower with former Politico writer Ben Smith and others, or The Huffington Post (whose co-founder Jonah Peretti is also at paidContent 2012)?

One thing we know for sure is that the world has changed in some fundamental ways thanks to the power of the web and of social media like Twitter: since anyone can be a publisher or a journalist — even for a short time — with the push of a button, we now have an unprecedented ability to see and hear what is happening in places like Tahrir Square in Egypt or Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Politicians like former deputy British prime minister Lord Prescott say Twitter gives them “a connection to millions” without having to go through the “distorted prism” of the traditional media.

What the future holds for media companies and for society as a whole remains to be seen, but there’s no question we are going through a time of almost unprecedented disruption. I’m looking forward to hearing what Fred Wilson, Josh Marshall and Vivian Schiller — and all of the other great speakers at paidContent 2012 — have to say about that future. Please join me at the Times Center in New York on Wednesday, May 23.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Nony Mata

Every so often I’ll find something when I’m working on the planning/publishing side of our operation that I think might interest you. Click through to read more only if you’re up for some discussion of how many people read TPM on mobile devices.

The key line in the graph below is the blue one, which represents the percentage of visits to TPM that come from all mobile devices. As you can see, it’s still relatively small: just under 7 percent. But 12 months ago it was less than half that. And it’s now going up at just under 1 percentage point every two months.

As you’ll also note, about half our mobile device audience is from iPhones. But that number has been relatively stable. In October it was 3.5 percent. What’s really driving the growth are a slew of other gizmos that have come onto the market over the last year — particularly the iPad and the range of smart phones that use Google’s ‘Android’ operating system. (An important context for these numbers is the fact that Mac usage runs much higher among TPM Readers than on the Internet at large. Roughly 1/3 of our readers use Macs.)

For those of you who follow the world of tech or digital publishing these numbers may not be that surprising. And they make sense in the context of the craze amongst publishers to find the right ‘mobile strategy’ and throw a bunch of money at it whatever ‘it’ might turn out to be.

I had to put this graph together because we’re currently putting together the business and scheduling plans for a major expansion of TPM. And getting a good read of how we see our mobile readership developing is critical to getting that right. We’re planning on dramatically upgrading the mobile versions of the site for iPhone (where we have a passable iPhone optimized version now), iPad and Android.

Many of you have asked about this … a lot. And trust me, it’s on the way.

More generally, my own sense is that most of the publications that have a ‘mobile strategy’ think they have one when they really don’t. I watch these things pretty closely — both because I need to for the line of work that I’m in but also because I’m just into technology and news. And mobile news sites are about where websites were in the mid-1990s when it was just people taking newspaper journalism and sticking it on a website with little sense of the new technology’s potential or pitfalls. It was only about the turn of the century that you started to see people applying genuinely new ideas about how to form and present news that were in some sense native to the medium. The ‘blog’ metaphor — with a running stream of updates, reverse chronological order and more audience-engaged style was part of that. But far from the only part. These were structural differences at the surface; but they were tied to very different ideas and practices about how to report news.

I’ve seen very little of that yet on the mobile front.

This article originally appeared in Talking Points Memo.