Newspapers Mull Group Trust Fall into Pay Model

Like teenage girls who only go to the bathroom in groups, insecure newspaper publishers are willing to contemplate the terrifying leap into a paid content model, but only if they're assured they won't be alone.

Alan Mutter reports that a number of CEO currently in San Diego for the Newspaper Association of America convention are holding a clandestine meeting to discuss, among other topics, whether and how to start charging readers to view articles and other content online. The presence of a lawyer is meant to ensure the conversation doesn't stray into antitrust territory, whatever David Carr might wish. Still, one might think these executives -- whose companies are, after all, competitors -- might wish to keep any brilliant ideas about monetizing journalism to themselves. Chances are this confab will be less a workshop than a support group.

Rupert Murdoch, likewise, seems to be hankering for some company in his misery. The News Corp. chairman was recently quoted saying he thinks The New York Times would be wise to adopt a premium-content firewall like the one used by his Wall Street Journal. Considering that Murdoch mused publicly about how much he'd like to see the Times go out of business, one suspects his advice might not be informed by the purest of intentions.

Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff cautions the Times against listening to Murdoch's siren song:

[I]f newspapers follow the Journal model and wall off their content with subscription fees, we'll do what we do now with the WSJ site. We'll buy a subscription and then we'll summarize whatever they're charging for, bringing their way-too-long and gassy prose down to Internet size -- so you can, in other words, read less, and know more -- and we'll give it to you for free.

Of course, that doesn't offer any comfort to those papers that don't wall off their content; Wolff plans to undermine those as well.

The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann looks at Rupert Murdoch -- in the context of his historical peers, Williams Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer -- and concludes that the Australian mogul may be due for an unpleasant dose of irony:

"It's easy to imagine NewsCorp [sic] suffering the same fate that he visited upon the Bancrofts' Dow Jones -- a sale brought on by weak economic performance and family disharmony," writes Lemann.