Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian, was the keynote speaker this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism. (The study is entitled “How will journalism survive the internet age?” Round 1 was held in December; transcripts and other material are linked here — scroll down. Not to be outdone, [...]

The Washington Post caused a bit of a stir yesterday when it announced a $1.99-a-year iPhone app. The choice was interesting both because it offered time-limited access to content and because of the low price point — at a time when other newspaper execs are apparently debating prices more than 100 times greater. As our friend [...]

ProPublica invites publishers to “Steal Our Stories.” John Thornton, founder of The Texas Tribune, asked newspapers to pay for stories, but concluded the effort was hopeless. But another new nonprofit news organization, California Watch, the Sacramento-based reporting initiative to be launched next month by the Center for Investigative Reporting, is barreling full speed into the [...]

No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of [...]

Kevin Kelly pointed a few days ago to this essay by Dan Cook, a designer of online Flash games, on how game designers can make money. As Kevin points out, there’s an awful lot of stuff in Dan’s essay that could be applied to other creative fields where a limited professional class is facing enormous [...]

We all know that The New York Times and other papers have been thinking hard about finding ways to charge readers for the news on their web sites, and there’s evidence that the decision-making process is moving along. Bloomberg has reported that a survey of print subscribers included this sentence:
The New York Times website, nytimes.com, [...]

Despite the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, wasn’t released until this week, it has still managed to generate much pre-publication discussion about the future of the digital economy. Anderson found himself enmeshed in a pre-publication plagiarism scandal two weeks ago when the Virginia Quarterly Review [...]

CircLabs, the hard-to-describe startup that aims to create new revenue streams for news sites, has detailed a little more about its plans. And Martin Langeveld, who’s involved in the project, has written more about it too. (You know Martin from his writings here.) Their initial product, Circulate, seems to be a browser plugin that tracks [...]

The Newport Daily News kept waiting for someone else to figure out how to make money giving away news online. But with no obvious solution in sight, its leaders have decided to try an answer of their own: charging for access to the news.
Lots of newspapers are considering similar options. What makes Newport different is [...]

At the Chicago meeting last week of top newspaper execs to talk about paid content, they heard from several entrepreneurs who are proposing new ways for papers to generate revenue online. Zach wrote yesterday about Steve Brill’s pitch; you’ll hear about a few more here in the coming days.
For the meeting, the American Press Institute [...]

Publishers Lunch is a daily pay newsletter for the book publishing industry. (Speaking of business models, here’s one: Find a niche; create great content that serves that niche; hide it behind a pay wall and charge. I pay $20 a month for that daily email, and I don’t even expense it to my employers! There [...]

Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, doesn’t believe the canard that only financial news outlets can charge for content on the Internet. He concedes that the Journal has a built-in advantage — its audience reads the newspaper for business and profit — but in an interview this weekend, Murray told me, [...]

I gave a talk to a high school in Toledo on Friday, which gave me a chance to do some ad hoc focus-grouping of how teenagers engage with media. (To put the demographics in perspective, this is a private school that, beyond some scholarship kids, is mostly upper-middle class and up.) We covered a lot [...]

Steve Outing adds another angle to the ongoing debate about paid content with a discussion of an upcoming service with the unfortunately Dot-bomb-era name of Kachingle.
Basically Kachingle is a voluntary, centralized system that allows users to support the online publications they like. It’s compared in the article as an NPR-style donation system for publishers, but [...]

Given the recent secret memos and TIME cover stories, the topic of “paid content” has once again grabbed the spotlight, offering at least a slim hope of revenue redemption to some newspaper people — largely on the print side, but with some notable digital advocates as well.
For those of us who went down these paths [...]