Newspaper heavyweights spar over charging for news online

With The New York Times and Rupert Murdoch poised to start charging for newspapers online, media heavyweights sparred last week over whether readers will pay for news on the web.

The Times plans to require payment for full access to NYTimes.com in early 2011 and Murdoch, who already charges for The Wall Street Journal online, has pledged to begin charging web readers of his other News Corp. newspapers.

Keynote speakers and panelists at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit here differed sharply on whether internet users would be ready to shell out money for what they have become accustomed to getting for free.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger said the time is right for his newspaper to start charging for its website and the move will provide a "critical" new revenue stream to add to print and online advertising revenue.

"There is an opportunity, I think, for us to gain a great deal of revenue from this paid model going forward," Times Co. president and chief executive officer Janet Robinson, said.

Merrill Brown, chief strategist for Journalism Online, said more than 1,300 publications around the world have expressed interest in the services offered by the company founded last year to help news outlets make money on the web.

"Everyone of them is contemplating a paid strategy of one kind or another," Ms Brown said.

Readers will not pay for "commoditized headlines," he said, "but they will pay for very specialised news.

"They will pay for deep coverage of their favourite sports teams, they will pay for content which only local newspapers have in their communities," Ms Brown said. "If (publishers) market it smartly to their most engaged users they have a chance to add at least incremental revenue."