Pay for One Online News Site, Get the Rest Free
It will be no surprise to me when, as David Carr stated a couple of weeks ago, the big news media players will be going all in. It’s just like a poker game and the chips are dwindling and your only chance to avoid a slow death is to make a big bet. It seems that Steve Brill is facilitating that bet.
Brill and his partners are setting up Journalism Online to enable all the big players to provide content to general audiences — for a fee. The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard has a point power presentation from a recent closed-door meeting where Brill made his pitch to news executives. Here is the paragraph which I think is key:
Participation In All-You-Can-Read Options: We will aggressively market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for consumers who want to pay one fee to access all Journalism Online-member publishers’ content or selected combinations of content.
Over the years, I have been thinking of it as different model. If you pay for your hometown newspaper online, then all the others come free too. They instead have set it up at one site, where you pay. Frankly, I thought that would happen through the AP.
