Should newspapers band together to try to force readers to pay for content online?
NYU's Jay Rosen pointed me to a column in the San Francisco Chronicle by former New York Times reporter, now Stanford journalism professor, Joel Brinkley, suggesting just such a scenario (and echoing some similar ideas from other former print journalists). And the answer is: No, for more reasons than I can count.
Brinkley wants the newspaper industry to go to the Justice Department and ask for an antitrust exemption that would allow papers to collude to set terms and pricing for online use. "If most papers in a region–San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example–began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe," Brinkley writes.
Well, setting aside the fact that most of the newspapers in the Bay Area already have the same ownership–thus no need for a antitrust exemption to allow them to collude–Brinkley's idea seems to assume that all news and information in a market comes from newspapers. If they can somehow control its distribution, he reasons, they can set pricing.
And that's ridiculous. First of all, there are many sources of news and information in the Bay Area and most other markets. Newspapers are just part of the picture. Any given local media ecosystem also comprises community papers, alternative papers, business papers, ethnic papers, TV stations, radio stations, blogs, community newsgroups and listservs, Web players (Yelp, Citysearch, craigslist, etc.) and many others.
If the newspapers in a market banded together and said, "If you don't pay us for content, we're going to hold our breaths 'til we turn blue" or, alternatively, somehow tried to withhold their content from the Web (another bad idea that's occasionally advanced), the marketplace is going to shrug and turn elsewhere to find out what's going on around town, for free. That's just the way it is in this ultra-competitive information world.
Besides, since most large papers cover a lot more than what's going on locally, these threats are even more hollow. What, we're going to be expected to pay money to SFGate.com to read coverage of world and national news–which the site gets from the AP? Sorry, that's a commodity, and it's available all over the place, for free.
Look, newspapers largely missed the boat on charging for content in the mid-90s, when they first went on the Web. With a handful of exceptions, they opted to make their online sites free, and got consumers into the habit of not paying for information. That horse is long out of the barn, and it ain't coming back. There are some potentially interesting models for newspapers to create paid premium products around niche verticals like exclusive business information, but those aren't going to be major businesses. What newspapers need to do to make more money online is get smarter about the kinds of advertising they sell and more aggressive about who they sell it to, as I–and others–have written over and over.
Besides, the idea of newspapers banding together for survival has been tried before–even with antitrust exemptions–and proved wanting. As Brinkley himself notes, the Justice Department has allowed local joint operating agreements, almost all of which have turned out to be horrible Frankensteins. And back in the dawn of newspapers online, nine newspaper companies got together to form New Century Network to share content, ideas, ad sales and other elements. Nice idea–disclosure: I worked there–but it didn't work, either, largely because newspaper companies seem congenitally unable to cooperate on anything. There's no reason to believe that, evem with an antitrust blessing from the feds, newspapers can figure out how to get people to charge for content that competes with free offerings from other sources.
As I said, there are more reasons why Brinkley's idea won't work than I can count. Back to the drawing board.
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