Carr vs. Masnick on pay to play

A two-part debate on whether newspapers can avoid the fate of horseshoe makers in the early 20th century. In part one, a discussion of why anyone might pay for news, a commodity in great oversupply. The potential for multiple big newspapers to more or less simultaneously charge for their news, the collusion argument, comes up. Says Mike Masnick of the aggregator TechDirt:

If I’m running a major newspaper the night that everyone starts to charge, I’m dancing for joy because my competitors just stepped out of a huge market and left it to me. And don’t think there aren’t news execs who get this.

The trouble here comes from the idea that there’s a huge market left to “me.” David Carr of the New York Times comes up with the obvious rejoinder:

A broad swath of newspapers are not looking into pay content as a matter of collusion, but survival. You talk about being the lucky newspaper that bystands a move to paid and then jumps in on all the free ad dollars. Who might that be? [bolding mine]

The potential candidates, to me, would be the Associated Press and Reuters.

In part two, Masnick outlines TechDirt’s spin on a virtual goods strategy, where it gets money from readers in return for things like a TechDirt badge for their Web sites, and TechDirt t-shirts. Creative and clever — I think virtual goods hold a lot of potential for online content sites. Though it depresses me to think that a t-shirt inspires readers to pay money, but content cannot. Also, a Web badge that says, in effect, “I paid for TechDirt content”  brands you as a loser who pays for online content. Why not just charge your readers for the content, and not ask them to identify themselves as losers?
Online content faces a nasty ‘free rider’ problem. But virtual goods do give those who are not free riders a way to pay for things. Better to go to a platform like the Kindle and start a publication. People expect to pay for things, there.