Fee content vs. free content

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times may drop pay-to-read content. But online ad revenue alone won't cut it.

from the August 14, 2007 edition

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But critics of TimesSelect, and there have been many, have long held that it lessens the impact of the columnists by allowing fewer people to read them. One of those critics is Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

A report last week in, of all places, the Murdoch-owned New York Post, said the paper was considering junking TimesSelect. The response from the website's general manager was less-than-Shermanesque: "We're still looking at the situation."

What does all this mean? If both the Times and Journal abandon the idea of pay-to-read content, it is essentially dead for the time being on the Web.

That may not sound like such a big deal. After all, as anyone who Googles enough knows, fee content doesn't necessarily stay that way for long. Any blogger who understands basic "cut" and "paste" commands can turn "fee content" into "free content" with a few clicks of a mouse.

In addition, there is a social networking news culture developing on the Web that thrives on sharing news accounts. The more news that's free, the more that can be shared. These sites, like digg.com, are particularly popular with younger news consumers, which newspapers are desperate to reach.

And, from a purely selfish standpoint, who is against getting anything for free?

But the demise of pay-for-news on the Web would also mean we are still a long way from figuring out how news organizations will function in the new news world.

Online ad revenues may be growing like weeds, but the growth rate has begun to slow sooner than expected. Even the most optimistic projections suggest if they keep growing at their current rate it will take more than a decade for them to equal the money that comes in from print newspaper ads. But no one expects them to keep growing at the current rate. Somehow, newsrooms need to find new revenue sources, or they won't be able to cover as much news.

Online fee content probably isn't going to be the answer for newspapers, but some thought it might be part of an answer. Now it seems that, for the time being at least, it probably won't be, at least not with the current approaches.

What these changes would really mean is that the fast and furiously evolving world of news gathering is a little cloudier this week than it was last month.

• Dante Chinni is a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

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