Small Texas Newspaper Charges for Content

Stop the presses: The Associated Press recently reported that the Valley Morning Star, a small newspaper in South Texas, this week would start charging for access to its website, explaining that the days of giving away content for free are over.

Does anyone think this will work?

While I praise the paper for its gutsy move, I’m curious to see if anyone would actually be willing to pay for content, other than the people who will have automatic access as a virtue of already being a subscriber to the paper.
The business model for newspapers has been flawed ever since the Internet made it possible for users to post free ads online in a more effective way (i.e. faster, more extensively and for free) than newspapers. Charging for content is not what will make newspapers profitable.

So, what business model would make papers profitable? Stopping the presses, as the first sentence of this piece suggests, might help. The high cost of printing and distributing newspapers makes it today very difficult to make money given the reduced amount of ads placed in papers. So far, only the Wall Street Journal and a handful of publications with specialized content (trade publications) have been able to successfully charge for content.

While it can be argued that the Valley Morning Star’s local content makes it “specialized” to the community, I doubt that users would pay enough in aggregate to make the paper profitable unless it stops printing.

Critics will argue that I am putting down attempts from a company at changing the status quo (which I admire) without providing an alternative solution. The reason I’m not providing an alternative solution is that I don’t believe there is one for print newspapers. In a not-too-distant future, most content will be online and as long as hordes of bloggers continue to publish free content, it will be expected to remain free.

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