Since The Times’s website just went from registration-wall to full-fledged paywall, the articles about paywall journalism are coming out in force. Here is a trio of particularly interesting ones. On the “Strange Attractor” blog, Kevin Charman-Anderson goes into the economics of print versus web publication and advertising. He notes that printed papers cost a lot more than web publishing (pointing out the statistic that for the amount the New York Times spends on printing, it could send every subscriber two Kindles), but print advertising makes up 80% of most papers’ revenue. Charman-Anderson points out that online advertising...

Results from the London Times’s paywall implementation are coming in. For the first part of the implementation, the Times has gone to a registration wall, rather than a paywall—the site is still free to read, but users must register to do so. According to statistics from Hitwise, the Times’s site lost about 1/3 of its traffic just from users who were unwilling to take the time to register to keep reading for free. Of course, Rupert Murdoch would probably say those people were all freeloaders, and the site will be better off without the additional load...

Steve Jobs has been talking about the future of journalism at All Things Digital’s D8 conference. Saying that he does not want “to see us descend into a nation of bloggers,” he has some opinions on what can be done to “save” journalism. "One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press," he said.  "Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford...

John Gapper at The Financial Times has an interesting article about the paywalls that are going up all over, most notably at Rupert Murdoch’s properties. (Of course, the article itself is behind a paywall, so you might need to search it from Google or register an account to read it.) He notes that Murdoch is hoping that the core audience of each paper will be willing to pay enough to support it. However, the problem Gapper sees is that Murdoch has overbroadened his audience—unlike in strictly business-focused papers like, say, The Financial Times, there isn’t enough content there...

Recently, the Frontline Club held a roundtable discussing the issue of newspapers and paywalls. Present, among others, were representatives from the Financial Times, which recently instituted a paywall, and Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, which will be doing so soon. British journalist and blogger Adam Tinworth was present, and writes of a considerable disconnect between the newspaper representatives and the rest of the audience. When the audience brought up social sharing, the paper reps talked about “being on as many platforms as possible”. The message seemed to be clear - the majority of the...

The Financial Times reports (behind an annoying paywall, alas; you may have to search from Google or register to read it) that Google and Rupert Murdoch’s News.corp may be on the way to making peace. Murdoch and Google had been famously at odds over the last few months over newspaper stories’ inclusion in Google’s on-line search engines, with Murdoch even suggesting at one point that suing Google was not out of the question. Murdoch’s UK newspapers, the Times and Sunday Times, are soon to go behind their own paywalls, and withdraw their articles from Google’s search...

A few days ago, BoingBoing noticed something quite interesting in the iBooks store. In looking up the classic book Moby Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Melville, they noticed the description said that one of the true stories that inspired the book was “the killing of an albino s***m [sic] whale" known as Mocha Dick”. Since I don’t have access to iBooks yet, I can’t look it up for myself and see if that bowdlerization is still intact. But regardless of whether it is or not…why on earth would they censor “sperm,” which is not commonly regarded as...

In contrast to papers, such as the London Sunday Times, that are erecting paywalls, one English and Scottish local newspaper publisher is bringing its paywall trial to an end. Press Gazette reports that Johnston Press is dropping the paywalls it erected on the websites of two Scottish and four English weekly papers starting in November as a trial to learn more about how well paywalls might work. If one source the Press Gazette heard from is right, they might have learned a lot: One source has told Press Gazette the number of subscribers paying...

Last week, writer and consultant Mark McLaughlin had a great article in the Huffington Post about the current attempts of newspapers and others to get audiences to pay for on-line content. McLaughlin points out that audiences usually don’t pay for content, but rather for distribution. It is the advertisers who pay for content. McLaughlin cites the old print newspaper delivery system as an example: newspaper readers didn’t pay for the content in the paper, but for having the paper delivered to their door every day regardless of whether they read a single article in it or not. Advertisers...

The Sunday Times of London is the latest newspaper to institute a paywall, and has posted an editorial explaining why. The Times plans to charge the same amount it charges for its print paper—£2 per week (approximately $2.98 at current exchange rates)—for access to its on-line site, because selling on-line ads just wasn’t cutting it, and “giving away expensive journalism is financially unsustainable and ultimately bad for us and our readers.” Write the Times’s editors: We acknowledge the risk involved when much other good journalism is still available free online. However, we believe that if we are transparent with our readers and...

Rowan Gibson writes an interesting piece on Blogging Innovation about what he terms “the Internet commodity trap”—the rampant free distribution of content, authorized and otherwise, that is causing a great deal of disturbance in business. Gibson first brings up the problem of e-book copying. I remember talking to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, back in 1995 about the future of the Web. He told me he viewed the Internet as a "planetary-sized copying machine" and added that "trying to stop copying on the Net is impossible." As an example, he cites...

A Pew Research Center study has some interesting conclusions about on-line advertising, says Ars Technica. On-line ad revenue declined by a total of $1 billion last year, falling for the first time since 2002. 81% of respondents said that they didn’t mind on-line advertising in return for free content. However, only 7% of consumers said they would be willing to pay for news—most said they would simply look somewhere else if their favorite site erected a paywall. Ars Technica recently experimented with blocking content to users of ad-blocking software, then posted an editorial haranguing users of ad-blockers...