Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 2

The buzz among journalists about where to find a suitable business model for disseminating news is focused this week on an online Q&A New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller is having with his paper’s readers, who also are trying to peek into the future.

AP has written about it. So has the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine and countless blogs.

It is a topic near and dear to those in the profession. When you grab their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Keller declares there is a diminishing supply of, but a growing demand for, quality journalism, “the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards. I mean journalism that, however imperfect, labors hard to be trustworthy, to supply you with the information you need to be an engaged citizen.”

Sometimes I suspect the diminishing supply is the engaged citizen. Present company excepted, of course.

Keller also did some backgrounding on the Times' own efforts at finding a business model. He noted the company tried an online subscription service called Times Select that charged a fee for the paper’s archives and some columnists. It generated $10 million a year in revenue, he said, but the company thought it might be able to generate more in advertising revenue if the Web site could attract still more visitors.

“A lot of people in the news business, myself included, don't buy as a matter of theology that information ‘wants to be free,’” Keller told his readers. “Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for. So far, it gets paid for mainly by advertisers, but a lively, deadly serious discussion continues within The Times about ways to get consumers to pay for what we make.”

He then ticked off some of the suggestions that are being bandied about in every newspaper newsroom and executive suite in the country.

— A subscription model. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times do it.

— A micro-payment model. Readers pay a modest fee for the stories they want to read, the video they want to see, etc. Keller notes that despite all intellectual property thieves on the Internet iTunes has been a success.

— New reading devices. People could pay to download a newspaper to a Kindle or similar device or service such as the Times Reader. “So some people are paying for The Times online, Keller says. “Just not enough of them. So far.”

Lawyer and media entrepreneur Steve Brill was recently quoted as saying “the press has to stop committing suicide by giving journalism away for free. Start charging for it, start believing in your product."

"The central economic challenge of a newspaper is printing and delivering the newspapers," Brill is quoted as saying in the current edition of American Journalism Review. "Chopping down all these trees and printing and distributing is by far the biggest cost a newspaper has. So the Internet should have let newspapers get rid of their major cost. Instead, they decided to be online but do it for free, so they still do the newspaper, which they charge for, but not as many people want to buy it, because they can get it for free online. And they're giving up not only their classified revenue but their circulation revenue."

It would make blog postings like this more difficult to create, but if all the bloggers had to pay for their content and were required to point their readers to the paid copyrighted content, hmmmm ...