It's amazing to see just how thoroughly the newspaper industry's attitude toward charging for content online has changed since Farhi's article in 2008. In that piece, he has to preface the idea of charging for news with the description that the guy in favor of it "sounds like a man from another century." It just wasn't something that could be proposed without invoking eyerolls.
Today, just less than four years later, it's gone from almost unspeakable to the default strategy for major metro newspapers in the U.S. Reading between the lines, it seems as though newspaper publishers bought the idea that the future was online (which is true, at least in part), and responded by jumping onto the free-web philosophy full-bore, without putting much thought into how they were going to make money off of it. It took most of them a few years, but they've all realized that the business model just isn't there yet (and that's a key word), and they have to do something to make it feasible financially.
So I think what we're seeing now could be the best of both worlds -- an approach to the web that's aggressive about finding genuinely innovative ways to inform and engage audiences, along with a realism about what it takes financially to sustain that kind of quality, and an approach (charging for online news) that matches that realism -- all without walling themselves off from the web. As much as paid content's critics might call it a retrenchment, it does seem like a way forward, at least for the time being.
No comments:
Post a Comment