Micropayments To Save News Industry? Nope.

David Sarno wonders if micropayments could help save news reporting: what if you had to pay a penny to read the full blow-by-blow about last night’s game, or the editorial on Obama’s newest?

[from Micropayments: A rainbow for journalism…or a Hail Mary?]

Clay Shirky is a digital media consultant in New York who’s pointed to a number of faults with a pay-as-you-go system, including that it would terminally annoy readers. Moreover, he believes, the moment any group of outlets starts charging for news content, a new crop of sites will arrive to offer the same content for free — and scoop up all the advertisers abandoned by the pay sites.

But even though his anti-micropayment manifestos have been online for years, Shirky said, last week he received an unusual number of calls from reporters asking him about the theory, suggesting to Shirky that desperate newspaper types are “rummaging around” for revenue ideas. “I haven’t talked to anybody about this stuff since the last recession,” he said. “I don’t get any interest except when it’s a Hail Mary play.”

William Baker, a professor who is investigating new media business models at Columbia University, is more optimistic about micropayments and chose a metaphor to mirror Shirky’s Hail Mary. “There’s a potential rainbow here,” he said. “Normally no one would take this risk because it’s a scary jump. On the other hand, the economy is so terrible now that it may force some entities to try.”

It’s easy to imagine a kind of news network that would contain, say, 5,000 online magazines, newspapers and blogs. Every member of the network would be connected to the same pay system, so that the user could seamlessly navigate from one site to the next. Each time you loaded a page, you’d be charged a small amount, and a meter on your screen would allow you to keep track of your balance.

The notion of the news network is interesting, although not because it makes it simple for the news companies to charge us.

Imagine if some group of news companies could put aside their competitive instincts long enough to see what Huffington Post is up to. What if the best writers of the Washington Post, NY Times, and other companies were accessible though a single website, with some sort of platform that allows the most useful and interesting posts to rise to the top? And some sort of social architecture so that I could easily find out what my friends are reading and commenting on? I might be willing to pay for that. And a curatorial approach to the news, where really smart people are paid to comment on and pull the best stories of the day in tech, economics, politics, sports, science, food, entertainment, whatever.

However, the news companies are going to miss a wonderful opportunity, because they seem completely unequal to this challenge. They are so busy wringing their hands they aren’t spending any time looking at what is working online.

More likely someone like Google will build a platform like this (or some startup), and provide an easy way for news companies to play — a revenue sharing arrangement — with a simple integrated advertising model: an open news platform.