A pay model that might work would be some sort of micro-payment thing. Suppose a trusted major outlet (probably meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, or the AP) signed up a few hundred newspapers (whether or not they still have print editions) into an online news co-op, and charged $10 a month, $50 a year, or whatever worked.
Then one could read as much as one liked from any of the few hundred papers, and the co-op apportioned the subscription fee among the papers by some agreed-upon formula. Maybe each page-view counts as a use of the co-op service, with a system to keep papers from running up the count by putting very few words on each page.
Then for each month, each subscriber's payment is divided by that subscriber's total number of uses for the month, and the payments are distributed proportionally to member papers. If I pay $10 and read 1000 articles, each use generates a one cent use payment, but if I only read ten articles each use generates a one dollar use payment.
Even sites that serve the same news – even indiscriminate wire service aggregation sites – could draw lots of page views with quick server response and easy-to-read (low ads) pages. Sites with local content could draw page views from their own areas.
The main impediments to such a plan are mutual distrust between competitors and (maybe) anti-trust. But if enough good news outlets banded together like that they might be able to sell a worthwhile number of subscriptions, because one might have trouble finding quality reporting by going elsewhere.
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Date: Sat, Mar. 14th, 2009 10:39 pm (UTC)A pay model that might work would be some sort of micro-payment thing. Suppose a trusted major outlet (probably meaning the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, or the AP) signed up a few hundred newspapers (whether or not they still have print editions) into an online news co-op, and charged $10 a month, $50 a year, or whatever worked.
Then one could read as much as one liked from any of the few hundred papers, and the co-op apportioned the subscription fee among the papers by some agreed-upon formula. Maybe each page-view counts as a use of the co-op service, with a system to keep papers from running up the count by putting very few words on each page.
Then for each month, each subscriber's payment is divided by that subscriber's total number of uses for the month, and the payments are distributed proportionally to member papers. If I pay $10 and read 1000 articles, each use generates a one cent use payment, but if I only read ten articles each use generates a one dollar use payment.
Even sites that serve the same news – even indiscriminate wire service aggregation sites – could draw lots of page views with quick server response and easy-to-read (low ads) pages. Sites with local content could draw page views from their own areas.
The main impediments to such a plan are mutual distrust between competitors and (maybe) anti-trust. But if enough good news outlets banded together like that they might be able to sell a worthwhile number of subscriptions, because one might have trouble finding quality reporting by going elsewhere.