Steven Brill Goes Back to the Future

Steven Brill, founder of American Lawyer, CourtTV, and Brill's Content, has come up with an idea for charging readers for content online. He and several high-profile partners have developed a much-touted system for micropayments that would sell articles (including some from the New York Times) for around $2.95 via a platform unlike anything the Web has ever seen. Copyright holders would get their share, but Brill and his partners would also get a piece of the action. Some observers are understandably critical of the project. Others see its potential and are very excited.

Finally, after years of publishers giving content away for free in the digital age, Brill—the man Bob Woodward once called "the foremost serious journalistic entrepreneur of our times"—figured out a way to get people to pay for journalism online.

Unfortunately, fourteen months after its founding, the project is going to fail.

"We are sorry to report that we have suspended operations," Brill told users in a statement posted on the venture's website. "We appreciate your business, but, unfortunately, we simply were unable to entice enough people for us to see our way to a viable enterprise."

The year was 2000, and Brill—along with CBS, NBC, Primedia, Ingram Book Group, and EBSCO—launched Contentville.com, a clearinghouse for digital articles, books, dissertations, and other materials that were sold piecemeal. The site closed on September 28, 2001. Maybe it was bad timing: A week after the site's launch announcement, Pets.com had its legendarily bad initial public offering. And people were actually pretty well accustomed to paying for cat food.

Nearly a decade later, Brill is back at it with a new idea to sell content on the Web. In today's New York Times, Richard Pérez-Peña takes another look at Brill's new venture, Journalism Online. Brill, and partners Gordon Crovitz (late of the Wall Street Journal), and Leo Hindery Jr. of InterMedia Partners, announced the new venture in April. According to the Times, the founders say "within months it will have a system operating and in use by hundreds of websites."

In April, Brill talked to Paid Content's Staci D. Kramer about his old site and tried to show what he'd learned from that earlier failure.

"In retrospect, the way to make it work much better is what the Wall Street Journal does. They have a ton of advertising revenue because a ton of stuff is available for free in different ways, but a certain significant percentage, bought by a certain percentage of their hardcore readers, produces significant circulation revenue," Brill told Kramer.

As it happens, the Journal's parent company, News Corp., may actually be trying to figure out a way to expand the paper's pay model to other properties, including those of its competitors. In August, the Los Angeles Times' Dawn C. Chmielewski reported that News Corp., which has had some success charging for the Wall Street Journal online, had reached out to executives at several media companies about starting a paid-content consortium. Among the potential partners reportedly approached: The New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst Corporation, and the Tribune Company.

A News Corp.-Times Co.-Post Co.-Hearst-Tribune bloc might make for a powerful (and potentially FTC-provoking) partnership, which may explain why Google, the ultimate bigfoot, may be stepping in—and, in the process, stepping on some toes.

This week, Nieman Journalism Lab's Zachary Seward wrote about Google's concept—less a plan than a napkin sketch—for using its Google Checkout system to charge for content.

The system already exists: It's an open question if Google can implement for content before Journalism Online debuts at the end of the year or News Corp. expands its pay system. (Some have already speculated that this week's redesign of the New York Post's website may reposition it for charging.) The Times' Pérez-Peña reports that News Corp. has been developing a new payment system called Mosaic.

Those with long memories may catch an echo of the very foundation of the "information wants to be free" era in that name. The first World Wide Web browser, which was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1993, was also called also called Mosaic. Talk about going back to basics.

As with Brill's new non-Contentville method for selling journalism online, it seems that when it comes to figuring out how to make users pay, everything old is new again.