Former Time honcho to newspapers' online readers: The free ride is over

[thatcrazycajun]

Walter Isaacson, writing in an essay that serves as this week's cover story in Time magazine (of which he used to be managing editor), asserts that the big reason newspapers around the country are hemorrhaging money even as their reader base grows is that more of those readers are consuming the dailies' reporting, features, opinions and services online than those who buy the dead-tree editions...and that said dailies are moronic enough to continue granting access to said content gratis.

The conventional wisdom has it that consumers won't pay for online content, no matter how valuable, either because web subscriptions and other current payment mechanisms are still too expensive and hassleful or because of the legendary "information wants to be free" ethos of the Web (which Harlan Ellison has maintained for years is claptrap, so this column ought to make him deliriously happy). Isaacson insists that unless newspapers find some way to defy that wisdom and get the crowds to pony up, the day will soon come when some major US metropoli will not have major metropolitan newspapers.

As a creative professional of nearly a quarter-century's standing myself, I can readily understand his desire to see journalists and the companies that employ them receive fair recompense for their labors. And as a newspaper junkie literally since the age of two (my mother claimed I was reading aloud phonetically from the local paper then; obviously, comprehension came later), I have always quite highly valued the contribution to civic life, responsible government and the nation's collective IQ that the industry provides....and would hate like the mischief to see it lost.

Isaacson seems to think that if newspapers can make micropayments for reading articles one-click easy, this will stave off the extinction of the species. If iTunes and Amazon can do it, he reasons, why shouldn't the Detroit Free Press or The New York Times be able to? His argument is that the papers need to figure out the mechanics and readers need to get over being used to freeloading if newspapers are not only to survive, but to remain focused on serving readers rather than advertisers (the latter group being the ones in charge under an ad-supported model).

What do you think? Is it time finally to wean ourselves off the endless digital gravy train? And is it doable?

Comments

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

And I shall trot down to the sea shore and order the tide to stay out, as if it comes in it will get my feet all wet.

There is a good rebuttal to this in Today's NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html?ref=opinion

Newspapers are "dying" because they stopped providing news and got into the "synergy" business. What killed Tribune was not "the internet" but the $16bn debt they ran up buying up media properties.

Lots of newspapers are turning a nice business. These include a variety of online publications that are "newspapers" but without killing trees. True, there are many things I think are problematic with the current business model for news production, but I expect it to work out.

And newspapers are an "advertiser supported model" already. Subscriptions don't even come close to paying costs. This is why we have free newspapers in this country. But advertising revenues have fallen due to a combination of declining subscribership and the availability of other venues -- like Craig's List. You don't fix that by charging for online content.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

moreover, i've heard that one reason for newspapers to charge is that it makes them more valuable to advertisers - there's a certain stigma attached to a free newspaper that makes people undervalue it and that carries over to the ads it runs. this is definitely not true for the net - if anything, i'd say the psychology of the thing was reversed, and things locked behind a pay barrier tend to get taken less seriously, and left out of the global conversation.

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

Micro-payments?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

Yes. Let the "big" newspapers try that.

There are enough free news sites (and free newspapers) out there that use ad revenue (rather than subcriptions) to generate their funds that I won't go uninformed.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

I should add that "creative people" have lots of options. I have a standing offer to produce freelance work at between $50-$100 a pop, as well as other freelance gigs if I want them. Why? Because for the last 5 years, I have given away quality work for free. Heck, as a direct consequence of my blog analysis, I have been offered $300/hr industry analyst spots.

True, there are costs to moving to a system of free lance stringers. Also true that I am exceptional and most freelancers will not get offered $300/hr to simply say where they think the industry is going. But the odds are no worse than they are for every single actor or musician holding it together while dreaming of their big break. In fact, my (and other free lance journalists) have better odds, because this field remains wide open as opposed to controlled by a cartel.

Bottom line, the news industry is changing. But change does not mean "death." Those like Mr. Isaacson who have earned a fat living off the old business models may dread the need to hustle against the likes of BBC and Al-Jazeera English and bemoan the loss of their previous double-digit profit margins. But that hardly means we live in a crisis of journalism.

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

Free information is the one thing that got the Net where it is. Once you start that sort of thing it metastasizes, then suddenly you have to use PayPal to click your Safari icon.

As a {broke/retired} person I'm not a fan of data tolls. Had CUNY not been a tuition-free university when I went, I wouldn't have been able to afford to go for another decade. And as you know, I refuse to pay somebody every month to watch TV.
All the damned advertising everybody's trying to delete or avoid is there to help the organisation in question pay the huge cost of providing this simple thing. I can look at it all day; it doesn't mean I have to buy anything but I appreciate it being there so I can do my thing without worrying about more than rent, utilities, and oh yeah, food.

[mdlbear]

I subscribe to an online weekly news site, http://lwn.net/ -- what that means is that I get their new content when it's published, not a week later like everybody else. It's a business model I'm happy to support.

Micropayments almost certainly can't be made to work -- if I have to decide whether every single article is worth my money, the answer for every single article is going to be no.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

We are staring down the barrel of this here in Seattle. One of our town's dailies, the Post-Intelligencer, is for sale, and Hearst has said it would shut the paper down if a buyer isn't found by sometime in mid-March.

The dead tree version, at any rate. The P-I has a very nice web site and even though we subscribe to the paper, I read most of the articles online. One reason is that the online version has some very interesting blogs -- a political blog written by one of their political columnist, two tech blogs, one of which is done by their Microsoft beat reporter, a couple of sports blogs, food, arts, on and on. There's even one done by a woman calling herself "Bus Chick" who reports on life without a car, complete with job, husband, social life and daughter in diapers. Even their Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist, David Horsey, has his own blog that doesn't just cover the subjects of his cartoons. The paper also appears to have all of its features online, such as movie listings and comics, and even has a couple of interactive features such as Crickler, a fill-in-the-blanks current events puzzler.

I will be ambivalent about the passing of the physical edition of the P-I, but would really miss the website if it goes away. I've heard rumors that the P-I might survive even if Hearst decides to cease physical publication by keeping the web site and cutting back the staff. I certainly hope so. It would be an interesting experiment to see if a newspaper could survive the transition to all-digital, and FSM knows the P-I web site already has its share of advertisements. Even so I would still pay $10/month (roughly what I'm paying now) to subscribe to the website.

Switching over to the Seattle Times is not an option for a variety of reasons. And they aren't looking too healthy either. (The story of the two newspapers in this town is a fascinating one that I don't have time to get into tonight, but would be worth looking into sometime.)