The CEO of News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co is convinced that people will be willing to pay for digital content, a statement which will be welcomed by publishers currently developing pay models in an attempt to create revenue from digital editions of their news sites.

The Wall Street Journal, a News Corp. publication already charges for access to its online content. In the keynote speech at the official launch event for the PricewaterhouseCoopers "Media and Entertainment Outlook 2009-2013", Les Hinton suggested that Dow Jones is currently developing a technical application to facilitate the payment for the WSJ, other Dow material and some third party content. Without offering great detail, Hinton revealed that the arrangement could include micro payments and subscriptions.

One complication in the implementation of some kind of payment for content is that the fact that the majority of news content has been available online for free viewing for many years. Some media experts now perceive this as having been a gross oversight, as it has allowed aggregators and search engines to capitalise on their material. Hinton maintained that newspapers had given away their content for free for too long, allowing the search engine Google to develop into a sort of media 'vampire'. The laissez faire attitude towards online content "fed Google's lust for newspaper blood".

The illustration of Google as a parasitic force is not without precedent in industry dialogues. The implementation of a payment system would offer publishers' content an element of protection and there is a strong, albeit possibly optimistic argument that people desirous of news would be willing to pay for it, particularly if the content came from a reputable name, of which Dow Jones & Co. certainly is. At this stage, however, much is speculation, as there are equally valid contentions that people will be reluctant to pay for content that they previously accessed for free. The sentiments raised by the Dow Jones talk, however, appear primarily concerned with regaining control over content.

To facilitate the transition to paid content and take hold of the variety of platforms through which news is being diffused, it appears that publishers will need to form coherent systems for their own payment arrangements. Alternatively, common online payment systems are being developed by companies, such as journalism.online to facilitate the process across the board.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, paidcontent.org