Good Times, bad Times in New York City

David Rothman mentions “forthcoming subscription charges for the superproprietary Times Reader.” Influential newspaper people are extremely unhappy that their journalistic content is available free on the web. The latest exponent of discontent is David Lazarus, a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, who said “It’s time for newspapers to stop giving away the store.”

He believes that newspapers “have to be prepared to charge for online access to their products just as they charge for print access.” Further he wants newspapers to do this collectively, and he says that “For this to work, the entire industry would have to come together and unite in saying that the era of the free online lunch is over.”

Of course in the United States a joint action like this would be legally fraught because of antitrust laws designed to prevent the coercive manipulation of prices. Hence our intrepid commentator calls for a radical approach to enable newspapers to rise from the grave that they are digging. “My thinking is that this is approaching a life-or-death struggle for newspapers, and an antitrust exemption may be the only way that the industry can smoothly make the transition to a digital future. Put simply, we need to charge a fair price for our products, and we need to do so together.”

(I apologize in advance to all for the groan-inducing metaphor of “rising from the grave” in this “Lazarus” context. A special pay-per-view version of this comment is available for three dollars that removes this ill-advised phrase.)

What a great find, Garson; thanks. Actually the idea of special favoritism for newspapers is nothing new.

(1) Consider the postage rate breaks that they get. I haven’t problems with this, however, just so the rules are administered impartially—not always an easy issue to decide.

I’ve even come out for the idea, gasp, of a well-stocked national digital library system, which certainly could pay for access to old archival copies. But I’d be very grumpy if such a system were not decentralized and if other business models didn’t survive.

(2) Also, plenty of morning and afternoon newspapers in the same cities have joined forces under operating agreements authorized by feds.

Meanwhile freelance writers starve even more than they would otherwise, because meaningful organization would be in violation of labor laws.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if powerful media interest got Congress to make the columnist’s fantasy a reality—while at the same time preventing freelancers from truly organizing?

Just to emphasize, I believe in fair pay for content.

One of the biggest frustrations of the TeleBlog is that I can’t pay regular contributors—not with a budget of $0 even though we reach more people than libraryjournal.com on many days and, as shown by the Blackmask item, originate our share of original content.

David