Free-dom's just another wordfor nothin' left to lose

This Guardian article somewhat reinforced the feelings of dread brought up by CNN offering its wireless content for free:

Yet despite the rocketing growth in online advertising - estimated at more than 30 per cent but up to 60 per cent in some sectors - most papers wonder how long they can depend on banners and pop-ups. Internet purchases may have reached a staggering £40bn, but newspapers seem to be missing out.

"It's the only medium where you get content free," says Alexandra White of the UK Association of Online Publishers. "In other media like TV and film people are used to paying. Revenues from online have all been coming from advertising and that's sustainable for now. But publishers have been keen to look for other revenue. Now they're looking at what unique propositions they can offer, like The Guardian's weblogs."

At the upper end of the market it is widely accepted that paid-for content is the way ahead. It's hard to charge for news, because of its general availability elsewhere, but archive news can be paid for, as can specialist information. FT.com introduced a two-tier subscription last year and has more than 55,000 subscribers, while most of the other nationals have identified niche content that readers value enough to pay for. The Independent charges for some columns, the Telegraph and Times for crosswords and The Times for fantasy football.

And stateside, everyone has been giving it away too, creating a free-milk society that's a major contributor to the industry's problems.

Around the watercooler at the day job (where we charge for our online content, unless you're a print subscriber or someone who asks nicely), we've looked to the WSJ as the paid-content model hero. But you have to wonder -- their test of opening the site up for free last week couldn't have been just a matter of academic curiosity.

The crux o' the problem?:

Yet there is a delicate balancing act between making money by charging for services and keeping enough free content to maintain traffic for the advertisers. Allow reader numbers to drop and advertising revenue will go the same way, yet having a small group of motivated subscribers can be a great investment when targeting them for other sales.

Where do we come in?:

According to Simon Waldman, debates about degrees of paid content are irrelevant. "The big question is how newspapers will fit into an internet which is increasingly providing a "citizen's media" with bloggers and Google - people create their own media and newspapers become less the arbiter of what's important in the world."...Seeing print and online as rivals is no longer the point. "People in newspaper offices debating the threat of the net have a Ptolemaic view, where the Earth is at the centre of the universe," says Waldman. "Things are evolving so rapidly, they need to work out how to stay relevant."