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Information wants to be expensive
February 23, 2009 | 1:22 pm
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By Chris Meadows
In the Wall Street Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz has an editorial looking at the currently hot topic of how and whether to charge for on-line newspapers. The Wall Street Journal is itself one of very few newspapers that has successfully parlayed its web version into a subscription-based service (though some content, such as this editorial, is free).
Crovitz hits the nail on the head when he points out that newspapers pondering whether and how to charge for a web version are asking the wrong question:
For years, publishers and editors have asked the wrong question: Will people pay to access my newspaper content on the Web? The right question is: What kind of journalism can my staff produce that is different and valuable enough that people will pay for it online?
Crovitz looks at the question much as did the Slate article I covered yesterday. Newspapers can’t just charge for any old content—that will drive readers away to free competitors offering much the same stuff. Instead, they need to produce unique content (such as local news for most papers, or in-depth financial coverage for the WSJ) that is worth the fee.
This is a very sensible position. As Crovitz points out, many web users are used to the idea that “information wants to be free” because it is so easy to obtain through the Internet.
But the half of that quote that is always forgotten is that information also “wants to be expensive,” because the right information at the right time can be extremely valuable. Newspapers may need to find some way to leverage that value on-line if they want to survive.
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Comments:
The brief history of the web indicates that people are willing to pay for three types of content:
1. porn
2. financial advice
3. health information and advice.
leaving aside #1, we have one area where the payment for WSJ content will ‘pay for itself’ by helping readers make wise and timely investment decisions. And health info is valuable because even though we have riches, what good does it do us if we are suffering and dying?
The New York Times, on the other hand, tried exactly the approach that Crovitz recommended – and it was a failure. The ‘news’ was freely available, because, I suppose, ‘what the president said in the press conference’ is indeed available on many other sources. But ‘opinion’ were locked up in ‘Times Select’ and available only to paying subscribers. If we wanted to read Tom Friedman, Mo Dowd, Frank Rich et co., we had to pay.
This was dropped after a few months. It didn’t work for a couple reasons, I imagine:
1. We all found that we could do very well without reading Tom Friedman’s latest pontificating;
2. Tom et co. were cranky and upset that their words of wisdom were not reaching the widest possible audience, thus not only reducing their influence over the world, but also making them less prophets to the masses, and so reducing, perhaps, the value of their book deals.