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German Newspaper Summit: A call to fight free culture with regionwide paywalls

Horizont (in German) :: The first German Newspaper Summit, which took place yesterday in Wiesbaden, could be the start of a completely new quality in the fight against the free culture online. Jan Bayer, Welt-Gruppe / Axel Springer, used his keynote speech for a passionate speech: "We have to be more aggressive, instead of defending ourselves constantly. Paid content will be standard in the industry. What we need are regionwide payment models. And perhaps this is a rousing signal from the Congress today."

"Zeitungskongress: Verlage wollen Gratiskultur im Netz beenden" - Continue here Anja Sturm, www.horizont.net

''Sheep mode': Many newspapers simply mimic New York Times metered paywall

Steve Outing :: It’s often said that newspaper publishers act like sheep, and that’s clearly the case with “going paid” online. Nearly all the announcements are for programs that mimic NYTimes.com’s “metered paywall” model, where for newspaper websites, users can view 10 or 15 or sometimes 20 articles per month without needing to be paying subscribers or members. Most, too, make their walls “leaky”; e.g., you can just type a headline into a search engine and view a story, even if you’ve bumped past the free-article limit, because you’re coming into the news site from an external source.

[Steve Outing:] Umm, did anyone think that maybe this “X free articles per month” model is not the best one?! Or did everyone just go into sheep mode?

"10, 15 free web articles a month: Is this a mistake? (Yes!)" - Continue to read Steve Outing, steveouting.com

New York Post pivots on iPad strategy, dropping paywall

Forbes :: The “most egregious paywall yet” is how one tech writer described the system introduced last year by the New York Post for managing its web traffic from the iPad. Basically, if you wanted to read the Post on your iPad, your only option was to install its iOS app and pay $6.99 a month for a subscription, or else use a browser other than Apple‘s pre-installed Safari.

Egregious, maybe, but also short-lived.

Continue to read Jeff Bercovici, www.forbes.com

HT: Mathew Ingram, here:

goodbye to the world's stupidest paywall: forbes.com/sites/jeffberc…

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) Juni 20, 2012

Fairfax to shed 1900 staff, erect paywalls

Sydney Morning Herald :: Fairfax Media will cut 1900 staff and erect paywalls around the websites of its two main metropolitan newspapers as it adjusts to shrinking advertising revenue.

Continue to read Chris Zappone, www.smh.com.au

Paying for information versus *access* to information: The news you won't get elsewhere

Online Journalism Review :: By making access to the world of information ubiquitous with direct connection to sources, eyewitness accounts, and publishers with cheaper overhead, the Internet has forced news publishers into the marketplace that so many publishers naively believed that they were in before. Now, news publishers really are selling just information, instead of the access to it. And they're running into trouble because the market's telling them just how worthless much of that commodity information is to them.

But there is a way out for newspapers.

Continue to read Robert Niles, www.ojr.org

HT: Jay Rosen, here

Paying for information vs. paying for *access* to information: a key distinction for news providers. bit.ly/N5Ay6v Yes, @robertniles.

— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) June 17, 2012

New Yorker editor David Remnick talks future of print, paywalls

Huffington Post :: New Yorker editor David Remnick weighed in on the future of journalism on Tuesday, maintaining that his magazine has a certain competitive edge over online media. He appeared on "CBS This Morning" for a wide-ranging talk with Charlie Rose. When asked to identify the "essence" of the magazine, Remnick said that he wanted the New Yorker to be about "depth" and "spending a lot of time on particular stories."

A summary of the interview - Continue to read www.huffingtonpost.com

10 ways, how David Simon is wrong about paywalls

Columbia Journalism Review :: David Simon is a talented writer and storyteller, but is he qualified to give advice to publishers about how to save their dying industry? As qualified as anybody else, I suppose. But when he suggested in a recent piece for CJR that people like me who disagree with his position on paid content were unqualified, that got under my skin a bit. Simon wrote, “These folks (paywall opponents) don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism.” He also lumped us in with an imaginary crowd of people who supposedly think amateurs can replace professionals, though we take no such position.

I decided to step back and lay out my thoughts in a more organized fashion.

Continue to read Howard Owens, www.cjr.org

HT: Steve Buttry, Digital First Media

Most major newspaper groups are now experimenting with paywalls

Poynter :: The Chicago Tribune’s plans to charge readers for some of its online content, along with McClatchy’s announcement last week that it will expand its paywall testing to four more sites, are further proof that a majority of large newspaper companies now believe in some form of paid online content. Ken Doctor expects about 20 percent of the 1,400 or so daily papers in the U.S. to charge for online access by the end of the year. That seems small when you look at the major newspaper chains; it’s getting harder to find one that isn’t at least experimenting with some kind of paid access.

An overview - Continue to read Steve Myers, www.poynter.org

Chicago Tribune to take leap over online pay wall

Crain's Chicago Business :: The Chicago Tribune is mulling a plan to charge online readers premiums for different kinds of content, a structure similar to the fee it charges for the print literary magazine it introduced this year. The city's largest newspaper is charting an unusual path as it aims to start charging online readers as early as July, although the details and timing are still in flux, according to sources.

Continue to read Lynne Marek, www.chicagobusiness.com

David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme: Put all news behind a paywall

Note: The author of this piece David Simon refers to the recent Times-Picayune cuts. I post a teasure and link to the source for further discussion - and as always to refer you to interesting content on the Internet. It doesn't say, that I share his opinion.

Columbia Journalism Review :: It’s grievous what is happening to regional newspapers, especially. But the whole industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall. The New York Times has shown us the end of the beginning; they’ve embraced the paywall and they are seeing significant revenue. The Washington Post, LA Times, others have to follow. Once the content of the larger papers is no longer available to aggregators, then regional papers can safely take that same path and, maybe, there is an online revenue stream that will allow high-end journalism to survive.

HT: Mathew Ingram, GigaOM:

I know that everybody loves David Simon because he created The Wire, but he's still wrong about paywalls: bit.ly/LkWlGi

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) May 26, 2012

Continue to read DAvid Simon, www.cjr.org