NYT "Deadly Serious" re: Paid Content? Prove it.

Among the (literally) thousands of connversations I have had with media colleagues about how to induce people to pay for online content, one in particular stands out. It was with John Markoff, then and now one of the most talented reporters at The New York Times, way back in the fall of 1995.

I was a newbie to the web at that time, looking for tips. John said he was excited at the prospect of being able to read all the newspapers he wanted early each morning on his laptop before he even left for the office. I was helping David Talbot and his tiny intrepid band of newspaper expats launch a web-based weekly, Salon Magazine (now Salon.com) that fall, so we discussed how such a venture could succeed if it didn't charge a subscription fee.

John said he envisioned the emergence of a system of micro-payments, whereby surfers would be charged a small fee (under a dollar) for access to the work by writers they wanted to read. Over the ensuing years, however, as I proceeded to work at one online content company after another, no such system came into being.

When iTunes exploded, establishing the business model of the 99-cent download, many of us tried to adopt a similar model for the content we were aggregating at companies like MyWire. No luck. Whatever its merits, a well-crafted article does not loosen one's purse strings as does, say, a song like "Kids" by MGMT.
Which brings me to today's headline that The New York Times is once again considering how it might charge for content. (How's that for burying the lead?) We have been around and around on this topic for well over a dozen years now, and only the Wall Street Journal seems to have been able to pull off a successful model of the dreaded paywall that causes most users to hit the back button faster than a New York second.

I read the report in Editor & Publisher right after it posted early this morning, hoping for some new ideas, but there simply was nothing there. Which is precisely why I buried my lead today. This is, in my view, just an empty headline without a story. I like John Markoff's old vision much better than Executive Editor Bill Keller's, although the latter's quote that these are "deadly serious" deliberations was a nice touch.

Because it's quite apparent that unless we, as an industry, collectively figure out how to charge for our work, we will soon be burying not just our leads but our companies as well.