Somebody's got to pay: Are you willing to fork over for online newspaper content?

Several of my posts here in Inside Pages have included no small sum of hand-wringing over the future of the newspaper industry. The current economy certainly has evoked a lot of the anxiety. I would argue it also has accelerated the arrival of problems we were going to have to confront sooner or later, anyway — primarily, figuring out how to either enhance or replace what we do in print with online versions of our services and, more vexing still, figuring out how to make a buck off those services.

The second problem probably sounds a bit crass, but I’ll be straight with you, folks — I don’t work for free, and since none of you have offered to clothe, feed and shelter me or my family, I think it prudent for both of us to think of ways to make this a money-making enterprise. (I’m serious about this. I sweat into the couch and am a heavy snorer. You don’t want me living with you.)

As I explained briefly in my post two weeks ago, circulation revenue is an important but small piece of the revenue pie for print media — generally, a newspaper wants to pay its carrier fleet and cover a portion of production costs with subscriptions; advertising pays most of the rest of the freight. When we started posting substantial portions of our print product online, the prevailing logic was that if we used a vehicle that doesn’t require a delivery fleet or a printing press, then we should just drop the subscription price and let our readers have free access to our content.

There is one obvious advantage to this — we attract lots of eyeballs that way, which in turn makes newspaper Web sites more attractive to potential advertisers.

But come to find out, there are at least two important downsides.

First, online advertising indeed is growing, but it still is not able to sustain a newspaper-style reporting operation. Perhaps it will one day, but for now, at least, it does not.

Second, by giving our product away for free, we run the risk of sending the unintended message to readers that the content is of little value and isn’t expensive to collect. The former has not been the case so far, and the latter never will be.

Thus, we reach another pivotal point in the evolution of news-gathering — can we ask readers to pay for material they receive online, or would they balk because we’ve already trained them to expect it for free?

I’ve got some ideas about which would be the case, but I’m going to withhold them at least until I see a few comments in response to this post. That’s because I’m more interested in hearing what you have to say and don’t want to taint the discussion.

I will throw out some information to get us rolling, though.

The American Press Institute is in the midst of a poll of newspapers that seeks to indicate which are considering initiating paid access for information they now give away. According to initial results, that number is about 60 percent of newspapers.

The paid-content survey, conducted by ITZBelden in partnership with API, was launched in August, the group said in a news release last week. Invitations to participate were sent to 1,350 U.S. and 30 Canadian newspapers. The 118 responses in the initial report represent a wide cross section of market sizes. Among the findings:

• 90 percent of the respondent newspapers currently do not charge for content.

• Only 3 percent currently have a pay-only site.

• Nearly 25 percent expect to start a paid strategy in the next six months.

• Given 15 different options of pay models to implement, respondents indicated they were seriously considering 11 of them.

So I wonder: As frequent visitors to this site, would you be willing to pay for the services you receive here? Would you be willing to pay (or do you already) for this or another newspaper’s online services?

And how would you be willing to pay? Using an iTunes-style, a la carte system? Some material free but other content behind a pay wall? Paying only for Web-exclusive content, such as audio clips, video and primary source documents?

Would you be willing to pay daily? Monthly? Quarterly? Yearly? Lifetime?

Finally, how do you think your consumption of beaufortgazette.com or islandpacket.com would change if you had to pay for some portion of it?

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