Are pay walls on their way back for the Internet media? It’s looking that way.
A while back Pressroom noted that Daily Variety was putting a pay-to-read system back up. And now comes The New York Times, which in 2011 will implement a system of charging for frequent readers while letting casual readers browse for free. Digital media consultant Ken Doctor, writing for Paid Content, has a particularly considered analysis of the subject. If it works for the Times – a big if at this juncture (and commenters on Doctor’s piece are skeptical, at least initially) – you can bet other news organizations will follow suit, including right here in Milwaukee.
Two other items of recent note in the digital media world underscore the challenges that media companies face in evolving to survive as ink on paper gives way to the Web. The first is that aggregators don’t really do much for the news outlets they aggregate: Close to half of those surveyed by Outsell said when they read the headlines on Google News, they quit there rather than following links through to the original publication. No wonder some publishers are turning to technology to block automatic links from search engines.
Not that that’s going to help much. Outsell forecasts “a 3.5 percent annual drop over the next three years in both daily and Sunday circulations that will lead to just 43 million Sunday newspaper readers in 2012, compared with more than 62 million in the early 1990s,” reports B to B Online.
The other worrisome trend is the race to the bottom in the payment for content, as noted by James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times. There is no better illustration than what happened just now when I opened Rainey’s article: A Google ad promised, “Write & publish online. Get paid up to $20 per article. Apply now!” (Um, better hide that ad from Murphy.)
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One area that seems to be especially hard hit as newspapers continue to cut back is copy editing. Pressroom is wondering how that trend is being felt here in Southeastern Wisconsin or in the Madison area. Whether you’re a reader or a working journalist, share your thoughts by contacting pressroom@milwaukeemagazine.com.
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