RSSHow much would you pay for news? A new coalition seeks an answer
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published April 15, 2009, 6:36 PM
For a great many Internet users -- perhaps a majority -- who believe they're already paying monthly fees for content, the thought of paying a subscription fee for online news may be akin to yet another "tax." Certainly the purveyors of the news-is-by-nature-free argument may elect to characterize such a fee as a "tax." But challenging and defeating the new conventional lack-of-wisdom is just one of the challenges facing a group of businessmen at the nucleus of a new online news coalition.
Perhaps if there were just one fee that pertains to a whole portfolio of news providers, enough readers would see enough value in their product as a collective, to subsidize it through a single subscription fee. That's the bet being placed today by Journalism Online, LLC, the latest venture from business innovator and Court TV founder Steven Brill, venture capitalist and former TCI CEO Leo Hindery, and former Dow Jones executive vice president and The Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz.
"We've all heard some people say that Internet journalism needs to be free because other less-valuable content is free. But we believe Americans know that advertising alone can't support quality journalism -- and the truth is that it never has," Brill pronounced in a statement this morning. "The irony is that by using the Internet, publishers of newspapers and magazines have dramatically improved the quality and breadth of their journalism with online updates, video reports, blogs, data analyses, and specialized beat coverage. The problem is that, with rare exceptions, they are getting paid nothing for it."
Though at present, there do not appear to be any charter members of the JOI coalition (and with Rupert Murdoch now running the WSJ, its likelihood of membership is slim), its hope is that enough publishers would be willing to supplement their advertising-based income that they would pool their premium content together, with fees payable through a single source. Though members would not have to charge for all their content, one condition for membership, JOI stated this morning, is that they must charge for something.
Crovitz' contribution to this morning's statement made it clear -- perhaps in a roundabout way -- that members would not have to be the size of Dow Jones to qualify. As an example of one way a publisher may monetize its content, he said that pooling subscription resources could give smaller publishers a leg up: "This way, when a story from a publisher that is not one that a consumer usually reads 'pops' in popularity and becomes prominent, that publisher will benefit from all of the interest in it in a way that would not happen if the reader had to have a separate subscription to that paper." (Note Crovitz still calls the publisher in question a "paper.")
The three founders of JOI already have some spectacular histories with the problem of building business models around online news -- histories that are not success stories throughout each and every chapter. Crovitz' insistence upon some premium content at WSJ.com was generally regarded as unpopular, and even reportedly had its doubters within the newsroom. Almost immediately after Murdoch's appropriation of Dow Jones, CORRECTION Murdoch Crovitz announced his intentions to make WSJ.com completely free -- a decision which was partly behind Crovitz' swift exit. However, in light of the current economy, Murdoch's declaration has never yet led to action.
Leo Hindery is known as the architect of the deal that led AT&T to purchase John Malone's TCI, catalyzing a series of transactions that ended up catapulting Comcast to the top of the heap in US cable TV and broadband. Hindery's brief tenure as CEO of fiberoptic firm Global Crossing was not exactly perceived as successful. Having left InterMedia Partners in 1997 to head TCI, he essentially founded it again in 2005 as InterMedia Advisors, with the mission of funding new media ventures. And if Hindery's name is ringing a bigger bell than Crovitz's, it's because it was linked to the failed nomination of former Sen. Tom Daschle to head the Dept. of Human Services. Reports say that Sen. Daschle, a member of InterMedia Advisors' board, advised then-Pres. Elect Obama to hire Hindery, who also happens to be a top-ranking fundraiser.
In a September 2007 conference sponsored by The Deal, Hindery told attendees that online media could not achieve long-term success without a viable growth plan. Such a plan must include, he said, some kind of barrier to entry -- a premium that disables competition from players that can't ante up.
And then there's Steven Brill. He's an innovator of business models by trade, one of his most recent successes being the Clear system that offers subscriptions to airport travelers for faster security screenings. Beginning his career in the 1970s publishing a magazine that cast light on some of the shadier sides of the legal profession, he used the funds he received from a Time Warner buyout of that magazine and other properties to found Brill's Content, one of the new media industry's first regular journals. As a symbol of its own innovation obstacles, Content was a monthly printed magazine, which sank like all the other such publications of the period.
Recently, a memo that Brill wrote in November 2008 -- obviously with the intention of being read and debated -- was published by the respected Poynter Online journalism site. Its subject was the revenue debacle currently facing The New York Times, and whether it could afford sticking to a free publication model.
"A business model that is based uniquely on expensive editorial quality but that derives revenue only from advertisers who only indirectly use or pay for that quality is a business model that cannot work," Brill wrote. "There is simply no example, not one -- in print, online, in television -- of quality content offered for free ever resulting in a viable business. The Times has made great strides in developing beyond a simple print business, yet it is currently wasting all of that by sticking to that free model."
If ever there were three men in this industry with the war chest, the fire and brimstone, and the battle scars necessary to get things moving in the direction of a viable online news business model, these are definitely the three.
They're certainly struggling to survive in the digital world. one factor many people dont look at is that the hardest hit news outlets abandoned their journalistic principals years ago in favor or populist agendas. the papers that stuck to the facts without constantly pushing their political viewpoints are the ones doing the best.
the AP provides a good portion of the news content on the market yet they're pushing to keep newspapers and other outlets free. What if the AP sticks to this view and this conglomerate of news outlets continue going to subscription models or this single group subscription? We could still get a good portion of the articles for free from the AP itself. The papers that stick to being free would probably see their readership go up.
it's pretty apparent to me that some of these major global papers need to start scaling back their reach and maybe become more localized. if you're losing the amts of money these companies are losing, you only have so much time and money to try out different business models and it seams like theyre reaching the end of the line before they need to really scale back or go under.
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|Rush Limbaugh would disagree. I guess we should start paying for radio content on some subscription basis too?
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|simple formula: basic should be free, advanced should be paid for.
for users that just want to know what's happening, basic is fine. like reading the front page of the newspaper. just the article.
for users that critical decisions are based on what's happening, or want to know exaggerated details about it, requiring a greater effort from the publishers, like charts, expert analysis, they should pay a fee.
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|Silly question to ask here surely. The folk who post at Betanews don't actually believe in paying for anything. That's why they only use free stuff to get here in the first place, their motto is "if it ain't free it's not for me". However they will spend all their dosh on the latest laptop to hit the streets, then bore all and sundry silly, telling how many tabs they can load on Firefox before it exploded. I live in the UK we have to pay for a TV license, so I have no choice but to pay for my news, now that's not fair. Opera rocks, not really just wanted to say that, it really annoys the Opera crowd. But Chrome does rock, now that's the truth, and it's free, free !
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|Just what everybody else had said, I'm not paying for news, they must be in living in the dinosaur age still, to think that people will pay for news. News should be $0, that's right free. That's just like why would I pay for a computer magazine as an electronic download when I for all these years I could get it delivered in my mailbox and just read the magazine. I think that having an computer magazine as an electronic download is terrible and that it should be kept like it was as a regular magazine. It sounds to me that these people haven't heard the saying if it ain't broken don't fix it. In the conclusion I like to say that news is suppose to be free therefore it should remain free.
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|$15.00US per month - IF -
The content can be saved and printed,
The previous content can be searched,
Any changes to the content are noted and dated.
If the format changes, Refunds will be given.
( CNN headline news was valuable until it
became the 20-Hour Caley update site.)
It can be a 'Brave New World'
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|These people must be living in the last century. Period.
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|This is the easiest question I've been asked in over a year. Answer: $0
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|I'd pay probably 10c for some heavily-researched/creative content (not just some guy's opinion or news reports). Maybe even 25c - not sure. But then I'd expect to pay less and less per article the more I read a certain content-provider.
If you're asking me for a flat-rate amount -- I'd say somewhere between $2 to $5 per month, again depending on what I get for it...
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|Are you kidding me ?
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|I'm not paying for news... I won't I don't care how good they think there service is... Not worth paying for... leave it ad supported.. If they arn't getting the income they want.. then they probably are not worth a fee in the first place...
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|I believe that there is probably quite a substantial audience for paid content. However, I think that there are a couple of important pre-conditions to success.
1) There must be an effortless and risk free way of making micro-payments
2) The payments must be micro
3) No DRM - or imperceptilbe DRM which probably amounds to the same thing.
I believe that a lot of the resistance to paying for content is based on the perception of unfairness in the price or restrictions and it manifests itself as either a refusal to pay or pirating.
The often obvious lies and distortions in the "justification" from would be vendors don't help much either.
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|This a complicated situation, no question. The 'net isn't controlled by a handful of media conglomerates like print, TV and movies, so there's nearly always a free alternative to any pay service you'll find online (Lord help us if the ISPs get their way and are able to start taxing content). Sure, if you want truly commercial-quality offerings then you're going to pay for it..but the price had better be very reasonable. Even the best writing and presentation has trouble going head-to-head against "free". Maybe its time for the print and new media publishers to start presenting a united front the way other content providers have. These newspapers, magazines and blogs should empower a collective agent with finding the best platform for their subscription format. Yahoo or a similar network would have the expertise to make this work. I have always believed that content creators deserve to be fully compensated. As much as I adore the free and open exchange of information, I also realize that print periodicals will eventually be internet-only. They've' got to make money to survive and consumers can't expect magazines, papers and so on to suddenly be free just because their online. In fact, I could envision something like this: using Yahoo as an example, imagine a single subscription giving you not only Yahoo's premium mail services but a host of content from their e-publishing and media partners. I don't see why this couldn't work as long as the price was reasonable. To most people that means something much less than the cost of their internet connection.
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