For the record, the only content I have a pay subscription for is ESPN.com, but that’s because it’s niched in an area I enjoy reading about and I love the lineup of writers they have. I can’t think of a newspaper that would get my dollars online, even the NYT.

And in response to Len’s question: I’d go read something else.

Shockingly, I go for days without reading nytimes.com. While I like the New York Times, it’s hardly the only quality news option on the Internet. And while I also like “All Things Considered” very much, my eight-year-old “new” Saab’s fancy Harman Kardon radio won’t pick up either of our NPR stations (some sort of antenna connection issue). Somehow, I’m surviving. Yesterday I listened to Leonard Bernstein; today it was the Baltimore Consort. It was good.

We live in a very, very big world of options.

Nobody is going to solve the “problem” of financing quality journalism by making vague threats or trying to organize a journalism strike. Keep in mind that the current crisis is entirely about poorly timed high-stakes financial gambling and not caused by the Internet-driven transformation of the media landscape. The latter is much more manageable than is being suggested.

I’m halfway kidding, of course. But while you make some good points about other content being protected, bear in mind Google’s not publishing much more than a link and a teaser paragraph (if that). The link points back to the content holder’s site. The analogy would be yahoo having a list of links to radio station feeds on the web. They’re doing a service to the radio station and using ads to pay for it. I see this as nothing different. Online news sites might think they’re entitled to a cut given they’re the content originator, but they’re only hurting the site delivering traffic to them. It’s the wrong war, and just because they don’t have the sense of the right one means it’s a good idea to lash out when they’re cornered.

Also, if newspapers are convinced that aggregators are costing them real dollars (and I’m not convinced this represents a huge amount of money, but I’ll play along), why don’t they just aggregate in addition to their other services and steal some of those dollars back? Out-aggregate the aggregator?

Plus, once you put up those pay barriers you hurt your brand by becoming the “money grubbers” while other major news services are still giving the content for free. Now let’s say everyone did what you suggest tomorrow, not just NYT and NPR (which may be more toward your point), I think it would only bump revenue slightly while people started discovering more underground Web sites that offer the news; heck, it might even be a site that is simply writing down what Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and others are saying on television!

The problem here, I think, is akin to what Rob is saying; many newspapermen are under the impression that people are used to (or expect to) paying for news, which isn’t true. News was, first and foremost, free hundreds of years ago. Town criers, decrees from the king, things like these were not charged for. Newspapers only started to gain traction as paid new sources because of what they offered people besides news; a forum to buy and sell news, services, and ideas.

Now, papers are too bloated; they have 15 sections that only a tiny fraction of their readers ever even look at (seriously, every time I pick up the NYT I end up pre-recycling half the paper), which of course has increased overhead tenfold. They have hundreds of employees and large printing plants to roll off these huge newspapers so ad revenue can’t cut it. And let’s face it, putting ads in the paper now is already ridiculously expensive for the non-targeted audience advertisers receive from it.

What’s the answer? I honestly don’t know.

I don’t profit when I tell someone to go read an NYT article. Google does. If this is the wrong war, what is the right one? Sitting around waiting for online advertising to become profitable? That’s not likely to happen in time to save the newspaper industry. Certainly you’re right that it would help to improve the product–and educate media consumers to appreciate it and maybe even pay for it. A pay model seems like a good idea especially for local sites, as Clyde suggests. But plenty of other media content gets protected from aggregators (ie–music on the radio and in public performance, Viacom on YouTube so far). Why not news? Sure, newspapers missed the boat, beginning not just 5 or 10 but 30 years ago. So now we’re going to need a lot of different solutions. Why not try everything we can possibly think of?

@Clyde: A low-cost subscription seems to be the best course (especially for the ad reasons you state), but I’ve been reading a lot of things that make me wonder if it’s feasible given that a lot of pubs aren’t in a position to let it develop over time. It would seem that a model like this would need some time to take hold. Do online newspapers have time?

On your larger point, in the first paragraph, you’re talking about a reconception of what it means to be a news source. It means organizing content that is customized to users in the way they want to read it. I can get election results and analysis by looking on the SoS web site and a few blogs, but there is value to me in organizing it. This doesn’t mean you have to produce it, just do the hunting for me in a fashion that throws out the worthless material. This sounds a lot like aggregation, but some purists still want to think the value is in solely the content.

I think the earlier pay-site efforts by newspapers were doomed by the greed to which you allude. My price break for information is fairly low. As is my price break for recorded music (I’m tone deaf). The iTune concept works for me, but the Skype unlimited subscription concept works even better. I would gladly pay an inexpensive subscription — $1 a month or so — to get my hometown news.

That would not raise much cash for the newspaper, but it does pull the full content of stories out of Google. It then becomes like many of the academic literature sites where you get the headline and abstract through Google, but have to ante up for the full content. I think that is fair to everyone. Probably from at least three “hometowns.”

A paid site, by the way, also offers more value to local advertisers. The payment stats and limited scope make it much easier to convince advertisers that you are delivering real local customers to them.

Clyde

There’s a large misconception that subscriptions are the only way to “pay” for news. I wrote more about this here, but the condensed version is this: Subscription revenue has always been a break-even proposition. Ad sales are where the real dollars are. And news organizations need to realize that their core business model is selling eyeballs to advertisers.

If you look at it that way, I’m not getting news “for free” on the NYT Web site. I’m subsidizing their business by reading news. They sell my clicks to advertisers. This is no different than the old broadcast TV model — I watch Hee Haw for free, but it’s subsidized by corporate sponsors.

I do think your analogies are flawed though because they misunderstand my point. Let’s take your Starbucks example. The problem isn’t that they charge for coffee, but imagine if I went in today to order a tall Sumatra and they said, “Oh, you’ll have to also buy a scone and one of our CDs. We bundle purchases here and call it a ‘subscription’ to your coffee drinking.”

That’s pretty much what newspapers would have to do since they have been loathe to have a pay-per-story model. I read about 1/1000 of what the NYT has on its site on a typical day. You can’t tell people they have to pay a monthly subscription to read that little content. There’s no value there. It has been that way with me for newspapers for a long time. They’re filled with content I don’t care about, and I know I’m not alone there.

As for Singleton’s comments: To use your Starbucks example, what he’s saying basically is that the coffee will be free but we are going to charge anyone who recommends that a person get their coffee at Starbucks. This feels to me like the other extreme to charging subscriptions.

If I take Len’s comment earlier to mean what I think it does, will people pay when we go from information overload to information scarcity? I don’t know. But I do know that if you’re going to charge me, the value better be there. That is, you better be offering something of great tangible value that I can’t get anywhere else for free.

How’s that suit ya?

Or how about if I borrow your car, put advertising on it people have paid me to show around town, and take it for a spin. I’ll pay you in marbles. That better? After all, you weren’t using your car and you have a lousy business model. Think how many people will have seen your car. Isn’t that great?

This “information wants to be free” is the mindset of a spoiled brat who’s been playing with someone else’s toys. Time to join the grown-up world.

But that’s kind of my point. The type of NYT stories I read are the unique ones or investigative work. But that’s such a small percentage of what the NYT produces, and most of that other stuff I don’t care about. I just wonder about any business model that says you have to buy a whole lot of things you don’t want to get what you do want. That kind of model is made for people who use it the way we use newspapers, and that isn’t how I use Web news at all. And I’d bet that’s similar for a lot of folks.

Of course there are huge journalism/democracy problems attached to this. But I’m not worried about the NYT or WaPosts of the world, I think they have the brand power to reformat in this transition. It’s the state and regional news sources I’m worried about.

Reff: http://highmontain.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/news-business-and-news-using-business/

Thank you.

So if I said as of tomorrow, you can’t read the New York Times anywhere without paying for it and if I said you can’t listen to the NPR without paying for it, what would you do?

That said, though, all too many newspaper executives came up through newsrooms (hold the cries of “heresy” for a sec). They don’t understand that people bought newspapers for a lot of utility reasons that had nothing to do with the news content — things like advertising (gasp) or columnists or horoscopes or comics or recipes or whatever. Or, to be precise, not for any individual one of those things, but for the whole package. Online papers broke the model down into news and some banner ads, so it’s not surprising that the online offering wasn’t that compelling to print readers.