Shall Readers Pay For Online News?

To a large extent, many major publications dug their own tombs and jumped in, hoping there is a heaven, until they are more than half way to the hell. Now they admitted that they screwed up.

“We made a mistake!” Walter Isaacson, the president of Aspen Institute, a DC-based educational and policy studies organization and former managing editor of Time Magazine said to Jon Stewart in The Daily Show recently. The mistake that Mr. Isaacson was referring to was when the print moved online, the news should never have been free.

He is right. The mistake was they started a price war with online news aggregators and bloggers and sold themselves short.

What Mr. Isaacson and other decision makers back then hoped for was the free news would have driven up traffic which was thought to be the key to attract ads. But the plan didn't quite pan out.

If the idea was to copy what the telecom companies are doing: give away the cell phones and charge for the services, it won’t work because telecom companies like AT&T owns both the services and the phones while Time doesn’t own advertising companies.

So now what? If we cannot make magazines "narcotically addictive" as Stewart suggested in the show, what can we do to make readers pay?

Mr. Isaacson’s idea was to charge micro-fees and I couldn’t agree more.

In fact, I agree to such an extreme that I think we should charge per article instead of per magazine edition. Therefore, readers can choose the topics they want to read instead of being given the bunch of articles. Besides, charging by articles will ultimately bring down the fee from dollars to dimes or cents. Price for each article should also go up as more readers buy it. This encourages readers to buy as early as possible.

Yup, I strongly support that quality writing should be paid. By the way, did I really hear Isaacson say: “We gotta have some system where some journalists are getting paid…!” Really?