Want news? That'll cost you

If you went to the Wilson Times Web site today, you ran into a blockade. After five or six years of free access to the site, the newspaper has erected a barricade around its news stories. Only the often enigmatic headlines are free to all. The newspaper had tried setting up a pay wall around its content in the past, as news Web sites were just developing their presence. The $6 a month fee for print non-subscribers never generated much revenue and scared off potential readers. With online readership peaking at a couple of hundred or so, the Web site had little or no appeal to advertisers, and the pay wall was taken down several years ago.

Pay Wall II will charge an audacious $9.50 a month for access, the same price as a print subscription. This price, of course, has no relationship to the cost of placing the news on the Web. The newspaper's Web site has no printing costs, no delivery costs, no mechanical infrastructure. It appears to be a price aimed at shoring up print subscriptions — subscribe to the Web edition and get the print edition for no extra cost. Buy one, get one free? Something is needed; I'm told that the newspaper's circulation, which peaked above 18,000 when I was there, has fallen below 15,000.

This aggressive pricing has been advocated by some of the "experts" offering advice to a newspaper industry that is clearly in turmoil. News content is costly to produce; it has value; anyone accessing it, in print or online, should pay for that cost, these experts say.

Others are not so sure that's the right approach. Most state, national and international news probably will remain "free." There's just too much competition and too little consensus about how to charge for this information. Local news might stand a better chance of surviving behind a pay wall, but this news has to have real value sufficient for large numbers of people to want to pay for it. And entry into the information business is so inexpensive these days (no need to buy a printing press, and there are plenty of out-of-work journalists to hire on the cheap) that even highly local content providers have to beware overpricing their content. An upstart competitor could easily overthrow their monopoly.

The fundamental problem is that the newspaper business model has broken down. For generations, newspaper owners got rich by delivering reliable readers to advertisers. Now readers are less likely to read a newspaper because they have so many other options, and advertisers are concentrating on the narrowly targeted cohorts of buyers delivered by Internet search ads and other innovations instead of the shotgun-blast approach of hitting the entire population (or large portions of it) via newspaper ads. Charging for content, which newspapers never really did (subscription prices used to cover only the delivery costs), is one answer to this quandary, but it might not be the best solution.

What is the best solution? If I knew the answer to that, I could be a consultant and make big money instead of giving away my opinions for free. I do know that charging for content that used to be free will only anger the people accustomed to dialing up the newspaper Web site whenever they feel like it, and restrictions will sharply reduce traffic on the Web site, making advertising space there less valuable.

It's a bold but risk-laden strategy, but these are desperate times (no pun intended).