A national association of newspapers asked for advice on how America’s newspapers could stop hemorrhaging money on the web and received answers from some unexpected sources.

The Newspaper Association of America, a nonprofit organization representing the $47 billion newspaper industry and more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, asked for advice from the high-tech industry on how they could make money on the Web at a time when many newspapers are going bankrupt trying to keep their print editions alive. In return, they received advice from large companies like Google and Microsoft as well as smaller companies with news for profit ideas, according to an AP article.

The problem has received a lot more industry attention than the possible solutions. Alan Mutter a former editor and current industry consultant, says “This was supposed to be the year that newspapers started charging for online content. Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t get any sense that there is unanimity about charging or that they would know how to go about doing it.”

Google, the company some people blame for many of the problems of online newspapers, was not at all shy about what it sees as the solution. Their response reads, in part, “Google believes that an open Web benefits all users and publishers. However, `open’ need not mean free.” It goes on to suggest that a system like its own Google Checkout could be used to allow readers to access for-pay news from many paid on-line sources, in both subscription sites and micropayment sites, without having to continually enter the authentication credentials on different sites to access the news.

A much smaller startup based at the University of Missouri has a similar idea, involving advertising-supported news and subscriptions. Like Google, however, CircLabs is proposing that the newspapers make use of its proprietary system to take the news behind a simpler for-pay firewall. Both proposals offer an existing service from which the proposer will make a profit. Neither are particularly innovative. Both are self-serving.

Nor do they address the real problem, which is a lack of consensus and commitment by newspapers to finally take action to charge for news content on line. Free internet news is such a fact of life today that any action taken by newspapers to charge for Web news must be a concerted action by all news organizations. There is no proof that any solution is viewed favorably by all the players, or even that all the players have the determination necessary to make such a difficult move. Until truly unified action is possible, probably supported by technical innovation, nothing will come of for-pay news on the internet.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 5:02 pm under Ecommerce, Internet, Open source.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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