Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Micropayments for news

PLEASE NOTE: My new blogging home is now at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I'll continue to update this site for the time being with the introductory portion of my posts, but to read the whole thing, you'll have to head over to the Nieman site!

I know. You don’t want to hear about it. Readers will not pay for news online, period. We tried that and it didn’t work. Information wants to be free. Attention, not content, is the new scarcity. Free is a business model. I’ve explained this, myself.

But the “make the reader pay” crowd just keeps sending new combatants with new fodder into the fray. The latest is Jon Austin, one of the perpetrators of The Same Rowdy Crowd, in a very long and well-informed post entitled “Fixing the Newspaper Business or ‘Do I have to Do Everything Around Here?‘” You can read it for its considerable entertainment value (and very thoughtful chain of comments), or save yourself half an hour with Paul Gillin’s summation, or Austin’s own...

Read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

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