And Murdoch thinks I’m going to be willing to pay to read AP reports, or his equivalent? No way.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346956,00.asp

Brief extract:
“…newspapers actually do get their act together, convince Congress to loosen monopoly laws, and then work in concert to create a fixed online menu of content prices. With all this once-free content behind a pay gate, one would assume that smaller news sites and blogs—even citizen journalists—would fill the free gap. Not so fast. The safety nets provided by companies with deep pockets and the patience to let a platform build its revenue base are no more…”

The power player is the internet. Newspapers can’t force the internet to do anything.

On the other hand what would happen if all the newspapers would create a consortium and sell subscriptions jointly?

It could be a bit like a cable TV bundle where, instead of a bundle of film channels to be watched on TV, we would have a bundle of online newspapers to be read on the web.
This consortium could also negotiate special deals directly with the internet service providers, shutting off those ISPs which do not accept the model.
ISPs could embrace the model because it could bring them additional revenues, since they could be the prime sales channel of the subscriptions and keep a share of the transactions.
It is probably a crazy idea (very very difficult to implement), but I would like to hear some comments about it.

Wouldn’t it make much more sense to create new varieties of niche-y stuff, then put that behind the pay wall?

Wouldn’t that totally shake up this Etch-a-Sketch?

But know that in a recession the revenues are probably even lower, and people cut subscriptions, newspaper, magazine, online, as one of their first cutbacks. Just for future notice.

It’s true that lots of old-media journalists are curmudgeons who begrudge the changes that have come to the industry; but it’s also true that there are ideologues on the other side for whom any form of payment is out of the question. It’s a new age – let’s experiment and see what works in a fact-based way.

Revenue models are only one piece of the equation, of course. We also have to look at new structures and cost structures for newsrooms – even blowing up the entire idea of newsrooms, perhaps. New revenue models may not support entire newspapers, but why should they? Newspaper newsrooms are built a certain way to produce a certain product. New online newsrooms needn’t follow that model.

Likewise, new newsrooms will likely use new techniques and tools for both news gathering – crowdsourcing, data analysis, etc – and for story-telling – beyond slideshows and videos to interactive databases and topics pages.

Not to mention new ways of thinking about the meaning of “news” – not as something that happened yesterday, but as content that addresses issues and questions people have, whenever they’re interested in the topic. That speaks to better taxonomy of information, search and archive capability, and potentially re-aggregating older stories into newer ones.

Presumably some or all of these things could lead to something sustainable – whether through some combination of lower newsroom costs, subscription fees, advertising revenue, philanthropy, or something else we haven’t yet imagined.

It’s a brave new world, and a pretty exciting one in some respects. But I’ll echo Working Reporter above: Naysayers need not apply.

My thinking was, “I’ve been thinking about doing that anyone. It is interesting to get their viewpoint – which I often disagree with – becuase what they say does become the common market “wisdom”, so what the heck..” and I subscribed for the year.

Just to point out that the “purchasing decision’ is much more complicated than what is the money cost of reading on line vs the cost of the paper in print.

Right now, when the New York Times and Washington Post are free online, I’ve got no reason to pay for the Wall Street Journal. But if all three of them start charging, suddenly I’m going to have to consider paying for one of them.

Would that possibly boost the retention levels in your analysis?

Put another way, right now, I can read all the local news I want online free, making the print product look ridiculously overpriced. But if every local news source were to start charging, and that long-rumored day when all the blogs that merely recycle and scrape content go starving, wouldn’t I be inclined to cough up a few microcents to get the news I need?

Or do we assume that readers have permanently affixed a value of “free” to professional journalism, and the laws of supply and demand teach us there is no way we will ever get around that?