Halkias: Reality behind the pay walls

Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Telly Halkias, an award-winning freelance journalist. It originally appeared in the Bennington Banner.

An editor friend of mine recently lamented the growing trend of print newspapers launching paid premium sections of their online editions. However, in the same breath, he was quick to add: “[B]ut what do I know? I don’t need to pay the publisher’s bills.”

This long-time journalist was wise in including that caveat to his assessment. In light of the Bennington Banner and Brattleboro Reformer’s recent move to that arena, a quick refresher is in order.

Internet news proliferation is one of the vexing questions for print publishers nationwide, specifically in private news organizations. The problem faced by those who banked on the free online news model of the 1990s is how to go back and undo what consumers now expect.

For example, The New York Times stock is now worth somewhere in the neighborhood of its Sunday print edition. Given this, paying for the electronic version is a hard sell for the Times’ increasingly younger audience that stopped subscribing to the print edition.

Operating in the red for years, the Times more recently followed the lead of its cross-town rival, The Wall Street Journal, which moved to a paid subscription model for its Internet version years ago.

The fact that the Journal is a perennial in-the-black operator might have something to do with that.

But the main issue that faces the publishers of the Banner, Reformer, Times and Journal remains the same, and harkens back to the expansion of the Internet as well as the evolution of the news business.

During the 1990s Internet boom, free information was considered de rigueur, a consumer convenience at the click of a PC mouse.

But this premise turned out to be a death knell for many newspapers. More recently, we have seen the demise of many publications, either totally or in print: The Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are two prominent examples.

Ultimately, most major media companies reached the conclusion, as the Journal had at the turn of this century, that there would be free content, but if you wanted full access, you had to pay a fee.

This stemmed from the previous failure of many news moguls to see that by providing unlimited free content online, they devalued their print product. So for customers to value the quality of news delivered, media companies are now banking on their willingness to pay a nominal price for its availability.

Those with foresight created bona fide revenue streams offering year-round relief from the cash-flow problems now plaguing The Times. Others who got on the bandwagon late are compelled to do so in the name of survival.

Essentially, successful online pay models have demonstrated there is value to news, and that customers will pay for it. And since online overhead is far less than its print complement, these subscriptions are highly profitable, a welcome reprieve in the face of lower advertising revenues.

That said, the news world continues to evolve, and traditional publishers would do well to stay ahead of it. Two recent trends are worth watching.

One of these is evident in last week’s breaking story by Yahoo! Sports of the booster money scandal in the University of Miami football program. Once just a collection website of stories tapped into from national and international outlets, Yahoo! has slowly developed its own reputable editorial/news division.

The painstaking depth of the investigative reporting done on the Miami story signals not only Yahoo!’s arrival as a bona fide news organization in its own right, but also the ability to use its very deep online pockets to subsidize such excellence.

Charles Robinson’s story has “Pulitzer Prize” written all over it. As a result, major news players all over the country are now tapping into Yahoo! for this story, instead of the other way around.

The other quieter but no less important trend is that of non-profit online news. Already, in the Green Mountain State, we are seeing the staying power of neophyte VTDigger.org, a project of the Vermont Journalism Trust. In its short life so far, it has shown the same hybrid ability as Yahoo! to tap into solid offerings from other outlets, as well as slowly develop its own internal news arm to cover in-state stories.

This is the continuing saga of online news. No one seems to have a clear answer as to its future, but publishers everywhere are juggling both paid and free models. And as my friend astutely noted, none of us have to pay their bills.