My chat with Steve Brill about charging readers for news online

By Zachary M. Seward

It’s happening. Yesterday we revealed Steve Brill’s latest moves toward charging readers of newspaper websites, and separately, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney said he would erect an online pay wall by the end of the year. Those developments followed similar statements by executives of Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, among other newspaper companies.

As these paid-content models develop, a key question is how the broader news ecosystem — of blogs, radio, TV, and mediums still unknown — will react to the opportunity. That subject came up in my conversation with Brill on Monday:

Me: There’s certainly a working theory out there that the minute any of those big-city papers start charging, they’re going to encourage competition that they don’t currently have. That the free blogs that are much derided now for not providing reporting will, in fact, you know, begin to put up much, much more competition—

Brill: Why? Why will they be able to? How are they going to pay for it?

Me: Perhaps by starting with a model that is, you know, that isn’t a 150-person newsroom, and so even if the end product is not as good, it’s free, and that’s sort of the hardest thing to compete with.

Brill: But again, if what you’re striving for is to get the 5 or 10 percent of your most committed readers to pay, then you can afford to have that happen. And you can’t afford not to do it.

That’s just a taste of our 23-minute chat, which you can listen to below (or download here). Much of my interview with Brill focused on slides he presented to newspaper executives last week, which I’ve embedded again after the jump. There’s also a full transcript of the conversation with some references explained by links.

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How Steve Brill pitched newspaper executives on charging for online content — and why they’re buying it

By Zachary M. Seward

Here comes the summer of paid content: Steve Brill tells me that his pay-for-news startup, Journalism Online, will soon announce deals with several newspapers to — in many cases, for the first time — charge readers for some of their digital content.

“We’ve signed a couple, we’re going to sign some more, but we’re sort of holding off on making any public announcements about that, probably for three or four weeks,” he said in a phone conversation from his New York office yesterday afternoon.

Brill’s firm, which he launched in April with media magnates Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindrey, is pushing a “common platform” for news websites to charge annual, monthly, and per-article fees. They believe publishers, by offering a mix of paid and free content, can wring subscription revenue out of 5-10 percent of their existing monthly visitors while maintaining 88 percent of page views and 91 percent of ad revenue. That, at least, is the pitch Brill made to leading newspaper executives who gathered in Chicago on Wednesday at the O’Hare Hilton.

We’ve obtained the slides from that presentation, and you can follow along right here:

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