Congress is now focusing on the future of newspapers. Here is a radical thought: stop thinking of newspapers as something on paper, at least as a daily news device. You want to money again? Start charging for your internet content. The Wall St Journal seems to have it right, giving away dome content for free online, or a the first few paragraphs of an article, and then charging for the full content. Right now I pay roughly $10 a month to read the WSJ electronically, which is considerably less than I would pay if I bought the physical paper each day. There is no reason why other papers, such as the NY Times, couldn’t do something similar.
Yes putting the free news all the time genie back in the bottle may be hard but there is no reason it needs to be painful. Smaller newspapers could combine efforts, perhaps charge a more nominal fee for access to many papers owned by the same parent. Or, at the same time, any newspaper could make their physical weekend papers more attractive to advertisers by allowing weekend subscribers, who probably pay more than $10 a month, full access to the newspaper's web site at no additional cost. Perhaps a publisher would limit some of what appears in print, such as a magazine article, from the website for a day to encourage online only readers to subscribe to the hard copy? Under this plan the newspaper could survive and even make a few extra bucks in advertising on the weekend when circulation tends to be higher.
Of course that wouldn’t work for every paper. Many are going to have to find some other way to charge for content and to focus on more local news. I’m sure more mergers and closings are in the near future as the new business models sort themselves out. One thing that is important though is to make sure we still have a press that investigates and reports on possible misadventures by our politicians and citizens.
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