Two cents to save the biz

As the news content industry stutters and stumbles, all the journalism veterans seem eager to contribute their two cents toward a financial solution. If only those cents could be deposited into the San Francisco Chronicle’s bank account, the Bay Area might not be facing the reality of a massive hole where their news coverage used to be. Unfortunately, the currency of opinion doesn’t pay the bills—not lately at least.

Walter Isaacson, a former editor at Time Magazine, seems to think the newspaper industry would be better off if they could find a way to charge for their content, if only in small amounts. These small charges, called micropayments, would be deducted from readers’ bank accounts through services like PayPal at a rate of something like five or ten cents per article. With time and volume, Isaacson argues, the payments would add up to an amount that could potentially save newspapers from their demise.

Isaacson’s philosophy stems from the idea that making news content free on the web was a mistake in the first place. By relieving the reader of any cost, the onus of keeping news businesses afloat falls completely on the advertiser. Along with making newspapers less profitable, this model makes America’s largest content producers indebted to Fortune 500 companies rather than readers, that is, if they even continue to buy ads.

The solution, then, according to Isaacson, is to break the financial dependence on advertisers and start charging readers small amounts for the content they read. Surely such a shift in the model would shake things up enough to give the newspaper a fighting chance. Or would it? Michael Kinsley, the founder and editor of Slate Magazine disagrees. In response to Isaacson’s call for micropayments by readers, Kinsley claims that asking readers to pay for their web content is absurd. Citing past attempt to coax readers into shelling out, Kinsley makes the argument that the internet, as is currently function, does not lend itself to Isaacson’s model, and that any future attempt to cash in on readers is futile. He makes this rather compelling argument by explaining that, contrary to popular understanding, readers have never really paid for their content.

Even before the rise of the internet, readers really only paid for the newsprint and the ink used to produce the paper, never the reporting or the writing. Given that, Kinsley says, creating new model contingent upon readers opening their coffers is nothing more than a fool’s errand.

So where does that leave us? One wise editor suggests a solution to the catastrophic financial problem, and another equally wise editor shoots it down. It seems to me that, for all the years of journalistic experience invested in this argument, the only thing these veterans have accomplished is canceling each other out. Isaacson makes a valid point. The ideas and concepts that constantly improve our content viewing experience are too great not to be paid for. As a reader, I should be paying money for the work reporters have done to make their content available. That all seems to make sense within the age-old American capitalist mold.

The problem is that the web was never designed to accommodate for this type of business. Call it a lack of foresight, but instituting systems of payment for every available news article would drastically retard a medium whose primary appeal is its convenience. Issacson’s method seems plausible in theory, but as Kinsley points out, people would never go for it. They have already become accustomed to viewing news content in a certain way, and with a certain freedom. T

hey have been spoiled at the expense of the journalism industry. But that doesn’t mean that Kinsley has the answer either. In fact, Kinsley doesn’t have any answer. Not to bring politics into this debate, but it makes sense that Mr. Kinsley works for Slate (a conservative-leaning publication) as he publishes columns discrediting the ideas of others, offering no new ideas of his own. Kinsley seems to think that if we just leave the industry alone, and let hundreds of imperiled local papers die, the industry will become competitive again, if only for a handful of survivors. This cannot stand as the default course of action.

The economic theories of Ayn Rand and Newt Gingrich have been discredited repeatedly, and they need not factor into the downfall of yet another sector of American industry. Micropayments may not be the answer. In fact, they probably aren’t. The media industry has always found new ways to make advertising profitable enough to sustain its business. Soon, as the country moves out of recession, internet advertisements will become more valuable. Companies will begin to realize that online readers are worth as much as print readers. Until then, the benevolent wealthy should be employed. If keeping newspapers afloat requires endowment, fine. Donation? Great. The short term goal should be pumping money into these organizations in any way possible.