Secret meetings and paywalls

Over at the Huffington Post,James Warren breaks the news of a secret meeting in Chicago with various media organisations.

The subject apparently is how to get people to pay for content.

"Models to Monetize Content" is the subject of a gathering at a hotel

he reports adding that

There's no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all.

A broadband license-he's nicked my idea

What do people think of Peter Preston's idea in the Observer this morning?

He proposes that there should be a broadband license to fund journalism.

When I read this,I thought that gosh he has pinched my idea.

This was one of the ideas that came out of the "radio show" that we put together at Uclan last month on the theme of who will pay for journalism.

My view was that one of the few organisations to have made monety out of Web 2.0 are the internet providers.So why should they not pay for the capacity that they use.

Preston doesn't agree necessarily that the providers should pay.Instead he says

If you have a broadband link - the fundamental enabler - you pay for it with a licence fee. Your internet provider already debits directly away: add a modest extra sum - perhaps £1 a week - to that deduction as the cost of public service information on the net. Much of the BBC's own £145m web budget would then come from this pot. The providers take a share for collection and for investing in super-fast broadband. Then the £500m or more that's left goes to help pay for the most threatened public service: the news.

The easy way to make money-make the content valuable

What is the best way to charge for online content? Simple make it so valuable that people want to pay for it.

In the latest contribution to the paywall,micropayment etc etc debate,Gordon Crowvitz writes that

People are happy to pay for news and information however it's delivered, but only if it has real, differentiated value. Traders must have their Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters terminal. Lawyers wouldn't go to court without accessing the Lexis or West online service.

Simple until someone sets up the same operation and gives it away for free.

Ht-Martin Stabe

How the New York Times could profit for selling online for $1 a month

Over at Poynter Online, Jim Romenesko is looking at the business model for the New York Times a paper which he describes as

daily miracle of fresh, smart, crucially important content.

which is worth saving beacause

saving it can become a model for saving other quality journalism.

And now he adds

the Times has done so much so well to build its online offerings it's time to turn the dynamics around -- by getting paid for that content, while using the Internet to eliminate the huge costs of producing and delivering it. The Internet should be a publisher's dream, not nightmare.

So here is the model

Charge its 20m unique monthly visitors a $1 a month which would produce $240m in new annual income.

Of course it misses a point that a payroll not matter how samll would probably turn away many of those unique visitors but he gets around this by planning the following

1.To help preserve the Times' search results, the headline and first paragraph of each article will appear online (and on mobile and other electronic devices) for free.

2.All online articles will cost 10 cents each to read in full, with simple, one-step purchases powered by an I-Tunes-like Journalism infrastructure.

Would it work.Well read the full content for a more detailed explaination but I wonder how much a paywall would put the barriers up for the general browser.

Nevertheless an interesting proposition?

NYT considers a pay wall.

That is according to the comments of Executive Editor Bill Keller as reported by the Huffington Post.

In an online question-and-answer exchange with readers this week, Keller said that although advertising generates the bulk of online revenue, "a lively, deadly serious discussion continues within The Times about ways to get consumers to pay for what we make."

adding that

Possibility include charging for full-access subscriptions, developing a micro-payment model in which readers pay a few pennies each time they click on a page and selling news to be distributed on reading devices, as the Times already does with Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle.