The future of internet journalism?

by David Safier

How do newspapers transition away from paper and still make enough money to survive? Here's one scenario I think might work. Create three levels of reading ease: Clunky with lots of ads (free), reasonably efficient and with fewer ads (moderate subscription cost) and smooth as silk (higher subscription cost).

The free Level One would look something like online newspapers today, except you would have to wade through more advertising clutter — popups, short mandatory videos, ad pages that show up before you reach the content you clicked to and so on. All the news (or most of the news) would be there, but you would pay the price of time and bother. And the news organization would get more ad revenue.

The moderate subscription, Level Two, would be similar to today's online newspapers. It would have ads, but they wouldn't really interfere with your reading. And maybe some material would be available at this level  you couldn't get on the free version. (I pay a yearly fee for that kind of service at Salon.) A number of online news organizations could join together and have a group subscription rate, kind of like TV cable packages. You could choose, say, 4 newspapers from a list and use them all at Level Two with one moderate subscription cost.

Level Three would charge a higher subscription fee. Since I get the Sunday NY Times delivered, I have access to the Times Reader at no additional cost. It's by far the best online reading experience I've had. It's not part of my web browser. It's a separate piece of software. When I open it, today's entire paper loads, and I move through it without interruption or ads.

This is what an article looks like: three columns of very readable type. If I want to read more of that article, I just hit my Page Down key, and it slides to the next page instantly. If I click on International category on the left, I get a listing of all the International stories to link to. But if I just want to browse the stories — this is my favorite feature — I just hit my Page Right key, and it slides from story to story. For someone like me who reads at least the first paragraph or two of most stories in the morning paper, that means I get the full browsing experience. When I have a clickable list of stories on most online news sites, I rarely click on more than one in four. I'm willing to pay to have a smoother, more inclusive, more newspaper-like experience, and lots of others would as well.

A paperless news organization would save huge amounts of money on paper, printing and distribution. From what I've heard, when you buy a paper, you're only covering those items. The money for news staff and profit comes from ads. So a combination of online ads and subscriptions wouldn't have to bring in as much as today's papers to be profitable. If it pays for the news staff and some office space along with some programmers, web designers and server maintenance people, and anything over that is profit.

I haven't figured in the portable media — iphones, blackberries, etc. — but similar levels of use could be created there as well.

I think some variation of this system could work.