It’s hard to disagree with that Internet Age axiom “information wants to be free.” Not because it’s convincing or anything, but just because it sounds so good. Imagine Dennis Hopper in full counterculture dudgeon shouting it from the top of a day-glo bus speeding down the open road, and man — it just feels right.
But apparently, if information is synonymous with news, then it turns out it’s about as coherent as, well, Dennis Hopper joyriding around in a day-glo bus. At OpinionJournal, Walter E. Hussman takes a pretty common sense approach to the newspaper industry’s practice of giving away its content for free:
Newspapers initially created their Web sites with the best of intentions. After all, newspapers are in the information business. And rather than fight the new medium, the Internet, why not embrace it? Wanting to be the leading information providers and thereby have the most popular Web site in the community, they posted all of their news online for free.
Exacerbating the problem with free news was the decision by the newspaper industry, which owns the Associated Press, to sell AP copy to news aggregators like Yahoo, Google and MSN. These aggregators created lucrative news portals where the world could get much of the news that was in newspapers. So readers could now get free news not only on newspaper Web sites, but also from portals and aggregators that had a chance to monetize the content, most of which was created and financed by the newspaper industry.
Hussman catalogs the inevitable circulation decline that occurs when newspapers ask people to pay for things they’re already getting for free. Then he adds a neat twist: as circulation goes down, revenues decline, quality reporting is cut, people stop reading for that reason and so on and so on, vicious circle, etc. etc.
It’s a sensible slap in the face. I don’t know if the industry can put the free-news horse back in the barn, but if it can, the best way to start would be leaving headline articles free (you know, the basic, four-paragraph stories on the Yahoo! home page) and assign a premium to the longer, more substantial articles.