Newspapers experiment with charging for premium content
Two news items about our business from last week:
- Circulation is down. Big-time. Average weekday circulation has dropped nearly 11 percent, the sharpest decline in years. And the big guys are hurting the most: Nearly two-thirds of the 25 largest papers in the U.S. posted circulation declines of 10 percent or more.
- Despite the drop in circulation, or maybe because of it, the buzz in corporate offices is still about how to charge for content. More publishers, it seems, are determined to make news consumers pay for what they've been getting up to now for free. But despite the conversation about the need for pay walls, and no lack of proposals about how to make them work, publishers realize that erecting pay walls only drives away readers.
About the only pay-wall ideas with traction now are the ones that involve charging not for the basic news content of the paper, but for supplemental content.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, for instance, has a free site but charges $19.95 a year for premium coverage of the Minnesota Vikings — a plan similar the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Packer Insider coverage.
The Wall Street Journal Online uses a model now being talked about in Texas newsrooms — offering some free content, but only teasing a lot of major pieces, which will require a subscription. The magazine Consumer Reports uses much the same approach.
The issues here, of course, are that these are highly specialized media. WSJ is the last word in business and financial coverage, and CR is best known for its product reviews. Neither — at least of that quality and reputation — is available free on the Web and gathered in one site.
Some newspapers have even offered up as a model iTunes, which lets the consumer pay for individual music downloads. Newspapers, some publishers say, could offer news downloads in the same way. Of course, downloaded music can be played again and again, and you don't typically see news and opinion being read over and over.
And perhaps the Internet's best example of pay-for-specialized-content is the one type of content that (until social media came along) was most prevalent online: pornography. But even with porn, you can now get pretty much all the smut you want for free, and profits for purveyors of porn have plummeted. [Sorry; some alliterations are just too good to pass up.]
Lauren Fine, research director for ContentNext Media, believes that newspapers are going to have to realize that they cannot charge for most types of news:
"[Newspapers] have to think a little more creatively about what people will pay for, what they find of value, but core news in and of itself still feels like there's so much available that it will be hard to get people to pay," Fine said.
The analyst believes newspapers are going to have to think out of the box to come up with the types of content people will pay for on their Web sites:
"If I'm a local newspaper, maybe I can't get you to pay for the content, but I could create a real estate service that says you're going to be one of 25 people who receive the first alert that a new home is available," she said.
The real question, of course, is what kind of content the reader will be willing to pay for. One blogger put it like this in a series of questions we must all eventually ask ourselves: "What value are you providing that makes it worth paying you? That's the question I keep asking. Newspaper folks seem to think that their content is magically so valuable that everyone will start paying if they charge. There's no evidence that's true at all. So what value are they adding beyond all the other content out there that makes it worth actually paying for?"
That's the dilemma. The staff of the Center is following this issue, so you keep following the blogs and Around the Web features here, and we'll report the newest trends and experiments in ways to charge for premium content.
About the author
Bio
Tommy Thomason, the founding director of the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism, has left that position to become the founding director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism. Thomason began his career in journalism in the early 1970s with the Associated Press, working as a sportswriter in Arkadelphia and Little Rock, Ark. He has also worked in public relations in Dallas and as a copyeditor for several regional magazines.
Dr. Thomason has taught journalism at five universities and has been at TCU since 1984. In 1987, he was one of the winners of a national Teaching Award in Journalism Ethics from the Poynter Institute of Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.
He has been one of the nation's most active researchers on the media's treatment of crime victims. His research has been presented at both regional and national symposia and has cited in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, Presstime and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Dr. Thomason was co-director of the first national symposium on crime victims and the news media, which was televised nationally on C-SPAN, and a symposium on coverage of sex crimes, Sex in the Media: The Public's Right to Know vs. the Victim's Right to Privacy.
He maintains an interest in writing at all academic levels, and frequently speaks to elementary school teachers about writing workshops for children. He is the author of More than a Writing Teacher: How to Become a Teacher Who Writes, Writer to Writer: How to Conference Young Authors, Write On Target: How to Prepare Young Writers for Success on Writing Achievement Tests, Absolutely Write: Teaching the Craft Elements of Writing and Writeaerobics: 40 Exercises to Improve Your Writing Teaching. A new book, Tools, not Rules: Teaching Grammar in the Writing Classroom, is scheduled for publication in 2009.
He is listed in Who's Who in the South and Southwest, Who's Who in American Education, Men of Achievement, Who's Who in the World and Dictionary of International Biography.
