Fenixnordic Group

By Jeff Bercovici, for Portfolio

At
some point in the last couple months, the newspaper industry crossed an
invisible border.

In all but the most isolated backwaters, the debate
is no longer whether publishers should be charging consumers to access
some of their online content but which content, exactly, they might
successfully charge for. Framing the question this way, of course,
presumes there’s an answer — hardly a given.

The New York Times
looked recently at what it is, exactly, that enables vendors of various
other could-be-free products or services, from music downloads to
premium television programming to airline pillows, to convince people
they’re worth paying for. What does filtered tap water have that
professionally-generated reporting and writing doesn’t? "[A] kind of
snobbery and the perception of healthiness," apparently.

So much for looking outside the news industry for inspiration. What
about taking cues from one of the few news organizations that seems to
have cracked the code, at least partly?

Over at Nieman Journalism Lab, Alan Murray, The Wall Street Journal’s
online executive editor, offers some pointers: Don’t try to charge for
breaking news exclusives; don’t put anything behind a pay wall that has
the potential to generate tons of traffic, lest you forfeit valuable ad
revenue; do zero in on niches, the smaller the better, and offer them
stuff they can’t get anywhere else.

All sound advice. But how readily can it be applied to an everything-for-everybody paper like The New York Times?
Not so easily, I’m thinking, or else Bill Keller wouldn’t be
considering "voluntary donations" as one means of keeping the lights
on. It’s generally agreed that last time the Times tried to
turn some of its ordinary content into "premium" content, it picked the
wrong bits — mostly op-ed and news columns. But do the right bits even
exist?

At a Gelf magazine event on the media industry last night, Seth Mnookin, who wrote a book about the Times
a few years ago, argued that most of what the paper is doing is a waste
of its time and resources. He singled out foreign reporting as one of
the very few areas in which the paper’s content is unique and
compelling enough to have a claim on consumers. That’s a
counter-intuitive position; foreign coverage is one of those areas that
newspapers have always covered because they’re supposed to, even though
none of them make money on it, which is why so many of them aren’t doing it anymore. But unless the Times is going to become a completely different type of organization, it’s hard to come up with a better answer.

Or, as Michael Wolff puts it:

Any effort by a major news organization to put up a pay
wall means a windfall of new traffic for free news sites. In the end,
such a gambit would be less about free-to-paid conversion rates and
more about the speed at which people would discover how quickly they
can live without the New York Times.

Also in Portfolio:

• Thursday Links on Fixed Income
• WSJ.com’s Barbell Strategy
• Greenspan’s Reputation Continues to Decline
• Idle Chatter: Don’t Hate the Google
• First Bytes: YouTube’s Doom, Facebook’s Identity Crisis
• Annals of No-Comment, Meredith Whitney Edition
• The Geithner Plan vs the Brady Plan
• The Return of the Day Trader