Newspapers Mull Group 'Trust Fall' into Pay Model

Like teenage girls who only go to the bathroom in groups, insecure newspaper publishers are willing to contemplate the terrifying leap into a paid content model, but only if they're assured they won't be alone.

Alan Mutter reports that a number of CEOs currently in San Diego for the Newspaper Association of America convention are holding a clandestine meeting to discuss, among other topics, whether and how to start charging readers to view articles and other content online. The presence of a lawyer is meant to ensure the conversation doesn't stray into antitrust territory, whatever David Carr might wish. Still, one might think these executives -- whose companies are, after all, competitors -- might wish to keep any brilliant ideas about monetizing journalism to themselves. Chances are this confab will be less a workshop than a support group.

Rupert Murdoch, likewise, seems to be hankering for some company in his misery. The News Corp. chairman was recently quoted saying he thinks The New York Times would be wise to adopt a premium-content firewall like the one used by his Wall Street Journal. Considering that Murdoch mused publicly about how much he'd like to see the Times go out of business, one suspects his advice might not be informed by the purest of intentions.

Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff cautions the Times against listening to Murdoch's siren song:

[I]f newspapers follow the Journal model and wall off their content with subscription fees, we'll do what we do now with the WSJ site. We'll buy a subscription and then we'll summarize whatever they're charging for, bringing their way-too-long and gassy prose down to Internet size -- so you can, in other words, read less, and know more -- and we'll give it to you for free.

Of course, that doesn't offer any comfort to those papers that don't wall off their content; Wolff plans to undermine those as well.

The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann looks at Rupert Murdoch -- in the context of his historical peers, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer -- and concludes that the Australian mogul may be due for an unpleasant dose of irony:

"It's easy to imagine NewsCorp [sic] suffering the same fate that he visited upon the Bancrofts' Dow Jones -- a sale brought on by weak economic performance and family disharmony," writes Lemann.

Comments

[Mad Hedge Fund Trader]

They certainly could use a new model. I bumped into Jim Lehrer last night, the legendary anchor of “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS, as he breezed through the San Francisco Bay Area promoting his 22nd novel, “Oh, Johnny”. The ex-Marine, who’s first big story was covering the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, had some cogent observations on the current demise of the US newspaper industry. Print media have traditionally been the originators of the news, the guys who went to the city council meeting and took copious, accurate, notes. For this, the paper got full page ads from the local car dealers and every other retail business. Now the car dealers are going under. The proliferation of new media, from radio to TV, the Internet, and smart phones means that the monetization of this content has moved downstream to be reaped by others. Talk radio, weekend news programs, comedy shows, even congressional debates, and yes, blogs (guilty), are feeding off of this news fount for free. The originating newspaper maybe gets a penny of each dollar of revenue spawned by their stories. Newspapers now have no choice but to cut costs by firing journalists and moving online. Thomas Jefferson said that “an informed electorate is essential for a democracy”. The big question is, when all the journalists are gone, where will the news come from? I have suspected all along that Truth, Accuracy, and Neutrality will be the big casualties of all of this. They will go the way of the full service gas station, free check in luggage on airlines, and home delivery of newspapers by teenage boys on bicycles.

2009 Apr 07 09:37 AM

[RWCMom]

There will always be a group of people, like myself, who value un-editorialized news from the source. We like to draw our own opinions from the facts. I realize the selected facts might be edited themselves but we live in an imperfect world. I value the written word and I can get through it much more quickly and with much more content than video shorts. I'm willing to pay for my San Jose Merc and San Francisco Chronicle subscriptions online as soon as they are offered. I cancelled my paper subscriptions because I could not keep up with the reading or recycling of them, not because I was unwilling to pay for them.

2009 Apr 07 12:48 PM

[Larrysyr]

It seems to me that "Truth, Accuracy, and Neutrality" are in the eyes of the beholder and actually died long ago.

Newspapers are in business to sell papers (making advertising space more valuable) and have long spent more space on the spectacular, less on the substantive. In their drive to compete with newer media, they have sacrificed more and more of their natural advantage - space - in favor of expensive full-color printing, shorter news items and less overall information within the paper. If this trend were reversed, say by spending more space on substantive, in-depth analysis, the print media might be able to compete.

As it stands, the overhead costs of printing and physically distributing the newspapers puts them at too much of a disadvantage to electronic media. The newspapers are dinosaurs, and they will suffer the same fate unless they give people more reasons to read them.

While we certainly need good news sources, we don't necessarily need one particular form of delivery.

2009 Apr 07 01:10 PM

[Amateur Hour]

Everyone one needs to calm down.

As I've stated before, the newspapers, unlike the WSJ made a fundamental flaw in devising their online business model. Simply put, "free is not a business model".

And, in failing to recognize they were entering a world where content can be poached, reproduced, commentated on and editorialized instantaneously, the erroneously continued to believe that their content held the same value online as it did in print.

They've commoditized their own and their competitors content. When you have a commodity, and no-value add, the only way to ensure a certain price is to band together in a cartel for the greater good of the industry (ala OPEC).

I think the AP has it right in going after aggregators and the like -- not news readers. It is those who build economic value on top of the raw product -- news content -- that are in a position and most likely to pay for the right to reproduce and / or used newspaper content.

2009 Apr 07 09:03 PM

[Amateur Hour]

Everyone one needs to calm down.

As I've stated before, the newspapers, unlike the WSJ made a fundamental flaw in devising their online business model. Simply put, "free is not a business model".

And, in failing to recognize they were entering a world where content can be poached, reproduced, commentated on and editorialized instantaneously, the erroneously continued to believe that their content held the same value online as it did in print.

They've commoditized their own and their competitors content. When you have a commodity, and no-value add, the only way to ensure a certain price is to band together in a cartel for the greater good of the industry (ala OPEC).

I think the AP has it right in going after aggregators and the like -- not news readers. It is those who build economic value on top of the raw product -- news content -- that are in a position and most likely to pay for the right to reproduce and / or used newspaper content.

2009 Apr 07 09:03 PM