My EZ solution to get people to pay for online news

Sigh. I've been very disappointed with garbage SEO content from web searches lately, which only reaffirms my feeling that there will have to be a new type of shakedown with web providers, rankings, and so forth. (Lame SEO as the new spam? Maybe.)



The issue comes back to my previously mentioned problem of needing online curation methods. Which websites do we trust? Which provide the best* information?
*Yes, that's subjective, and I know plenty of people would take TMZ over NYT, but still.

 So how does this relate to the issue of newspapers and online content? Well, if you break the problem down to essentials, the reason you'd pay for a paper newspaper vs. just hearing your neighbor tell you about the warehouse fire down on the docks is an issue of quality and reputation. You pay for reputation. (Let's exclude the entertainment-purposed newz lite for simplicity.)

Online news provision changes the game though, now information can spread, it can travel, and it doesn't take an economist to figure out that people don't like to pay for things that they can get for free, or where they can get acceptable substitutes for free. Question is, how do you then monetize high quality news online then?

Well, I've got a solution. In an online age, where information travels quickly, monetizing the news is difficult, because there are so many alternatives. But you can certainly monetize community participation. Let's think about this a bit more...

What's the difference between reading the news at the New York Times and paying for some content, vs. finding an AP story elsewhere for free? Well, NYT is reputable, and hey, they don't have a bunch of flashing graphics ads that are distracting. (Yes, I would pay for no ads versions, but I think I'm in the minority on that one.)

Actually, let me change examples to a site where this will work a lot better, and use an example close to my heart (as an academic) to talk about The Chronicle of Higher Education. What the Chronicle offers, and you wouldn't find on other websites that might repost the same or similar content, is the comments section. Take the following randomly selected story about professors being required to be present in their offices for a minimum number of hours per week here: http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-at-U-of-North/124308/. As you might find from a quick skim through the rest of the website, the Chronicle requires subscriptions to view some articles, but not all of them. However, almost all articles now allow comments, and with many things, you get quite a healthy argument going under the fold.

Which brings me to my point - the Chronicle may be charging for some content, but I bet they would convert a lot more people by switching to charging for the right to participate in the conversation and making comments. Yes, moderation issues and TOS issues will probably have to be worked out to disallow spam, and of course with an audience of PhDs and university administrators, you usually get very high quality comments, which won't be the situation for many other news providers. But these caveats aside, I think it would be pretty effective to charge readers for the right to comment, rather than the right to read material. Basically, we've got it wrong - forums used to be where you could get free information, but maybe the future of news is that you only get to participate in forums if you pay, whereas the news itself is free.

Of course, this isn't a perfect solution, because it could have negative effects like shifting news providers toward comment-worthy or controversy heavy stories, it would make active management of forums essential, you would miss out on intelligent comments by people who wouldn't pay, it might be undemocratic by not allowing poorer people to participate,* the commentary might drive away some potential readers, and who knows, I could be wrong about the majority of people being willing to pay to comment. So it's probably not the panacea, but it would be an interesting experiment to see how well this would work to monetize high quality news and reporting, vs. the paywall schemes that are being rolled out lately.
* This could be mitigated by allowing editorial selection of some comments for free, the same way letters to the editor are sorted and chosen. 
** Also, we do still need a viable micropayments system to capture the nonsubscriber / infrequent visitor issue, which decreases the 'barriers to purchasing' in technical terms. Hello, Google? Paypal? Why isn't one of the big boys working on this?