Thinking outside the paid content box

In his recent post about Journalism Online’s intent in proposing a system for news sites to charge for their online content, Steve Outing notes the absurdity of asking readers to pay for content offered by outlets whose quality has diminished after laying off  thousands of journalists:

The minute paywalls go up on content on the web, all but the most devoted will click elsewhere to find alternatives. Consumer behavior will make an abrupt change online. Brill and his supporters think that newspaper content is so special that bloggers and new news players online won’t match the quality, yet newspaper quality has been sinking badly as thousands of journalists have been pushed onto the street.

Setting aside the issue of quality, news sites that intend to charge for content have their heads in the sand if they think people will pay because “Who else will provide the coverage?”

Plenty will. And plenty are, as Mark Potts pointed out during a panel in Baltimore, titled “The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?”:

Wall Street Journal to launch micropayments service

The Wall Street Journal plans to start a micropayments service for individual articles this fall. Let the echo-chamber pooh-poohing begin! (Quote below is from Jeff Jarvis; emphasis is mine):

So if the Journal brings on micropayment, I fear for them that they’ll lose doubly. They’ll lose my subscription. They’ll lose my even occasional readership and the ad revenue that can come with that. They will, in a cruel irony, replace digital dollars with micro pennies.

Or, conversely, WSJ could increase readership by allowing the purchase of individual articles without the need for a yearly online subscription. Time will tell.

Tinker, Tinker, little blogger

Looking for another way to get paid for what you write on the Web? Tinker, which tracks topics on Twitter and Facebook, is setting up a micro-blogging network that will include a system of micro-payments. [Via TechCrunch]:

It will be called the Tinker Micro-Bloggers Network. This will be a vetted subset of Tinker users who are advertiser-friendly. Glam is working on a micro-payments system to share revenues with approved micro-bloggers from ads in their associated widgets and Tinker streams.

The power of the printing press

In the race to find an online business model that works, are newspaper companies ignoring their own, most obvious strength? Michael Josefowicz, writing for MediaShift, thinks so:

In all the noise about the web, newspapers have overlooked their defensible advantage. They have the intelligence and machinery to print and distribute information faster, cheaper and more accurately than anyone else. Instead of focusing on that strength, most of the current discussion is about how they have to get into a new business in which they have no natural advantage.

Better than micropayments: packaging the news

The more the debate about paying for online news content rages on, the more I’m inclined to agree with some of the sharp commentary on Mathew Ingram’s recent look at the micropayment issue, comments that have served to focus my ideas about what news sites can and cannot charge for.

What they can charge largely depends on what consumers need. On that issue, Terry Steichen believes they require context:

Advice for journalists, hope for newspapers

Michael Miner readily admits he doesn’t have answers for the newspaper industry’s struggle to adjust to the current economic realities. But in his fine essay for the Chicago Reader, Miner offers hope for the survival of print and for journalists who worry about the future of their profession.

Miner considers the solutions that have been presented — micropayments, subscriptions, endowments — finding each of them lacking:

Once for micropayments, now against

Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics, has had a change of heart regarding the implementation of micropayments to save the newspaper industry. In his article for the Miami Herald, Wasserman doesn’t go down the “information wants to be free” route; instead, he considers how readers use the Internet:

Kachingle is chump change for newspapers

Remember Kachingle, the voluntary payment system Steve Outing touted as an alternative to micropayments, and which I wrote about here? Well, Newsosaur Alan Mutter, who touts a micropayment system, writes that the projected revenues from Kachingle wouldn’t add up to much except at the most popular news sites:

From micropayments to Kachingle

Alan Mutter has a plan to make readers pay for content, Michael Kinsley thinks micropayments are crazy, and Steve Outing says there is another, better way.

Mutter’s solution is a system in which users would pay for premium content by clicking a button that accesses accounts funded by their credit cards:

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: