They’re talking about a blackout of free news. Again.

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They’re talking about a blackout of free news. Again.

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 | E-commerce, Media Behaving Badly, Tech |

Jack Lail - Crazy talk about newspapers:

TJ Sullivan proposes “It’s time for every daily newspaper in the United States, in cooperation with the Associated Press, to shut down their free Web sites for one week.”

Ah, you first TJ.

My guess is that the result would be one or more of: 1.) People wouldn’t notice and 2.) People who did notice would start thinking about the eventual death of newspapers and how they’d get online news without them. Either way, nothing good will come of this.

Lail also has a roundup of links reacting to Walter Isaacson’s stumping of micropayments and a link to Jeff Jarvis’s thoughts on bad models for financing newspapers:

Make Google pay. This one assumes that newspapers have a God-given right to the income they used to get from advertising and that Google (and craigslist and eBay and papers’ own customers with their own, free web sites, for that matter) stole it from the papers and thus are starving journalism. Show me where that commandment is written. Others competed with lazy, monopolistic newspapers, giving the marketplace a better service. Google and the rest owe them nothing. Indeed, newspapers should be paying Google for its distribution and promotion, as Google is the new newsstand and content gains value with links.

Someone in Jarvis’s comments mentions iTunes as an example of successful micropayments. First, iTunes isn’t really micropayments. The 99 cent songs are much more expensive than the vanishingly small amounts most people consider micro.

More to the point, Apple can charge 99 cents because there’s no free alternative for most of their content. There’s nowhere you can download the latest top 10 hits to your iPod for free and do so legally. In contrast there are lots of places to get news for free. If not the AP, then Reuters. If not Reuters, then AFP. If not AFP, then CNN or the BBC or the IHT or the NYT, etc.

There’s just no shortage of alternative news sources and in most cases one makes a pretty good substitute for another, which isn’t true of iTunes. Teenage fans will pay 99 cents for their favorite boy band even if they can listen to Engelbert Humperdink for free. Meanwhile, most people will gladly flee their current news outlets the second someone mentions money. Very few news outlets have enough clout and brand power to charge for online news. Most news outlets, in other words, are Engelbert Humperdink.

Previously

Tags: micropayments

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