Former CEO of CNN wants his micropayments

Remember that New York Times article by David Carr calling for an “iTunes for news?” Well, former CNN CEO Walter Isaacson, in a speech delivered a couple days ago, agrees:

But I don’t think that subscriptions should be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants a copy of one day’s edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under the current payment systems. The key for attracting online revenue, I think, is coming up with an iTunes-easy, quick micropayment method.

Isaacson then runs down a list of existing micropayment services and describes how one could be implemented for online news sites:

Free as a business model isn't working

At Garcia Interactive, John Duncan dissects the “Internet is about free” orthodoxy that has left so many newspapers in economic shambles. He writes about the free online model:

It forced every entrepreneur to fish in the same pond. It focused an entire generation of innovation on the same revenue source: online advertising. And the fact that consumers were not asked to spend money, to make decisions on what to consume and what not to consume at a certain price, meant that it has actually hidden the winners and losers from view, allowing no clear demonstration of the value that consumers attach to a product via a price and a sales figure.

In his New York Times article about an iTunes for news, which started quite an Internet buzz, David Carr quotes Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett, who also speaks of the folly of online papers putting all their eggs in one basket:

An iTunes for news

Vanity Fair decided to have some fun with David Carr’s New York Times article calling for an iTunes for news delivery. Funny stuff.

Would you pay for news online?

In the Jan. 11 New York Times article “Let’s Invent an iTunes for news,”  David Carr argues for a business model that will convince readers to pay for some of their online news.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine proceeded to take Carr to task in “Penny for his thoughts.” He writes: