More than a few times recently, I've had colleagues channel their laments over the state of the industry into plaintive calls to demand readers pay for our online product.
The topic's been hot lately, sparked by Walter Isaacson's essay in Time, How to Save Your Newspaper; and fueled by subsequent remarks by the New York Times' Martin Nisenholtz and then, his boss, Arthur Sulzberger. Most recently, the call was picked up by Time Inc. CEO Ann S. Moore, who said, "Who started this rumor that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out?", and longtime Time editor-in-chief boss James Kelly, who chimed in with "Paid content in some fashion is just inevitable."
My colleagues generally get the need to move the news online to meet the growing demands of our audience. But for many of them, despite growing online audiences, it just doesn't seem right to be giving it away for free. As one newsroom friend wrote to me recently,
"Honestly, I don't get it. How can we survive when we continue to offer so much free info without the web advertising revenue to support a news operation? ... I'm all for the web and see how vital it is and will be for our survival, but more and more I dislike the idea of posting so much free info on sites that don't earn the bucks."OK, I can see that. And it works for some news shops. The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports offer content unique and proprietary enough that they can demand payment. I don't mind paying $4.95 a month for Consumer Reports' authoritative product reviews. But (confession) it took only two Google searches this morning to find a Journal story online that I was supposed to cough up American money to read. (Or euros. They probably take euros.)
But - and I hope I am wrong on this, it's not unheard of - people just won't pay to read most stuff online. Including news.
The other day I spoke to seven college students visiting the newsroom. How many read the news in print? Zero. How many read news every day online? Everyone. Would they pay to read the news online? Back to zero. I got pretty much the same response when I tried that with a university journalism class.
Some newspeople (we can't just be newspapermen anymore) are trying things that might pay off and prove me wrong and, if so, I won't complain. Newsday started charging for online news. Hearst is creating an e-reader. The iPhone offers a model for both display and payment. And I mentioned how the big cats are talking about it above.
But in a "will-readers-pay?" story on the issue in Advertising Age, one of the smartest guys I've ever met in this business summed up what I really believe to be the truth. The guy is Charlie Tillinghast, who runs MSNBC.com, ("Charlie is a stud," one of his editors told me, boasting about the biz boss.) What he said was,
"Consumers won't pay; it's just that simple. They'll read amateur blogs and everything else first before they pay for general news and information. Those are the physics of our business.""Wait!" faithful readers say. "Tom, we thought you saw a lucrative future for us!" I do.
Newspapers, their newsrooms, lost classifieds, but we still own local news and information and listings and all that. Search advertising is big, but people are already learning to not click on the shaded, highlighted or advertising-labeled links. They prefer organic search results. And readers are also learning that the "Local" offered up by Goog-hoo-SN can be pretty random, often a scrape from second-tier news sources.
So, when the economy turns around, which is inevitable, the content that a traditional newsroom can assemble is bound to be more attractive to advertisers needing to reach local eyeballs.
But readers paying to read? I wish it could work for us, but I just don't think so. Besides, even in print, they never really paid for it before.
Update: Sulzberger and Isaacson on making money online - in 1995, and
A new report suggests some consumers may be willing to pay for online news content.
Posts
