That genie’s flown: Part 3

This is the final post in my thinking-out-loud series on subscriptions for online newspapers and why I think the idea that newspapers made a mistake but not charging for access to their content in the first place is wrong.

Here’s what I think happened:

First, the rapid development of the web showed that news, as a product, was not only abundant but that it wasn’t unique. Much, if not most, of the content of the local newspaper was available elsewhere. (That’s not exclusive to the web. I could be convinced the path to subscription-free online news started to be laid in the ’60s with the development of TV as a news medium.) It is the lack of uniqueness, as much as the abundance, that makes it difficult to sell news.

Second, newspapers never earned full value for their distribution. In the ’70s, when I started reporting, common wisdom was that each copy of the paper was read by 3.5 people. The readership figure, bruited about with much pride, counted other members of the family, employees in the workplace and folks in the local coffeeshops. Imagine the net as one big breakfast table/break room/coffee shop.

Third, the web turned out to be more than just a way of moving a lot of information between computers. Interactivity turned it into a huge conversation pit, subdivided into thousands of overlapping communities of interest. Anything I discovered about x could quickly be shared with all the other connected folks interested in x, whether I knew those people or not. More detrimental to the newspaper was that anything that was posted about x would (eventually) come to me.

In the communities of interest, one site or several tended to emerge as central clearinghouses, where the threads of information are pulled together and linked to. Individual newspapers (and other sources) are mined for the information of interest (disaggregated) and then those pieces, from all those sources, brought back together (reaggregated). There was still some value in having access to the local newspapers, but to a greatly diminished number of people: the dis/re aggregators. The rest of us were along for the (free) ride.

Even without the centres, the ‘net makes possible the quick spread of news. The “hey, did you hear…” conversations around the watercooler, became emails, then IMs, then text messages, then blog posts, then Twitters, and on it goes. If I’m at the end of that pipe, I have dozens of people reading the news for me and pointing me to sources, mostly free.

All of these things are not effects of the web so much as they are embedded into it. And each of them makes the possibility of charging for local news content through subscription more and more unlikely. There’s not enough uniqueness there, and what there is is rapidly “reported” across the net. (Do a Technorati search on Nicholas Kristof or any of the other NY Times columnists trapped behind the Times Select paywall. I don’t need to read Kristof to know what he’s saying.)

And this is pretty much where my thoughts end: Even if newspapers, at the outset of their internet adventure, had charged for their online editions, eventually the nature of the ‘net would have chipped that away, the way it has chipped away site registrations, and led newspapers to add comments, editors blogs and all the rest.

Additional reading: There have been a number of recent, excellent posts on the issue of newspapers charging online subscription fees, including these:

Howard Owens: Stop the insanity: paid content is not the answer
Vin Crosbie: Supply & Demand and ‘Unpackaging’ on Newspaper Content Online
The Inksniffer: Counting on the Web…E&P

TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, ONLINE, SUBSCRIPTIONS