C.R.E.A.M.

Let's save the newspaper industry, shall we?

I'll spare you the standard gloom and doom statistics normally placed right here in the nut 'graph because the specifics don't really matter, especially at this point. Jobs are probably gone for good and newspapers that aren't shutting down are closing bureaus around the world. Most importantly, advertising revenue for Web sites, long since seen as the saving grace, is drying up quickly.

If you think about it, printing millions of newspapers every day on gigantic printing presses to be shipped around towns on gas-guzzling trucks so they can be out of date within a few hours of sitting in their depressing pile at 7-Eleven is a pretty horrid business model. Everyone seems to agree that this whole Internet route is the way to go.

Although it isn't news, The New York Times quietly announced this week that it's officially thinking about charging $5 per month to view its Web site. This model has been picking up steam for a while now as to how the paper should recoup some money, and probably the best idea I've seen so far. Paying for individual stories like iTunes songs wouldn't keep readers around, grants can't provide enough funds for a permanent solution, printing only two paragraphs of each story like the Athens Messenger does is just frustrating and government intervention would be a fishy combination even if most constituents didn't view the newspaper as a liberal rag.

This would be the Times' first experiment with charging for news content since 2007's TimesSelect, a bad idea that ran far too long. I actually had access to TimesSelect, a premium registration to read its columnists on the Times Web site. It was free with a college e-mail address and never worth the trouble of logging in. The columns were always copy and pasted somewhere else, and the whole half baked idea was scrapped within two years.

Watching borderline desperate ideas being tossed around to save a model that probably can't withstand itself, I just can't help but notice the similarities between the newspaper industry now and the Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa music downloading craze of about five years back. Both sides are now sharing not a tangible product, but an imitation of it. A story hurriedly posted online for free and a song mislabeled on peer2peer share that unfinished state that's good enough for the majority of users. The music industry never did much beyond sue, and now it's on the way out. But maybe riding out the storm isn't such a bad idea.

The sublime Ed Droste from Grizzly Bear spoke to Pitchfork the other day about his album leaking well before its release date last May and still debuting at #8 on the US Billboard charts. Allowing the public to share what they've done beforehand led to a huge success.

"There was literally no one, I can promise you, inside the label or anywhere who expected anything like it," he told the Web site that hipsters are starting to turn on. "Maybe top 50 or maybe sell half of what was sold, but that was a total fluke and surprise. I couldn't believe it, especially after the whole leak fiasco. I guess this goes to show that leaks don't necessarily hurt, so we should all just chill out."

The biggest risk with a straightforward pay wall is how many will stick around should the paper say that enough is enough, it has had it with these freeloaders on its Web site. Of the Times' Web sites' several million unique viewers each month, there's no doubt that a huge chunk of them would balk at paying a dime for something they had for free yesterday. I know I used to check the Messenger Web site quite a bit when full stories and archives were freely available, but it's now become a chore to look for new content on that horrid Web site. Then again, the Times' nickname isn't "The 'Mess," either.

If it came down to it, I probably would pay $5 per month for the Times online. The only reason I'm unsure is my college bookstore, Little Professor, charges $28 per quarter for the paper, Monday through Saturday. That's ten weeks of the actual paper edition, which is much preferred. Otherwise, of course I would, because good journalism is worth paying for. Good journalism also needs to be paid for, which, unfortunately, is why we're in this situation to begin with.


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$5 per month for the Times?