All The News That’s Fit to Free

Media: All The News That’s Fit to Free

By: Jay Rosen

Wednesday 26 September 2007

Jay Rosen

I recommend Jeff Jarvis’s obituary for TimesSelect. The thing died at midnight last Wednesday, 19 September.

’With it goes any hope of charging for content online. Content is now and forever free.’ Jarvis thinks Murdoch will tear down the pay wall at the once-mighty Wall Street Journal; and there are signs that Murdoch thinks he will too.

‘TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media,’ wrote Jarvis, ’the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.’

I think real value is in weaving yourself into the Web. ’Conversation‘ is blogger’s shorthand for that larger idea.

Charging for columnists only made sense as a political action within the conflicted state of the Times, a compromise among contending factions and a show of support for certain ideas that spoke to parts of the base. ’People will pay for Times journalism because Times journalism is much better than what those people can get for free…’ spoke to the newsroom base. In that world, TimesSelect made sense.

The professional premium had to be established. The Wall Street Journal had done it by charging for its web edition. The Washington Post was comfortable staying free and finding more of the web it could like. The New York Times was to have its own strategy; this became TimesSelect.

Staci Kramer at PaidContent.org has the view from the Times, provided by Vivian Schiller, a Senior VP and General Manager of NYTimes.com. She sounds cool and collected:

Schiller insisted, as she and other NYT execs have said before, that TimesSelect was on plan, was bringing in $10 million in subscription revenue and was successful: ’This is what is really important — it did work. It’s just a matter of as compared to what.’

In this case the ‘what‘ is the result of traffic increases from search-engine optimisation (SEO) and the NYT’s belief that by opening millions of pages to search engines, that traffic growth will continue and with it, ad revenue growth.

That’s the decision in web court accepted by the New York Times. The decision says you can try to charge, and some people will pay, but there is more money and a brighter future in the open flow of Web traffic, a lot of which is coming sideways into your content stack because Google sends you tons of users via that route, not through your pearly gates of news, also called a homepage. Just as RSS sends stuff from the middle of the stack out.

When every barrier....