I haven’t blogged much about my first, short-lived career reporting the news. I didn’t work as a daily news reporter for too long (couple of years) and it wasn’t much more than a speed bump on the way to the stuff I do today. But I’ve always been passionate (more like obsessive) about knowing what’s going on in the world, and in college I was lucky enough to have worked with and been influenced by some of the greatest college reporters anywhere.
Now that I work for a company that has a decent-sized presence in online news delivery (if not actual reportage), I am very excited to let the frustrated reporter inside of me out, just a little bit.
There was a story in last week’s New York Times about how, supposedly, lots of terrestrial newspapers are considering going to a paid-subscription model because the internet is stealing so much of their readership. Attention: there is only one newspaper that has anything close to a viable paid subscription model today, and unlike most newspapers, it has no real competition. Put it this way: Just because you’ve charged customers $0.25 a copy for your dead-tree paper for the last 50 years and the Wall Street Journal can get away with charging people (including me) online, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Tallahassee Democrat will ever be able to.
All this combines one of my big obsessions, the news, with one of my other big obsessions, which is the way that new businesses disrupt old businesses. Today there was a story on the AP wire about how the AP will, for the first time, charge additional licensing fees to Internet-based news outlets to publish its stories. They didn’t say how much more they’re going to charge, but they said they’ll offset the charge by reducing its annual across-the-board fee increase (which has roughly tracked the rate of inflation for the past decade). So this leaves me wondering…exactly who is this fee increase really targeted at? Is it intended to make their pricing more equitable or preserve the old model? (Remember that AP’s a non-profit co-op, so the phrase "money-grubbing weasels" cannot be a part of your answer.)
For bonus points: Guess which of the news outlets I linked to above interviewed me for a job in 1992?
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I agree — especially the greatest college reporters part.
The WSJ does have some competition though — Bloomberg, which charges for most of its content, the FT, which I think still charges, and Reuters, which is already charges for most of its financial content, and is considering charging for more online content.
I agree that papers like the Santa Barbara News Press and Bakersfield Californian are just never going to get away with charging for online content – maybe to get to the archives, but not for the daily content.
What I’d like to see is the online ad rates rise to a rate that makes it unnecessary for readers to pay. Though I don’t know enough about the ad side to know if that’s viable.
I think online ad rates rising would be an excellent idea as well. (Ms. Langfield, your five-spot is in the mail.)
Is the Bloomberg offering really competitive with wsj.com? I thought Bloomberg was more real-time, like you pay them $2,000 a month and they plop a terminal on your desk. Do they have a price point for online content that’s competitive with the $80ish a year that the WSJ charges?
Reuters is an interesting case, too, because they syndicate content over the wire like the AP.
I don’t think Bberg has a service that competes with WSJ Online — though they go head to head via WSJ/Dow Jones (and Reuters) … which is in some ways is the same big reporting machine. … It’s a bit of apple and oranges but important eventually in how they’re able to sell part of their product via the Internet to people who don’t work at Morgan or Fleet or BofA.