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Media Executives Plan Online Service to Charge for Content
« on: 2009-04-14 18:32:05 » |
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The New York Times
April 15, 2009
Media Executives Plan Online Service to Charge for Content
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
A trio of long-time media executives are building a computer system to allow newspapers and magazines to charge for online access, including an all-you-can-read subscription that would allow access to multiple publications, the executives said on Tuesday.
Their company, Journalism Online Inc., aims to supply publishers with ready-made tools to charge Internet fees, an idea that has gained sudden currency as advertising revenue plummets, but whose prospects of success are doubted by many media analysts. The company, which says it may have a product ready by the fall, says the advantages it offers are that publishers would not have to develop their own systems, and readers could use a single system for many different publications.
Their plan might not draw much attention save for the stature of the people involved. The founders and investors are Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and The YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.
The company has a board of advisors that includes two of the nation’s most prominent lawyers, David Boies and Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general of the United States.
No publishers have signed on as yet as clients, but several major newspaper and magazine publishers have been in active talks with Journalism Online about how such a system should work.
As the company envisions the system, a non-paying reader on a magazine or newspaper site would reach a certain point and see a page asking for payment — the Journalism Online system, operating within the publication’s Web site. But a reader who wanted a subscription to multiple sites would go directly to the new company’s own site.
“The most important thing is it’s simple to use,” Mr. Brill said in an interview. “Much of the barrier to charging online is the transaction friction, as opposed to the actual cost. With this system, you’d have a single password, give your credit number just once.”
He said that for the unlimited subscriptions, “we’re playing with a figure of $15 a month.”
Each publisher would be free to set its own policies, like determining which items are free and which are not, setting its own prices, and deciding whether to use a pay-per-click system or a daily, weekly or monthly subscription rate.
“There are all these religious debates going on about how to do this, and it’s too early for anyone to be making those decisions,” Mr. Brill said. “No one knows which approach is going to work. So we’re offering all of them.”
The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work, and has retained Mr. Boies’ law firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, for that work. That parallels a recent announcement by The Associated Press that it, too, planned to pursue unlicensed use of published material.
Experts say that it is not clear what legal recourse publishers have against major sites that simply cite articles and provide links to them, rather than reproducing them.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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