I’m using the home page at GigaOm as of this moment for inspiration of this post. I’ve always admired the consistent high quality they’ve been able to produce over the years.

There are two posts on their home page, one titled, “This American Life” Tries a Paid iPhone App” and the other is “Subtract the Swearing and Dave McClure Has a Point.”

I read Dave’s obscenity laced post earlier today and left a comment. He’s right on the money. And like most people I rarely comment on blog posts. But his post about getting paid subscription style hit home for me. I’m doing personally and it works on many levels.

The first post on Om’s site about This American Life got my attention for the word ‘tries’. Just what are they trying to do with a paid app? There is no trying – they are doing it. And more power to NPR for going this route. I said it would be this way when CNN launched their paid app that people flipped out over. Media production has to be sustainable at a minimum to continue delivering the content that people enjoy.

My hope is that someone from the NPR HQ in DC will hit up Gigaom and read those two posts in succession and have the brain blast of the century and begin charging a monthly subscription fee for This American Life. Okay, so maybe it would have to be someone from WBEZ in Chicago, but regardless, they need to do it for the listeners of the show.

Funding a program of as beloved as TAL isn’t shameful by requiring a fee for the show. If it saves people from having to sit through hours of pledge drives, I am sure they would gladly do it. The rabid TAL fan base could no doubt support this show through subscriptions but many others as well.

This is the headline that I would like to see at NPR.org tomorrow morning when I wake up, “Dave McClure Swears This American Life is The New Black for Going Subscription.”

Thank you NPR, WBEZ, GigaOm, Dave McClure and the color black.

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The Pay Meisters Are Here – Misers Better Recognize is a post from: TechStartups.com

It sits on a stool next to a patron in a camo hat, flips up his eye patch to reveal a glass eye he swiped from a taxidermist. He orders a beer. When he reaches for the beer – right then – his bar stool breaks in two. He hits the floor – wham – spilling his beer everywhere.

Worse yet, his patch was up and when he landed it popped his cosmetic anomaly out. Mixed with the laughter was the sound of it rolling across the floor out of sight. Uh . . . it was loud cuz deer eyes are big. Okay?

What is a one eyed deer to do? Pick himself up, avoid a punchline and start a website where people can post ideas about how to make things better.

The site that he created, One Eye Deer, is dedicated to just that. A service not for complainers but for doers, seekers and problem solvers.

One Eye Deer is similar to a UserVoice style of feedback and CRM service except that their angle it to attempt to crowdsource as much of a solution as possible. The other difference is that the focus is on real-world items and not just digital.

Take for example this thread on gas pumps. The site blends the mundane of what would be a woeful Tweet about the inconvenience of standing at the pump while it continually shuts off, your cold hand now covered in petrol film and the thought that you are missing a replay inside your car of the best Terry Gross interview of Gene Simmons ever on NPR circa 2002, with the sensibility that their is a solution. Woeful Tweets and thoughts on solutions.

Someone knows a way to make sure you can have less stinky hands and listen to Gene Simmons get raunchy on the public airwaves. That is where the One Eye Deer makes its mark.

Also, take for example this deer’s ability to now share his bar experience and request solutions for chairs that hold deers. Not to mention his ability to offer a solution for glass eye retrieval that involves strong magnets, RFID and not making it so round.

I’m not sure what sort of uptake the site will have until it has more companies and product development folks from those companies participating, but it is a novel idea that deserves highlighting. That is especially true since the site was started by a one eyed deer named Sheffield.

Okay, the part about the site being started by a real one eyed deer named Sheffield is a fib. It sure does sound pretty awesome though. Anyway, the punchline has something to do with depth perception and touching something he shouldn’t.

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A One Eye Deer Walks Into A Bar . . . is a post from: TechStartups.com

Bloomberg is helping to ensure that when it comes time for you to hire a trained journalist that you can pick from top talent – the highly trained kind with decades of writing under their belts and rolodexes full of names.

Sure names like those that are coming out of Bloomberg would be costly and increase the overhead of any business significantly. But man, in a time when content is driving every business and the ones that are built on poor models are failing, this is where the rubber meets the road. Quality content matters.

There are media networks that are being crushed under their own weight as they stopped licensing content from organizations like AP and Reuters. They’ve been dropped because of the annual expenses that networks thought they could earn back in creating content on their own or annexing it from citizen journalists.

There is no mistaking that when major media outlets are in a race to the bottom that the reason is because of content. The fight for audiences with extreme views either right or left have enamored the outlets for the last five years. What they created was an insatiable desire from their audiences for spectacle. The next needing to be bigger than the last. Usually these players were left to their own devices to rile up their contingents.

The rise of the internet exacerbated the need for major media outlets to become salacious and embrace tabloid tactics to compete for audience – so the outlets thought. Those that chose not to do this needed to grow news bureaus or create content for syndication. NPR is one such company that followed this model. Even helping its radio personalities find their way to the tube. The ones that haven’t are at the bottom of the ratings with diminishing audiences for their news fed shows.

They are there because they pander to the basest human intellect. Believe me when I say that what puts a media company in this position is a lack the foresight and strategic planning. When you have little or no original content and add little value to purchased content, it doesn’t matter how great the technologies supporting them are because they too will falter. It will be at a later time than the demise of on air personalities with nothing to say or partner providers of Google food for the online rankings that keep bytes flowing through expensive data centers.

Depending on how you look at this situation it is a dire state of affairs or the greatest opportunity to begin building a media company in decades. There is talent to be had as it is being cut loose from business models that refused to embrace the coming of online distribution. The next web is waiting. Who is going to be weaving it? You?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Journalist Draft Pool Growing is a post from: TechStartups.com