Some Information Wants to Be Paid. But Which?

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 looks today 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.