With The Times' paywall coming down very soon its an interesting time to see if 'paying for news' will pay for publishers.
At the moment there seem to be two camps...
In the red corner the journalists decrying the free nature of the Internet which is removing the value (and money) from their profession.
In the blue corner (which seems to be quite a lot bigger) are readers who say - why should I pay someone when I can get news for free?
So in my role as being stuck in the middle here's my pennyworth.
The main problem I see is that of understanding what 'news' is. Just as not everything on the Internet is free, not everything in a newspaper is actually news. Equally not a great deal of the 'news' bits of a paper are even written by that newspaper with lots being agency copy, or mildly rehashed copy from other places. In fact a large percentage of original copy in a paper isn't really 'news' at all it being columnist material and this is where the paywall arguments become interesting.
Take for example last week's interview with Lady Ga Ga by Catlin Moran which was in The Times. My wife who is a big fan of both people decided to actually buy the entire paper (£1.50 I think) solely on the basis of this single article. The vast majority of the paper was left unread (and indeed still folded). Had this article been available via some itunesy type system then she would have been happy to spend 99p simply to download this one piece and save a tiny bit of Finnish Forest in the process.
On the other hand the carefully crafted/rehashed content in the rest of the paper was 'worthless' as any news can be read on multiple free sites or, heaven forbid, even on the TV or Radio.
The Times would, I'm sure have been happy to sell this one article and Catlin would have been happy as she could then have directly measured her worth to Mr Murdoch and charged accordingly!
Other columnists who sold articles in this way would be able to measure (and be measured on) how popular they are and how much they actually contribute to their paper. Maybe a meritocracy amongst columnists will be the result?
The best analogy I can think of would be the 'Now that's what I call music' albums. Why on earth would you pay £9, £10 or even £5 for a 2 CD pack which had 4 tracks you wanted and 34 you couldn't care less about when you can already download the four tracks for 99p each from iTunes and leave the rest of the rubbish alone?
So perhaps The Times and other papers might consider configuring, in time, their paywalls to allow people to view and 'download' articles on a pay per view basis. The main advantages I could see would be;
1) I can read one article from The Times, one from The Guardian and maybe one or two others for less than a single subscription to either paper
2) The papers will know which of their contributors are paying their way
3) Contributors can promote their content on blogs, twitter or facebook and actually be helping themselves and their employers to earn a living.
4) If there was a referral system (like adsense or similar) then other sites and blogs would actually have incentives to link to content behind the paywall rather than attempt to steal the content and republish it - If you make linking to content profitable then why steal it?
What about the poor 'news' team who's content is 'worthless'
Well it does seem strange that any pay-per-read system might actually switch the priorities around. Instead of being news first and columnist padding second this system probably reflects a switch of priorities in supply and demand. There are many ways to find out what the FTSE100 is doing but only one Jeremy Clarkson (thankfully) so the paper that 'owns' him has a commodity that no-one else can replicate. Any paper needs both but instead of the news team subsidising expensive columnists it'll be the expensive columnists who'll be expected to draw readers towards the 'public service' news element.
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