If Paid Web Content Is Dead, Are Newspapers? - Page 2

I believe that there are too many problems with the micropayments model to work. For one, newspaper articles aren't like songs on iTunes, where consumers have clearly shown their willingness to pay for content on the Web. Given the differences in the two mediums and the way the content is used, I believe it's a fallacy to assume that because online consumers will pay for one they'll willingly pay for the other.

There are also problems with getting firewall-protected content indexed (what is sometimes referred to as "Google juice"), though they are not insurmountable from a technical standpoint.

Thomas rightly points out that it also wouldn't work for commodity news -- the type of story where hundreds of outlets, online and off, are essentially reporting the same facts.

Another problem with the micropayments model would be the lockstep action it would prompt from papers. If the Times went to a micropayment model but the Washington Post remained free, the market would have no trouble picking a favorite. (Bear in mind that, as noted above, the Journal is in a slightly separate category with its paid content.) It's hard to imagine such a news cartel getting off the ground, even if it managed to steer clear of the price-fixing and collusion concerns the government might raise.

But there is a real problem with free, if you believe at all in what good newspaper reporters do.

Writing in response to a column by Michael Hirchorn in the Atlantic gleefully predicting the demise of the Times, Carr noted that "while there is nothing sacred about The New York Times, the experienced, and yes, expensive journalistic muscle it deploys on events big and small is not going to be replaced by a vanguard of unpaid content providers. It's not that journalism is impossibly difficult; it's just that it takes enormous amounts of time and a willingness to stay with the story."

The unpaid vanguard he refers to can make a tremendous contribution when it comes to events like the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, when Twitter was getting flash bulletins out to the world long before the BBC or other big media outlets got to the scene.

But Twitter, the blogosphere writ large and the great majority of online journalism doesn't have the economics in place to stay with the type of story that requires prolonged investigation or extensive travel.

When Keller writes, "The wonderful fluorescence of communication ignited by the Internet contains countless voices riffing on the journalism of others but not so many that do serious reporting of their own," it's not surprising that the anti-newspaper crowd will crow about the financial woes of the paper's parent company, and gleefully write him and his ilk off as relics and worse.

But he's right. The Web didn't tell us about clandestine CIA prisons in former Soviet Bloc countries or a massive and highly secretive domestic surveillance program.

A strictly ad-supported online model could not accommodate the work of Barton Gellman, the Post's investigative reporter who shared a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Cheney vice presidency.

On his excellent Newsosaur blog, Alan Mutter puts the average newspaper's ad-revenue split at 90 percent print to 10 percent online. Therefore, it follows, the decision to shut down the presses in favor of an all-digital format would entail a commitment to continue gathering and reporting news on a tenth of the budget most papers are used to. A bitter pill, and one Mutter prescribes only to those papers that are "irreversibly losing money."

So we're not at the end, yet. In a time when it is still unclear how soon -- or if -- the online ad economy will bounce back, Keller is sage to warn against the "faith-based polemics on the subject of newspapers' survival."

After all, there are a great many smart and Web-savvy people at work on the issue -- people who actually respect and value the work that good papers do and steer clear of the invective that crowds the discussion online. So I'm inclined to listen to Keller when he advises, "We should be a little suspicious of ironclad certainty."

Kenneth Corbin is a staff writer for InternetNews.com and is based in Washington, D.C.