Charge for News! Yes, Do It! C'mon! I Dare You

I'm in London at the Guardian's Changing Media Summit conference.

Guess the subject that has most often come up. Yes, yes, pay walls. The absolute determination on the part of many of the world's most powerful news organizations to charge for content. The steely determination. The moral necessity to charge. The inevitability of it.

This has been the central subject at all media conferences for more than a year. Rupert Murdoch has become a sort of fulminating robot on the subject of paid news, followed closely behind by his fulminating son, James. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher and controlling shareholder of the New York Times, with the Times' CEO, Janet Robinson (Sulzberger is really the CEO, and Robinson the number two, but who's counting), go around to conferences together painstakingly outlining the intricacies of their as yet highly uncertain pay-wall strategy, the job, at less panicked and self-obsessed companies, of mid-level product managers.

My question -- and the question of my interlocutor at the conference, the Guardian's redoubtable Emily Bell (the Guardian has no plans to charge )-- is what's taking so long?

If these mooks really want to charge for this stuff, why don't they?

What the hell?

Continue reading on newser.com

 

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Comments

[wakupmagy]

04:59 PM on 03/22/2010

I'm no fan of the NYT. But I have never understood how the current model of Internet news can sustain itself. Without the paid reportage of traditional news organizations, what information will the cyber-news sites post? And what will opinion writers like Michael Wolff use for fodder?

[drumz]

06:43 PM on 03/21/2010

They are cowards. They will only do it if they can get everyone to go along but they cannot control the internet.

[Kevin Scherrer]

02:31 PM on 03/20/2010

The question of how news organizations can make money on digital information via the internet is as old as the world wide web itself. The pay to read model has been tried many times and failed just as many and will continue to fail for all of the same reasons. Nothing in the nature of the WWW has changed over the years that would make this model successful. The only thing that has changed is that the publishers are being hurt increasingly as more and more people become wired.

I used to be a subscriber to a daily newspaper until I found that virtually every single important piece of news that I looked at I had already seen online. Even when I when I was referred to a paid version of the NYT by a blog I found that I could usually just Google the title and author and find a free copy somewhere.

I'm not sure what the solution to the problem is. I agree that reporters should be paid for their work and therefore news organizations need to make money, but until every single one of them is making me pay none of them will be able to do so without very compelling content that I can't get anywhere else.

[SystemLink]

11:11 PM on 03/19/2010

Some local sites could charge successfully, imo but major news networks generally will fail with this model.

I can get most national news with google/bing/yahoo news searches

I am probably the most active/interested in specific/local news though so I would be more willing to pay for that

[kevinw]

09:00 PM on 03/19/2010

The New York Times tried that and people stopped accessing it. It would be one thing if the NYT and other papers were doing ground breaking stories. These happen occasionally, but as we saw in the Iraq war fiasco these stories can not be trusted on face value. They are so filled with anonymous sources that it can't very readily be discerned what the agenda is that is pushing the leak. What passes as ground breaking is usually rehased material with extra sources that they can not tell you about. Most of it is passable for free (with advertising revenue). I still read New York Times and Washington Post out of habit. I did not pay the last time NYT put up a wall, and it was a better paper then. If they want people to pay they need to be breaking the news. Have a story that breaks the torture veil of secrecy. Do the investigation that Holder has been ordered not to do. Uncover the financial trail with the Famil, the Cstreet house and members of congress. Do it in the paper instead of your next subsidized book. If there is real NEW s then people will pay. Right now they just have their reps, and those have been tarnished for some time.