I’m glad to hear a rising thrum of debate on the future of the newspaper, as I’m genuinely concerned about the industry’s punched-out spasms. Though not especially romantic about the smell of newsprint, I believe strongly in the art, science, and craft of good reporting, and I’m pretty sure that large-scale newsroom layoffs are not good for any of us. Precisely because of the Internet, a good reporter or critic in Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles can have a lot more impact than he or she could 20 years ago.
Conversely, precisely because of the Internet, pundits who have built their careers on the Web insist that the dinosaurs don’t get it: print is dead, and no one will pay to read information online. No one surfs more enthusiastically than I, but I just don’t buy that argument. I would gladly pay for a subscription to the New York Times (among others) online because it has great value to me, and I’m confident the same is true for a large and fertile number of the paper’s readers. It’s clear that advertising is not going to make up the shortfall caused by the loss of paper subscriptions, so it’s time to face the music and charge for good content. Some critics point to the failure of the Times Select experiment a few years ago, but that strange measure put only a few star columnists behind a firewall, not the actual news.
I’m eager to see a visionary try something new, but for now there are some interesting ideas floating around, such as micropayments (unwieldy) and nonprofit papers on the NPR model. My two favorites are: (1) Newspapers have to charge for their content, but no one wants to commit suicide by going first — so the government should exempt the industry from anti-trust law, allowing them all to jump in together after conferring on “how to scale prices” –Tim Rutten, L.A. Times. (2) Papers like the NYTimes will have to combine original reporting with smart aggregation of reporting from other sources, creating “a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post” – Michael Hirschorn, Atlantic.
Michael Kinsley’s op-ed in the Times, based on his experience trying to charge for Slate content early in that magazine’s life, crunches some numbers and argues that subscription fees will not save newspapers. I question his math, however, which is based on the 1 million subscribers who buy the hard copy. Online readership is now around 20 million unique visitors a month, and even if only a fraction of them pay, that’s a big new chunk of change and a market ripe for development. In the words of a commenter named Rudolph, responding to a post by Mathew Ingram of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab:
The biggest problem you “information wants to be free” types have is that the industry has followed your model. And guess what? It ain’t working.
More than a decade of free, high-quality content has badly spoiled us all. Imposing new fees makes people grumble, but it doesn’t necessarily drive them away if they can’t get the product anywhere else. After a lifetime of checking luggage on flights without a second thought, we now pay a substantial fee for each bag, grumbling less each time. If the product has value, people will buy it.
I saw Mort Zuckerman (owner of NY Daily News and Editor of U.S. News & World Report) on Charlie Rose recently, along with the current head of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal is apparently doing very well with a subscription-based online service, whereas Zuckerman seemed completely resistant to the very idea that charging for money for *anything* online — whether an entire magazine or newspaper, or micropayments for individual articles — could possibly work.
He has already been proven wrong by other publications and still he resists. He apparently fails to understand that, if unique information (such as that contained in certain newspapers and magazines), for which there is a demand, is not available any other way nor for a cheaper price elsewhere, people will indeed pay for it. I’m afraid his publications will suffer for his shortsightedness.