Commentary
Brill: Times Should Charge Online Readers
- by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 9, 2009
Entrepreneur and journalist Steven Brill has joined the pundits who say the answer is no. In a confidential memo obtained by Romenesko, Brill argues that newspapers hurt themselves by giving away articles. "Free content ultimately sends the message that the content is fungible," he writes. "If it is fungible, then the Times has no business paying as much as it does for its content other than to be an eleemosynary institution trying to stave off extinction as long as possible."
Brill proposes a range of prices -- 10 cents an article, 40 cents a day, $7.50 a month, or $55 a year. Brill calculates that if each of the 20 million unique visitors the site currently draws pays $1 a month, the Times could garner an extra $240 million a year.
But there's a flaw in his number-crunching: some of those unique visitors would surely stop reading the paper online if they had to pay to do so.
While Brill's ideas are drawing much press attention today, the concept of charging for news is hardly new. Web publishers, including the Times, have unsuccessfully experimented with paid subscriber models in the past.
In 2005, the Times launched TimesSelect, which put columnists behind a $49.95 a year subscriber wall. But two years later, the paper abandoned the initiative. Although around 250,000 people purchased the Web subscriptions, the newspaper decided it preferred enabling columnists to reach a large audience than to glean whatever incremental revenue they could from charging for access.
Brill also advocates turning "parasites" like the Huffington Post, "which subsist on original reporting from sources like the Times," to generate sales for the newspaper. He would pay the sites a 5% referral fee for any customer who clicks through and purchases an article or a subscription to the site.
This prospect might sound appealing to traditional media publishers, who have long complained that bloggers are cannibalizing content. But these days, the lines between bloggers and mainstream media are increasingly blurred, with bloggers themselves now breaking stories that traditional newspapers subsequently pick up.
Consider one recent example: Friday morning, the blog Legum's New Line was the first to report that the Maryland General Assembly was going to block access to Facebook and MySpace. The Baltimore Sun followed up with a story that didn't appear until midday.
Wendy Davis is a Senior Writer at MediaPost. You can reach Wendy at wdavis@mediapost.com
Steven Brill is a lawyer and a failed publisher, I don't think he has the answer here for the New York Times.
Brill isn't necessarily wrong. As Walter Isaacson noted in his recent op-ed in Time, the new model could depend on micropayments. He laments that people pay 20 cents per text message or 99 cents per download, but nothing for reading a story.
I would never pay $5 or $10 to subscribe to the NYT, but I might pay 10 cents per story. My Facebook account has Spare Change on it; that might work for such billing.
Then again, other people (a.k.a. pirates) won't even pay by the song, so why would they pay per article? Unless it's the only way.
Is NYT content THAT unique? Maybe not. It's certainly not unbiased.
Brill states, "There is simply no example, not one – in print, on line, in television – of quality content offered for free ever resulting in a viable business."
This is not true. The alternative newsmedia has been offering free content to readers for more than four decades, from vital community event guides to investigative exposes. Free alt weeklies still thrive across the country, and they may grow yet, given the nimble nature of a small-business model. Advertising foots the bill, not the readers.
It's like saying that paid subscriptions for the dailies, corrupt as some of those numbers have been, were the basis for the success of the business. They weren't. They aren't. It's the ad sales models that have to evolve.
As for Legum's scoop, snap! A scoop is a scoop! Give the guy his props and pageviews!
IF NEWS IS FACTS, CAN'T I GET ELSEWHERE FOR FREE.
It is amazing that people keep thinking the way they do. I'm so tired that I can't even think of something new to say, but, what is it about it that you don't get?
I'm not going to give away all of the secrets to the future, but a quick hint - 'out of the mouth of babes' or something like that, Steve - and, just 'cause we're all getting older doesn't mean we can't listen to the younger set.
It's called - 'do you actually think we're going to pay for news anywhere, brother?' - we pay for it through them providing it and us buying into the advertising that we embrace because of it.
Sure, we can still actually pay $5 for a Sunday NYTimes and it's great - magazine and all - and all - but, most Sundays, we almost just don't have the time and patience to sustain them (the Times - as in enough of us consistently). Yeah, we want to, but we have too much learning to learn.
What is it you don't get? You're older, I'm older, let's create a new model and we'll all live happily everaft.
There is more than one point to consider:
Who will pay for news that is unbias and presented with excellence and integrity? There are some excellent services out there ie: WIP (Women's International Perspective), The BBC online, etc. that easily compete w/our best US offerings.
If I felt that the news I was receiving was done with excellence, I would pay an annual fee to have access to it. To keep that fee down I would accept advertising as a fact of life. On the other hand, do I feel that the NYT gives me something irreplaceable? No, I like it, but it is not irreplaceable. How would it become irreplaceable? Quality. Journalism that went beyond opinions - please spare me another opinion - more science reporting, more reporting on the condition of the world, and the people in it.
Many have stopped delivery of the newspaper due to the environmental impact of newspapers. This hurdle was set up a long time ago when they started cutting trees down fast and with out consideration to the long term effect of deforestation on the planet.
Above all less opinion, more true journalism and in-depth reporting from people who have no obligation to advertisers or corporations or lobbyist.
I do think that the newspapers offer something tv doesn't and won't. They are worth having.
Nothing is free. Freedom is not free. Get that word out of media language. Either something has value, added value or a waste of the limited time you have here in your life. Without costing additional investment into educated people who also need to earn a decent living in time consuming journalism and fact checking. And just because you are not paying upfront for great, let along good reporting, doesn't mean anything everywhere is free. After all, what are you worth? Why should you get paid for what you do?
When Brill uses terms like, "fungible" and "eleemosynary," that, in itself, says he has some kind of premium language we should be paying for.
The reality is that people like Brill generate so much online verbiage out there about anything and everything, there is very little reason anyone in their right mind would actually want to pay for it.
While eleemosynary institutions like Time continue to pay people to write it, the blogosphere is already gagging on more content than they know what to do with.
The plain fact of the matter is there are only so many op-ed diatribes on the economic stimulus package or the latest Paris Hilton sexcapades anyone can reasonably stomach, let alone spend money to subscribe to. We have 537 channels of talking heads, an insane number of blathering webpages, endless talk radio commentary and a freight train of social networking portals from Facebook to pornographic blogs.
So, shelling out "10 cents an article, 40 cents a day, $7.50 a month, or $55 a year" -- does anybody seriously think that is a viable business model? (Long vacant pause, tumbleweeds drifting down an empty street.) Yeah, that's what I thought, too.