Go for it.

However, remember that consumers have choices too and they don’t care about your business. They only care about the value that they get.

If you’re producing content that is worth less to your customers than what you charge or that others are selling for less, you’re going to fail.

The construction of an advertising-driven online news model was an abject failure; it is about time newspapers (and others) wise up and start demanding compensation for their product from consumers. You never saw LexisNexis giving it away for free. Why should anyone have ever done so?

Pay for content is the only viable future of news whether the operation is a couple of guys in pajamas in their mom’s basement or Sulzbergers at 620 Eighth Avenue.

How can Murdoch et all keep spinning free distribution of information as the end of journalism is beyond me. It’s like if a free energy device was invented and it was immediately hailed as the end of electronics industry.

We see some parallels in open source software development. How do the open source developers and companies get paid? By various mechanisms. Some achieve this by giving away some stuff free and providing premium services/product to others. Some have sponsorship deals form big companies (IBM, Google etc). Some dual license (eg. free to Linux users, pay for commercial licenses).

Finding the right balance for news will be difficult and might be impossible for some markets (eg. entertainment news and other low-brow reporting ) but might be very feasible for higher value political and business analysis and material (eg, maybe WS, Guardian etcJ).

There has generally been a race for the bottom and, as people realise that internet does not equate to free, people are going to be increasingly prepared to pay for quality.

That is not really any different from how it was with print. Why pay for for a WSJ than Time (assuming it does cost more )? Well I value WSJ more than Time so would be prepared to put money on the counter whereas I would not do that for Time.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Guardian Maybe it, or other large players, can still think of themselves as having a mass audience — but isn’t the winner going to be the one who figures out how to be a player in a news ecosystem, and not the one who tries to maintain control over that audience?

“It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech.”

Alan really gets it. The industry will probably label him a madman today. They will realize their mistake in a few years. A few short years if Mutter’s calculations are correct.

http://is.gd/74MP8

Please comment on all the exciting things that are just around the corner with the Apple tablet and paid content:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/technology/26apple.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

It’s an easy thing to rail against, but it’s not so black and white. There are plenty of opportunities to create paid content products alongside a core free product. Certainly the Guardian, with its tremendous talent, is capable of this.

But by going so far out on a limb in opposition to an oversimplified concept, paywalls, Rusbridger makes it harder for the Guardian to ever consider developing paid content opportunities. And he makes his own views needlessly more absolutist and therefore less relevant to what is really happening out there.

I addressed this further in the comments on the Paid Content website, also available on my blog here: http://bit.ly/7DjSga

(While we’re on the subject of being open to the conversation, Jeff, why don’t you implement Disqus in your own comments so that discussions that happen here can be open to the web? Right now your comments (and by extension your blog) are a cul de sac where the discussion only happens here and is not linked to the wider conversation. For those of us who want to be part of the broader discussion, commenting on BuzzMachine is unfulfilling because it goes nowhere else. Do you prefer it that way, or are you planning to address this?)

Best wishes,
Evan

The only part I don´t agree with him is when he says “It’s not a digital trend” because digital is the enabler of all that is happening. The whole trend is due to the fact that you cannot stop the digitalized free flowing information and you cannot place it in a walled garden.