April 14, 2009

Can you charge for content?

A trio of big-name media execs think you can. This NYTimes article is a little vague on the details but that makes sense.

Journalism Online L.L.C., their company, will have an automated system for news outlet to charge for content. After reading a certain amount of a story, a teaser, the user is prompted to pay for more.

The names, straight from the story, are:

Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.

This would only work, I imagine, if every news outlet in a given market area or reader demographic group only distributed through this company. Obviously if you could get an AP feed from Google or somewhere with the same info, that would negate the need to pay for access. So would a country-wide media conglomerate be allowed to exist? Isn't there an anti-trust problem here?

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