The Takeaway: Reactions to Journalism Online

So Steve Brill and his pals are going to rescue newspapers by giving them an easy, centralized way to charge readers for content. That's swell. Let's see what the blogosphere thinks.

Valleywag: Ryan Tate predicts Journalism Online will fizzle. "Brill has no prayer of competing with either Amazon or PayPal when it comes to scalability, fraud protection, or number of existing accounts. Like countless consultants and software companies before him, Brill's only hope is to convince old-school newspaper publishers they're better off buying overpriced content management 'solutions' than building simple, reliable websites using off-the-shelf technology and in-house programming."

Content Bridge: Ken Doctor doesn't think JO needs to compete with Amazon or PayPal, however; in fact, it may be able to work with them. "If it's smart with technology, it can piece together vendor relationships from available technology, and lightly customize on top of it," he writes. Doctor foresees a different hurdle: "No matter how good the proposition, the reluctance to create a new middleman may be overwhelming. Hearst, MediaNews and News Corp all have their own major initiatives around paid content. Revenue sharing doesn't come easy."

The Business Insider: Henry Blodget also wonders how well rival media conglomerates can play together. "Big, brand-name newspapers will demand a much bigger share of the revenue than smaller papers, and the company will need a critical mass of them to succeed." Will players like The New York Times Co. throw their weight around so hard that they capsize the lifeboat?

Buzzmachine: If you were just waiting for Jeff Jarvis to piss all over the notion that anyone, anywhere, should pay anything at all for news content -- well, the wait is over. "Best of luck to them but I predict it won't work," writes Jarvis. "Once again, this will not only reduce traffic and thus advertising opportunities and revenue but it will reduce Googlejuice (even if Google can search the paid content, it will get fewer links and clicks and thus less juice) and it will bolster competitors.". □

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