Newspapers: Will Web readers pay for news?

With newspapers teetering on the brink, said Walter Isaacson in Time, it’s time for a “bold, old idea”: charging customers for the journalism they consume. Newspapers have been losing readership for years, but in a very real sense, they “have more readers than ever.” Readers, especially younger ones, are flocking to papers’ websites, where “news organizations are merrily giving away their news.” The New York Times has a weekday print circulation of about 1 million, for instance, while its website attracts 20 million nonpaying users a month. As a “business model,” this is madness. I believe the answer lies in some kind of “micropayments” system—similar to how consumers buy songs on iTunes—that permits “impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog, or video for a penny, nickel, dime, or whatever the creator chooses to charge.” For great newspapers to survive, there is simply no alternative.

As the founding editor of Slate.com, said Michael Kinsley in The New York Times, I, too, once dreamed of charging for online journalism. But as we quickly discovered, few online readers will pay for content, since the Web offers a nearly limitless array of free alternatives. Even in the unlikely event that these readers can be coaxed to pay $2 a month, the Isaacson proposal won’t cure what ails papers like the Times, since it would hardly generate enough income to replace the Times’ current subscription and advertising revenue (most of it from print), which currently exceeds $1 billion. “The harsh truth is that the typical American newspaper is an anachronism,” and in a few years, as circulation and advertising revenue continue to drop, only a few newspapers will be left.

So where, then, will we get our news? asked Gary Kamiya in Salon.com. At least 80 percent of all “news” you can find for free on the Web originated at a newspaper. Reporters dig out this news by talking to a wide variety of “real people,” while striving for balance and objectivity; editors then scrutinize their stories for fairness and accuracy. That process is “imperfect,” to be sure, but imagine getting all your information about, say, Gaza or the federal stimulus package from highly opinionated bloggers who ignore all information that contradicts their bias. In that impending future, the populace will be divided into segments of smug but ignorant certainty, and “the very idea of objective reality” will join newspapers in the dustbin of history.

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