With newspapers struggling for survival, industry observers are asking whether it makes sense for publishers to continue to post free articles online.
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.