I have been following, albeit not closely enough, the trials and travails of the newspaper industry. From general complaints by the industry that the web is challenging it unfairly, to newspapers both cutting staff and shutting down (even when they have been long established), to the Associated Press's decision to try to "wrap up" its content to prevent its use for free on the Web, there is a general consensus that something is going to happen to/with newspapers, and possibly soon.
What will happen? No one really knows, but it seems likely that they will either find a way to adjust to today's marketplace, or they will die. Both options seem to involve some overall losses: if they find a way to monetize their content, it seems likely that discussion and discourse on the 'Net will suffer in some way; if they shut down, we're not sure who will take on the tough issues of the day, the ones that involve correspondents in foreign places, or long-term, methodical investigations of corruption, or favoritism, or unfairness (side note: David McCraw, NY Times Co. VP and Assistant General Counsel, will be taking up this very issue in a talk entitled, "Friend or Foe? The Law of Intellectual Property and Mainstream Media’s Fight for Survival" on Monday, October 19th at noon at Michigan State University's College of Law; e-mail me for more details).
Into this potential abyss steps Google, which licenses some content for its Google News service (for example, from the AP), but generally relies on fair use (so it has played both sides of the payment game). Google has proposed a "micropayments" system for newspapers. According to Zachary Seward at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard:
In the document . . . Google outlines its “vision of a premium content ecosystem” that includes subscriptions across multiple news sites, syndication on third-party sites, accessibility to search, and various payment options, including small fees for access to individual pieces of content (known as micropayments).
The Journalism Lab provides a link to a hosted copy of Google's submission to the Newspaper Association of America (ComputerWorld also has a report, but its link to the Google document on the NAA site document doesn't work). This is an interesting submission because so far micropayments -- small, incremental payments -- have not been an entirely successful general (ie, non-entity specific) business model for monitizing content on the Web. Instead, what we have are systems that work for some businesses -- Apple's iTunes store is often touted as an example -- where large amounts of money are made, but of course Microsoft or Napster don't have recourse to that store. If newspapers as a genre are to succeed, they will need something that is more generally accepted, so that competition can flourish between individual papers as well as between newspapers as an industry and other media outlets (such as blogs and web pages). A system that is built for the NYTimes (or the Wall Street Journal, which keeps a lot of its content behind a pay wall) will not work for the Lansing State Journal or the Indianapolis Star (to give but two examples).
For example, if I am simply browsing the Web and come across an article in the Indianapolis Star, I am unlikely to want to enter all of my billing data to read that one article, even if the article is priced as a "micro-payment" (which seems to include prices of $1.00 or $2.00, though I tend to think of micropayments in terms of cents, not dollars). Nor am I likely to want to buy an ongoing subscription to the Star simply for this one article. What do I do? I spend my time, instead of my money, trying to locate the article elsewhere. Part of what Google is thinking about would cover this scenario, at least in theory. That is, I would log in once to Google's service, and when I came to a page covered by its service with content that I want, I would simply click through and Google would bill me and pay the source. Transaction costs are thus greatly reduced. Google would also be offering to create potential "packages" of premium online content (say, the top ten newspapers, though this would appear to allow room for an ala carte menu, as well, if the details could be worked out). I would expect other packages to be offered, as well (say, buy any ten newspaper articles, or access for one day or ten days to the whole of the available sources).
Whether the newspapers are willing to work with Google on this is another story, but it at least proposes one way that newspapers might be able to recoup some of their costs for developing and publishing the news. That said, even Google doesn't think that most content will be licensed in this way (Seward notes that in its filing with the NAA, "Google douses some cold water on micropayments for news: “We do not believe it will be the norm for accessing content.”" That is, most content will not be purchased, even for micropayments). But it's still worth thinking about, even if it won't solve all the newspapers' woes.
via slashdot
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