Rule's Roost: September 2009

By PAUL RULE
President, MARQUEST M&E RESEARCH

Having given away the store on their websites, newspapers are talking about going back behind a pay wall. It didn’t work before, so, of course, it will work this time.

Few seem to be discussing the broader picture of how the internet has changed the way people use newspapers. It’s more than simply substituting electronic delivery for the carrier throwing the paper through your rose bushes.

Except for a handful of news and political junkies, consumers of print newspapers read no more than one or two papers a day. So far, nearly all pay models seem to assume that internet users follow this same pattern. They just want their daily New York Times or Washington Post fix, and now they get it for free without paying that annoying subscription fee. Force them to pony up and they will. Well some will, but many won’t because of a changed usage pattern.

Henry Ford did more than build lots of cheap cars for people. He freed them from having to go downtown on the trolley company’s schedule. The internet frees me from having to rely on one or two newspapers, regardless of how good they may be. I can read a columnist I like in the L.A. Times, catch an editorial cartoon in another paper and a backgrounder on energy policy in a third. I’ll be happy to pay a reasonable rate for the news and features I read, as long as I can read them from whatever publication strikes my fancy today. Tomorrow I might want to sample a different one. News grazing might be a good term for it.

Maybe the club model would work. Many of us have belonged to gyms or clubs where our membership entitles us to privileges at associated facilities in other cities. So let’s say I subscribe for internet access to The Boston Globe, paying about what I would pay for a print subscription. But my subscription also gives me access to the Web content of The New York Times, the Journal-Constitution from Atlanta, the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other papers across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other parts of the world who are members of a subscription co-op.

Now that I would pay for. But I don’t want to be limited to one or two online newspapers just to avoid a hunk of dead tree being thrown through my rose bushes. C’mon publishers, you can figure out how to do this. BMI, ASCAP and SESAC collect fees for music rights owners from thousands of radio and TV stations and other venues, and they started long before the invention of modern computer-based accounting systems. Find a way to shift the money around, and I’ll be happy to pay for my news nibbling.

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