In American Journalism Review, long-time newspaper analyst John Morton yet again has trotted out the tired argument that the newspaper industry made a colossal mistake years ago by giving its news away free on the web.

“So what should the nation’s dailies have done to combat the Internet onslaught? Erecting paywalls to protect their most valuable resource – the information they gather – is obvious.”

(There’s more nuance in Morton’s argument, but read it yourself; I won’t waste your time repeating his other points.)

This has become a political argument within the media world . It reminds me of the politics of climate change:

• Climate-change debate:
  • Vast majority of scientists believe humankind is adversely affecting climate and that we are headed toward catastrophe, and must act quickly to implement solutions.
  • Vocal minority of entrenched interests (nearly all non-scientists) makes so much noise arguing that climate change is a myth that our political system is paralyzed and little progress is made toward changing public policy to support finding solutions.
  • We well may end up discovering that climate change is “real” when its effects are so detrimental that the deniers finally have to shut up.
• Newspapers’ mistake was free content on the web debate:
  • Most experts in digital media recognize that the web is different than “old media” (especially newspapers) and charging for commodity news content is fool-hardy when the environmental factors include a massive number of competitors and potential competitors, enabled by a very low barrier to entry. In other words, putting up newspaper-website paywalls early would have enabled a wave of online-only news entities that probably would have killed many more metro newspapers by now than has been the case.
  • Powerful and vocal old-media players like Rupert Murdoch have amped up the volume on a disproved notion (“newspapers should have charged all along for news on the web”), and a modest but growing number of old-media publishers now are trying paywalls online. This is happening despite numerous failures by metro newspapers trying web paywalls in the past, from the web’s earliest days to recent years (remember “TimesSelect”?).
  • My expectation is that we’ll find out soon enough that paywalls on general news by newspaper websites truly don’t work (except perhaps in some non-competitive small markets), but the result of some following Murdoch’s lead will be the death of more metro dailies.

Don’t mistake this for a “news wants to be free” screed. The right business model for news online very well may include as a component people paying for some content or services, and there are many possibilities other than Murdoch’s “hard paywall” as demonstrated by The Times/Sunday Times.

But resurrecting the “Original Sin” argument tends to get news people thinking in black-and-white, which won’t solve the problem.

I’m sticking to my predictions. Climate change will prove out. Newspaper website paywalls will not be the solution that saves old-media news organizations.

Unless your personal blog is your livelihood and brings in a decent amount of revenue, it’s sometimes difficult to keep it well fed. That’s my excuse for not having posted here in over a month. (Yikes!) … But I have been working on some fascinating news- and technology-related projects recently, so I share them here as an update.

Nearly all my work time has gone into the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, a program I founded and direct. (Yes, that journalism school — the one that may be “discontinued.” But no, it’s not the end of journalism education at the University of Colorado, but rather an institutional process that will modernize it as part of an overall restructuring to make journalism and media teaching and research more interdisciplinary and relevant to the digital transformation under way in our society.)

I’ve been pleased that the Test Kitchen program has been raising donor money despite the uncertainness of the university process’ eventual outcome, including two donors coming forward just last week.

So, here are some of the project areas that we’re working on at the Test Kitchen. I welcome partnership and collaboration inquiries in these areas, as well as new research ideas to benefit the news sector.

• Membership models for news. This is a Journalism-Business research project looking into alternative revenue models for news websites (and including mobile components) vs. “paywalls” that some news publishers have put in front of commodity news content. We’re focusing on two areas of news providers where paywalls don’t make much sense: investigative reporting organizations and collegiate media.
• Social gaming to change news behavior. In partnership with the developers of the popular Qrank mobile social news/trivia/history quiz, we’re experimenting with and examining the role of mobile gaming in changing the news-consumption habits of young adults, and increasing news awareness.
• Always-on video as a news tool. In the area of “life-casting” is technology that allows an individual to record everything that happens to them, including video recording of everything that the person sees and hears. We think a more practical use for always-on video is for reporters out working a story.
• Cross-device media viewing. We’re experimenting with ways to allow for better consumption by an individual of long-form journalism across multiple devices (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.) by allowing an article reader to pick up where he/she left off when picking up a different media device at a later time.
• Mobile augmented reality. This is an area where we’re looking at the potential of smartphone AR technology being put to use for innovative editorial presentation and reporting, and for new forms of local advertising.
• Next-generation news aggregators. We’ve gotten a start on that with our beta SlicesofBoulder.com site, but more is in store, including a refined user interface and aggregator-level source ratings.

There’s more, and I’m excited about the coming year. As I mentioned above, I love to hear from potential partners and collaborators: students, academics, entrepreneurs, etc. E-mail me at steve.outing@colorado.edu or call me at 303-834-7810.

And if the Digital Media Test Kitchen sounds like a program worthy of your financial support, allow me to point you to our Giving page!

As I noted yesterday, web donation network Kachingle has launched a good-natured guerrilla marketing campaign to allow Kachingle users to financially support any of NYTimes.com’s 50-plus bloggers. The theme is “Stop the Paywall!” (as in, NYTimes.com’s upcoming “metered paywall,” set to debut in early 2011) … “Keep the NYT Blogs you love in the open web.”

And as I predicted yesterday, Times executives have decided to put their lawyers on the case and send a cease and desist order to Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos and CEO Fred Dewey. So, rather than let an innovative marketing campaign by a tiny company run its course, Times executives are doing Kachingle a potentially big favor by flexing their legal muscles.

If this gets much press/Twitter/blogosphere attention, then Kachingle will benefit from a big boost in visibility. (Perhaps NYTimes.com could run a news story about the dispute!)

Typaldos today blogged about her encounter yesterday with Times executives: “But we love you The New York Times. My conversation with Mr. Digital and Mr. Legal and Mr. Paywall.” In her blog item, she recounted the discussion and reported that she would be receiving a letter soon:

“They said they were going to send us a legal document via FedEx called a ‘cease and desist’ order. I have never received one of these before so it’s going to be quite exciting. As soon as it arrives I will scan it and post.”

It doesn’t sound like Typaldos intends to back down:

“I told the three NYTimes executives that we have the same goal — saving the NYTimes Blogs from obscurity. Finding a new business model for news. At Kachingle we passionately believe that paywalls are truly bad … they cut off information from the open web, they dampen social discourse, they exclude people all over the world who cannot afford to be nickel-and-dimed-and-quartered-and-dollared for quality content. We believe paywalls are the enemy of democracy. We believe in our mission, and we will not back down.

While I can’t imagine it’s fun to be threatened by a huge media company’s lawyers (and there are financial risks in fighting back, of course), there’s clearly potential for an upside. I’m reminded of a former business partner (our company died in a bit less than two years from launch) who, when traffic to our websites failed to grow sufficiently fast enough, bemoaned that we needed something that would make a bigger splash. Getting sued by a big media or other company and the accompanying publicity and controversy would certainly do the trick, he said. I don’t believe he was joking. (He was a veteran of several previous Internet start-ups, and now is a partner at one that’s doing very well.)

I’ll keep watch on what happens next and report any interesting developments.

(Disclaimer: I have written about Kachingle in the past as a former columnist, and in this blog; I’ve also done a small amount of consulting for the company.)

This is an interesting case of what I guess would be termed “guerrilla marketing.” Kachingle, an online user-donation network that aims to financially support many websites and blogs, has begun a campaign to “STOP THE PAYWALL” at NYTimes.com.

First, some quick background:

• NYTimes.com has announced that it will put up a “metered paywall” on the site in early 2011. That means that site visitors after viewing an as yet unspecified number of stories in a month will be asked to pay to subscribe to the site or otherwise pay to access more Times content. It is likely that web users referred via links on Google, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. will not be counted against the monthly free allotment. (In other words, it’s a porous paywall, unlike the “hard” paywall that’s on Rupert Murdoch The Times (UK) website; that paywall allows no free content, and only paying customers can see beyond the headlines.)

Kachingle’s founders don’t believe in paywalls for general news websites, and they think that they have a better idea: Get readers of news across many sites and blogs to band together, pay $5 a month to Kachingle, then have Kachingle distribute that money based on individual users’ tracked visits to sites and blogs that they like (and that display Kachingle “medallions”).

The Kachingle guerrilla marketing campaign has specifically targeted the 50-plus blogs published on NYTimes.com, by allowing Kachingle’s paying member (I’m one) to “Kachingle” or support any of those blogs — without NYTimes.com’s cooperation. (I regularly read some of the NYT blogs and have Kachingled the ones I like. So, when I visit those blogs from now on, some of my $5 a month will start going to NYTimes.com bloggers — that is, if they choose to sign up to collect it.)

Since the Times doesn’t appear to want to do business with Kachingle or support its donation scheme, Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos and CEO Fred Dewey had their staff create browser plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome that allow a Kachingle member to support the NYTimes.com blogs. With the plug-in installed, when you visit one of the blogs, a thin Kachingle medallion banner appears above the page, pushing down the rest of the NYTimes.com page. That’s how you can “Kachingle” a specific NYTimes.com blogger. … NYTimes.com visitors who do not install the Kachingle browser plug-in will not see the medallions.

There’s also an automatically updating “Leader Board” that shows which NYT blogs are getting the most Kachinglers (i.e., financial supporters). As I write this, Paul Krugman’s blog is leading the Bits Blog and David Pogue’s Posts blog. The numbers aren’t much, but the campaign was launched only last night, and paying Kachingle members and some journalists and bloggers were notified today.

We’ll have to wait and see what the reaction is from NYTimes.com executives. As I see it, they can ignore this innovative but perhaps annoying (to NYT) ploy by a small Internet donation start-up, and it will either catch on with web users who think it’s a good idea, or die quickly. Or the Times execs can make a stink and try to force Kachingle to halt the campaign.

My experience with big media companies is that they often can’t help themselves from the latter approach: Call in the lawyers and send out the cease-and-desist orders! That would not be wise, since it will turn Kachingle’s guerrilla marketing ploy into a David-vs.-Goliath saga that could get lots of attention in the blogosphere and on Twitter.

Hey, what better way for a small business struggling to catch on with the public than to get a boost by being threatened or sued by New York Times lawyers! And it will raise more questions about the NYTimes.com paywall strategy.

I should learn more later, so we’ll see where this goes. In any event, it looks like fun.

(Disclaimer: I have written about Kachingle in the past as a former columnist, and in this blog; I’ve also done a small amount of consulting for the company.)

I’ve been neglectful of this blog for nearly a month (till posting about Paycheckr yesterday), but perhaps I can get back into the groove. It’s just that I’ve been working hard at driving forward the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. And since the School is going through a “discontinuation review” and might be reinvented or replaced by a new School (or other form of academic entity) designed to be more interdisciplinary in addressing the complexities of today’s journalism and media realities, it seems like an important time to push forward on leveraging emerging technologies in the pursuit of better journalism and better informing communities.

At the Test Kitchen, we just debuted a new website, SlicesofBoulder.com, that fits that bill. Working with Toronto-based Eqentia Inc., a CU team (journalism instructor Sandra Fish, journalism master’s candidate Jenny Dean, and me) worked over the summer to produce an extensive taxonomy of the city of Boulder and its surrounding area, and find all the news and information sources online producing content about Boulder. (I.e., not just websites and blogs that fit the traditional definition of “news,” but also the information flowing out of scientific institutions, government agencies, police and fire departments, key local companies, local bloggers and tweeters, etc.)

The result is SlicesofBoulder.com, powered by Eqentia.com, which processes and slices and dices links to the content flowing from hundreds of local sources, plus finds news coverage about Boulder from non-Boulder (state and national) news sites and selected credible blogs.

What’s exciting for me about this project is that it is, I’m pretty sure, the most in-depth curated news and information site in existence about any city. (Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.) The site can serve in an in-depth manner the ongoing news and information needs of any Boulder resident with a specific topic interest (city politics, Boulder crime news, the local rock climbing scene, a specific local company like Celestial Seasonings, a specific neighborhood, and so on). It continually tracks Boulder news and and information digital content flow, and provides links to the original content. (Users can create a personalized Boulder news/info page; receive a personalized daily e-mail; subscribe to fine-grain RSS feeds; etc.)

The site could be described as a “hyper-local” aggregator in that it identifies fine-grain content feeds from sources that Google News, Yahoo! Local, Topix.com, and Outside.in don’t get to.

It’s not a creator of original content, of course, but rather a curated aggregator of local sources — so my hope is that it will help new hyper-local blogs and news outlets in and around Boulder be exposed to new users.

In addition to being just plain useful (to keep citizens informed at either a local overview level or deeply on specific local topics, and to give local journalists story ideas), I’m fascinated by the research potential of the project. It gives us a snapshot of the Boulder digital media-sphere today, and we’ll use the site to watch as the Boulder digital media landscape evolves in the coming years. (My prediction: further decline in news output by traditional local news media, and growth of small local and hyper-local news providers to make up for that.)

Boulder is a university town with 100,000 or so residents, so researching and finding all the local online sources of news and information was a doable task. (I know we haven’t found them all, and expect that the team will discover more, and that community members will suggest additional sources.) The research work to find all the sources in, say, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay Area, which both have a thriving online independent local and hyper-local media scene, would be daunting; though perhaps crowd-sourcing plus dedicated researchers would make it possible.

The surprise for me was in finding fewer individuals providing news about Boulder’s neighborhoods than I’d expected. I thought we’d find more people using the free publishing tools of the web to keep their neighbors informed, a trend that’s common in some other cities. Perhaps it has to do with demographics: Boulder’s population is one the most highly educated in the U.S., and I’m wondering if that has something to do with it. (We’re all mostly too busy to do volunteer work like run neighborhood blogs or websites?)

If you’d like more information about the SlicesofBoulder.com project, feel free to contact me. A backgrounder about the project and site is here.

If you mouseover the “PayCheckr” widget above, you’ll see an early version of a donation and payment model for digital content that I find intriguing. You can create your own beta PayCheckr widget and play around with it now, as I did with the widget above, though this is a “lite” version and the customization is limited.

The concept is simple enough to understand. I think of it as a payment and/or donation widget that is very much like the ShareThis widgets that you see on many websites and blogs; at the beginning or end of an article you mouseover a ShareThis icon which expands to offer multiple options for you to share a link to it with others via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail it to a friend, etc.

PayCheckr likewise expands to offer the web user multiple options — as chosen by the site or blog owner — for paying for or supporting a website or blog, or specific content (article, video, service, etc.). The site or content owner can configure the widget to contain multiple options:

• Collect money…
• for a subscription
• for a one-time purchase (say, to trigger a PDF or software download, or access premium content)
• as a donation from the user
• Ask for non-monetary support by…
• viewing a sponsor’s message
• viewing an advertisement
• taking a survey
• Point users to other sites that earn you money, such as…
• affiliate e-commerce pages (e.g., Amazon.com or an online store) where purchases by your users earn your site a commission
• a marketing-firm survey that you receive commissions for participant referrals
• a barter-exchange program

For now, PayCheckr “Lite” offers limited functionality. I can’t yet put my own logo or otherwise customize how the widget looks in its closed state, or change the default language of “Many ways to pay.” The fields to enter my options limit the number of characters too much, so that when I tried to put in the names of my “sponsor” sites, they wouldn’t fit and had to be shortened. But it’s enough to envision how it might be used once the PayCheckr service is fully featured:

1. Access to full article after user action – Let’s say a news website wants to encourage some form of “payment” before showing the user more than the first couple paragraphs of a story. Rather than a typical paywall (i.e., pay now to view more or go away), a PayCheckr widget (properly designed to explain its purpose) could permit access to the content when the user selected any of the options set up by the site owner. Let’s say, either (1) make a donation, (2) pay for a subscription for future premium-content access, (3) watch a 30-second video ad and then get access to the rest of the article, or (4) visit a sponsor’s page that shows as a pop-up while the rest of the article appears on the screen below.
2. Give payment options up front for a purchase – Let’s say that you’ve got an e-book that you want users to pay for, but you want to give them multiple options. Rather than require the buyer to fill out a credit-card order form as the only option, your PayCheckr widget could offer multiple payment options: PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon or iTunes account payment, direct payment from bank account, standard credit card form, payment with frequent-flyer miles, charge to mobile-phone account, etc. The benefit would be that if one of the choices is quick and convenient for the individual buyer, he or she is less likely to bail out of the purchase than if the only option is to fill out a long credit-card form.

Since PayCheckr is in early beta state without some of its planned features implemented, I can’t give it a good trial run yet. But it represents, to me at least, a softer approach to getting users to “pay” for digital content (especially news). If I as a web user I run across, say, an interesting research report that the publisher wants me to pay for, I might click on by if the only option is paying actual money. But if that valuable report can be viewed by non-monetary means — taking a marketing survey, or watching a 30-second sponsor video — then the report’s publisher is earning some money from me when with the money-only option I’d mean zero revenue.

PayCheckr also offers yet another model for soliciting donations. If I’ve got a special report online that I want everyone to see, but I’d still like to get some willing people to donate in thanks for the work I’ve done, perhaps a PayCheckr widget could offer multiple donation options — again, to make it easy for the potential donor to toss some money my way by selecting a donation option that’s simplest for him or her.

I also might want to put a PayCheckr widget in a permanent position on my blog, such as I’ve done with my Kachingle donation-network medallion in the left column of this site. (I’ll likely do that once PayCheckr offers more customization of the widget’s look and wording.)

Finally, since I work in an academic environment (University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism & Mass Communication, running the Digital Media Test Kitchen), I’m interested in PayCheckr from a research angle. I’m reminded of the Miami Herald’s website experiment late last year when it put a “donate” button at the bottom of all stories, but the only option for those wishing to donate money to support the Herald’s journalism was to fill out a long credit-card payment form. I’d love to know if a similar experiment would work better (the Herald killed its donation experiment quickly) if potential donors had multiple options for supporting the Herald, a la the PayCheckr approach.

(Disclaimer: I’ve been following the development of PayCheckr for some time, and have volunteered for solo focus-group sessions to aid the development team, led by PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving.)

I’ve been in touch with Twixa.com and its CEO, Kurt Huang, for some time while he and his team have been developing a new revenue widget for online publishers. You can see it on this post, next to the Tweetmeme (“Retweet”) button at right: ThankThis.

Click on the button and you can financially support this site AND support a charity that you choose. But don’t worry: You will not spend a dime (or a cent) by clicking.

The money comes from sponsors, whose messages show up in a pop-up box after you click “ThankThis.” Money earned when a visitor to this blog clicks on an ad in one of these pop-ups goes into the system, and is later distributed among:

• The site publisher (in this case, me)
• The charity that the visitor selects when he or she has accumulated enough points
• Twixa.com (which collects a small portion to run the service)

ThankThis is in private beta currently, and the ads you’ll see are from Google, so for now we’re not talking about much money changing hands. But if the service takes off and is able to sell enough sponsorships (or better, targeted advertising), I think this could turn into a nice extra revenue stream for online publishers.

An important point to note is that when you click “ThankThis,” the ad is not the prominent thing in the pop-up. Rather, it’s a note that tells you how many points you just earned; the ad is below that. To the right you should see how many points you have accumulated by clicking “ThankThis” on various participating websites and blogs.

When you get enough points to be ready to donate them, you click the “Donate Points” link and are presented with several options for spending them on a charity listed. (See the image accompanying this post.)

I like this idea, because … well, most people are cheap. They don’t want to donate money to a website that asks for a donation, and they most often ignore calls online to donate to charities. But with ThankThis, of course, donating money — yes, money — to a charity costs nothing.

Charity giving for cheapskates … what could be better?! (Count me among those online cheapskates, for the most part; but I do pay $5 a month for a Kachingle account and €2 a month for a Flattr account. Those services similarly aim to support multiple online publishers with user donations, but they distribute website users’ money while ThankThis distributes money from sponsors and advertisers.)

Will this work? I don’t know, but I like the concept and think that it has a chance of working. It’s not likely to support large newsrooms or anything like that, but, again, it might provide some extra money for the budget.

I’m disappointed that Kachingle and Flattr haven’t taken off in a big way yet, and I fear that ThankThis may suffer the same fate. If some BIG web publishers implemented any or all of these systems for networked user donations and put some marketing smarts into them, I suspect we’d see more money flowing. (I mean the likes of you, HuffingtonPost.com, About.com, et al.)

Over on the website of the Digital Media Test Kitchen (I’m director of that program at CU-Boulder), I’ve posted an update on one of our projects, called “Slices of Boulder,” which we’re working on with a technology partner, Toronto-based Eqentia, using its semantic publishing and distribution platform.

Work is happening over the summer, including building a taxonomy for the city of Boulder and surrounding communities, and identifying all of the local news and information digital sources currently in operation and serving Boulder’s residents. The latter is a fascinating, if big, task; the number of online sources of local, niche-local, hyper-local, and neighborhood news and information sources has grown significantly in the last year or two.

If you head on over to the Test Kitchen site at the link above, you’ll see a table I created of just some of the varied online sources available in the Boulder area today. The breadth and scope of the list (and what I published is just a small sample) is impressive. There’s a lot of diversity in the digital media-scape these days, even within a single mid-sized city. (Try this for a bigger city like Seattle, and you’ll be even more impressed by the growth of the “5th estate.”)

The reason for this, of course, is both the ease and low cost for anyone to publish in the digital age, and the decline in our local legacy news organizations, which just like in most other communities have seen editorial workforce reductions that leave holes in coverage of the Boulder area.

We expect to have a working website, a deep local-news-and-info aggregator, ready by the end of the summer or early fall.

There. I’ve said it. Now that I have an iPad (and love it as a device for media consumption), I really don’t ever want to see a print magazine again. If I could, I’d happily convert all my remaining print magazine subscriptions to iPad subscriptions, and be a happy guy. (And yes, I’m willing to pay, of course.)

For now, I still have a handful of print-magazine subscriptions, though most of my reading is done online on my laptop, on the iPad, or on my iPhone. What’s left of print for me: Wired, Columbia Journalism Review, and some cycling magazines (Bike, Bicycling, Mountain Biking). I also receive a few unasked-for print magazine subscriptions. That’s it. I receive no print newspapers and haven’t for some time.

Wired for the iPad: For now, that’ll be $3.99 per iPad edition, or else go to print

My reasoning is simple enough:

1. I dislike the waste of trees and energy for physical delivery of my magazines; a digital edition delivered to my iPad is preferable environmentally.
2. Print magazines pile up in various places around my house and office, and often don’t get read. Having them all in my iPad would be so much more convenient, and I’m pretty sure that they’d get read more (vs. now, when many of them get tossed in piles for later reading, and then I find them again when they’re months old, at which point they often get tossed in the recycling bin unread).
3. Many digital editions are better, since they can include video, multimedia, interactive forms, etc.

Alas, the current state of iPad magazines is maddening. Apple, as has been reported recently, isn’t letting magazine publishers use iPad apps to sell subscriptions. Instead, we have the situation where Wired in print is $8 for an annual subscription (I just got my renewal notice). The Wired app on my iPad (free download) allows me to buy individual issues at $3.99; no subscription discount, courtesy of Apple’s resistance to permitting publishers to offer subscriptions. No thanks.

Ditto for Newsweek, but it’s even worse. The weekly per-digital-issue price on the iPad is $2.99 (no subscription offered), while a print subscription can be had for as little as $21 a year (54 issues) via magazine-subscription discounters.

Zinio offers a digital, save-trees alternative for many magazines. Via the Zinio app on my iPad, I can buy digital subscriptions for many magazines. Alas, the only one from my list of remaining print subscriptions is Bike, for $9. For the rest of my list: no option other than print. Wired, Newsweek? Not offered on Zinio.

I hope this is a temporary situation. It’s absurd for digital editions to cost more than print, considering the high costs of delivering print magazines to subscribers: printing, trucking, postage, direct-mail renewal reminders, etc. I’ll settle for the same price I pay now for iPad editions.

Here’s a tip for magazine publishers, once Apple relents on permitting subscriptions from within iPad apps:

• Low-cost digital magazine subscription for what is essentially a replica edition of the print magazine.
• Higher subscription rate for enhanced iPad edition with video and multimedia bells and whistles.

Oh, and those unasked-for magazines that show up in my mailbox? Sometimes they are publications that I’m interested in (such as our local city magazine), but please, offer me a free iPad or Zinio subscription; I don’t want print!

When is this going to get fixed?

In my last blog post, I ranted about Rupert Murdoch’s “hard paywall” on The Times and Sunday Times websites, suggesting that his company’s newspaper division needs to think in shades of gray when it comes to website paywall models, because the extreme black-vs.-white approach being taken is likely to fail.

I received the following comment, which makes me think that there may be others who misunderstand my position on news paywalls and paying for news content. (I’m answering as a separate blog item, rather than have it be less visible in the comments.)

“Dear Steve Outing: I know how fiercely against paying for journalism you are, but please do explain what is so brilliant about the Guardian’s strategy. As far as I understand they just continue the FREE strategy and at the same time they have deep economic problems because it is expensive producing such high quality as the Guardian does? –Cheers, Pernille”

Thanks for taking the time to comment, Pernille, but you mischaracterize my position. I am not against online users paying for journalism. Rather, I don’t believe that enough people will pay for general-interest news online from a single news brand, like The Times, to pay for a well-staffed newsroom, except in certain non-competitive markets. Here’s why:

1. In the case of The Times, that UK national newspaper has multiple serious direct competitors, each of which continues to offer its news content on the Web free. TheTimes.co.uk likely will convince some of those loyal to its historic brand to pay up online, but the overall effect will be to turn a large chunk of its Internet audience over to the other UK newspaper and other news sites. The influence of The Times will wane.
2. Murdoch makes the mistake of believing that The Times’ news content is superior to its news competitors, thus lots of people will decide to starting paying him online. He may not believe that in relation to competing newspapers (The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent…), but rather is hoping that they’ll see him leap first and follow along for the ride and they’ll all make boatloads of cash. But there’s a problem…
3. On the Internet, no one knows you’re a newspaper! (Historical reference: that old New Yorker cartoon with two dogs at a computer, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog!”) By that I mean, with a news website, there’s often not much difference between a broadcaster’s news site (say, BBC.co.uk) and a newspaper site (like TheTimes.co.uk). All the major news providers now trade in text, audio, multimedia, and video. I don’t for a second believe that the TV news folks, steeped in models that don’t charge subscription fees, will follow Murdoch into paywall-land, even if the UK newspapers do (again, unlikely). A Murdochian walling off of all newspaper content online would just boost broadcast news entities while sinking the newspapers.
4. The non-newspaper, non-broadcast news media segment is growing fast, and if The Times and other legacy news brands all marched to Murdoch’s orders, then the up-and-coming news providers would say, “Thanks a lot, guys,” and build up their news quality, staffing, audience, and advertisers. Oh, and who’s running these fledgling Web and mobile news outfits? Lots of laid-off newspaper journalists, in large part. Perhaps Murdoch believes that journalists who don’t work for legacy media still work in their pajamas and don’t do any original reporting.

So, Pernille, I simply call foul on newspaper publishers who think that because they say that news is expensive to produce (yes, it is), that people must pay to view it online. Um, no, most won’t pay when the free alternative is one click away.

I do, however, support the idea of Internet users paying for news and news-related services. (An example of the latter would be finely tuned personalized news offered with synchronization across multiple devices.) I believe that premium content and premium services can carry a price tag, and if the offering is good enough and well targeted, then people will pay. The way to accomplish this, I believe, is through premium memberships (non-mandatory), or “member zones,” as my friends who recently exited MediaNews Group call them. Another apt descriptor is “freemium,” since the model involves free news content (like the stuff that’s a click away) and paid premium content and services. Simple.

As for The Guardian’s free-syndication strategy: Indeed, it is brilliant — and counterintuitive to those still wedded to old notions of news publishing. Here’s why:

1. By allowing full-content publication of Guardian words, images, and more, the news company is creating a global network. For now, anyone running Wordpress can post full Guardian articles rather than just link to the Guardian website, or rather than rewrite Guardian stories in condensed form (a la HuffingtonPost.com or DailyBeast.com) and include a link back to The Guardian site.
2. The Guardian gets to sell ads on this “global network” and keep the revenue that thus comes from websites and blogs that it has a simple, low-maintenance relationship with. The trick will be to get effective targeting of ads in place, so that readers of Guardian news on an Australian news site aren’t shown ads for London auto dealers.
3. The incentive for blogs and many other websites to publish full Guardian content is not, I’d say, assured. But in theory it is a great idea, because other Web publishers who can get extra audience traffic by posting Guardian stuff can earn ad money off those pages — i.e., from ads on those pages other than the embedded Guardian advertising.
4. Sure, we’ll have to see how this plays out. But what The Guardian is doing is saying that instead of making our money solely from within our walled garden (as Murdoch is doing with The Times online paywall), we want to turn on a bunch of other revenue spigots that are outside of our garden.

It’s pretty simple, really, yet seemingly so difficult for the newspaper industry to grasp. The secret is to stop trying to chase after and punish those who “steal” your news content, and instead figure out how to make the inevitable into a profit center and brand enhancer. You know, the old “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” approach to life, and business.