Washington and Lee University
Will consumers of news on the Internet, the majority of whom have become accustomed to getting content for free, ever choose to pay for their news?
That is one of the key issues at stake as newspapers try to find new economic models. One of the latest attempts to charge for news is an e-commerce startup called Journalism Online, which targets the top 10 percent of Web sites' visitors and believes it can charge $50-$100 per year for content without losing users and advertising.
Brian Richardson, head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University, says suggestions that media have ever been a pay-for-content model are incorrect and that finding effective Internet models has potential perils. On the other hand, he says that the challenges facing newspapers have not deterred students from considering careers in journalism.
"What I think is going to happen is that news organizations will have to provide pay-for-content boutique sites as sort of ancillary services for specialized audiences," said Richardson. "One of those ancillary services is going to wind up being the print product for a certain audiences - those people who want to be readers of print."
Adds Richardson: "I worry that news services see the siren song of those boutique services to do only narrow casting. If that's true, then we're going to be in trouble, because then their function in a democratic society - i.e, creating the common forum - is going to go away."
Richardson does not believe that is the way the future will unfold and adds that newspapers in particular, but all news media, have never been primarily a pay-for-content model. "So to say that's going to be the model on the Web, I don't think is going to be viable," he says. "We've always been a delivering-eyeballs-to-advertisers model. Broadcast TV and radio have been exclusively that, and newspapers have been predominantly that. The solution is going to be some sort of combination business model. For the people who say, well, people pay for content in print and in broadcast so they need to pay for it on line, is just fallacious. To go to an exclusively pay-for-content model on the Web will be a brand-new model, and I just don't think it's going to work."
Richardson observes that one of the places where newspapers have lost an opportunity that they may never be able to recover is in classified advertising, where Web sites such as Craiglist and eBay have become dominant players.
"There is some revisionist history going on saying that those things may peak and some of it may migrate back to newspapers," Richardson says. "Classified is a problem. There was a big missed opportunity there. If we do get some of it back, we're not going to get all of them back."
Even as media continue to struggle with their economic model, Richardson says that while students continue to come to Washington and Lee planning to major in journalism, they don't see newspapers or television or magazines as a specific path.
"I think, particularly in a liberal arts environment like ours, we are able to stress to them the importance of news as a public service," Richardson says. "If you have the kind of vision that young people tend to have, they think in terms of news. They (young people) don't think in terms of news rather than newspaper or television or Web. News is the service and the product and the function in society, and everything else is the delivery system."
Richardson notes that railroads went out of business because they thought they were in the railroad business and forgot they were in the transportation business. "To the extent that news may be endangered, part of it is the narrow vision that we're in the newspaper business rather than in the providing-news-to-audiences business," he says. "I think, increasingly, young people are seeing that."
