Who will pay for news?

My thoughts went to the music downloading comparison when I read this.

Does everyone pay? No. I piracy still rampant and fairly easy? Yeah. But music downloading services have worked as businesses, and a lot of people do pay for music.

I think a lot of people won't pay, but there are enough out there who will that, if they're able to stick with it through the initial, inevitable bumps and keep their expectations modest, it's a model that I think can succeed.

 

Change the Page Style option under the view menu in Firefox to "No Style" or I can just click on the Print Story button before the pop-up telling me to subscribe pops up.

 

The comparison to music downloading is faulty. When you download a song, how many times do you listen to it? Just once? I don't think so. Now ask the same question about an article - will you read it more than once? Save it on a device for random reading?

 

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I see continuing resistance to paying for news. People are cheap and selfish. I don't think the average reader puts a lot of thought (or would care if he did) about how I'm going to pay the mortgage this month.

 

We're about to find out at my shop. Word is our paper (30-35K daily) is going to a paywall this year.
I don't know whether it will prove lucrative. But our online ad revenue is so minuscule, it's worth it to try.
Because we're a smaller daily and dominate the media in our area, I think we're as well-positioned as anybody to have at least some success. But we'll see.

 

Online ad revenue is miniscule because the idiots who run these papers used to give it away to try to get print ads.

 

Yet, people will pay $3.99 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, $100 for cable, $29.99 for a carton of cigarettes, and $7.09 for the Baconator with large fries and large Coke at Wendy's.

But they can't afford $14 a month for a newspaper.

 

"Online ad revenue is miniscule because the idiots who run these papers used to give it away to try to get print ads."

It's also minuscule.

 

There's a few major differences between music piracy and free news.

For starters, music piracy has always been considered illegal or immoral. People can quibble and justify that, but the concept of receiving a album-quality rendering of music for free when it's not being officially distributed for free has always been wrong. News, on the other hand, has always had a free option -- you never had to pay to listen to radio news updates or watch Eyewitness News 11 On Your Side. You're not paying for news in a newspaper, you're paying for shipping and handling. Then the Internet happened, and few businesses found much luck convincing people to pay for something when they were already having to shell out $25 to AOL every month (and later $50 for broadband).

iTunes supplanted original Napster and its ilk because it melded the convenience of downloading with the safety of getting it from a reputable source. Sure, that download of Monkey Wrench might be the real thing. Usually it was. Sometimes, though, it was a crappy cover version with a misleading title. Or maybe it's actually the death metal anthem Monkey Wretch. Or you just downloaded an .exe that sends two girls, one cup to everyone in your Outlook contact list. With iTunes, you know what you're getting all the time, and that makes it worth the .99/1.29 per song. That and you're actually getting the song legally. Generally, news sites are safe; even Perez Hilton and Bleacher Report won't drive your virus checker batty. There's some disreputable sites, but they're easily avoided.

Music has far greater replay/review potential than news. Maybe if I see a great long-form piece in the NYT or a magazine, I'll save it to read again. But most news exists to be consumed, then either subsumed or forgotten about. Excepting your BASW entries, the only sports stories I ever want to reread are ones I wrote, and usually I don't want to do that. Conversely, there's songs on my iPod I've played more than 1,000 times. That's a lot of value for 99 cents.

Maybe paywalls can succeed for news gathering organizations (I think there's more potential in apps, where people are accustomed to spending a flat rate for access to something they want). But music downloading is a false equivalency.

 

Still, a big problem is that there is an entire generation of people now who have no interest in paying for things online, be they music, TV shows (even legally, like Hulu), movies, and, of course, news/information. They'll pay for services to get Internet access/smart phone packages, but they simply don't want to pay for content. They haven't paid for it for years, so why would they start now, even if the content is valuable? Maybe apps will change that but I'm not sure. It seems like papers need to focus more on getting other revenue streams to their online, rather than worry about the individual subscriber. I'm afraid that ship has sailed.

 

It's a simple business paradigm of continued return, as stated above.
A la carte journalism is not analogous to a la carte music selection. Plain and simple.

I love Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. I feel smarter after reading their pieces. Don't always agree with them, but I consider the two essential to my weekly reading list.
Now, ask me how many times I paid for their columns when the NYT charged for opinion pieces?

 

where are these $29.99 cartons of cigarettes?