If Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. opens up the Wall Street Journal's website to free browsing without subscription, it will spell the end of one initiative to figure out how to finance quality news on the web, according to the former editor of the Los Angeles Times. John Carroll was among four people on a panel, "The News Business and the Business of News," on Saturday at Boston College.
Carroll's assessment came as he describe research he conducted last year while a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He was on a panel organized by the Masssachusetts Foundation on the Humanities, part of a free symposium entitled: "No News is Bad News."
Carroll, who now lives in Lexington, Ky., said he interviewed about 50 leaders of the news industry during his post-L.A. Times research for Shorenstein. "The captains of our industry were in a state of demoralization and confusion," Carroll said he found. He said circulation revenue which sustains newspaper report in print is "kaput" on the web because nearly all news websites are free.
During his visits, he said he proposed the idea of a newspaper-industry consortium of four of what he termed the most prestigious papers for national, international and business news -- New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street -- who he said should merge access to their websites and create a common subscription to all.
"And If you could pursuade those people, who don't like each other all that much, to form a consortium and have all of their web, all of their online material be sold through one vendor, like they would own, just like a newstand on the corner here which sells multiple papers," said Carroll, "they would reclaim something something that the newspaper business is losing, which is a quasi monopoly.
"I don't think it would be an illegal monopoly, because thousands and thousands of people are covering national, foreign and business news. But these people do it by far the best. And if you were an intelligent, if you were this audience, and you could only get those four papers through that site, I suspect we would have a 90% plus subscriber rate in this room and could recover that circulation rapidly.
"That idea, I mentioned it to people at these various papers. None of them said it was a bad idea, but they were already so absorbed going in their own direction with their own contractual relationships and strategies and so forth that nobody did it or even paid it that much attention I think. Now that the Wall Street Journal has gone to Murdoch and Murdoch is talking about taking it free, that's the end of it. It will never happen. But it was kind of a last stab at preserving the idea of paid content."
Carroll's remarks came 30 minutes into a 75-minute discussion lead by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume, who now teaches at UMass Boston, and including New York Times columnist David Carr and St. Petersburg Times Executive Editor Neil Brown.
Brown outlines efforts by the St. Petersburg paper -- which is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute -- to develop multiple means of delivering on its quality-journalism-which-benefits-democracy-mission to users non only on the web and in the traditional daily paper, but also via free-distribution weekday tabloid. He said the traditional paper's circulation is holding steady and even increasing among some younger demograhics.
Carr said he things newspapers and magazines will evolve into niche publications for the wealthy and they will be "like catnip for marketers," and hence will likely survive, although perhaps with reduced circulation and higher subscription fees. Meanwhile, he said, "making their websites better and better [and free] is in a way building out the gallows."
The irony, said Carr, is that newspaper reporters have never had more readers, when combined print and web readership is included. But the problem is that advertisers do not consider a web reader to be as valuable as a print reader, so web ad revenue increases are not offsetting print ad revenue declines.
To listen to an audio stream of the entire panel, click on the carat to the left of the bar below. Carroll's remarks about the four papers begins about 30 minutes in (after about 10 seconds of crowd noise and an introduction by Donald MacGillis, Boston Globe assistant editorial-page editor. A downloadable MP3 podcast is also available (36 megs).
(Full disclosure: The author of this post is an investor in Clickshare Service Corp., a company which has patented a system allowing users to have an account at one website and purchase or subscribe to content at multiple other websites.)
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