Printed Matters: Paywall madness: Dec. 2008 – Feb. 2009
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Tim Burden has a nice roundup of the recent spate of articles proposing various schemes for introducing paid content at US newspaper sites.
Category Archives: free
Slate: Not all information wants to be free
Jack Shafer: "Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative."
New York Times: You Can’t Sell News by the Slice
Michael Kinsley: "Just a few years ago, there was no sweeter perch in American capitalism than ownership of the only newspaper in town. Now, every English-language newspaper is in direct competition with every other. Millions of Americans get their news online from The Guardian, which is published in London. This competition, and not some kind of petulance or laziness or addled philosophy, is what keeps readers from shelling out for news."
Buzzmachine: Can journalism go with the flow?
Jeff Jarvis: "All the many desperate attempts to propose means to save newspapers/journalism seem to me to be efforts to swim upstream, for force something to happen that doesn't want to happen in the internet age."
Buzzmachine: Can journalism go with the flow?
Jeff Jarvis: "All the many desperate attempts to propose means to save newspapers/journalism seem to me to be efforts to swim upstream, for force something to happen that doesn't want to happen in the internet age."
Recovering Journalist: Welcome to the Age-Old Online News Debates
Vin Crosbie offers an argument for micropayments: "many of my graduate students from foreign countries are amazed that we in America have never adopted the very successful microtransaction system they use in their countries. It's called their mobile phones. From Finland to the South Africa to the Far East, millions of people use their mobile phones daily to pay parking meters, buy from vending machines, and make other types of micropayments without cash. Many even purchase daily or weekly access to newspaper and magazine Web sites..."
Reflections of a Newsosaur: Mission possible? Charging for web content
Howard Owens in the comments: "Any newspaper that switches to paid faces an immediate threat of a disruptive start up that will offer as much or more news online for free at a much lower cost basis (producing news for online is much more efficient than print, so a smaller staff can produce a great deal more content that a typical print newsroom). There is no historical mistake in newspaper having given content away for free online. It was inevitable and unavoidable. It's also well documented that newspaper readers have NEVER paid for content."
Clay Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content (2003)
"[Micropayment systems don't] work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. ..."
Recovering Journalist: Welcome to the Age-Old Online News Debates
Mark Potts: "One of the chief reasons online news vets like myself get frustrated by wacky suggestions from people like [Peter Osnos and Walter Isaacson] is because, well, it's not like these ideas haven't been considered before in the online world. Ad infinitum, if not ad nauseam. What's happening is that smart traditional print guys like Osnos and Issacson are turning their brainpower, finally, toward the online world. It's pretty much all new to them, so they're having what they think are brilliantly original ideas. Except they aren't original."
Nieman Journalism Lab: Please pay us for our news — please
Evan Rudowski talks sense in the comments: "You are absolutely right, [Mathew Ingram], to belittle those who think they can ever get away with forcing people to pay online for their standard, commodity news product. However, newspapers do possess the skills to create online content that people will pay for. They ought to be encouraged to go for it, rather than being told that the model can never work."
Time: How to Save Your Newspaper
Walter Isaacson: "This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s." Ah yes, the walled garden is the future.
OJR: Papers Must Charge for Web Sites to Survive
Vin Crosbie sets things straight in the comments: "Newspapers aren't giving away their news online for free because people have grown used to such information being free. The reason why instead is because the principles of economics make it largely impossible."
BBC News: Buy none, get one free
Chris Anderson on Radio 4's In Business: "Is the business model of the future one where the customer no longer pays? Already products in the digital marketplace are being given away free, yet companies are still making profits."
Seth Godin: When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?
"What's left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. ... ewspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction."