SAN FRANCISCO — Three media veterans plan to bundle the Internet content of newspaper and magazine publishers into a subscription package that will test Web surfers’ willingness to pay for material that has been given away for years.
The system won’t be ready until the fall, but the plans were announced late Tuesday because so many publishers already are clamoring to sign up, said Steven Brill, co-chief executive of the new venture, called Journalism Online.
“The interest in this came together a lot more quickly than we anticipated,” said Brill, the founder of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine. “We are dancing as fast as we can now.”
Brill declined to identify the publishers willing to participate because agreements haven’t yet been signed.
Journalism Online’s other principals are former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz and former cable-television executive Leo Hindery.
The decision to place more toll booths in front of online news reflects the deepening financial problems threatening the survival of print publishers, particularly newspapers.
Since 2005, the annual volume of print advertising in U.S. newspapers has plunged by $12.7 billion, or 27 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Over the same time, the amount of online advertising on newspaper websites has risen by $1.1 billion, a 53 percent increase, not nearly enough to offset the erosion in print.
With their profits shriveling, newspapers have been laying off workers and cutting other costs. In the most severe cases, five newspaper publishers have filed for bankruptcy protection since late last year, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has gone online only and the Rocky Mountain News has closed.
Few newspapers now charge for access to their websites. The Wall Street Journal is the largest one to do so, with nearly 1.1 million subscribers.
By putting content behind a “pay wall,” publishers also could keep search engines from indexing the stories and then delivering links to them in search results.
Journalism Online plans to offer an “all-you-can-read” option that would give customers access to the content of all the participating publishers for a monthly fee, expected to range from $15 to $20, Brill said. The publishers will divvy up the revenue, based on which articles draw the most readership each month.
