The Coming Media Shift

One year after the collapse of Wall Street signaled the start of the Great Recession, another struggling industry is moving fast to change. And by change I mean charge. There’s been a seismic shift in online journalism, from a philosophy of free content to one where everything may soon disappear behind pay walls.

Say goodbye to the era of the Free Internet. The New York Times recently wrote how Steven Brill and Journalism Online.com, once the lone venture seeking to build a paid online model for newspapers and magazines, suddenly has competition.

Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena said media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and tech giants Google, Microsoft and IBM have each announced plans to develop pay systems for media companies. Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, the one major paper which already successfully charges for online content.

Read the Times story here: http://bit.ly/4aHUwb

What’s interesting about the looming shift in online journalism is how the media itself has resisted. From reporters and editors to industry insiders and executives, the cry has been that a pay model would never work.

Many news organizations tried to charge – unsuccessfully — for content at the dawn of the Internet in the mid 1990s. Back then, customers revolted because newspaper penetration was high in most communities and the online content was little more than a less-glitzy version of the print edition.

Not today. There’s far more content online, including multimedia offerings such as video and photo galleries, than in the daily paper. And with the advent of Open ID-style systems, a pay model to view content from multiple news sources is possible – and inevitable.

The traction for this move has come in the last year. The latest economic crisis forced many businesses to rethink how they operate. An advertising crunch has online media considering a fundamental shift. And it’s coming fast.

On Long Island, Newsday has a unique path toward this. Cablevision bought the paper last summer and has moved quickly to use the content as a selling point to fend off hard-charging Verizon. So what does it mean locally? If you already subscribe to Newsday or Cablevision — nothing. But if not, get ready to lose access to Newsday.

Also, Cablevision, in partnership with Newsday, is launching MSG Varsity, a high school sports channel. It’s the first such network in the nation. And once again, it’s content that’s available only through Cablevision. Expect more innovation to come in the next few years.

Blog originally posted at LI Entrepreneurs.com