Paying for Online News...or not?

In today's tough economic times many businesses are trying to figure out the best way to still make a profit.  Newspapers are not an exception to this, rather they are actually at the center of this very issue.  Readership of print papers is going down as more and more people are getting their news online.  So the question has arisen: Should newspapers charge people to read their paper online?

WHAT TIME IS SAYING

Walter Isaacson of Time recently released an article called How to Save Your Newspaper that was in favor of creating a system in which online news sites would charge readers to view their content.  Isaacson argued that if print newspapers continue their downward trend, and online newspapers continue not charging, eventually no one will be able to put out news.  In the current online business model all revenue comes from ad sales.  But since ad sales are currently on the decline, newspapers are making less money.  

According to Isaacson's argument, news should be treated as something of value.  If people are not making any money from writing news, no one will be inclined to make news of value in the first place.  He ultimately is championing a pay as you go system that would charge readers a small fee (five or ten cents) each time they read something news online.   

WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES THINKS

In contrast to Isaacson's view Michael Kinsley of The New York Times thinks that paying for online news is something that should not and cannot feasibly be done.  In his article You Can't Sell News by the Slice he surprises support for this argument by referencing a time when Microsoft charged $19 for a years subscription to Slate, their online magazine.  They even offered a free umbrella when readers signed up.  But this idea failed after only about a year and the idea of charging for content was dropped.  

Kinsley makes an even more compelling argument when he points out that readers have never really paid for content in the first place.  They were actually paying for the paper the news was printed on, not the words themselves.  He even says that newspapers were actually giving away about a dollars worth of free paper to readers every week.  So, if they got people to read the content without paper, it should theoretically be a good thing.  

Finally he argues that even if newspapers were able to get around two dollars a month from readers like Isaacson thinks is possible, this would not compare to the revenue that papers get from advertisements now and that really it would not be enough to save newspapers in the first place.  

To Pay or Not to Pay?

As a journalism student I have heard plenty about how newspapers are dying and how online is the way of the future, although I feel this fact is probably obvious to most people, not just those studying the field.  As a news reader, I feel that this is a great thing.  I love the convenience of being able to check the LA Times whenever I feel like it.  I don't have to lug around a newspaper in order to be able to check the day's stories in my spare moments, rather I simply click the icon on my Blackberry and any story I want is at my fingertips.  Online news has made me  a much more avid news reader.

That being said, I don't know that I would feel the same if I knew that every time I clicked a headline, I was being charged five or ten cents.  In my opinion, this would drastically alter the news people look at.  With online news free as it is now, I constantly read stories that I do not know if I have an interest in or not.  I have learned a lot of interesting things this way.  However, I feel that I would be far less likely to click on a story that I didn't think I would necessarily be interested in, because I wouldn't want to get charged if I decided I no longer wanted to read past the first page.  

Beyond the fact that people may not read as much news if they had to pay for it, I think it would be extremely hard to get people to want to start paying for things that they had been getting for free for a long time.  Do people actually want the content enough to pay for it?  This is a question that Susan Mernit also asks on her blog for the Huffington Post.

She points out that people aren't as concerned about getting their information from a "brand" source.  Many people are actually getting their news from individual sources and blogs and it is unlikely that all these sources would also start charging.  Basically, it is unlikely that people would pay just to get news from a brand name source when they could get the information elsewhere for free.

While I understand newspaper's dilemma, I personally feel that starting to charge now is not the way to go.  While it may seem like a solution to the decline in paper newspaper sales, I think this is short-sided thinking.  Ultimately, I think that instead of trying to replace the money lost from paper subscriptions with money from online subscriptions, newspaper companies should instead look for a new way to make a profit.