Who's Really Going to Pay for Journalism Online?

Is all this talk about getting consumers to pay for the news they read online really a front for something else?

Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery say their new company, Journalism Online, is first and foremost about giving newspapers an easy way to start charging for subscriptions or soliciting micropayments for individual pieces of content. But there are signs that the more important function of their endeavor will be to provide publishers extra clout in their bid to squeeze licensing fees out of Google, Yahoo and other aggregators.

Brill emphasized this latter goal in an interview with Ad Age's Nat Ives:

[W]e will have strength in numbers. The point is that if you have a large group of publishers -- and we think we're going to have a very large group of publishers -- negotiating with the dominant search engine or the two or three dominant search engines, at least you're starting to get some parity in that negotiation.

Matthew Ingram from the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that what Brill seems to be talking about sounds an awful lot like the rumbles coming from the Associated Press, which has been heavily hinting that it's going to demand more favorable terms from Google for the licensing of its content.

It's a reasonable strategy: Google and Yahoo have already demonstrated their willingness to pay news providers for use of their content, presumably because they know that the limits of what constitutes fair use on the web are just ambiguous enough to make them tempting legal targets for desperate media companies. On the other hand, the proof that web users will pay to read most kinds of general news is thin on the ground.

So why not just form an umbrella organization to represent publishers in their wrangling with aggregators and skip all the stuff about making readers pay their fair share? As it turns out, Brill has thought about that. Again, from the Ad Age interview:

No publisher has any real good argument against fair use if it's giving the stuff away for free themselves. Because how can you say, "Google, you can't have it for free" if you're giving it away for free?