I promised at the end of my New York Times
post to write a longer piece about the financial and legal woes of the newspaper industry—particularly, the growing debate on whether or not papers should charge for online content. This week, both New York's Newsday and the Boston Herald announced plans to do just that, although most of the country's large papers continue to offer free content online, relying on revenue from advertising for their web-related profits.
This will be the Herald's second go at marketing online content; the paper charged for select features and columns back in 2001, but made everything free following complaints from readers. The owner
acknowledged that the paper's forthcoming online subscription service will probably only work if other outlets initiate similar setups, especially The Boston Globe. (The New York Times, by the way, launched a subscription service in 2005, which they eliminated two years later.)
Really, the only paper that's managed to successfully charge for Internet content is The Wall Street Journal, which restricts most of its online articles to subscribes. The Journal is actually going to expand its online services in November, offering a package with all of its articles, plus Dow Jones reports, for a $49 fee, according to
MarketingVOX. It seems The Journal's subscription service works for two reasons: first, the paper offers in-depth analysis not available from most news sources, and second, the target audience—businessmen—are more likely to open their wallets than, say, college students.
Another issue confounding newspapers is news aggregation, available at sites like the Drudge Report or the algorithm-based Google News—The Huffington Post has an excellent
article covering all of the relevant legal drama.
The trouble is, if papers start to publish subscription-only articles, Google & co. can still list the headline and first paragraph of every report under the copyright law's fair use doctrine, a notoriously vague and headache-inducing exception. And even if papers could find a legal strategy to twist fair use in their favor, news aggregates could simply rewrite the articles' headlines and opening paragraphs—facts, unlike the articles' "expression," are not protected.
As The Huffington Post points out, the fair use debacle is worst for sources of newsy articles, who lose little of their value when truncated or rewritten, and not so bad for specialized, opinionated, or long-form pieces, which are somewhat unique to their parent publications.
How do you think newspapers should manage online content? What other specialized publications, like The Journal, could succeed with online subscriptions?
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