Like a bad case of herpes, the idea of micropayments refuse to go away, with News Corp now making noises about rolling them out this fall. To be fair, Murdoch’s plan sounds more realistic than the wishful thinking engaged in by the likes of Isaacson and Brill, since the Journal is proposing to use micropayments as an add-on to its existing subscription business and only apply them to niche subjects (though Jeff Jarvis remains skeptical).
What amazes me, however, is that while there has been much discussion about how micropayments would be bad for consumers, no one seems to have considered the fact that they would be an absolute disaster for journalists.
The argument for micropayments is usually couched in terms of how we must do something to save newspapers and the vital civic role they perform. If they go away, we are told, who will fund the Baghdad bureau? Who will be left to cover the statehouse and the city zoning-board commissions? And so apparently if we adopt micropayments, everything will go back to the way it was. Newspapers will become profitable again, reporters can once again be insulated from all that nasty business stuff that they never cared about in the first place, and everyone will get a pony.
As it happens, I agree that newspapers provide a civic good by covering important but less sexy topics. Which is why I’m dumbfounded that these micropayment enthusiasts haven’t figured out that charging for individual articles not only won’t save the Baghdad bureau, it will hasten its demise. Read the rest of this entry »
