Paying for Content: The Debate and the Experimentation Continue

Link to February 3 New York Times article, "Some News Outlets Ready to Try Charging Online Readers".

Excerpt: Extracting payment from online readers has been called everything from the next great folly of print journalism to its salvation, but to get a glimpse of how it really looks, head to Lancaster, Pa.

Specifically, head to the offices of The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, one of the first handful of news outlets to acknowledge in interviews that it intends, in the next few months, to start using a software system developed by the entrepreneurs Steven Brill, L. Gordon Crovitz and their partners, which they are calling Press+. (This link includes sample screens for Lancaster Online.)

[snip]

“We are quite a ways from widespread adoption of paid content, so it’s too soon to tell how successful they’ll be,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. But most publishers will not want to develop their own software systems, he said, and assuming Press+ works well, its chances of catching on “look pretty good.”

Decisions, decisions.

Sites can let nonpaying readers see the top of an article, while only paying readers see the whole thing; they can allow unlimited reading of certain articles, while charging for others.

They can charge by the month or by the click.

They can limit free reading to a certain number of articles a month.

They can treat readers differently depending on their location.

They can charge a single price or have a tiered system.

They can give print subscribers free access or charge them, too.