Herding Cats

So Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz and some other big names have decided to step up and create the dinosaur's dream: a mechanism that will allow newspaper sites to hide their online content behind paid subscription walls. It even has micropayments!

Good luck with that.

There's not a lot of point in piling on to why this is a really bad idea; Jeff Jarvis does a good job of being properly skeptical, and the media blogosphere soon will no doubt be aflame with additional opinions pro and con. I think the whole online subscription idea is harebrained and doomed to failure, and I've ranted about that more than enough.

But I want to address one element of it, which Jarvis touches on, because I can speak from personal experience: Getting newspapers to agree to work together on anything is well-nigh impossible. I worked for New Century Network, the ill-fated early newspaper-web consortium that Jarvis mentions: Nine big newspaper companies that could barely agree on when and where to meet, much less on the substantive issues that have turned out to be increasingly fatal to the print business. After that, I worked for Classified Ventures, another newspaper consortium, and saw the same fractious behavior torpedo best-laid plans. It's just the way newspaper companies are. They don't play well with others—even within the same ownership group, much with other newspaper companies.

At its core, the plan put forth by Brill, Crovitz, et al is dependent on something very close to 100 percent buy-in by newspaper publishers. Even assuming that newspaper content is that vital that people will pay for it (a huge leap of faith), everybody's got to agree to put a substantial portion of their offerings behind a subscription wall. Everybody. 

If one publisher decides to go it alone, that site will instantly become the leading free news site on the Web (newspaper division, at least) as soon as the pay wall goes up around the other sites. That will bring advertising revenue as well, from advertisers are fleeing the paid sites and their crippled traffic. All it takes is one renegade. And believe me, there's at least one smart publisher out there eager to cash in by zagging while the rest of the industry is (foolishly) zigging. Probably a lot more than one.

At that point, it's game over for Brill & Co. Epic fail.

Best of luck to the latest effort to unite the newspaper industry. They'll soon learn that one of the penalties of being the rough draft of history is that you need to be able to learn from that history.

Comments

[Jason Fry]

Hi Mark,

I'm not as skeptical as you are about either the overall prospects for getting people to pay or the idea that there will necessarily be a race to the bottom (or at least to below the subscription wall) if there isn't 100% buy-in. But that's a philosophical debate that's been had many times before, so no point rehashing it.

I'd also be reluctant to bet against Gordon Crovitz -- he's a smart guy, and the WSJ.com content strategy he spearheaded is a lot more nuanced than how it's generally portrayed.

What gives me pause -- a lot more pause -- is that I don't think many newspapers could charge for their current online products no matter how good the payment tools available are. They're still print papers dumped into online form, without much in the way of reader engagement or community. That needs to be fixed before any of those papers can even have a larger debate about charging.

[Neill Watson]

Superb piece of writing. Only just found this site, but your thinking is dead-on inline with my views.

It's going to be really interesting as this whole sea change moves over to my own genre of monthly lifestyle and motoring magazines. It's definately in it's way. I used to have a hard hat and body armour. Now I'm looking forward to the oportunity...

Many thanks, and definately one for the blogroll!

[John Ros]

It depends on what kind of news the sites offer and if they can get some other stuff for subsribers (like being able to comment on news stories as a paid subsriber)

There are a few paid "news" sites out there already, for example inman.com (a very large if not the biggest real estate new sites for real estate agents (mostly)) has a paid subsribtion. You can still get some of the news for free (and all the titles of paid ones) But they've been moving more and more content towards the paid side.

The question is will it work for the general news papers when there seems to be plenty of online sources to get the same news.

If the newspapers could actually agree amongst themselves (or if it'sa niche market and is almost fully covered by just one news source) then paid subscriptions could work.