E-Media Tidbits

Much is being written today about Katharine Seelye's article in the New York Times, "Can Papers End the Free Ride Online?" There's much teeth-gnashing in the piece, as newspaper types ponder whether to charge for content and what types of content.

This is an old debate, dating back to when I first got involved in online journalism 11 years ago. Frankly, I find it a bit depressing, because as I see it, we're heading into an era when free access for the consumer is necessary for a general-news publisher to operate in the digital networked economy. I think that the only news publishers who will be able to charge are those with extremely narrow and unique content niches. For everyone else, the benefits of being reachable in a Google-driven world outweigh what can be gained from subscription revenues. That's because the network makes it so easy to find similar or the same information elsewhere for free.

And consumers not only get the cornucopia of information and news free, but marketplaces are gravitating toward free. Pay for a newspaper classified? Craigslist works better in large U.S. metro markets, and ads placed on its sites are free. Younger consumers don't want to pay for newspapers, so publishers are forced to create free papers in order to reach them at all. All the signs are pointing toward free.

Then we've got the "citizen journalism" trend, where members of the public end up contributing to a publisher's news product, adding a new and deeper (micro-local) element to existing staff coverage. Assuming that starts to take hold in news organizations -- and I'm convinced it will -- then we're looking at "compensating" citizens to take part. (Perhaps not with money, but with other enticements.) The paid-subscription model for newspaper just doesn't fit with that.

Yes, this means the next few years will be a rough transition for the newspaper industry. I'd recommend an exercise: Assume that your newspaper's model for the Web is free access to content (except for unique topic niches where you can safely charge because you have a coverage monopoly) and even free classifieds (except in classifications that look like they will continue to support charging). How will you make money? It's not an easy exercise. But I don't see that newspapers have a choice but to figure this out.