By Alan Mutter
newsosaur.blogspot.com
The resolve to charge for most interactive content is dissolving at some newspapers, potentially thwarting the plans of other publishers who still hope to erect pay walls on their sites.
Despite determined statements by several publishers earlier this year that they intended to make consumers pay for the valuable content newspapers have given away for more than a decade, the managers of some newspapers have come to realize that they can’t afford to lose the traffic that pay walls almost certainly would turn away.
So, the executives are scrapping plans to charge for most, if any, of their content. The latest thinking – which, of course, is far from unanimous across the industry – is illustrated in two fresh data points:
– Goli Sheikholeslami, the general manager of WashingtonPost.Com, told a conference at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard last week that “not enough people are willing to pay” to make the sale of online content a viable business. “If could get 5 million people to pay me to visit my site each month, I would be done,” she said. But Sheikholeslami said she has no hope of doing so.
– Although Hearst Corp. attracted headlines in February when its top newspaper executive said he aimed to start charging for content, Mark Adkins, the president of the San Francisco Chronicle, told me last week that “we believe in being a free website” but plan to develop supplementary “premium content we will charge for.” . . . READ FULL STORY
