Steve's Brilliant plan to save newspapers

Steve’s Brilliant plan to save newspapers

By David Eedle |

Steve Brill, the inventor of Court TV and a prominent media businessman, author and lecturer has teamed up two two similarly well-credentialed friends, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery, Jr. to found Journalism Online, a new business “that will quickly facilitate the ability of newspaper, magazine and online publishers to realize revenue from the digital distribution of the original journalism they produce.”

It’s the big story of the day in the media and paid content world, I’m gettting 340+ ’similar stories’ on Google News. Journalism Online’s site says the project will have four activities:

A password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.
Market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.
Negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.
Provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue

Opinion appears divided. Indeed, Henry Blodget at Business Insider says someone else tried to get almost the same idea off the ground a year or so ago, but simply didn’t have the same size PR megaphone. This is not encouraging. Valley Wag isn’t impressed either:

“Brill’s only hope is to convince old-school newspaper publishers they’re better off buying overpriced content management “solutions” than building simple, reliable websites using off-the-shelf technology and in-house programming.”

At the press conference Crovitz trotted out the same old same old examples of paid subscription success: ConsumerReports.org, WSJ.com and FT.com.

I think the key will be the way in which the news items from disparate publications are aggregated and presented. A simple business selling passes to online newspapers isn’t particularly interesting. It’s the contexualization and presentation of the content that will be key.

However, whilst I respect the people behind the project, one cannot help but wonder if this is a strategy akin to herding cats. Whilst media outlets might occasionally profess unanimity in tackling the issues facing the industry, actually getting them all to agree to something is another task again.

PaidContent.org has an interview with Steve Brill.

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