Praise the journalist, pass the Kachingle

Journalism has been likened to a religion, so it’s poetic that Steve Outing defends Kachingle, a voluntary pay-for-content model, by pointing to the success of churches in reaping billions in donations:

If people can be convinced to voluntarily give that much money to their church (they could let those collection plates slide by), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that we can get news consumers to voluntarily pay a monthly fee — probably less than they give to those churches — to support their favorite news websites and blogs.

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: