Can newspapers charge for the online versions of their work?

Today's topic: There's a lot of discussion right now about newspapers charging readers for their content online. Is this a workable model for a medium in which content cannot be made scarce?

Point: Jeff Jarvis

No.

How's that for a direct answer? Every rule has its exceptions -- this one only a few: The Wall Street Journal (paid by expense accounts), Consumer Reports (which serves reviews, not news), iTunes (we may play a unique performance over and over, but I don't read even my articles more than once) and porn (which is suffering the same problem newspapers are thanks to free competition from, uh, amateurs). But the rule of the new, post-scarcity economy is clear: Charging for news online is dangerous folly. Why? Let me count the reasons if not the dollars:

Once news is known, that knowledge is a commodity and it doesn't matter who first reported it. There's no fencing off information, especially today, when the conversation that spreads it moves at the speed of links.

There will be no limit to competitors. Readers, like water, will follow the path of least inconvenience. It's impossible to compete against free. Have papers learned nothing from Craigslist?

In the old-content economy, one could make much money selling many copies of a product. In today's link economy online, we need only one copy, and it is the links to it that give it value. So rather than complaining that Google should pay them for aggregating their headlines, news organizations should be grateful that Google does not charge for the links it gives and the readers it sends. Indeed, we should be spending our effort figuring out how to get more links to original reporting to support it.

Putting your content behind a wall cuts it off from the conversation and robs it of influence. Just ask New York Times columnists how much they disliked the pay wall the paper finally demolished.

The conversation is how ideas and information are dispersed. That's why the Guardian (where I write) just took a radically different path from charging, opening all its content to outside developers in an application programming interface, so its stories will be read all around the Internet, not just on the Guardian's site. This is the new home delivery. News must go to where the readers are. As a college student said not long ago in the New York Times, "If the news is important enough, it will find me." How can our news find readers?

Charging money costs money. We know in the magazine business that it is terribly expensive to acquire subscribers, and most U.S. magazines -- like newspapers -- reach profitability only through advertising.

Charging radically reduces the audience for news stories and thus the ad revenue from them. When the New York Times took down its pay wall, its traffic soared and so did its opportunities to serve and sell ads. Micropayments and subscriptions would, I predict, bring in too little money to support news operations, and I'll bet that they would bring in less money than the advertising revenue they kill.

Perhaps most important, putting content behind a pay wall robs it of precious Google juice. Even if Google can search it, the hidden content will not attract as many of the links and clicks that Google's search watches and values. In American newspapers' sites, as few as 20% of users in a day come through the home page; most come to news via search and links from aggregators, bloggers, feeds and Facebook. Cutting yourself off from that rich economy of search and links is like taking your publication off the newsstand and making your readers walk to your office to buy it.

With due respect, you asked the wrong question. You should have asked how news can benefit from new business models in the post-scarcity, link economy, Google reality. How can news organizations find new efficiencies by working in collaborative networks and by doing what they do best and linking to the rest? How can news go with the flow of a new economy rather than trying to preserve the artifacts of an old one?

Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do?," teaches journalism at the City University of New York and writes about news and media on his blog, Buzzmachine.com, and as a columnist for the Guardian.


Counterpoint: Alan D. Mutter

After years of giving everything away for free on the Web, it admittedly won't be easy for publishers to start charging for at least some of the content they spend small fortunes to produce.

But there is no other choice for them -- or for consumers who want to be properly informed. If the news media don't start getting paid for at least a portion of what they produce, some outlets simply aren't going to be around to provide it. It's already too late to save such papers as the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

So, free is not a business model that will support journalism produced by professional news organizations. Because I have no faith in the blogosphere to replace the vital work of the professional (though admittedly flawed) press, I sincerely hope the traditional media will put a major effort into finding ways to get paid for at least a portion of the valuable content they produce.